My cycling trip through Puglia was nothing short of wonderful on all counts. The landscape, company, guides and people were completely enjoyable.

The US holiday weekend is approaching, and on Tuesday I start my new consulting job. I’ve enjoyed my respite and I’m looking forward to getting engaged again. I don’t know if my new comapny has a blogging policy; considering that they take a positive stand on the role of social computing and the potential of Enterprise 2.0 I’m hopful that I’ll be able to continue in a more direct manner.

In the last few weeks the year-end pace has picked up. Everyone I speak to at work is very busy, and a lot of it is unplanned activity. Many of my colleagues sense chaos and distraction, but I perceive connection. In my direct line of work I’ve written charter documents for a couple of small but strategic initiatives around our organization. My seeding of using BPM as our foundation is beginning to win converts with the right influence. Talk is about organizing around business services rather than application teams. My roadmap for 2007 is heavily weighted towards end-to-end user experience. Yesterday a colleague showed me a mashup of our locations in a Google map.

In my matrixed world, our CEO has expressed interest in blogging and online chats and I’ve been asked to help shape that effort. I also asked to step into a situation where an executive had a bad experience with a webcast we produced. I’ve joined our enterprise collaboration architecture domain.

Something is happening – all these strange attractors have a theme, and true to chaos theory they don’t know they’re going to coalesce. Thomas Otter would say that it’s getting very enterprisey around here, and Andrew McAfee would smell the Enterprise 2.0 goodness of the ingredients. I’m going to take a try at writing the Grand Unified Theory. It’ll be interesting to see which predictions come to pass.

On Friday my family and I go on a 2 week holiday. Best to all, be happy and safe!

I’ve spent a fair amount of bandwidth moaning about how difficult to impossible it is to get to mashup nirvana with a mixed HCM vendor environment, so don’t miss Jim Holincheck’s post Really Achieving User Centricity if you want a clearly articulated vision of how I would like to deliver services. Thanks, Jim!

Amazingly, I now have a rollup of over 30 internal apps with target dates for migration to the standardized UI. Getting there was easier than we feared, most of the development teams were fairly receptive and the pushbacks could be anticipated – resources, overloaded work slates and budget. My team is central and funded as an expense so we were able to position ourselves as additional, no-cost resources per project. The timing issue got easier when we made it clear that we were happy to work in existing release schedules and if they needed all of 2007 to get there, that was fine so long as it wasn’t open-ended.

Next stop, another 10 vendor applications. My mileage will clearly vary. I need to spend some serious time analyzing the Portal upgrade approach and coming to a go/no-go on that.

This Tuesday I participated in a World Usability Day panel on managing the usability function within the enterprise. I met a few folks from my own organization and we are trying to maintain a dialogue. This is an emerging theme, last week I was contacted by another person internally who said she’d been trying to find me (not me personally, but whoever does what I do) for that past two years. A community of four has emerged.

Findability in the enterprise typically sucks and it’s compounded by the timidity that we have about allowing people to manage information about themselves and their expertise and even further repressed by lack of rewards for sharing knowledge. Social networking is the only way to manage this right now, but I’m hopeful that we can leverage blogs and wikis to create sturctures that help lubricate the process. But creating community in an organization is hard. Anyone with thoughts about that? Please share them, I need help with this.