No Agile Gospel please, just give me Enlightenment

For lack of a logo, here's the Snowbird resort where the Agile Manifesto was developed back in 2001

Agile Software Development presently is suffering from evangelisation, it seems. Which is awkward, as it's been around for almost 10 years, and evangelists usually are needed in an earlier phase in life. By now I'd expect Agile temples and churches to self-attract masses of believers. In stead, it's a bit like fundamentalist Christians repeating the 2,000 year old words from the Bible - and I thought that good wine needs no bush?

As there seems to be a Manifesto for everything these days, here's the Agile Manifesto:

Cloud Field. The social way to the future

Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, like the electricity grid

That's the definition from the wiki and it's pretty fine if you ask me. However, one can picture that this may not quite concur with the ideas and habits of traditional vendors and system integrators.

Get your act together! @Klout

A few posts ago, I wrote Why I have doubt about @Klout. That post actually led to the problems mentioned being fixed by Klout although they never got back at me, not even when being politely asked to do so - which is their loss

Klout announced their Perks a few weeks ago, which basically means that they determine who is influential enough to be able to become eligible (!) for third party goodies and gifts. Or, in their words:

Every individual now has a network value based on their ability to leverage word of mouth and social media to influence their network and spread the word about a product or service.

Ambitious? I'd say so! Nonetheless, their service is still very, very shaky and they have lost my trust for sure. They are absolutely not up to the road lying ahead, simply because their statistics and calculations are erratic at best

How Chatter made Marc humble

Now I know I've had my fair share of daring blog post titles so far, but this one must definitely be the most daring one

Today TechCrunch announced the public release of Chatter, pointing to prnewswire.com who released the intial story. Let me briefly requote its functionality as stated by TC:

Similar to Facebook, employees can create business profiles with professional information like personal contact data, area of expertise, and work history
(...)
With Chatter, all status updates from a customer’s Sales Cloud, Service Cloud or custom Force.com application are posted to the feed

There. Impressive? I don't think so, nor does Salesforce.com itself. Let me take you through 4 stories on TechCrunch to see Marc Benioff's enthusiasm start in exuberant euphoria and end in modest humility

E20 goal: Intimacy solves the problem of Anonymity

Over the past months, these two words have been dancing around my mind: Intimacy. Anonymity.

• They relate very strongly to my decision to become self-employed
• I can perfectly use them to describe the assignments I liked versus those I didn't like
• But, last but not least: they determine my state of joy of being employed

Why is there an Enterprise 2.0, but no Small Business 2.0? Or Entrepreneur 2.0? And why is @Headshift's bio better defining Social Business Design than Dachis's?

Why I have doubt about @Klout

As a self-proclaimed figure-fetisjist, I like to get data and stats on pretty much anything that interests me, in order to juggle that into information.
I figured out that I'm 1.5-10 times as "strong" as my current company, that Tweeps are 35 times as active as Facebook users, and other findings - some of which aren't that appropriate to publish (yet?)

On Twitter of course, I have used TweetStats to find about what I tweet, and when (I really should get a sleeping schedule, I know) and Klout to measure my "influence": a well-elaborated set of variables weighted individually, forming one final score

But, since 3-4 weeks, I am doubting Klout: actually, just about since Klout changed their quadrant into a dekahexadrant (16 pieces) aka Klout 2.0

Core-business versus business criticality

[Image: Reactor core of the Gösgen Nuclear Power Plant]

I've seen the different concepts of core-business and business criticality every single time in my line of work around Integration. B2B e.g. is hardly any company's core-business, but it always becomes business-critical when over 90% of your order-entry flows fully automated through your company from outside - and then what? Third-party it, outsource, offshore, half, whole?

Semantic Web - a tech fix for a human problem?

I tweeted about the Semantic Web today:

A Semantic Web pursued by techies is futile. How about a Semantic World for starters?

In a then following Twitter conversation with Peter Evans Greenwood, it became clear that we could "dance around" the definition of semantic itself - so how could we ever achieve a Semantic Web?

The real question is: should we even?

Why I'm not signing up for Amplify just to comment

Eric Goldstein dedicated a blog post today trying to explain why Amplify requires people to join Amplify in order to be able to comment on a post

He failed.
Not for lack of trying, here are his points:

Yammer overstretches - and breaks

I have been using Yammer for almost a year now together with almost 8,000 colleagues from Capgemini, and it's a wonderful way to share anything with your colleagues. It used to be a perfectly safe compound because of the technical limitation of email domain (meaning only people from e.g. @company.com could access the same Yammer network), but that changed March 1st 2010 and I blogged about that. I even got a reaction from Davis Sacks himself, the CEO, and we've been into contact occasionally ever since

Today it's time to post again, as access to my account (and other colleagues) has been suspended due to a change by Yammer