A mighty thank you to all those who submitted their entry to Enterprise 2.0 Boston Launch Pad 2010.  The jury has voted and we have selected our 8 Launch Pad semifinalists. They are, in alphabetical order:

1. Baydin Inc.
2. Doodle
3. Flowr
4. InnovationCast
5. Lyzasoft, Inc.
6. MindQuilt
7. MindTouch, Inc.
8. Pramata Corporation

Congratulations and best of luck to these 8 as they advance to the video round and compete for the the chance to demo live at Enterprise 2.0 Boston in June. If your company has been chosen, please email me at paige at techweb dot com so I can send you instructions with next steps on submitting for the video round.

The clock is ticking and today is the last chance to submit for the Enterprise 2.0 Boston Launch Pad.

What do I have to do?

Not much. Just Tweet to #e2conf-lp and tell us in 140 characters or less why you deserve to present at Launch Pad.

What makes me Launch Pad worthy?

If you’re launching a new product, recently formed a new partnership, are sporting a new integration point or have added a new feature between January 1 and December 31, 2010, we welcome your Tweet. It can be a peek behind the kimono of future announcements or something your company just recently rolled out.  We also require that your company is in the Enterprise 2.0 space. Here’s a brief list of the types of technologies we consider E2.0.

Does it cost anything to enter?

Nope. There’s no fee to enter and if you make it to the Final Four, you’ll get the chance to demo in front of a live audience on the keynote stage.  Check out some footage from the Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco Launch Pad last November to get a taste of what the live contest feels like.

You’ve got till end of day today to Tweet to #e2conf-lp – good luck!

This post first appeared at Diversity Analysis

I spent some time recently talking with Terri Griffith, a lovely lady who also happens to be a professor of management at Santa Clara University. Terri’s focus is on the “implementation and effective use of new technologies and organizational practices.” Terri hunted me down after seeing a post I recently wrote about the disconnect between technological tools and the culture within the organizations that are attempting to deploy those tools.

Over 30 minutes or so, Terri and I had an energetic conversation about technology implementation, and the wider Enterprise 2.0 space. I’ve said many times before that it concerns me that most Enterprise 2.0 commentators have a high level perspective on organizations and thus miss the all to important aspect of how culture on the shop floor is an impediment to adoption. Or, to put it more correctly, how technology fails to design products based on the realities for shopfloor workers.

All this got me thinking about my role in a former life, in which I consulted to organizations helping with Design Strategy (capitalization intentional). In this role I attempted to build cross functional teams that could ideate outside of the constraints of the status quo, while empathetically hearing the perspectives of others. Often when doing this work we would defer to the concept espoused by design consultancy IDEO, that organizations should look for individuals who fitted the mold of “T-shaped people”

According to IDEO, T-shaped people:

have two kinds of characteristics, hence the use of the letter “T” to describe them. The vertical stroke of the “T” is a depth of skill that allows them to contribute to the creative process. That can be from any number of different fields: an industrial designer, an architect, a social scientist, a business specialist or a mechanical engineer. The horizontal stroke of the “T” is the disposition for collaboration across disciplines. It is composed of two things. First, empathy. It’s important because it allows people to imagine the problem from another perspective- to stand in somebody else’s shoes. Second, they tend to get very enthusiastic about other people’s disciplines, to the point that they may actually start to practice them. T-shaped people have both depth and breadth in their skills.

I’ve had a notion I’ve been tossing around now for five years or so and it’s one of triangle shaped people. I don’t want to push the metaphor but humor me a little on this one and I’ll explain. You see the problem I see with T-shaped people both in IDEO’s definition and from what I’ve seen in practice, is that these people have a very thin veneer of broad knowledge – connect many of these people together and, beyond the thin veneer, there are huge functional gaps between them.

Rather than merely semantics, this is a major risk for organizations as much damage can be done by groups that, from appearances at least, have broad ranging skills. When let loose on projects, this thin veneer can soon develop cracks and be the cause of project failure.

Triangle shaped people are very different however. They begin with a broad skill base but, rather than only having this breadth over a very fine depth, their skill base narrows gradually as it deepens – these people are balanced and have much higher levels of what I call skill volume than the T-shaped individuals.

The thesis goes that T shaped people collaborate but don’t increase an organizations skill volume much if at all. Triangle shaped people however greatly increase skill volume in a "sum of the parts" type way.

Beyond skill volume however, triangle shaped people have an important benefit when working in groups. In a cross functional group staffed with triangle shaped people, members alongside each other have much more closely aligned areas of deep knowledge – for this reason, an approach that encourages triangle shaped people can result in a deepening of knowledge across the entire team.

It’s an area I’m re-energized about and one which I’m looking forward to collaborating with Terri on further.

Calling all E2.0 vendors!

You have 4 more days to get your Launch Pad Tweets in – we’ll close submissions end of day on Monday, April 19th.

You’ve probably been working hard and polishing those 140 characters to get them just right. To enter simply Tweet to #e2conf-lp. After the 19th, our Jury will chose their 8 favorite Tweets and if selected, you’ll move on to the next video round.

What’s in it for you?

• Opportunity to demo live on the E2.0 Boston keynote stage on June 16. 2010
• A Publicity Package that includes lots of PR love
• Final Four branding around the Launch Pad program
• The fame & glory of being crowned the E2.0 Boston 2010 Launch Pad Winner!

More information on key dates can be found on the official Launch Pad website. Best of luck to everyone submitting!

Cross posted on Diversity

I saw a tweet the other day that heralded the fact that someone I know who runs a business support agency had begun using microblogging service Yammer. Great you might say… well maybe.

I’ve had previous conversations with this particular individual (who shall remain nameless for obvious reasons). A year or so ago I was surprised (actually somewhat flabbergasted) to receive an email from his PA telling me that this person had been impressed by an article I’d recently written. The email was all of eight words long – and I can’t help but wonder how much more time it took this person to instruct his PA to write it than it would have done to write it himself.

One thing I enjoy about the dealing with software companies directly is that (generally) no matter what level you sit within an organization, you’re a technologist at heart and hence embrace different communication technologies. I’d be shocked if any of the SaaS CEOs that I’m in regular contact with actually had a PA let alone had their PA write their emails.

This is in contrast to another organization I’ve been involved with (and yes, I’d love to name and shame but I won’t) this organization is a multi billion dollar business involved in selling telecommunication products and services and alas, a large number of the workers within the organization seem unable to use the phone let alone email.

But all of this isn’t merely an exasperated rant – rather it’s a cry to think about culture, not technology. All the microblogging, collaboration, e-this, i-that and mobile everything else technology in the world is of little effect if the people within the organization have a culture that doesn’t encourage responsiveness, dialogue and open-communications. So please people – focus on the system, not the technology….

Haven’t posted here in quite a while, so hello again to those who remember me. I just posted a piece on my team’s blog at blog.trailmeme.com, looking at an issue that might be of interest to this audience:

Soldiers, Privateers, Mercenaries and Web Technology

One of the fun aspects of Web product development is that you get to think up usage scenarios, and interesting personas to go with them. A few months back, an old classmate, who now works for a big Wall Street firm, emailed asking if we had an enterprise version of trailmeme available. We don’t, and at that point we didn’t even have fully-thought-through ideas; we only had some poorly-defined conceptual vaporware for potential enterprise markets. But the email got me thinking, and a startling thought hit me: the old idea that you develop a Web 2.0 product for consumer/SMB users and harden/evolve it for enterprise users is changing very rapidly. This is because the enterprise itself is changing very rapidly, due to the emergence of three very different IT-user personas, who demand very different future enterprise IT strategies. The three user personas I’ve defined are soldier, privateer and mercenary. Depending on which one dominates the future of work, enterprise IT could evolve in three very different directions. Which means the enterprise design for products like trailmeme could evolve in radically different ways.

One of the more radical conclusions in the article is that perhaps there is no real need for a separate category called “Enterprise 2.0″ software/IT, given the way the workforce (and as a result, the enterprise) are changing, with blurring boundaries and increasing numbers of people employed in non-traditional models.

Read the full post at here

Google announced several new features for Google Docs today. Most of these are designed to improve the UI to take advantage of advancements in browser capabilities, but the most notable new feature is the ability for up to 50 individuals to simultaneously collaborate on a document in real-time. This feature shows the first application of Buzz technology into Google Docs and leaves one anticipating the integration of DocVerse to enable co-editing of Microsoft Office documents directly within Google Docs.

There’s a lot of vendors and noise in the Enterprise 2.0 market – in an effort to pay tribute to the folks that are making strides,  innovating and solving business problems creatively, the Launch Pad program provides an opportunity and platform for companies to toot their E2.0 horns and get some well deserved recognition.

The competition invites all companies and developers, large and small, to enter their application. There is no fee for entry, nor do do you need to be an exhibitor at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference (although if you are, that’s cool too). The bar for entry is set very low – simply Tweet to #e2conf-lp and tell us in 140 characters or less why you are ‘Launch Pad worthy.
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