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Aw, now that’s just mean.

• Apparently, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer‘s desire to out-innovate Apple really bubbled to the, um, Surface, this week in the form of his trademark Howard Dean-esque shoutiness.
• And while we’re sure the tech innovation under the Surface is swell, pardon us if we are a little more wowed at present by the kids who made these gloves that translate sign language into speech.
• The first photo uploaded on the Web (not to be confused with the Internet) will have its 20th anniversary this coming week. Believe it or not, it was totally ”safe for work” – albeit not so much for fans of halfway decent Photoshop skills.
• Hey, Google and Apple — can your maps do this? Recce is an interactive map, a real-time information provider (think train schedules and bite-by-bite restaurant reviews) and, oh yeah, a gaming platform. Rumors that it’s also a floor cleaner and a dessert topping have not been verified.
• The list you’ve compiled while sitting alone in the far corner of your office may be longer, but here are four reasons your company needs a collaboration upgrade.
• Finally, in case you missed it, check out this week’s CIO Matters column on the agony and (potential) ecstasy of mobile device virtualization.

Jones was brought into NASA in 2007 to develop the agency’s Enterprise 2.0 social media strategy and platform called ExplorNet.

“I’m Kevin Jones, and I’ve failed,” he said to the audience before giving his take on the top social media project missteps. Many involved political landmines and the fear of sharing knowledge.

Take, for example, his No. 1 reason for social media failures: Creating a culture of mistrust. A director was wary of letting his employees use NASA’s internal social media platform to ask and answer questions and share ideas. The director’s concerns: His employees would post something stupid, spell something wrong or take a shot at another group.

“If we don’t have a good trust culture, trying to do anything social is very difficult,” Jones said. One audience member said that a big blockade to creating a culture of trust is fear of retribution. Instead, people need to feel that they can make mistakes and not be punished.

In fact, this theory was at the heart of Jones’ presentation: Failure leads to learning for everyone, which leads to innovation, which leads to progress. “Flip that around. The less trust you have, you’re not going to have failures; then [there's] no learning, then no innovation, then no progression. We need to fail, and we need to be OK with it,” he said.

Here is a brief synopsis of Jones’ five other reasons a social media project could fail:

Relying too much on stats. Jones gathered data to back up his proposal for ExplorNet, but it wasn’t until his manager actually used the system that he got the point and became aware of how useful the tool could be: “I crammed in facts and figures, and it didn’t work. It wasn’t until he had his own experience and he had a good story to tell that he could really buy into it.” The takeaway: Make a business case and create interest in social media by relying heavily on sharing stories and experiences across the company.

Underestimating the political landscape. The CIO asked Jones to let him know if anything held up the social media project. When something did, he told the CIO, who in turn asked the managers he had put in charge about what was going on. The managers didn’t know what the CIO was talking about, and Jones got an earful. They told Jones not to talk to the CIO, or meet with him or email him without first going over what he was going to say to the CIO with them first.

“I said, ‘OK, do I go to the CIO and tell him they said this, or not? What do I do?’ I was so confused. I underestimated the political landscape, and I still do. Politics can seriously alter the outcome of what we [as social media project managers] are trying to do,” Jones said.

Treating the project as yours. Jones admits he fell into this trap in 2007 while working for another company. He quickly learned that it was “almost a potential disaster.” By making it his project, he realized, there would be less buy-in from others. He turned it around by seeking out feedback at every step from many people across the organization.

Treating the project as an IT project. NASA put the IT group in charge of the social media project, and in the end it became all about the tool and not about the people. “IT is definitely part of it, but you don’t want it to become an IT project. It needs to be a human project,” Jones said.

Audience members suggested these steps to keep a project from being identified with IT: Making sure business users were early adopters, involving users in the decision-making process, making sure the money for the project comes from outside of IT.

“If you ever want to get into a good debate, ask what department Enterprise 2.0 should live in,” Jones said. “IT was in control, and we were stuck on a timeline, which was not necessarily bad; but if they control it, you lose the perspective of the people.”

Going cheap. When the social media platform was rolled out, it crashed. IT added more memory and it crashed again. When he was asked by management what happened, Jones explained: “Nothing. You guys went cheap, using the minimum specs for everything, and had no idea how popular [the platform] was going to be . . . If you go cheap, you’re going to get cheap, whether with personnel, whether with your software or hardware. You don’t have to spend billions, but if you go cheap, you will get cheap as well.”

Let us know what you think about this post; email mailto:ctorode@techtarget.com Christina Torode, News Director.

Now that I speak mostly with IT executives for SearchCIO.com, I see why such grass-roots efforts are the bane of their existence. As the collaboration tool count rose, their ability to harness and share ideas across the company sank.

But it is the knowledge workers who again are taking the lead — at least, they have at Intuit. The company behind QuickBooks and TurboTax was using SharePoint and “countless” other idea collection tools when employees began coming to Roy Rosin, vice president of product management and innovation, to say, “this [collection of tools] is where ideas go to die and not evolve.”

So, a group of employees started their own grass-roots effort, and built a collaboration tool called Brainstorm — which now is sold as an Intuit product. Brainstorm does what the collection of now-retired idea-creation tools at Intuit could not: It connects ideas to people who can help shape and improve them, or to decision makers who can act on them. In one place.

Getting back to the SharePoint grass-roots effort: I received an email a while back from a project manager who had been put in charge of centralizing hundreds of SharePoint instances, and wanted to know if we had written anything about how to consolidate SharePoint deployments. I directed him to a story by our TechTarget sister site SearchWinIT.com about enterprise SharePoint deployments, but have not heard from him since. That makes me wonder whether he got caught up in some SharePoint centralization rebellion.

So, on the one hand, grass-roots IT can be a good thing: It can lead to innovation when employees take it on themselves to create new and useful tools for the company — and perhaps a new product for customers. On the other hand, rogue IT can take down an enterprise, as SearchCIO.com Senior News Writer Linda Tucci talked about in her recent blog post. At the very least, a standard collaboration tool can help you avoid idea dead zones.

Then, a comment by security expert Rachel Kleinfeld about an information innovation made me think about your job as CIOs. The co-founder and CEO of the Truman National Security Project, she was commenting for The New York Times on why it took so long to find Osama bin Laden. She writes:

I know, some people are saying the opposite: that torture helped us get the intelligence that ultimately led to the courier who worked for bin Laden. But the facts simply don’t support the claim. Torture produced a lead, but it took nearly five years between that lead and the end game, which simply shows that torture produces intelligence leads that can’t be trusted and must be verified through other means.

Instead, the intelligence breakthrough came when Gen. Stanley McChrystal took over at Joint Special Operations Command in 2004. In the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, he and his intelligence chief, Gen. Michael Flynn, brought police experts to teach their special forces cutting-edge criminal forensic techniques. They then forced the special forces, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to work together.

This could not have been easy: I was a researcher in 2003 and 2004 on a Defense Science Board study looking at why intelligence agencies weren’t sharing information, and it is hard to overemphasize how much the deck was stacked against information-sharing. But McChrystal forced cooperation, and it paid off. It was the intelligence gained from this innovation that led to the breakthroughs of the last few days.

But McChrystal forced cooperation, and it paid off. It was the intelligence gained from this innovation that led to the breakthroughs of the last few days.

Readers of SearchCIO.com know that we are writing a lot about technology innovation this year: the role CIOs play in innovation, how they use technology to spur innovation, how they create a culture of innovation, how they measure the risks and benefits of innovation.

For many CIOs, breaking down information silos — and forcing cooperation — is the innovation that will lead to more innovation. Abha Kumar at The Vanguard Group is convinced that the social collaboration and communication tools her IT team is implementing and supporting will dramatically change corporate culture in concrete ways, such as compensation, as well as in ways we cannot even imagine.

The New York Public Housing Authority’s Atefeh Riazi is convinced that the business intelligence systems most likely to lead to the breakthroughs that will improve the lives of the authority’s low-income constituency are those that can cull and correlate data from inside and far beyond the parameters of her organization.

Breaking down information silos has become something of a cliché in CIO circles. It’s good to be reminded how monumental information-sharing is. Go forth and force cooperation.

Schulz is the founder and senior adviser to The Server and StorageIO Group in Stillwater, Minn., and author of Resilient Storage Network and The Green and Virtual Data Center. While researching a piece on storage management this week, I toured the consultancy’s website and enjoyed his blog post about VMworld 2010 but was struck by the way he revealed his connections to other people during the event — by giving a shout-out to their Twitter addresses. Suddenly I felt like a creeper, viewing his correspondents through the lens of their @’s. He even thanked @rogerlund “for organizing a very impromptu, ad hoc lunch discussion with a couple of other IT pros …”

I asked Schultz about this over the phone: Were people now using their Twitter addresses to identify themselves? Had he met them in person or by tweet? Was this a trend among IT executives and staffers?

Not so much, was his response to the last question.

“If you look in IT in general, less than 1% are on Twitter,” Schulz said. “It’s VARs, vendors, the marketing side, some journalists, editors, analysts, a lot of consultants, super IT people, early adopters [who tweet].” He himself participates in about a dozen social networking sites, in some more actively than in others. “You can’t learn every language or culture,” he said.

But wait: Isn’t IT an early adopter? Doesn’t it have to be, in this day and age? With integration tools coming out that connect cloud applications with enterprise data more easily, with a steep rise in automated end-to-end monitoring tools that make it a snap to find and fix problems, with application performance monitoring tools that business analysts can use to streamline processes, technology is about to bypass the slow adopters en route to business transformation.

And yet, fewer than 1% of IT staffers are on Twitter. Does it matter? Again, not so much, Schulz said.

“I wrote a post two years ago about how different people use different media,” Schulz said. “Some still want a printed copy, some want it in email; some read a book, others read a Kindle; some communicate via Twitter, via Facebook, via LinkedIn,” he said. LinkedIn is where the practitioners of IT find each other online, he added, while spammers show up everywhere.

IT executives of a certain generation won’t even read a blog, never mind a tweet, Schulz said. “With the blogs, the issue is what is vetted content and what isn’t? Do CIOs want to know information in each story as it’s breaking? No — they’re in meetings. They want the analysis.”

The news junkies sitting on different websites — who literally can put up a site and claim to be an expert — are the ones most involved in Twitter, Schulz said. “You can tweet faster than IM. … Those who tend to flock around that flagpole want that information fast.”

Let us know what you think about the story; email Laura Smith, Features Writer.