Social Networking for the IT Crowd Vermont

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Originally published at Internet.com

Your kids have MySpace. Now you have Aggreg8.

In partnership with not-for-profit organization Culminus, which supports the development of the IT community, Microsoft has quietly launched a new site that offers social networking and private workgroups for an IT audience. The site aims to fill the need for an IT-related community, writes "Mike," a Microsoft employee and member of the Aggreg8 team.

"There really are not a lot of IT related communities out there," he posts. "Most are developer focused. My group is driven solely to increase satisfaction with how Microsoft supports the IT Community. This is something that has come up in surveys as a main pain-point."

Ah-hem. Anyway, the site is still finding its sea-legs; it isn't well-populated yet, or searchable. The workgroups are there - and, by the way, they aren't all Microsoft-specific - but most discussions don't seem to have kicked off in a big way.

But already at least some participants are, inevitably, using the space to gripe about how businesspeople just don't get IT. One poster in the Low-End Computer Geeks workgroup, aimed at IT personnel in small businesses, noted that his biggest complaint is that he tries his hardest to explain tech concepts "to management in 5 different laymen's terms and they still don't get it."

IT pros at larger organizations probably share the same frustrations. But perhaps it's time to ask whether there's something more important missing from these discussions, aside from the neat analogies. (Increasingly agitated IT pro to business leader: "Think of web services like ingredients - they're eggs, butter, flour, and sugar, for God's sake! - and you can combine them all to make cake, or add blueberries for pancakes, or Â…. Don't you get it?!?!").

What may be absent is the context. You can call web services ingredients or components or whatever you like, but you need to make the case that a services-based architecture is important for bringing flexibility to business processes - and that matters because it will let the company get products to market before competitors, create innovations in customer services, and move fast on new revenue opportunities. That's the kind of language business folks understand.

A casual perusal of Aggreg8 doesn't yet turn up much perspective from senior IT pros who've discovered the nuances of speaking the language of business, but that may come as the site really gets underway. For sure, it's a discussion worth having.