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Culture change, collaberation and elephants May 28, 2005

Posted by evilzenscientist in : blogging , add a comment

A colleague from the Novell European Support Centre sent me an interesting article from IBM research.

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/442/neus.pdf

Interesting in many respects - especially seeing the ‘team drawn elephant’ exercise brought into a discussion about collaberation methods.

The key piece that I was interested in was in the culture change required to bring about such changes in communication:

1. Keep it simple. We used a few simple methods in
assessment and intervention that were accessible
to the client’s employees. We did not overload
them with methodology or jargon.

2. Find passionate people. To drive change, you
need passion. You need people who understand
and are excited about the change.

3. Do the ‘‘emperor’s clothes’’ test on the organization.
Don’t require the novice to ask the
emperor’s advisor for permission to spread the
word about change.

4. Involve me, and I will understand. Cultural
change cannot be forced; it can only be facilitated.
Nothing is as powerful a teacher as firsthand
experience. We allowed people to experience
what open-source collaboration could mean
for them in their working environment.

5. Start small, grow fast. Start small with a limited
scope and the mission to solve a concrete
problem. Demonstrate value; then grow.

A really interesting idea - that may be difficult to implement in a corporate structure - is letting individuals find out about open-source collaberation for themselves.

I agree fully that to drive change you need passionate people; my open-ended response is ‘what happens if the enthused change-agents alienate the broader population?’

Cluetrain

Posted by evilzenscientist in : blogging , add a comment

I’m not claiming any credit.

One of my team is now recommending Cluetrain Manifesto to members of the Novell Communities of Practice.

Kinda cool really :)

Team.
Here is a PDF of the Cluetrain 95 theses. Buy the book for the real goodness.
Cheers.

GroupWise Sequoia - and moving to Linux 100%

Posted by evilzenscientist in : evilzenscientist , 1 comment so far

I’ve just upgraded to the latest Novell internal build of GroupWise Sequoia client on NLD - and it’s much improved.

Lots of small things in the Linux client have been fixed - and it seems a lot more responsive and less ‘crashy’ :)

Even small things like the startup parameters are now respected and work just great.

I moved my GroupWise caching mailbox across from Windows about six months ago - and went totally cold-turkey with Novell Linux Desktop. GroupWise was the one application that was making me wait. I was running a (ssssshhhhhh) unofficial build of the GroupWise Sequoia client; but now the 25 May 05 build is supported by Novells IS&T team I’m happier.

One tip I have is using ext3 rather than reiserfs as a production filesystem. I found that GroupWise caching mailboxes and reiserfs just don’t play well together.

I now use Novell Linux Desktop exclusively for my production laptop. I found that the IBM ThinkPad seems a lot more Linux friendly than my Dell Latitude.

So I’ve done it - I switched from Windows. Have you?