This is not nearly as irritating as it sounds but it is compounded by the fact that he so often is right.
A large part of Dennis' independent makeup can be ascribed to his pre-blogging careers. He was a partner in a firm of British Chartered Accountants for 10 years and held a number of senior finance related roles before that. For many years, he was a writer and journalist.
"I started blogging in May 2005 after taking about two years out of writing, a career I'd been following since 1991," he says. "At the time, there was no real work for journalists like me and it seemed like a natural evolution of the online reporting metaphor. My first attempts were abysmal because I didn't really understand what blogging was about. After three months I almost gave up but ended up reinventing myself at AccMan, learning from past mistakes."
Since that time, he says, AccMan has gone on to provide him with some income through the inclusion of content related widgets that draw in sponsor content and has led to two paying gigs at ZDNet, another at ITPro in the UK and a spot on IT Counts, a site for members of the Institute of Chartered Accountants England and Wales. He also undertakes consulting engagements helping software vendors and others understand how they might interact with users through the use of Enterprise 2.0 style tools.
Dennis also serves as the conscience and official "enforcer" of the code of the Enterprise Irregulars, an invitation-only group of mainly enterprise software bloggers who exchange thoughts on lots of topics daily on a Google group of the same name. A fun thing to do, if you're a member, is to try to flog some project you're doing or pass a press release off as a casual bit of community information and see how long it takes Dennis to incinerate your e-mail box. He is also a blogger and community mentor in SAP's community, a pro bono engagement that helps him learn more about the intersection between IT and business and, he adds, allows him to meet some really great people from around the world.
Looking at social media trends, Dennis says he sees the biggest potential in collaboration among supply chain players ("a topic to which I return with boring regularity") and he sees genuine value in microblogging tools like Twitter, FriendFeed and SocialThing.
"I'm not sure these will be the tools of choice for business but they represent a proxy for what can be done," he says. He'll be addressing that topic as a panel moderator at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston June 9-12, where he'll be joined by Laura Fitton (@pistachio), Bhaskar Roy of Qik and Chris Brogan, advisor to Utterz.
"I'm not sure I've learned a great deal from social media as such except that it is not easy to build a vibrant community without an awful lot of change management legwork," he says. "Many people make the mistake of assuming you can throw tools over the wall and that community will emerge. That might be true in the geek world but it is far from true in business where the constant questions raised are: what's in it for me, what are the risks, how can I engage and how will it drive profitability?
"I also think that people seriously underestimate the need to engage middle management in the process of learning how to use these tools. They are the most threatened and yet have the most to gain. My job then becomes one of 'comforting the disturbed and disturbing the comfortable.'"
Nobody is better at that job than Dennis.
Photo by Nigel James on Flickr