How did a cheesesteak-loving native of the Philadelphia suburbs wind up spending the past 20 years in the land of weiner schnitzel? For Mark Masterson, this week's Blogger of the Week, the answer is the familiar one--die Liebe. 'I arrived in 1989, when there was still a Wall," he says. "The Army brought me over, originally, and stationed me here. I met my (then future) wife here as a result. After a year with the 82nd Airborne in Saudi Arabia and Iraq during the First Gulf War, I decided I'd had enough of the Army, got out, and married my German girl. Been here ever since."
Masterson, who describes himself on LinkedIn as "Enterprise architect, troublemaker at Computer Sciences Corporation," began his career as a sys admin for the German Stock Exchange, moved on to become a consultant to many of the large players in the Frankfurt-based financial services industry, and then joined CSC in 2008.
"At CSC, I work with a global team, and my "office" is actually based in the UK, but I work mostly from my home office," he says. "I spent most of last year living in the UK, as a consequence of my job, and have now decided that I like living in Germany a lot better."
His involvement with social media pre-dates CSC (he started blogging in 2005) and the ability to continue blogging, he says, was one of the conditions he negotiated when he joined the giant firm. In fact, he says he's the first person he knows of to force the legal department to negotiate a contract explicitly excluding his contributions to open source software and the contents of his blog from the things his employer has rights to.
"In my brief bio on the blog, I refer to myself as a "spy in the house of enterprise," he says. "Big companies are not known for their either their agility,or their ability to innovate, but the hunger to do both within those same companies is breathtaking. The disconnect that results is sometimes really quite appalling, when viewed from the front lines. I'm interested in changing that status quo, and finding ways to feed that hunger. The blog connects me to a large community of like minded people who have been tremendously helpful to me. The conversation that my blog (and later, things like Twitter) enabled me to become a part of has become the most significant element of my professional life. And, not to be discounted, it has enabled me to build a personal "brand" of significant value. Just over the course of the last 24 months, I have seen a significant jump in my income, more or less on the basis of that brand alone."
As for the future of social software in enterprises, Masterston he's concerned that deploying standalone solutions and platforms will lead to what he calls "Yet Another Silo (tm)."
"What interests me the most is what happens when you bake social software functionality into "old fashioned" domain specific software," he says. "Ross Mayfield and the folks on his team call this being "in the flow", whereas deploying social software as a separate thing is what they call "above the flow". I think the "in the flow" use cases are far and away the more interesting (and potentially valuable) ones.
"To an extent, and just for the sake of being a jerk from Philly, I would even go so far as to suggest that all of the well-meaning folks running around heroically deploying stand-alone social networking tools are actually wasting our collective time. It doesn't help, to be honest, that most of the intelligent, interesting voices in this space are also the voices of people trying to sell one particular solution or another."
His view on the external effects of widespread adoption of social networking technologies is rather radical.
"I agree with people like Stowe Boyd that these technologies are less about ways to manipulate information (the traditional role of media tools), and more about lowering the transaction costs between (commercial) entities. So my view is that, if we accept things like Coase's arguements about why large corporations even exist, then what these tools hold is the potential for those reasons to be completely undermined. A group of 20 people, scattered all over the globe, can now behave in a way that is competitive with huge enterprises -- that's a fact that does not suggest long term viability for huge enterprises (or roles that have evolved to serve them, like, say MarCom) ."
