Strycher – Gen X in 2K

As I look back over the years, I have observed a common thread in my IT dealings with my various employers and their clients.  Whether outright stated or not, there is a mentality that, "if you build it, [they] will come" (Field of Dreams, 1989). Arguably, this means that all one has to do is acquire, develop, and make available the system, and adoption is the automatic result. I mean, technology is cool, right?

(continue reading…)

Welcome to the world of SharePoint.  You may already have experienced the Microsoft (MSFT) product line on the internet, or in your organization's network environment.  SharePoint is definitely a step up from the old days of placing a file on a file server and attempting to manage versioning and permissions, giving users a web interface for managing access, content display, and collaboration on various types of content.  In a sense, you may be looking at SharePoint as the next best thing to sliced bread, especially with the pending release of SharePoint 2010 coming later this year.  However, if you are like me, you are skeptically waiting to see the final outcome, because you have experienced the dangerous and troubles of SharePoint and are hoping not to repeat the pattern with a new face lift on an existing product.

(continue reading…)

Social Media and Enterprise 2.0 have become important buzz words and initiatives in many organizations. I and a co-worker have had many discussions about Enterprise 2.0 and social networking and communication tools, in particular, discussion about adoption. More often than not, when I hear people talking about social media, it is about the tools, or about the hype, but more often than not, the assumption seems to be that all you have to do is launch the tool and it will be adopted. After a series of discussions and attempts to initiate the use of social networking tools, we have uncovered some important lessons. In this post I will cover our initial assumptions, and lay out the lessons we learned related to those assumptions.

(continue reading…)

Back in the day, I was a heavy participant in MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons), a form of Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), both as a player and as a coder. For those that may not be familiar with MUDs, they were one of the first multi-user games on the Internet, text-based predecessors of Everquest, Ultima Online, and World of Warcraft (WOW). Usually, these games had a defined economy, usually based on some form of coinage, such as copper, silver, gold, and platinum coins. Items were valued in stores based on this economic valuation system, and life was good, right? What often happened, however, was that the games became unbalanced as players continued to play, with high-level players having an overabundance of coinage, making the resource no longer scarce. In real life, we find that most economies run on scarce resources, and are based around the relative scarcity of items. Our supply and demand curves from our college economic courses show the effect of relative scarcity and price — but what happens when the coin of the realm ceases to have the same value?

(continue reading…)