• Home
• About
• My Articles
• My Conferences
• My Presentations
• CAEAP
• NY Giants

Social Networking: Accelerate the Learning Curve

popping..

Every day the I find myself amazed at the amount of information that I can obtain and the speed at which I can learn about technology by leveraging social software. By using a variety of tools, I can tap into a network of several hundred individuals that I am directly connected to. Each of them have their personal networks at their disposal resulting in a viral network of millions of resources that I can tap into for knowledge sharing.

Over the last decade I have worked on three major enterprise technology initiatives that required extensive research on my part. One of the major differences in my approach is directly related to the size of my social network at the time of the project. The better my social network was, the easier I obtained information and the quicker I came up to speed in the technology.

Project 1 – Enterprise Portal Implementation

This project took place in 2001.  At that time my network consisted only of current and former employees from companies that I have worked for and from vendors that I had worked with.  Much of my research was obtained from Google Searches, books and trade magazines, conferences, and paid research like Gartner.  The disadvantages of this strategy is that it is a pull strategy where I had to know what to search for.  Another disadvantage is that most of the information that I was able to obtain was vendor marketing material and very high level in nature.  It took a tremendous amount of time on my part to get up to speed  and most of the “real” learning occurred after the product was purchased.  In other words, we learned a lot the hard way when things didn’t work as advertised.  I did not have any people in my network that had experience with this technology so I was on my own.

Project 2 – SOA & BPM

This project took place in 2005.  By then I was subscribing to blogs,  digging into wikis, and using social bookmarking tools like Digg and Del.icio.us in addition to the methods of the past.  A few months into the project I started blogging which is when my social network took off.  All of the sudden I was collaborating with practitioners all over the world.  Now the vendors could not hide behind the marketing slides because I was able to access real world information on how these technologies really worked (or didn’t work).  I was also able to collaborate with technical people within consulting firms,  software companies, and within businesses leveraging these technologies  who could answer deep technical questions in my language.  This collaboration happened near real time without having to schedule meetings two weeks out.  Unfortunately, my company did not allow us to use social networking platforms, chat, teleconferencing and other tools so much of the communications occurred in forums, blog comments, emails, etc.  But the ability to learn from practitioners allowed me to be much more knowledgeable about the technology than I was in the previous project.  This was a shift away from pull technology where I had to know what to search for.  Now I could listen to conversations and discover things to research further.

Project 3 – Cloud Computing

This project is taking place now.  In addition, I am now in a startup and in charge of all technology which means I can use any and all social software at my disposal.  I live on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and use Skype, DimDim, and GTalk to communicate real time with many people within or new to my network.  Over the past few weeks I have started following numerous cloud and security specialists and some of them are following me.  Between my blogs about clouds and my tweets which are questions or links to proposed architectural diagrams, I am brainstorming real time with experts in various areas of expertise.  Although my startup consists of only three people at this time, in reality I am working with dozens of people in a collaborative fashion.  When I want to know something about a product or tool I talk directly to CTOs, Product Managers, and architects and bypass the entire marketing and sales discussions.  I estimate that the amount of knowledge I have acquired in the last 2 months is equivalent of what I learned in 6 months with limited access to social software on my  SOA/BPM project and 12 months on my Enterprise Portal project where I did not use any social software.  Now my research is more of a push than a pull.  I fill my Google reader with searches of key words and phrases on Twitter, I follow numerous blogs from both practitioners and technical blogs from creators of the vendor products.  I follow various industry analysts and listen to them on a daily basis as they discuss emerging trends and practitioner interviews in real time.  It is like thousands of people are having discussions and I am able to observe and participate in all of them!

Is not just the tools, it’s the network

The tools play a role in the speed at which you can acquire information.  The more methods of acquiring knowledge, the better.  And chat, video conferencing, and the like provide for richer and more complete conversations in real time.  But the key differentiator is the size and quality of the network.  My network has grown substantially over the years and I have become a known entity on the web.  I now have direct access to some of the greatest minds in the industry, something I was never privileged to before.

If you don’t have a valuable network, you are reinventing the wheel!

So what I have learned form this experience is that without a valuable network, I was forced to discover the best practices of the portal technology by trial and error.  Was I successful? Yes.  Did it take too long and cost more than I thought it would? Definitely!  We learned may things the hard way.  This is what I see happening with SOA, BPM, and Cloud Computing.  IT shops that ban social software are relying too much on their vendors and trade shows to teach them about these technologies.  They are missing out on unbiased information on best practices and missing the opportunity to collaborate with experts.  I remember from my corporate life the sometimes hostile resentment to social networking tools.  Now that I am free from the tight controls of corporate America, I feel sorry for those colleagues who are being handicapped by corporate constraints.

I know it’s the end of the year and some corporations have some cash to spend before they close out the books for the year.  My recommendation is to use this cash to invest in collaboration technologies so that the staff can increase both the speed and depth of their knowledge acquisition.

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.

Copyright Kavis Technology Consulting | Theme by DailyBlogTips