I had about four topics that I could have written about today, but I decided on this one for no real reason. The other topics I considered were as follows:

• email and how we abuse it and don’t use the phone (too old school for some) or instant messaging (too new school for some)
• the concept of context
• meetings…when is there time to actually DO something?

Maybe I’ll tackle these later this week. I’m not sure about how profound a topic this will be, but I thought I would journal it anyhow.

The notion of eating one’s own dog food is not a new concept. The question is, what if you don’t actually make the dog food? If you don’t actually build or manufacture something yourself, is it your dog food?

Someone approached me about this today. I won’t get into the subject specifically, but his point was that we as a company do not have any dog food to speak of. Things like Microsoft SharePoint or the concept of a Service Oriented Architecture are not things that we can claim we created. I agree with that but what I tried to explain and failed to get through to him is that our experiences and methods that we use to implement such things are our own and with that said, we should absolutely eat our own dog food.

I even went so far as to say that we create new dog food everyday and that as a consulting firm, when we stop gaining new experiences and taking those experiences and incorporating them into our implementation methodologies, we will cease to exist. That won’t happen.

I told myself that I was going to spend some time over this rainy DFW weekend trying to better understand Web 2.0 and what is means to the enterprise of today and what it will mean to the enterprise of tomorrow (Enterprise 2.0). I found out quickly that what I set out to do is going to take me a lot longer than a few hours over a rainy weekend, especially since spending time with Austin, my son, would take priority. We’re watching Star Wars II as he calls it for a about the 100th time. I digress.

In my short amount of reading about Web 2.0 the one thing that seemed to resonate in my mind is that nothing is driving Web 2.0 and the services that are being created under that umbrella more than youth and progressive thinking. Further, I fail to see how this is much different now than what is was say 15 years ago. Web 2.0 certainly involves better and more feature rich solutions on the whole, but couldn’t that be attributed to better technology available to really smart and progressive developers? I think so.

Not to break out any “good old days” points, and actually this might be just the opposite. I just remeber when people started creating websites of their own using geocities and when they started creating hotmail accounts to send emails to people, this was way before Yahoo bought Geocities and Microsoft bought Hotmail. It’s hard to believe that those sorts of activities didn’t spawn the creation of Corporate Intranets and email systems. I was working for Alcon Labs at the time and we had no internet presence internally or externally and we just completed an implementation of MS Mail, which only about 20% of the company used. These are a given today. They’re default. Just has blogs and wikis and some sort of social networking outside of MySpace, the online meat market, will be in the future.
The thing that companies and teams like mine have to try to figure out is how we take these types of concepts and services and inform our clients about how they can securely and effectively leverage them in their enterprises. That’s not going to be easy, but it has to be our goal. It has to be a priority.

Enterprise solutions are already grasping some of these concepts. Even Microsoft has included blogging, wiki and RSS capabilities into the next version of Microsoft SharePoint, a widely used corporate collaboration solution. Whether we like it or not, and I for one do, if Microsoft is embracing these concepts, they are here to stay, just based on the sheer number of people that use their products everyday.

Here are a few links that I found interesting so far:

How to Harness the Power of Web 2.0

Web 2.0 Has Corporate America Spinning (Thanks for sending this link to me Stephen)

Microsoft Goes Web 2.0

Are you Ready for Web 2.0?
Microsoft Livens Up Web 2.0

I’m looking forward to hearing from my teammates on the Geniant EG team about how far on of off base they think I am.

Well, off I go to watch Yoda lay the smack down on Count Duuko, or as my son calls him, Count KooKoo!

It’ll only be my 101st time.