I am now, officially, a proud Ruby on Rails Pragmatic Stuido Alumni, having finished the Pasadena course on Saturday night.

I even have the stamp to prove it.

It is an amazing course, and I recommend it highly. It was also an amazing experience to see just how far technology has come in the last few years.

It is truly incredible how such powerful web applications can be built in such a very short time using Rails. This bodes well for Web Office. Ruby on Rails is such a powerful development environment because of its dedication to convention over configuration.

The success of a convention over configuration approach can be seen again and again. For example, feeds such as RSS and ATOM force bloggers and news sites into broadcasting in a convention, rather than forcing news readers to configure to each site.

In the context of empowering innovation creators, this means giving them a highly structured platform to share knowledge. Tangibly, this means some well defined conventions, such as People Pages, Client Blogs, or what ever simple set of categories your enterprise blogging system will require.

Define a few obvious and simple conventions, and you free up innovation creators to focus on developing and sharing knowledge, rather than forcing them to constantly re-format information so that they can communicate with each other.

If this sounds fanciful, let me give a specific example. The Wall Street analysts that issue buy/hold/sell reports on stocks are usually highly educated and highly paid. They spend most of their time manually cutting and pasting information from quarterly and annual reports into spreadsheet models. Imagine. $250,000 a year to spend most of your time cutting and pasting.

A simple set of XML based reporting conventions that were actually stuck to and these analysts could focus 100% their brilliant minds on actually finding real value. I should mention that this isn’t a new idea and there have been some attempts.

Regardless, if you want to truly empower your knowledge workers, and turn them into innovation creators, then you have to do two things.

First, you have to given them tools to share information more efficiently, such as enterprise blogs and enterprise Wikis.

Second, you have design the enterprise blogging and Wiki platform so that their is just enough structure, or in Ruby terms, just enough convention, so that your knowledge workers do not spend all their time on configuration.