Thanks!

Image via CrunchBase

This weekend at Midsouth Tech Corner I decided to see if I could write a program to send myself an SMS using Twilio.  I tried Coffeescript/Node.js for a bit but got bogged down in my own lack of knowledge about sending an https POST with specific parameters.  The node libraries for Twilio aren’t fully baked either, though I’m sure they work with a bit of effort.  Later that evening I thought to look up the official Python library and things worked great from that point on.  Special thanks to Ben Hamilton for helping me figure out the basics of Twilio by letting me look over his .NET app MealARoni.

The Twilio Python library is a pleasure to use. It wraps their RESTful API in a nicely designed package, making it only a few lines to send yourself messages.

Here’s the script I wrote on my VPS to allow me to send myself texts from the command line.  Note that you’ll need a Twilio account and phone number ($1/mo. for the number, 1¢ per text).

Related articles

• How to Send Twilio SMS Messages Using Python on Google App Engine (twilio.com)
• Announcing New Official Twilio Helper Libraries for PHP, Ruby, Python, .NET and Java (twilio.com)
• Plivo: An Open Source Alternative to Tropo and Twilio (readwriteweb.com)

Miyamoto Musashi via Wikipedia

Short but excellent, Chet Richards’ Certain to Win brings the underlying principles of 4th generation warfare to contemporary business and management. It’s a lot of Sun Tzu and Musashi mixed with von Clausewitz, Rommel, Patton, and Boyd. The bottom line is that organizations work best when they have clear visions, well-practiced skills, implicit trust amongst all contributors, and the commitment constant course corrections.
Supervisors deliver a picture of business needs, employees dissect and modify the problem statement, and then commit to delivering a solution. Communications flow rapidly in all directions, allowing teams to coordinate without slowing down and allowing leadership to stay in touch with the edges of the organization.
The concept of Schwerpunkt dominates the narrative here: A commonly held vision or overarching goal allows each unit of the organization to make decisions that continuously move them towards the goal. Toyota’s lean manufacturing Schwerpunkt was to continuously strive to decrease the time between order placement and order fulfillment. Everything else was secondary to that goal.
The only way to build the organizational culture required for this style of agility is to preach it at the top, incentivize all employees to buy in, and tactfully remove middle managers who don’t come along. Seeking and acting on bad news is seen as a critical component in strategy so employees are encouraged and protected in this mission.

Summary

Excellent read. It expands on some of the denser Eastern military philosophy you may have already read and frames it in a contemporary, easy to understand setting. Consider reading the biography “Boyd – The fighter pilot who changed the art of war” if you prefer a more holistic approach to the topic.

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• Summary and Review of The Art of War by Sun Tzu, Translated by Thomas Cleary (bookstove.com)
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Ada and Scala developers appear to be seven times more likely than C# developers to be interested in Clojure.  While the small sample size and overall selection bias makes the Clojure survey not entirely authoritative, I found the process of compiling the ratio to be interesting.

Sources:

• Survey of 487 Clojurians
• TIOBE programming index for August 2010

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Best wishes and heartfelt thanks to Susan Scrupski, Jeff Dachis, and the many helpful members that make the Council such a worthwhile group.

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Image by kenleyneufeld via Flickr

Microsoft SharePoint and Jive SBS are the two biggest players I know of in the one-size-fits-all enterprise collaboration world.  Thanks to the two year lag between consumer web product innovation and enterprise collaboration followup, we now see microblogs gaining recognition as a must-have feature for the biggest players in this market.

This is great news but there’s still a worry that the future of office microblogging will be born on top of some half-baked implementations if MS and Jive get it wrong.  My fear is that an integration of microblogging into Jive and SharePoint will wind up being less enjoyable to use than the standalone microblog networks such as Twitter and Yammer.  I’d really like to see Friendfeed-style realtime activity streams included rather than a me-too microblog that looks good on a brochure.

More important than being a twitteralike:

• Real time update syndication (PubSubHubbub, rsscloud).  Serendipitous Yammer conversations happen when two-plus people are online and reading/responding in real time.  Standard RSS can’t meet this demand.
• Integration of external content. See Facebook news streams for examples.  Automatically slurping in activity on other busy sites like YouTube and Twitter add a lot to your average Facebook news feed.  It actually adds *too much*, which leads to the next need…
• Granular filtering and presentation.  When you get around to allowing the syndication of any and all external content, then you *must* provide filtering and occlusion.  The person who tweets 50 times a day must not ruin the experience of the other 10,000 users of your system.  Users need granular filtering and control if they’re going to get any value out of your system. If we were to overlay our Yammer stream onto our Jive “recent activity” stream right now all of the long-form content would disappear in a sea of low-value Yams.  This isn’t to say that either mode of communication is more valuable than the other, only that we need multiple views: one for only micromessages, one for only long-form content, and one view for everything.
• Multiple modes of access.  Yammer and Twitter have standalone microblogging clients for desktop, smartphone, and web.  A Jive client that rolls microblogging into a one stop solution is unlikely to be as fast or as pleasant as the standalone microblogging solutions.  Ideally I’d like to see your microblog have its own first-class client that runs alongside the standard web+iphone Jive clients you already have.
• Easy interaction with items within an activity stream.  The baseline here is Like + Comment.  Facebook,  Yammer, and Friendfeed do this.

Bottom line

What I’d most like to see out of Jive/Microsoft is a way to bring in near-realtime items from other feeds.  Whether or not you implement your own “microblog” is immaterial as long as I can see Tweets and Yams and similar content brought in immediately via PubSubHubbub and then I can like/comment/share them within the walled garden of our Jive community.

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If you work in a multinational corporation like mine, you regularly work with people who don’t live in your area.  If you’re a contractor or self-employed, this will be even more familiar.  You’ll see them on mailing lists and dialed in to meetings from time to time.  We might not realize it, but often we leave these dial-in employees out of important team functions.

Maybe you’re having parties and meetings without informing the remote teammates.  Maybe your meetings feature photocopied handouts that the dialed-in folks never see.

Keep your remote friends in mind.

Be sure every meeting involving a call-in has a legitimate online component.  Share out your agenda and meeting documents online.  Take advantage of  screen sharing and video conferencing when you can.  Be sure that remote attendees can get their questions answered during the meeting, not just after.

Take care of your remote contributors.  In many cases you’re paying them as much as you pay your onsite employees, but you’re not empowering them to contribute and participate to their full potential.  The modern workplace becoming more and more decentralized.  You will be a remote contributor yourself at times, perhaps even permanently.

Take advantage of the opportunities you have now to get better at working with people in other places.

It helps them and it helps you.  You’ll need the skills soon.  Claire Flanagan, the most successful enterprise collaboration practitioner of 2009, honed her unique skills and insights by telecommuting.  One of the most creative and well-known E2.0 advocates has a similar story to tell:

I have been a remote employee, working from my home office, for over six years now and I absolutely love the experience. I probably wouldn’t even change it for anything else. And I suppose that would apply as well to the over 50% of IBM remote employees who work away from a traditional office. And I bet that would apply to most of you folks out there as well who have been working remotely for a while now. – Luis Suarez

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I have been quiet on the enterprise collaboration front for the past few weeks. Lately I’ve been brushing up on public-facing web app development using PHP (and sometimes Ruby/Rails).

I’ve been blogging in quick spurts about the sort of tasks I’m putting myself through over on my Posterous mailblog.

Recent topics on the mailblog:

• Test driving Munin service statistics on a LAMP virtual machine
• Learning more about CakePHP and git rollbacks
• Get up and running with a Turnkey LAMP server

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Reward programs gone horribly wrong

I think we’ve all seen examples of reward systems leading to counterproductive behavior.  My favorite example is working for a fast food joint when I was in college  and having a “seventy second drive-through time” contest.  Our goal was to keep the average time between customers leaving the drive-through menu (presumably having just placed an order) and customers leaving the drive through window (presumably having just received their food) below one minute and ten seconds – for an entire week.  The reward for meeting this goal was a week’s vacation in Hawaii for the GM and his wife.

We had a clock above the drive through window that let us know what our average drive through time was for the day.  That clock was the center of our world for a week, and we were led through some strange strategies to beat it.  The eye-popping cheats my team employed to meet this goal were as follows:

1. Assistant GM wearing headphones sets up an unsecured cash drawer on a makeshift table outside in front of the drive through menu.  Customers placed orders with her directly and paid.  She asked them to wait until she gave them the go ahead to drive forward to get their food.
2. AGM receives word via her headset that the customer’s order is nearly complete and she waves them through.  Customer drives over the sensor, starting the seventy second drive through clock at 0.
3. Customer arrives at the window seconds later, receives the food through the window, and drives off.   Total automatically measured drive through time: less than ten seconds.
4. In case of an unusual order, the customer was asked to pull all the way through and wait in the front parking lot to have the order delivered when it was finished.

Why people buy in to flawed reward systems

I can only really defend #4 as sound practice for operating a drive through.  If a customer’s complex order is going to slow up the rest of the business, it makes sense to pull them aside and let simpler orders keep going through.  Similarly, a table for two is always quicker to get at a restaurant than a table for ten.  The rest of these things were unsafe and dishonest and completely against the spirit of a program to minimize drive-through time, but I believe the GM received his trip to Hawaii all the same.  The only reason the rest of us were complicit in these ill-advised plans was because we wanted to keep our jobs.

So – make sure your employees’ individual incentives are aligned with your organizational goals.  If your new systems and processes (such as Enterprise 2.0) are going to require realignment of your employee’s daily work, be sure their goals and rewards are similarly recalibrated.

Current management theory on rewards and engagement

I had a conversation this morning with a coworker about career advancement in the form of promotions and raises and how (or if) they aligned with internal collaboration tools like SharePoint. I was thinking of Freakonomics when discussing this but I just got around to reading Venkatesh Rao’s review of “Drive” by Dan Pink (drive in this context appears to be mean employee engagement) and this part jumped out at me:

[W]e get a speculative list of reasons why carrots and sticks don’t work for creative work. The book calls this list the “Seven Deadly Flaws”

1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation
2. They can diminish performance
3. They can crush creativity
4. They can crowd out good behavior
5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior
6. They can become addictive
7. They can foster short-term thinking

In-the-flow versus “sure we’ll get to it the day after we run out of real work”

This fits right in with the accepted idea that the way to make enterprise collaboration work is to use it “in the flow” of our everyday work rather than using it “above the flow”.  In the flow means you’re actually getting your job done by using these tools as opposed to doing your job once and then going to another platform to write about it.

At the end of the year when your corporation looks over its employees’ performance and decides who’s helping the company out to the degree they need to be reinforced and who isn’t, are your reward systems structured to account for team-wide successes or individual stars?  It is easy enough to compare one person’s productivity against another’s as long as you are only measuring their direct outputs and not those of the people they work with and facilitate on a daily basis.  If you want your collaborative systems to succeed, be sure employees are incentivized to share rather than hoard.

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Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz is still working on his own business collaboration startup, Asana

Today’s announcment of Salesforce “Chatter” as a SaaSy enterprise Facebook product adds another option to the red-hot market for enterprise social platforms modeled on Facebook.  Regular readers will remember that I called out  ”Internal Facebooks” as the #1 collaboration trend for 2009 in a post last month.

We’re still waiting to hear from Asana, the business collaboration company started by Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz after he resigned from Facebook thirteen months ago.

Salesforce’s “Chatter” further validates the internal Facebook trend

The company, in a statement, says Chatter will “revolutionize the workplace” by leveraging social networking models that have become popular among the mainstream, notably Facebook, and bringing them to a secure and private cloud where people, content and applications will have profiles feeds and groups.

As you can probably imagine, Chatter incorporates things like status updates (I’m on a conference call now or maybe in a meeting), groups (which helps a project team stay updated), sharing (which allows users to determine who sees what) and, of course, Twitter, with the most relevant tweets being filtered into Chatter. – ZDNet

Cisco’s “Show and Share” video-based social network

Cisco’s announcement of a “Show and Share” platform came nine days ago via Burton Group analyst Mike Gotta (subscribe to his blog by the way, it’s excellent!).  There’s also a dryly named Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform:

Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform is an enterprise-class social software portal that features a corporate directory with social networking capabilities. It allows users to create team spaces and community environments ‘on the fly’ and also offers a customizable framework for integration of legacy business applications and web 2.0 content. Unlike today’s document-centric portals, the Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform is people-centric, facilitating real-time voice and video communication to connect people, communities, and information to make faster business decisions. – Mike Gotta

Novell’s new Wave-enabled “Pulse” complements their more orthodox “Teaming“offering

Pulse (announced November 5) adds Google Wave capabilities to the existing group-based collaboration of Teaming: Pulse, announced November 5 shares some similar characteristics:

Pulse is among a new wave of enterprise collaboration suites that aim to bring features from popular consumer social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to the workplace, with the added security and IT management that organizations require.

Some players in this space include IBM’s Lotus, Socialtext, Jive Software and NewsGator, which provides an enterprise social networking component to Microsoft’s SharePoint. – Computer World

Who’s next in the enterprise Facebook market?

I fully expect to hear an announcement out of Asana in the next 6 to 9 months.  Newsgator is already making a niche for themselves by Facebookifying Microsoft’s comparatively slow-moving SharePoint product.  What else is out there? Please let me know with a comment or a tweet!

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