There have been two serious problems keeping Twitter from being of much use to enterprise IT folks:
Neither, however, is as bad as it used to be. E.g., major downtime or inexcusable turning-off of major features, while not exactly things of the past, are much reduced. And Twitter spam isn't a killer problem either.
Actually, I've only identified one significant enterprise IT community on Twitter so far, specifically in the area of business intelligence. (Plus a second quasi-enterprise one for technology-in-schools.) I don't know whether there are others. Searching on obvious keywords such as Oracle, database, or SAP isn't terribly encouraging -- but searches on BI terms wouldn't easily have turned up the BI group I'm referring to either. That said, Twitter is a proven tool to:
and I don't see why that shouldn't work in the enterprise IT area as well.
Helping tip the scales, there finally are some useful tools for Twitter as well. Most of the Twitter clients -- such as the overly popular Tweetdeck -- are ridiculous, or else focused specifically on people who want to spend all day watching tweets go by. In the past few days, however, Michael Arrington has called attention to two new tools, and I can endorse both of them.
TwitApps is a simple service that emails you notification of @replies. Knowing when you are @replied to on Twitter is huge, since it's the essence of keeping conversations going. For the first time (that I know of), it is possible to stay well-engaged with Twitter without actually checking the core service in an obsessive, disruptive way.
Power Twitter is a Firefox plug-in that does a few things. One nice one is to expand URLs in tweets -- apparently the default is to something like HTML page titles -- and make them readable. The other is to make search boxes more convenient, although the utility of this is limited by the generally unrewarding nature of Twitter search.
Bottom line: If you're a sufficiently inquisitive IT person to be reading this blog, and you're not yet engaged with Twitter, it may be time to check the service out.
Curt Monash is a leading analyst of and strategic advisor to the software industry. Praised by Lawrence J. Ellison for his "unmatched insight into technology and marketplace trends," Curt was the software/services industry's #1 ranked stock analyst while at PaineWebber, Inc., where he served as a First Vice President until 1987. He subsequently co-founded Evernet, Inc., a $40 million networking systems integrator. Since 1990, he has owned and operated Monash Research, an analysis and advisory firm covering software-intensive sectors of the technology industry. In that period he also has been co-founder, president, or chairman of several other technology startups.
Curt has served as a strategic advisor to many well-known firms, including Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, AOL, CA, and Netezza. Curt earned a Ph.D. in mathematics (Game Theory) from Harvard University. He has held faculty positions in mathematics, economics and public policy at Harvard, Yale, and Suffolk universities.
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Twitters and such
Actually, I find adding a tool that only does one thing kind of useless, but an even bigger sin would be to install a tool that only swaps one technology for another. A good example was when one of our it co-op students created an In-Out Board on his down time. Someone said we should replace the magnetic in-out board at the front door with it. "Not good enough". After adding Web 2.0 properties such as private messaging, twitter and Yammer type utility, we were getting somewhere. Then we added hyperlinking and color coding to department intranets, mailto, and a bunch more stuff, we put it in place. You can't have enought entry points into the corp portals.
We used the demo In/Out board found at http://www.BillCatchem.net/InOutBoard/ as a model because it doesn't overkill on features and was a great map for our students who collaborated on it's development. Sure at 50 bucks we could have just purchased it, but it gave our new people a good intro in how we do things here. And that's if you want to replace a technology, you have to solve at least two problems, and more if they're small.
un-structured social chatter
Am I the only one to have noticed that 'threaded' conversations tend to 'unravel' - and need to become convergent..? The original issue gets lost in 'drop-down' comments and retorts to unrelated statements, etc, etc, etc.
We have more than enough social 'platforms' - none of which seems to have established or implemented the simple business rudiments of data management -
and "issue management" (progress tracking, etc).
If you share that concern or have an interest in a potential solution
http://unettednations.wordpress.com/lets-surmize/
Let's chat.
Better yet - let's converge!
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