Mike Gotta moderated our next generation workforce panel this morning, where I participated alongside Scott Smith from IBM Global Services and Patti Anklam, a writer and consultant on social networking. Here are a couple of key take-aways from the discussion: What is the ''next generation workforce''? The next generation workforce will be ...

So I've been at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston all week, but ironically, have not been able to blog because of technical problems with the wireless connection at the hotel. Apparently it did not occur to someone at Sprint that a conference of over 1000 people here to discuss social computing might have a desire to all connect to ...

Mike Gotta points to this article by Dennis Howlett called ''The poverty of enterprise 2.0 and social computing,'' in which Howlett observes: In the context of ’social’ anything, these are incredibly important concepts because what we’re really talking about are power relationships. In any business, power relationships are what provide the ...

I've been AWOL from the blog this week because I've been heads-down on some work I'm doing regarding the future of the insurance industry (hey, gotta pay the bills...). Because I do the majority of my work in the high-tech sector, which for all its issues tends to have a fairly progressive culture, I'm always a little bit surprised by how things ...

There's an interesting article at CIO.com today discussing the ongoing problems that employers are having with (mostly younger) workers accessing their social networking sites at work. CIO points out that, while it is technically possible to ban access to social networks from enteprise networks, this often only encourages people to access ...

I just finished reading Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams, Alfred Lubrano's excellent first-person account of the divide in values separating blue-collar and professional classes in America. Lubrano, an award-winning journalist and NPR commentator, grew up in the working-class Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn before ...

Although it's important to get people of all ages on the same page with technology in today's workforce, the issue becomes really important over the next 10 years. Right now, organizational leadership roles that correlate to experience and seniority are monopolized by Boomers (age 46-62); mid-career managerial and emerging leadership positions ...

In Philadelphia, a fair number of the better private secondary schools are run by Quakers. I graduated from one of them, the William Penn Charter School, in 1985, and benefited not only from a good education, but also from the school's forward-leaning approach to technology, even back then. I saw my first PC (actually an Apple II) in the school's ...