Back by popular demand, Launch Pad is open for business!
Register your company here, and we’ll email you instructions on how to Twitter pitch. Round 1 Twitter submissions will close September 25, and the Enterprise 2.0 team will announce the 8 finalists on September 28. Those 8 finalists will then submit video pitches and go through one more round of voting by the E2 community. The final four will be given the opportunity to give a 5 minute live presentation from the main stage, plus a complimentary exhibit space on the Enterprise 2.0 show floor.
Launch Pad is the premiere platform for unveiling new social tools within the enterprise. To get a sense of the innovative companies that have submitted in the past, take a peek at our four finalists from the Launch pad at Enterprise 2.0 Boston 2009 last June.
Want more detail on rules and key dates? Take a look here for more information.
Get ready – the fame and the glory that is Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad is coming to the West Coast.
If you are an Enterprise 2.0 start-up with a compelling tool or an existing company with a new application, we want to hear about it. Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad is an incredible opportunity for companies to present to the Enterprise 2.0 community from the main stage and win a complimentary exhibition pod on the show floor.
How does it work? We’ll have 3 rounds to whittle down entrants to our four finalists.
Round 1. Twitter Pitch: E2 staff narrow down the field of entrants to 16 quarter-finalists.
Round 2. One Minute Video: A round of voting by the E2 community to select 8 semi-finalists.
Round 3.Three Minute Video: A round of voting by the E2 community to select our 4 Launch Pad finalists.
Those 4 finalists will be announced in early November and will asked to give a 5 minute demonstrate of their applications live on the keynote stage at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, CA on November 2-5. The winner will be chosen by live conference attendees after the four finalists deliver their demo.
Start perfecting those 140 characters and stay tuned for the official Launch Pad Twitter hash tag and website – we’ll open up Round 1′s Twitter pitch on Friday, August 28.
After four successful years in Boston, the most influential event about the Enterprise 2.0 movement is coming to San Francisco this Fall. From November 2-5 Enterprise 2.0 Conference will bring together those challenging the status quo and leading the charge to enable more efficient, agile and productive workforces in their companies at Moscone North in San Francisco.
Register today and take part in four days of highly engaging Tutorials, Keynotes and Breakout Sessions and the opportunity to meet face to face with forward-looking businesses at the Expo Pavilion.
We’re still hard at work developing the full conference schedule and we’d love to hear what you would like to see on the agenda in San Francisco – let us know by completing our Conference Survey. Stay tuned to the Conference by Day page for the latest additions to the program. We’ll also be providing updates right here on the blog as well as on our Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn pages.
I wrote in June of the need for Microsoft to deliver cross-platform support for Mac (and Linux users) to combat efforts from both IBM Lotus as well as Sun’s OpenOffice. Today comes news that Microsoft will abandon Entourage for Mac and release a version of Outlook for Mac at some point in the future. Microsoft is also released a business edition of Mac Office with improved Exchange and Sharepoint integration. Still, with these products being developed by a separate BU they are still different from their Windows counterparts. Microsoft needs to set a goal of one application for all platforms.
Jakob Nielsen, who has been writing about Web usability for about as long as the Web has existing, has posted some analysis of Intranet usability best practices around data organization and personalization. It’s worth a read: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/social-intranet-features.html
Mobile workers are getting left out in the cold as battles between vendors continues. I mentioned a few weeks ago the dispute between Google Voice and Apple over allowing Google Voice into Apple’s iPhone store. This week comes news that Microsoft is delivering enhancements to its Office Communicator Mobile, which only runs on Windows Mobile and Nokia Symbian devices. Microsoft also announced new partnership with Nokia. Great, but according to our research, the vast majority of business smartphones are, and will continue to be BlackBerry’s, while 38% of companies are adding support for iPhone over the next year. Enterprise mobile planners are increasingly getting stuck in the middle of efforts by mobile providers to own the operating system, the device, and the software. A trend that appears to be accelerating at the expense of innovation.
After 25 years in business and 5,000 customers in 100 countries, Inmagic is no Enterprise 2.0 startup. Yet, like many vendors in the business of collecting and cataloguing data for years, it sees the new trend toward socializing knowledge highly attractive. Inmagic’s heritage stems from the Knowledge Management and Library Services background. In a 2.0 Adoption Council demo last week, Inmagic demoed Presto, its Social Knowledge Management Platform.
The product takes an inside-out view of data that can be shared in the enterprise. It catalogs and collects digital assets and data in a central repository and then facilitates a social layer to interface with those assets and build a social knowledge network.
What originally got my attention about this product was its SharePoint integration and compatibility. As much as the Enterprise 2.0 die-hards in our community love to diss SharePoint, the truth is Microsoft is the “liquid cement” of office productivity and will not be unseated any time soon in the large enterprise. (For further validation, make sure you didn’t miss this New York Times piece last week on SharePoint.) Established players like Inmagic will continue to reap the rewards of traditional enterprise business as SharePoint continues on its growth trajectory.
As far as the design/UI, the product doesn’t have the sex appeal of some of the 2.0 startup offerings, but I found it especially refreshing that the demo discussion revolved centrally around business drivers. “We feel very strongly that the key to accelerating adoption is to keep the focus on business initiatives,” said Inmagic’s Mike Cassettari, VP Marketing and Business Development.
For a deeper dive into Presto’s inner magic, take a look at Bill Ives’ post. Bill is an expert in knowledge management and enterprise 2.0 which uniquely qualifies him to posit an opinion.
Tomorrow, we’ll be taking a look at another major stakes winner from the SharePoint stables: Tomoye.
Yesterday, I did something that suggested to me that we are at an important tipping point in the psychology of Web 2.0 adoption. Within an hour of hearing the news of Facebook acquiring Friendfeed, I signed up for the latter, using my Facebook login info. I’d known for a year that Friendfeed is a great dashboard service that integrates your social media presence, but I had not joined. Apparently I wasn’t alone. Friendfeed was at one point described by TechCrunch (I think) as ‘a great service nobody will ever use.’ So how do you interpret actions like mine?
After I presented the Open Enterprise 2009 award to Booz Allen Hamilton ‘Hello’ team lead Walton Smith in Boston (also on behalf of Stowe Boyd and the conference), I had an opportunity to catch up with team members Megan Murray & Donna Lucas, who are in the trenches working with technology and change management respectively at Booz Allen.
If you were in Boston for the conference you’ll notice we’re actually outside and the sun is shining: this was recorded during the final hours of the conference when the rain finally stopped!
If you register (free!) on the Enterprise 2.0 conference site you can see my 15 minutes talking about the open enterprise 2009 research project and Walton Smith presenting the winning Booz Allen Hamilton (‘BAH’) case study, which gives added context to this video.
I’ll briefly summarize the above video but strongly recommend watching it – 8 minutes of very useful information.
Donna and Megan start with a a useful discussion about the teams’ success with rapid adoption, with 41% of employees using the system, which they attribute to a rapid amount of ‘press coverage’ within the organization.
Buy in from senior leadership – active and visible executive sponsorship has really helped with change management and in driving adoption. Donna finds that just getting new users to fill out their profile is enough of a catalyst to expose them to the utility of the system so they come back and get involved.
Silo busting is successful, albeit with some ‘kicking and screaming’. Requests for very narrowly focused communities for small parochial teams are met with an effort to open up topics to a much broader community, in order to more widely share information.
Connectivity between business units has greatly increased cross domain and cross solution through community management, as users realize other parts of the organization are focused on similar needs to their own.
Stimulating conversation across community really helps build adoption patterns, while email traffic and usage is gradually finding a viable alternative in the BAH environment.
Carefully listening to feedback from users has helped make the system better, faster and easier with continuous iteration of improvement.
Metrics are an important component to measure success and had just been gathered in a detailed audit by Donna at the time of this interview. This provides rich detail around what to do and where to go next in planning future strategy which is on point for user needs.
Middle management is ‘the toughest nut to crack’ but are seeing benefits in saving a few hours a week through greater efficiencies and cutting back on redundant email communication.
Change management includes dealing with 5,000 new employees a year in a 23,000 person company, which adds a layer of complexity to the rapidly evolving ecosphere served.
There is a culture of bringing users at al levels into the feedback loop and then using that information to make the resources better, faster and easier.
It is a continuous effort to drive momentum in most cases although there are pockets of users who are now self sustaining, these are people of all types and at all levels who see the environment as the best way to get their work done
Congratulations again to Booz Allen Hamilton on a well deserved victory!
Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco’s Call for Papers closed on Tuesday after receiving a mind blowing number of submissions – 446 to be exact. It’s great to see the community is as enthusiastic about the San Francisco show as we are, and really reinforces the need for Enterprise 2.0 on the West Coast.
Some highlights and prevalent topics include:
Tons of case studies and tales of adoption
Mobility
Cloud computing
Micro-blogging & emerging platforms in the enterprise
Driving the social media bus
Building an Enterprise 2.0 culture
Internal & external communities
A big thank you to all that took the time and effort to submit an abstract. Steve and the Advisory Board have got some reading to do.
The Enterprise 2.0 Blog is affiliated with the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, an event focusing on social tools and technologies that help make companies more creative, agile and productive.
Aug 28th, 2009 |
After 25 years in business and 5,000 customers in 100 countries, 
I’ll briefly summarize the above video but strongly recommend watching it – 8 minutes of very useful information.
