What I'm Playing: We Ski

The Wii game console is so popular, everyone is trying to cash in on the fad. They are oodles of games out there, all with chibi-headed cartoon characters and bright colors. Unfortunately, about 90% of those games stink to high heaven. Overly simplistic, boring, repetitive, awful controls... You get the point.

The trouble is trying to find the 10% that are good without having to experience (or buy!) the bad. It's hard, since they all tend to look alike. This is particularly true of the slew of "casual" sports games. Video game reviews can help. But even they can be misleading (since you and the reviewers may have different tastes).

So when you do find a good one, you feel compelled to tell the world. And last night I found one.

I am addicted to skiing games. I don't know why; I've only ever gone skiing twice in my life and I found it difficult, nerve wracking, and exhausting. I am sure I'd get better at it if I did it more. But there is something about the concept of flying down a hill on a couple of sticks (or a board) that really appeals to me.

So I have played a number of skiing games. I prefer the realistic ones (such as 1080°) to the over-the-top tricksters (such as SSX), but I'll take my virtual skiing where I can get it.

Which is why I bought We Ski. It looks like the other cheap ripoff Wii sports titles but this one is different. It really is a good game. Now, we are not talking complex or overly challenging, just lots of fun and plenty to do.

The controls -- using the Wiimote and nunchuk -- are accurate and very intuitive*: thrust down to push off, tilt to turn, rotate outwards to crouch... There are more complex moves (especially aerial tricks) that require additional buttons or twists. But the point is you can get going very quickly.

And once you are going there is plenty to explore. Multiple trails and chair lifts, plenty of variety. You can even ski down from the top of the mountain to the bottom in a single go. In addition to the skiing (and avoiding the other skiers) there are plenty of additional challenges (and unlockables) available if you talk to the people you find on the mountain.

No, there are no olympic level challenges (although one hidden course is quite a beast) -- this is a more relaxed game that lets you go at your own pace. But for a budget title (currently $30), it is packed with more fun than many if not most of the full-priced games out there for the Wii.

So if you are looking for some cheap thrills -- literally -- give it a try. I especially recommend it if you have friends to play it with.

* Footnote: We Ski supports the Wii Fit board, which may be its key marketing point. But I haven't tried that. In fact, when I first heard about the game, that feature put me off it since it sounded too much like a gimmick. But when I heard you could play multiplayer using the Wiimote and nunchuk I was sold.

What I'm Playing: Phantom Hourglass and Dragon Sword

I am currently playing two games on my Nintendo DS -- Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword. I didn't intend to play them together. I started Phantom Hourglass after it came out, but got stuck in one of the dungeons. Not seriously stuck, just stuck without sufficient time to work out the solution. (This happens to me a lot -- not having extended amounts of time to dedicate to gaming. As a result, there are certain games I get "stuck" in just because they require an hour or so to make progress and I just can't find the time. But that is fodder for a separate rant.)

So I put Hourglass aside and went back to other games. In the meantime, I picked up Ninja Gaiden and started playing it. Then about a week ago I actually had two free evenings, so I went back to Phantom Hourglass, completed the dungeon and moved on. That same evening, I played more of Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword as well.

What's interesting about playing these games together is that -- if you were to describe them -- they sound almost identical. But the experiences from playing them are almost exact opposites.

Both games are action adventures where your goal is to free a kidnapped female. They both use the stylus almost exclusively. (Dragon Sword allows the use of a button as guard. Otherwise all interactions are with the stylus.) Both are story-driven, largely linear gameplay -- although both give the impression of free roaming -- where you fight a seeming endless supply of enemies, followed by intermittent boss battles. In both games your primary weapon is a sword you swing by slashing with the stylus. In both you also have secondary weapons (shuriken in Dragon Sword and a boomerang to begin with in Hourglass).

So what's the difference? Well, style certainly. But not just style. It's timing as well.

Stylistically Dragon Sword is realistic pseudo-3D. The backgrounds are definitely flat 2D images -- like 1950's painted movie backdrops -- but your character gets to move "around" as if it were a 3D space (forward, backward, left, right, and up and down when appropriate). The character is probably rendered as 2D sprites, but it is rendered in a realistic style that gives the feel of 3D.

Hourglass, on the other hand is real 3D programming in a cartoonish style. Large blocks of bright colors, very little texture mapping, big headed cartoon characters. Even the sounds are bright and cheerful, with lots of major chords and bright tinkling and chiming noises as enemies disappear in a puff of colored smoke.

But it is not just the graphics that create the distinction. Kingdom Hearts (on PS2) is also cartoonish, but doesn't have the same feel as Phantom Hourglass. Much of the difference is in the timing. In Phantom Hourglass, the enemies, although endless, appear in a fairly regular pattern one or two at a time. Except for boss battles, you usually have plenty of time to plan your attack. When there are multiples, they are spread out so you can easily take them out one at a time. It is planned, almost rhythmic in nature.

In comparison, the enemies in Dragon Sword appear in groups. They come at you as a swarm or surround you; there is no taking one out while ignoring the rest. The pace is frantic and intended to raise your adrenaline level at least two notches.

The result is that -- although the storylines are almost identical and the challenges similar in nature -- playing Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword is like knocking down a hornets' nest and having to figure out what to do next, while playing Phantom Hourglass is more like popping balloons and seeing if you can do it in the right order to win a prize.

One other distinction between the games is how they handle the hardware limitations. Both games push the limits of the DS hardware: Dragon Sword in its striving for realism and Phantom Hourglass in its use of 3D.

In the boss battles, Dragon Sword really shines -- the realism and details of the characters and their actions, the urgency of the battle while still requiring strategic action -- these are the best parts of the game. The boss characters are also large, fairly filling the screen. However, during the interludes where you wander through woods, caverns, and palaces fighting off hordes of lesser minions, the realism falters. The 2D backgrounds are detailed, but your movement is artificially limited. And much of the detail is lost simply due to the small size of the figures on the screen. This is particularly notable when it comes time to talk to people and the game has to revert to flat cartoon stills of faces to provide "character" to the story.

Hourglass, in the other hand, always stays just within the bounds of what the machine can do. The graphics are fully 3D, but are kept simple not to push the hardware too much. Cut scenes also zoom in and take dramatic camera angles to emphasize the "3D-ness" of the game. but they still manage to get smoke effects and plenty of action onto the screen.

Dragon Sword is an impressive achievement, both as a game and a technical demonstration. However, Hourglass stands out with Mario Kart DS as perhaps the best and most consistently powerful use of the system so far.

Enterprise 2.0, Revisited

Having had yet another fruitless discussion about how important one or another piece of web 2.0 software is to the enterprise, I am even more firmly convinced that social computing -- sometimes referred to as Enterprise 2.0 -- cannot happen inside the corporation without some major changes to processes, practices, and preconceptions. This is not "change management"; this is a deep, fundamental change in beliefs throughout the corporation.

Lots of companies are dabbling in web 2.0. I say "dabbling" not to imply dilettantism, but to reflect the tentative, experimental approach most companies are taking. They implement a bookmarking service here or a company-wide wiki there, a blog or a social networking service as a prototype, and then try to encourage employees to use them. And the results are fairly predictable. There is a moderate level of participation early on and some enthusiastic devotees who preach the gospel of web 2.0 to others. But ultimately, usage tends to stall or even drop off before any critical mass can be achieved.

And let's not fool ourselves; critical mass is essential. Without sufficient numbers of people using these services as part of their day-to-day activities (rather than as a one-time trial separate from "real work") the services will falter. There is no social computing without an active, vibrant society.

What is the alternative? Well, it isn't to assume social computing can brazenly take the place of well-established corporate systems (such as email or intranet web sites). Neither can you run them as two wholly separate systems covering the same function. Your employees simply cannot accept that sort of schizophrenic behavior.

Any company planning to adopt web 2.0 has to first accept two basic facts about corporate life and then take several steps to ensure their web 2.0 efforts are successful. The two basic facts that need to be accepted are:

• A business is not a democracy. It cannot be run by the wisdom of the crowd. You can delegate responsibility, but ultimately management is responsible (legally and financially) and will dictate the direction of the company.
• Employees are individuals and will decide for themselves whether they believe a decision, a direction, or an activity is good or bad. That doesn't mean they won't follow orders (except in extreme cases) but it will significantly impact the performance and effectiveness of any process, to the point of influencing what business efforts succeed and which fail.

The consequence of these realities is that there are at least two social cultures within any corporation: the official organizational manager-employee relationship and the unofficial lunch room culture. Official announcements travel through the first network. Gossip travels through the second network. The first is strictly hierarchical and well defined. The second is dynamic, amorphous, and ever changing.

Both cultures need to exist. They intersect, interact, and influence each other, but neither can survive alone.

So what does this have to do with social computing? Social computing is the physical manifestation of and vehicle for the informal network. Blogs are not hierarchical. Wikis are democratic (or possibly even socialist). They are not an appropriate channel for official management communication -- although they are a very good channel for discussing official communications.

Similarly, the corporate intranet and applications such as the employee directory, expense forms, organizational charts, etc are the representation of the official hierarchical network. The corporate intranet portal is -- at least in part if not in toto -- a controlled communication vehicle of the management structure.

Just as the formal and informal networks must co-exist, the tools, applications, and web sites that support them must co-exist, not compete. What this means is that where the cultures intersect, the tools should intersect as well. So, very pragmatically, the following actions are needed at specific points of intersection:

Search & User-Generated Content:

• The intranet portal is the masthead of the official culture. However, search is the employees' gateway to all knowledge. Unfortunately, in many companies, search and the portal are seen as one (and managed by the same organization). In these cases, search is often restricted to only crawling "official" intranet sites and much user-generated content (such as blogs, wikis, forums, etc) is excluded.
  
• If your social computing efforts are going to succeed, they must be included in the corporate search index. Preferably, search will allow scoping so users can choose whether to search official material or user-generated content or both.
  

Employee Directory & Social Networking:

• The employee directory is usually managed by HR, which is logical since they manage the employees' official status (name, address, job classification, and position in the organizational hierarchy). If the company is also experimenting with social networking, the user-managed profiles will compete with the employee directory.
• The employee directory and any user-generated profiles should be connected. Preferably, this means the employee directory will display both HR maintained and user-managed content as a single page. At worst, the HR-managed directory should include links to the user's personal profile and other personal content (such as blogs and bookmarks). These links should be automated to ensure completeness.

Corporate Intranet Banner & Tagging, Bookmarks, Etc:

• Most large corporate intranets have a standard web banner that gives a consistent look & feel to intranet sites and provides links to common functions such as the portal home page, search, etc.
• If the corporation is experimenting with social tagging, bookmarks, or commentary (ala Digg), these functions should be embedded in the corporate banner. Why? The logic goes like this: the reason for running an internal service is to tag, bookmark, or comment on internal sites. (Otherwise why not use the existing external services?) If the employees have to find a page they want to tag, then have to manually visit the internal service, it is just too much work. They could use logos within the page as you see on internet sites. However, this would require all intranet site owners putting in the appropriate code. An unlikely thing to happen. By having the service accessible from the banner, it is automatically included on all intranet sites and employees are constantly reminded the service(s) exist and tagging becomes a single click activity.

Can social computing activities survive without these actions? Yes. Will they flourish or reach their potential? I'm afraid not.

The Four Paradoxes of KM

Knowledge Management is a big topic. There are different models and approaches for managing knowledge -- any of which can be helpful in establishing goals, a strategy, and tactical initiatives for a corporate KM program. Each model narrows the focus to a subset of the larger problem. Some focus on communities, some focus on capturing tacit knowledge, some emphasize best practices, while others target search and/or structuring knowledge that already exists.

However, whichever approach you take, at some point you will come face to face with one or more of the paradoxes of corporate KM. These are problems without a solution. They trigger intense philosophical debates when they arise and can lead to quite heated, sometimes personal, attacks on one position or another. The professional careers of a number of consultants in the field are based on advocating one side or the other of the debate.

Why? Why must it be one or the other? Why can't there be a middle ground? The reality is that any given KM program has only so much time, money, or attention to spend and must tactically select what problems to attack and how, thereby staking a position on each issue. And when you do, there will be advocates within management, among your professional peers, and in your audience base who will argue -- loudly -- for the alternative.

Be prepared. These issues cannot be resolved by pure logic or persuasion. They must simply be faced as a hazard of the profession.

The four paradoxes of KM are the following:

Tacit vs. Explicit

This is perhaps the oldest of the paradoxes and the most intractable: whether to focus on explicit or tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is information that is written down: project documents, white papers, lessons learned, best practices, etc. Tacit knowledge is all the information your constituents have garnered from experience but still have locked up in their heads.

A focus on explicit knowledge usually leads to an emphasis on search, taxonomy (categorizing the explicit knowledge), and sometimes selection (e.g. qualifying best practices). A focus on tacit knowledge often requires a concentration on establishing and encouraging communities (where tactic knowledge can be shared), story telling, and the technologies and events that support them (forums, blogs, SIGs, face-to-face meetings, etc.). Search is also important, but often focuses on people rather than documents (finding expertise rather than static information).

Local vs. Global

The second paradox concerns the geographic scope of the knowledge sharing. It is relatively easy to establish a community for knowledge sharing within a local area. Sharing involves trust and trust is easier to establish among people who share physical and cultural proximity. A small localized community also has more opportunities for face-to-face meetings that further increases trust and understanding between members. So you frequently see requests to create a local group, forum, wiki, or repository, although the topic at hand is itself universal (such as a Project Management community for the Boston area, say).

However, once a local community is established, either consciously or subconsciously, it creates barriers to those outside of the group. Just the existence of a local group will create an emotional barrier to people not within that area. They do not advertise their activities outside the region and often think their concerns are unique to themselves. In many cases, they even use security mechanisms to restrict access to their local members only.

But for large companies, sharing knowledge locally is not the problem. Making information and problem solutions visible and available across the corporation is the issue. Consequently, these localized efforts actually create barriers to sharing knowledge between regions and organizations.

Global communities are harder to get started. Individuals don't feel as connected and, for multinational companies, different languages can create an additional barrier. So, if there is a local community, employees will tend to expend their energies participating in the local activities and ignoring the global efforts. (There is actually a chicken-and-egg situation that arises, where people will claim, fairly, that there is no benefit in their participating in the global community because it isn't as active as their local group. But the global community cannot thrive until the individuals get involved...)

So, the individuals would prefer and will -- in the absence of any outside influence -- create small, closed, local groups. But from a larger corporate perspective there is a critical need to establish and foster global sharing. And until the global communities are firmly established and prove their worth, there can be continuing and sometimes heated battles over who gets to establish communities and how.

Open vs. Closed

The third paradox focuses on the tension between security and sharing. This paradox is closely related to the issue of global vs. local, but is not restricted to geographic proximity.

The goal of knowledge management is to maximize the value of the corporation's accumulated experience and wisdom by sharing them and applying them wherever possible: i.e. using knowledge as a business asset. But, in business parlance, assets need to be protected against misuse or -- worse -- industrial espionage. This is usually done by restricting access to the assets to only those who need to know. In other words, putting them under lock and key.

This approach may work well for machinery and a few highly confidential business strategy documents, but it does not work well for knowledge. As soon as you restrict access to knowledge you drastically reduce its ability to be applied and consequently its value.

Knowledge is one of the few "renewable" resources in business. In fact, it is not only renewable, it is regenerative, because the more you use it the more knowledge you create.

Unfortunately, there are many urban legends that scare managers and reinforce the urge to secure any but the most innocuous documents against misuse. Stories of a contractor who also works for a competitor, takes documents, gives them to the competitor who then presents the information as their own work and "steals" customers out from under your company. Even within a company, many groups will protect process documents, examples, best practices -- even sales presentations -- against access from anyone but select members of their own subdivision.

This sort of intellectual property hoarding is hard to argue against because it is not based on rational thought; it is based on fear. If you perceive others within your own company as a threat, it will be very hard to establish a culture of sharing and trust. And as the the average time of employment shrinks and changing companies becomes commonplace, even the most trusted employees within your division become potential future threats.

Quantity vs. Quality

Lastly, the fourth paradox struggles with the choice between a few excellent examples and sharing as much knowledge as possible. The argument goes like this:

• On the one side, you should save and share everything so as not to lose any of the valuable knowledge captured in your business documents. Besides, you cannot tell in advance what knowledge will be needed. Users can then search through and decide for themselves what is the most appropriate content.
• On the other side, even if you save only part of the accumulated documents, you don't want your employees wasting their time sifting through piles of unstructured content. The best examples should be reviewed, approved and highlighted to make sure they get the most appropriate content quickly.
  

Note this argument tends to come up most frequently when dealing with explicit knowledge. But it can also apply to tacit knowledge, when you get into discussions about archiving and how long to store forums, blogs or other user-generated content.

In most cases, whenever I have been caught in the middle of this argument, it has been completely hypothetical. The organization having the argument is neither capturing any measureable amount of unqualified content and has no process, criteria, or personnel in place to locate and rate best practices from any other type of knowledge. However, the debate rages on, hindering any further progress in either direction.

But the paradox does not have to be taken to extremes to prove troublesome. Even when a company attempts to take the middle ground -- accepting peer submissions, then reviewing, selecting, and highlighting best examples -- arguments still arise. To begin with, identifying certain samples as high quality and raising their visibility has the natural effect of discouraging contributions from those who and are not selected. If you encourage people to reuse the "approved" entries, you are implicitly discouraging them from using the rest, so why bother submitting? The other common difficulty that arises is disagreements over who (which group or which role) should have the right or has the expertise to make the selection.

Conclusion

I say these paradoxes are unsolvable, but that is only when they are being argued in abstract. Given any specific business situation, there is always a better and a worse approach that will fall to one side or the other of each issue.

When dealing with call centers and help desks, there is a considerable amount of explicit knowledge required. The call agents are not experts; they rely on databases of "answers" to respond to calls. Any issues that are escalated need to be captured into the database to aid future calls.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, when dealing with consultants, there is a certain amount of explicit knowledge -- contract templates, legal boilerplate, even past examples -- but the critical issue is enabling them to share, combine, and reuse their implicit knowledge with each other as they face new challenges each day.

Unfortunately, people tend to see these paradoxes as abstracts, even when facing specific business challenges. So, although it ought to be possible to argue the merits of a knowledge management program based on the specifics of its strategy and alignment with the business situation, you will more than likely be drawn into a philosophical debate over one or more of the paradoxes at some point in the project.

Being an optimistic, you might view it as a positive sign of interest and enthusiasm for KM. Being a pessimist, it might appear purely as unnecessary interference from the uninformed. Either way, it is best to allot extra time in your plans for it because no matter what you do, you are unlikely to be able to avoid the argument.

What is Enterprise 2.0?

In his comment to yesterday's post about Enterprise 2.0, Doug Cornelius posited that:

I do not think it [Enterprise 2.0] is using Web 2.0 inside the enterprise, it is tools like Web 2.0 inside the enterprise.

However, a previous comment, from Xyzo, took what appears to be the exact opposite position:

Enterprise 2.0 is not just web 2.0 in an enterprise. You first need a change in culture, which means adopting new processes.

So which is it? Is it web 2.0 tools and technology inside the enterprise or (if I can be allowed to paraphrase) web 2.0 philosophy inside the enterprise?

Well, not being a fan of the 2.0 craze, I am probably not in any position to insist on a particular definition. So let's go back to the source, Andrew McAfee and see how he defines it:

Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.

Hmmm... that doesn't seem to resolve anything. But if you read the rest of his definition, it appears he is siding more with the latter definition. I won't quote the definition in full -- it is a great read so I recommend it to everyone -- but some key points of his definition are the distinction between platform and tool and his use of the term emergent:

Emergent means that the software is freeform, and that it contains mechanisms to let the patterns and structure inherent in people's interactions become visible over time.

So if I interpret this correctly, the definition of Enterprise 2.0 is a little bit of both: it requires both the technology (i.e. the platform) and the philosophy (implied by emergent and freeform).

So are blogs inside the firewall Enterprise 2.0? It depends. It depends on how the technology is used. If it is simply used as another way to push executive news and announcements to the masses, then the answer is no. If it is used as a mechanism for managers to communicate and interact freely with their employees, or for the employees to develop their own interactions, then the answer would be yes.

Which gets us back to web 2.0 and process: intent and the process that embodies it is essential in the classification as any specific tool or technology as Enterprise 2.0. However, too much process is in itself a problem. Remember, McAfee speaks of an emergent platform; too much predefined process will tend to inhibit the emergence of patterns and structure over time. (In other words, there needs to be enough process or intent to act as a catalyst, but enough room to allow the emergence of the true purpose -- McAffee's patterns and structure -- from its usage.)

So, for example, as I read it:

• Blogs inside the enterprise are OK, but not in and of themselves E2.0
• Blogs used for project-based communication (as one example) are closer to the definition
• Blogs used by project leads to post weekly status on each project (particularly if comments aren't allowed or encouraged) push beyond the freeform and the process starts to inhibit the interaction -- becoming purely web 2.0 technology used for traditional top-down project management purposes
  

It all depends on what is required, what is allowed, and what is supported.

But the interesting question for me -- particularly when talking about the practical application of these emergent platforms -- is looking at what are the characteristics of the platform that tend to lead to success. Which, of course, presumes the thornier question of how one defines success...

Why Enterprise 2.0?

There is a lot of hype about Enterprise 2.0 (or "web 2.0 inside the enterprise"), but what is the buzz all about? There is certainly sufficient cause to be excited -- the exponential growth of social networking "in the wild" and the success of web sites like MySpace, Flickr, and del.icio.us demonstrate a transformative power that any corporate executive would be crazy not to envy. But can that power be harnessed in a corporate environment?

You can have philosophical debates about the revolutionary impact of web 2.0; how the "wisdom of crowds" can change the way business is done, harnessing the combined potential of thousands of employees, etc. But for the time being, these arguments are completely theoretical. Speaking pragmatically -- from a purely practical perspective -- what are the pros and cons that would cause a corporation to deploy social software internally, beyond simple speculation?

The Cart Before the Horse

The fact is, attempts to utilize web 2.0 within the corporate firewalls have -- from all reports -- been sporadic and slow to develop thus far. It is easy to see why.

Cons:

• Despite all the predictions that younger employees -- Gen X, Gen Y, and millenials -- will expect or insist on social software at work, the fact is they might not. Those employees who have already embraced social networking outside the company will have no great impetus to create a separate social network inside the firewall. The potential audience -- and therefore benefits -- are dramatically smaller and require duplicate effort. For example, if I am using del.icio.us for bookmarks, why would I want a separate, incompatible set of bookmarks just for work-related data? It's just too much effort.
  
• Employees not using social software today have no experience with it and so will feel little compunction or interest in using it internally.
  
• As mentioned before, the difference between millions (or hundreds of millions) of users on the internet and a few hundred or thousand employees inside the firewall is non-trivial. It is unclear whether there is sufficient critical mass within a company -- even a large company -- to make social software "work". There is simply not enough of a "crowd" to get wisdom from.
  
• Finally there are all the usual disincentives for using new applications within a corporation: not part of my job, overlaps with existing apps, can't waste time on pilots or prototypes that might go away...

Given these issues, the question ought to be: is it more beneficial to "roll your own" social network or could companies be more effective by really embracing change and using the existing public services? For example, why not just create a separate FaceBook group for your company and encourage employees to use it?

Pros

The fact is that there are at least three significant reasons for a company creating their own web 2.0 infrastructure internally.

• Security. First and foremost, the "network" inside the firewall can be far richer -- but at the same time more sensitive -- than the generalized social networks on the public internet. Corporate employees already have a point of connection, their employment, to tie them together. But there is a significant danger of proprietary -- or at least embarrassing -- information being exposed if a company's employees use an external service to develop company-based social networks. For large companies, in particular, this is likely to be a show-stopper requiring an internal infrastructure even if it is purely a replicate of externally-available services.
  
• Consistency. The corporate intranet is neither a democracy nor a competitive marketplace. Any good idea on the web has imitators and so individuals have several choices for social networking (MySpace, FaceBook, Orkut...) or bookmarks (del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, reddit...), or video (YouTube, Veoh, Flixya...). Sheer volume can allow each to be successful. But they can also create problems, as people often need to create multiple profiles to connect with friends who are on multiple services. Within the corporation you can insist on a unique service for each, significantly reducing confusion and the dilution of the crowd effect. Whether this uniqueness makes up for the significantly reduced overall audience is unclear, but it may.
  
• Integration. Perhaps the greatest advantage companies have implementing web 2.0 inside the firewall is the ability to integrate the services. For companies with single sign-on (i.e. unique digital identifiers for their employees) it is possible to automate the connectivity between multiple web 2.0 technologies as well as traditional corporate data. Rather than separate accounts (one for a social network, one for bookmarks, one for photos...) inside the firewall a person's identity are tied to a single ID, which can be used to merge content. When creating a profile, all of someone's basic information (location, email, role, etc) can be pulled automatically from the corporate directory. Only personal preferences and context needs to be added. In the same way, a person's membership in internal groups, forums, or businesses can be automatically linked to their profile. Photos can be entered once and used throughout the corporation etc. This type of linking has always been possible. The change with web 2.0 is giving the individual control of what that data is that is shared.

Conclusion

For small companies (100 employees or less), it may be possible to embrace the openness of social computing and utilize external services such as FaceBook* for all of their social interactions. But for even moderately sized companies, the need for privacy and security will drive them to institute social computing (if they do at all) inside the firewall.

Despite the drawbacks to internal deployment, the ability to integrate multiple social applications -- along with existing corporate data -- though unique IDs provides corporations with an opportunity to build social networks that are more technically powerful than anything currently possible outside the firewall.** However, even with this potential value, there are some realities that any company must face implementing web 2.0:

• Adoption will not be anywhere near as "viral" internally as equivalent services on the public web (for all the reasons given above).
• Implementing only one web 2.0 service as a "pilot" has little if any chance of success (again, for reasons previously mentioned).
• The previous limitation might be overcome by piggybacking web 2.0 functionality on top of existing corporate services. For example, adding personal biographies or tagging to an existing company white pages provides the new services with a large, pre-established audience. Similarly, adding social functions such as tagging and bookmarking into the corporate intranet banner (where standard banners exist) allows the services to reach the majority of intranet web sites with no additional work for web masters.
  

* footnote: In fact, for small companies, their entire infrastructure could be built on free services such as Facebook, Yahoo Groups, GoogleDocs, etc. Although I don't know of any companies doing this today, it is clear that an infrastructure-less company is possible, even without paying for commercial SaaS offerings.

**footnote: OpenID offers some of the promise of unique IDs in the public realm. But its potential is still nascent and seriously offset by competing services. For example, I receive requests to "connect" on a regular basis from at least three separate professional networks similar to LinkedIn . The benefit of any one of these networks is significantly diminished by the existence of the others. Thus far I have chosen to simply ignore requests from services I do not already have a profile on because it is too much trouble to maintain multiple profiles for a single purpose.

What I'm Reading: Late for Work

I am suspicious of awards books. You know what I mean: the National Poetry Series, the Agnes Starrett award, the Lamont, the Yale Younger Poets Series, etc. It's not that there aren't good books in these series. It's just that they tend to look better than they are (and I don't mean just visually, although that too).

You leaf through them at the bookstore and hit a poem that strikes you as interesting. Unique. Evocative. So you buy the book and take it home only to discover either that you read the one good poem in the bunch or it is all surface: the poems are all interesting/unique/evocative in the same, formulaic way. Again, I don't want to paint all award winners with the same brush, but as a consumer I have been burnt enough times to be wary.

So when I came across David Tucker's Late for Work at the Concord Bookshop (one of the nicest independent bookstores in the country, by the way), I was intrigued but not necessarily optimistic. The working poet. Poems about working life. I could see the hook and had serious doubts. But it looked interesting enough to overcome my reservations from its being a Bread Loaf/Bakeless Prize winner and picked it up.

And I am glad I did. Tucker is a working poet. Not because he writes self-referential poems about holding down a job (although he does that too), but because his poems are the product of a poet working at his craft just as he works at his primary occupation. The jacket tells us Tucker is a journalist. And plenty of the poems refer to this profession. But the work in Late for Work is the backdrop, the milieu of the poems, not the subject.

Tucker is not a great poet -- you can't expect the revelatory experiences of reading Whitman or Berryman or Neruda. These are not poems using language in a new way or extraordinary visions of the inner self. They are not flashy or arty poems. No, Tucker is a not great but he is definitely a good, steady poet and his poems reflect language used well to examine a life and the society it is lived in.

Which is surprisingly uncommon nowadays and what makes this book worthwhile. Here is a poet taking his time and looking closely:

Through most of January my two brothers and I
drove back and forth to the hospital where our old man was dying.
We did eight-hour shifts, just watching him go
from the final disintegrations of liver cancer, swabbing his lips,
talking into his coma, with sidelong looks at death.

--"Enough of It"

The careful articulation lets you see into the narrator's predicament, experience loss with a clarity that is not possible when the tragedy is your own. And with that clarity comes insight:

I've seen all the x-rays I ever want to see, checked all
the IV bags I ever want to check, heard enough of the morphine counter
and its little metal tongue.

And just as his poetry is slow and studied, his endings do not allow for the easy out either:

      -- and praying
and having faith that you'll get over it and move on and let go,
and the long view you take after losing one loved so much --
I've had enough of that too.

Even in his more flippant moments, Tucker poems are controlled (such as in the poem "Voice Mail", which personifies the one technology that is perhaps the most dehumanizing, beginning "this is what's-his-face's voice mail.") But where Tucker shines is where he examines the everyday, the common events we all share but must experience separately: life, death, work, etc. Poems such as "Enough of It", "The Men Decide", and "Putting Everything Off" make Late for Work a book well worth reading.

If there are flaws in Tucker's books (and one would imagine there must be in a first full-length book) I can see only two. Every once in awhile, Tucker draws out his images so carefully, so long and so far that he goes beyond poetry and stumbles into -- well -- prose. For example, this from the poem "That Day":

The mother sings some song we can't quite hear anymore
as she carries a sack of groceries on one arm
while the boy wades around her, kicking the dry leaves.

As for the second possible flaw, Tucker is a solid poet and his poems are not repetitive. But there is a certain structure that you see repeated in several of his poems. It is the slow beginning, the steady deepening of the images, followed by a turning as the poem progresses, finished off with a final twist in the last two lines. This is not a pattern unique to Tucker. Many poets do it. It comes from a desire for closure, a clean finish. The danger is that you fall for an easy out, a neat but artificial closing image. I recognize it because I recognize it from my own work and the work of others. It is a familiar trap.

Tucker doesn't fall for the easy or the quick close, the surprise ending. But he does favor that final poetic image and uses them frequently. He may want to consider occasionally letting the poem come to a halt, without that closing final exclamation, and let the poem rely on its own merits. A little ambiguity never did any harm.

But this is just nitpicking, quibbling over details. Late for Work is a surprising book because it isn't surprising. Its just good strong poetry in the American vernacular.