Enterprise 2.0 on z/OS

I had the pleasure to attend an IBM enterprise 2.0 workshop yesterday at the Böblingen Labs. Found out about it via Luis Suarez. Well, turned out to be a good idea, not only was I able to experience the extended version of Luis’ “Thinking out of the Inbox”, but also got some insights into IBMs mainframe business as a platform for business-critical applications. And yes, these may well include Enterprisey-2.0 stuff. And while I am still favorable of lightweight deployments, I can see their point, especially when coupled with the overall trends around virtualization, cloud computing etc.

The one day workshop (“Web 2.0 and System z”) – organized by Kevin Keller (kevkeller on Twitter) – both touched upon broad underlying motives, concepts and trends (systematized by Ansgar Schmidt under “Gutenberg 2.0”, I just loved the neologism “social translucence”) and downright IT-technological specifics.

Fot the underlying trends I think that the IBMers got it right, e.g. when pointing out the trend towards decentralized social networks, that are organized and supported by distributed players. Yes, add this to data portability and open standards and we’re on the right track. Besides, I got some nice insights into IBMs enterprise social software ideas, e.g. the internal BeeHive social networking platform (I know who called it a waste of time but am not telling …) – where already thousands of IBM employees “connect and share” and IBMs CatTail document sharing platform.

So, in addition to meeting nice people like Martin Packer, I also learned quite a bit. Yes, this is another one of the reasons why we still want to meet up with people in real-life. As Luis puts it, we want to:
– hear the story behind the argument
– confirm what we think we know (and I would also say put our ideas up for testing and refinement)
– decide what to pay attention to
– keep up with fast changing information
– feel connected

Makes a nice list of arguments for coming to the WikiWednesdayStuttgart this evening, although the planned main event has to be delayed onto the future (no I am not telling) we’ll have a nice group of people with expertise to discuss with …

The Visual Wiki: A New Metaphor for Knowledge Access and Management

Via Simon Dückert I found this video of John Hosking talking at Google TechTalks about “The Visual Wiki: A New Metaphor for Knowledge Access and Management“:

Successful knowledge management results in a competitive advantage in today’s information- and knowledge-rich industries. The elaboration and integration of emerging web-based tools and services has proven suitable for collecting and organizing intellectual property. Due to an increasing information overload, information and knowledge visualization have become an effective method for representing complex bodies of knowledge in an alternative fashion by using visual languages. The focus of this research is the development of a “Visual Wiki”, which combines the notion of a textual and a visual representation of knowledge. A Visual Wiki model has been proposed which provides a unified framework to design and discuss different approaches. Three prototypes of Visual Wikis have been implemented and evaluated according to the improvements to knowledge management applications that they facilitate. […]