I’ve been spending some time lately with social business and collaboration consultants, Oliver Marks and Sameer Patel, discussing where we’re headed with the Enterprise 2.0 industry and the role the Enterprise 2.0 Conference plays as a catalyst for this market. Oliver and Sameer spend their days helping companies – large companies – understand how best to leverage social and collaborative tools.  But what I find refreshing in our conversations is that they move very quickly to focus on what we’re trying to achieve with these technologies and strategies.  How are we utilizing Enterprise 2.0 to achieve demonstrable and measurable results?

As an industry we’ve spent a lot of time discussing the merits of social and web 2.0 tools in business.  That’s been an important part of the Enterprise 2.0 conversation as I firmly believe that the disparity between consumer technology and business technology has largely fueled the Enterprise 2.0 market.

At our Boston conference I heard time and time again, “it’s not about the tools, it’s about adoption.”  The burning question was how to change the business culture to better utilize these tools. There’s no question that culture and adoption play a massive role in being successful with Enterprise 2.0 but there’s more to this.

What many Enterprise 2.0 experts and practitioners fail to recognize are the end results they are trying to achieve.   Yes, replacing the corporate intranet with a wiki is generally a major step forward for businesses. But the promise of Enterprise 2.0 goes far beyond that, into functional areas within the organization that can also benefit from the underlying framework, strategies and tools that comprise Enterprise 2.0.  That’s where the real value lies and that’s also the trickiest part to fully understand, dissect and integrate with an enterprise-wide strategy.

With Oliver and Sameer’s help and guidance, our San Francisco conference is going to tackle this challenge through a series of sessions and half-day intensive workshop that Oliver and Sameer will co-chair. The workshop will address how to build a business case for enterprise-scale performance acceleration – a must attend program for anyone tasked with driving a company-wide Enterprise 2.0 strategy.  The breakout sessions will look at how an Enterprise 2.0 strategy can unlock value in specific functions within business including; business partner networks; customer support and collaboration networks.

Oliver and Sameer are putting tremendous effort into this program to provide attendees with actionable information and best practices. We hope to build on this program at future events so please let us know how this resonates with your interests or suggest topics you’d like them to address:

@olivermarks

@sameerpatel

@swylie650

Further discussion on this topic from Oliver and Sameer:

Enterprise 2.0 and the Paradigm of Social Partnerships – Pretzel Logic

How To Sell Collaborative Business Performance Internally – ZDNet

After reviewing the impressive submissions and internal deliberation, Enterprise 2.0 is pleased to announce the Launch Pad 9 quarter-finalists from Round One’s Twitter submissions. They are, in alphabetical order…

Ally Software

allysoftware: @e2conf #e2conflp Managing complex projects is stuck in Web1, too many emails & meetings. Harmony simplifies complex project & schedule mgmt

Covisint

MikejMorley: Connect employees to the purpose of the org, allow emp’s to see what eachother are working on&realize the Harvest of human capitol #e2conflp

thegarlandgroup: @e2conf – RiskKey, our real-time compliance mgmt tool for banks, promotes transparency, collaboration, and trust. They need us. #e2conflp

HashWork

@e2conf #e2conflp @Hashwork provides a social presence on web for any company and its community of custo – http://bit.ly/YlnGk by @wlansford

IncentiveLive

incentivelive: #e2conflp An enterprise wiki, blog, social network and widget platform? Great GUI & .NET? Well you’ve guessed right, it’s not Sharepoint :)

By way of @ITSinsider, @tweetmeme and @elsua… I just caught this interesting slideshow on Enterprise 2.0 initiatives at Adidas Group by Christian Kuhna.  Funny that just a couple weeks ago I announced that Nike would present at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference on their internal collaboration strategy.

So it would seem that the leading Enterprise 2.0 markets are  government and, uh… shoes.

Just a quick reminder…

Early registration for Enterprise 2.0 Conference San Francisco ends at midnight tonight (PST). Register today for the best rate.

Save and additional 20% with the code E2BLOG or get a FREE Pavilion Pass with the code PAVILIONPASS.

If you’ve been working hard on that 140 character pitch, a friendly reminder that we need your Launch Pad submission tomorrow to be considered for the chance to present on the main stage at Enterprise 2.0 in San Francisco on November 4, 2009.

We’ll announce the 9 quarter-finalists on September 28 . Those lucky 9 will then move on to Round 2 video submissions.

Interested in entering? First let us know who you are, and then Twitter pitch to #e2conflp. For more information check out the official Launch Pad site.

Best of luck!

First published at CloudAve

It’s not often I agree with Dennis Howlett. The two of us have a history of going at it hammer-and-tongs in the defense of our own perspective on an issue. Sometimes it gets messy but that’s all part of the *fun*.

Recently however, in something of an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment, Dennis posted the not-too-subtle notion that Enterprise 2.0 is a crock (of what he didn’t elaborate).

Most people interested in the space will have read the post, but the central thesis Dennis takes is that;

…business has far more pressing problems. The world is NOT made up of knowledge driven businesses. It’s made up of a myriad of design, make and buy people who -quite frankly – don’t give a damn about the ‘emergent nature‘ of enterprise.  To most of those people, the talk is mostly noise they don’t need.They just want to get things done with whatever the best tech they can get their hands on at reasonable price.

It’s a theme that, despite the historical acrimony between Dennis and myself, I find refreshingly honest, and one I want to reflect on here. Bear that thought in mind – business is full of real people doing real stuff without the time, inclination or need to wax lyrical on “the new paradigm”.

I reflected on this thought, especially given the post written by Enterprise 2.0 thought leader Stowe Boyd in response to Dennis’ polemic. In his response Stowe says that;

those things called Enterprise 2.0 form only one bit of this bigger whole. The world in which work exists has changed fairly drastically in recent years, and so we are seeing a fundamental reset in the nature of work.

And this is the point I want to come to – yes the world is changing, a fact most of us accept. But enterprise, at least at a granular, man-in-the-cubicle level, is (for the most part) not changing. And the main reason for this is not technological, not financial but rather cultural.

I occupy an interesting space in that my background is very much SMB (I own and/or manage half a dozen different businesses in different sectors – technology, property, manufacturing, professional services). Added to this background is the fact that I’ve also had a number of consulting roles for large businesses. I am therefore able to compare and contrast these two very different beasts, and parse the differences in terms of “Enterprise 2.0”.

I never cease to be amazed at the commonality between different large businesses – no matter the industry they’re involved in, no matter which part of the world they’re based, they seem to share similar traits. The people within the organizations are focused on compliance, they’re fearful of making decisions lest they be seen to be putting their head above the parapet and they’re invariably exceptionally poor at communicating – no matter how many whizz-bang “Enterprise 2.0” tools their organization has invested in. (Disclaimer – this a general comment and doesn’t reflect on current clients ;-) )

In his original post, Dennis asks what the problem is that Enterprise 2.0 is trying to solve. This question misses the point in my view – most people accept that the world is changing, that instantaneousness, collaboration, organic structures, open standards and agile development are the themes de jour and will continue to be so going forwards. This change however fails to take into account the nature of big business – despite the rhetoric and the hand waving by the select few organizations that have bought into this new way of doing things – enterprise is, for the most part, resisting change as strongly as is humanly possible. It’s almost entirely a cultural issue that Enterprise 2.0 is up against – and it’s a formidable barrier indeed.

I wrote a paper over a decade ago, in part inspired by Ricardo Semler, his book Maverick and his work within Semco, the large business he inherited. In part motivated by the belief that it is almost impossible to be innovative and proactive within a large enterprise, he set about tearing Semco apart, creating autonomous sub-organizations where the workers were often the business owners, able to sub-contract both to Semco but also to their competitors.

It’s a solution to the problem that Enterprise 2.0 is trying to solve – that is the sheer terror within large businesses of opening the floodgates, and the general trait of enterprise workers to be focused on creating a silo for information in effort to protect their own patch and, as Dennis puts it, “a protectionism on [their part] hoping they won’t be pink slipped any time soon”. Enterprise 2.0 is an incredibly valuable tool but, as yet, it doesn’t have much raw material upon which to work.

So… Enterprise 2.0 isn’t a crock at all, but until there is a new kind of enterprise that is able to leverage it, it may as well be.

Today was an interesting day in the Enterprise 2.0 echo chamber that reminded me of my favorite short poem by Robert Frost,

“We all dance around the circle and suppose. The secret sits in the middle and knows.”

A spirited debate erupted this morning in the blogosphere and on Twitter whether the Enterprise 2.0 meme should be retired in favor of the newly popular Social Business meme. The best quote I heard all day was from Megan Murray at Booz Allen Hamilton, the firm that won this year’s Open Enterprise 2009 case study . Ms. Murray wrote,

“In the end I’m not concerned with what we call it. I’ve got work to do.”

The secret, in this case, is that there are millions of enterprise professionals around the world that simply are not tuned into this hair-splitting debate. Whether we’d like to admit it to ourselves or not, large organizations are predominantly still hierarchical fiefdoms. Worse? Senior management and executives still make the big, expensive decisions on strategy and execution. We can continue to debate all the nuances of what Enterprise 2.0 is or isn’t or if it should be at all, but in the end, the good news about enterprise-wide collaboration and “social” innovation will be told and sold in small, leather-chaired conference rooms around the world. And, my prediction is that it will be told and sold by top drawer management consultants like Tammy Erickson.

Tammy is both a McKinsey Award-winning author and executive speaker. As President of nGenera Insight, she has conducted ground-breaking, extensive research on changing demographics and employee values and, most recently, on how successful organizations work. Tammy has co-authored four Harvard Business Review articles and the books Retire Retirement: Career Strategies for the Boomer Generation and Workforce Crisis: How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills and Talent. Her blog, Across the Ages, was one of the first Harvard Business Publishing Discussion Forum blogs. You can also find her blogging at Huffington Post.

I was the board member who nominated Tammy to open the conference this year in San Francisco. My position for supporting Tammy was rooted in the need to elevate the conversation of enterprise transformation to a senior management/executive level. Although we had many other good candidates, I felt Tammy was unique in her ability to raise the conversation to a more strategic level and connect the dots to business value. I hope you welcome her to our community.

And, I hope it’s not lost on anyone that Tammy is, well, female. Our old friend Tom Davenport, who originally pooh-poohed the Enterprise 2.0 meme, gives Tammy a ringing endorsement. I have had the pleasure of seeing Tammy speak to executive audiences; she rocks the house. I hope our tight-knit e20 community will be as delighted. I’ve already cautioned her not to call “it” by name.

In case you missed it, last week we announced an impressive keynote line-up for the Enterprise 2.o Conference in San Francisco.  I’d like to briefly touch on the keynotes from Microsoft SharePoint and Google Wave because there’s been so much talk about their potential to disrupt the market.

Christian Finn, Director of SharePoint Product Management, Microsoft

Why is this a big deal? Well because the SharePoint team at Microsoft will be digging into SharePoint 2010.  2010 has been referred to as a  “day of reckoning for the enterprise 2.0 vendors” because many third-party products have come into existence due to shortcomings in past SharePoint offerings.  Of course the big questions to be asked are:

1. Is 2010 finally “good enough”?

2. How will it affect smaller vendors and Microsoft partners in the market?

3. What impact will 2010 have on the nascent Enterprise 2.0 market overall?

Gregory D’alesandre, Product Manager, Google Wave

How much do you know about Google Wave? There has been a lot of speculation about what Wave is, why it’s important and how it’s going to disrupt communications and collaboration as we know it. After all, Wave has been developed by the same team of brothers who developed Google Maps years ago. So far the Wave Team have only made the software available to a small group of developers but later this month the they roll out a “Preview” version available for early pilots.

Does Google Wave have a strong play in the Enterprise?  You’ll need to come to the Conference to see firsthand what all the hype has been about and judge for yourself.

I spent a great deal of time working on the Open Enterprise 2009 Research project earlier this year, leading up to the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. I learned a great deal through the interviews with many thought leaders and practitioners, like Charlene Li, Euan Semple, Andy McAfee, Laurie Buczak, and Walton Smith, to name only a few. On reflection, I realized that in general the term Enterprise 2.0 was not used much, and no one spontaneously stepped forward with an impassioned argument as to why the term was even helpful.

Denis Howlett recently stated that Enterprise 2.0 is a crock, basically making the case that the knowledge management-ish arguments in support of E 2.0 don’t gibe with the way companies actually have to operate, what their drivers are, or what problems confront them. Andy McAfee responded with a not particularly brief or convincing response, stringing together a number of very narrow use cases — like bringing new hires up to speed, or internal prediction markets — and stating that since these problems exist, and since various solutions to those problems are being herded together as Enterprise 2.0ish applications, therefore Enterprise 2.0 is a good thing, worthy of our attention.

I think something more significant is at work, and those things called Enterprise 2.0 form only one bit of this bigger whole. The world in which work exists has changed fairly drastically in recent years, and so we are seeing a fundamental reset in the nature of work. On a secondary level, this translates into changes in how people communicate, coordinate, and collaborate, and this, then, leads to changes in information technology and related practices. Note, however, that talking about the secondary effects of these global business and social changes in and of themselves is, from my point of view, not a very illuminating exercise at the best, and at the worst, completely misleading.

In a way, you could interpret Denis’ polemic as making a similar point, but I don’t think that his perceptions are based on the sense of a sweeping change in the world of business, but rather the views that the timeless nature of business operations have nothing to do with knowledge management.

Howlett’s grumping is just some context for my point: ‘Enterprise 2.0′ is a not particularly useful characterization of what is going on with the spread of Web 2.0 technologies and practices in the world of business.

Note that I am a strong advocate for the use of the Web 2.0 handle, despite the various attempts by iconoclasts to topple it in 2008, or Arrington’s theory that a overpheromoned party of cool kids meant the demise of 2.0. I think Web 2.0 is fairly well-understood to represent a set of convergent and mutually supportive ideas — the Web as a platform, open standards, APIs, social tools, fast and low-cost development tools and techniques — that have come to define a generation of Web development and business.

Enterprise 2.0, on the other hand, does not have the same coherence. Perhaps this is because so many of the principles of Web 2.0 are blunted by the command-and-control needs of the enterprise. You cannot state that Enterprise 2.0 is Web 2.0 for the enterprise because much of what defines Web 2.0 does not easily translate to the enterprise context.

In particular, Web 2.0 as a phenomenon is strongly tied to social tools — social networking, social media, and so on — in which the individual is primary, and asymmetric networks of relationships with other individuals form the principal mechanism for connection and information flow. However, this does not gibe with the enterprise obsession with groups: where the rights and responsibilities of individuals are derived from group membership, and these rights are granted by the enterprise.

This apparently minor mismatch between the individualistic web and the organizational one desired by management leads me to believe that we are looking at the wrong end of the sausage machine. We need to switch our attention to the shifting nature of work itself, and how business needs to be reconsidered in a rapidly changing world (which includes a revolutionary social Web, notably). Toward that end, all manner of innovations, tools, and practices might be evaluated for their utility and impacts, but they cannot be considered hanging in space, in some sort of strategic vacuum.

First and foremost, management must settle on some principles around which work itself can be reworked. Difficult questions must be posed, and deep and principled thinking must take place before tactical software and business process changes can take place. In essence, forward-looking companies will devise something like a constitution and a bill of rights that attempt to lay out a worldview about the purpose of the firm, what it stands for, how it will treat its customers, what is expected from employees, and what the social contract between the company and individuals — employees and customers — is.

So, I have come to believe that this is the place where companies need to focus their attention: socializing the business, not adoption of Web 2.0.

I see that very smart folks in Dachis Group, Altimeter Group, and other upstart consulting firms are focusing on ‘Social Business’ as a defining theme, and I am lending my voice to that chorus.

In a time when we are shifting to a new, flow-oriented paradigm on information sharing and network-based coordination and collaboration, it might be fitting to focus on process and not its outcomes. Let’s leave the version numbering to one side, and accept the inevitability of reworking work into a much more social form. This will not be a one-time thing, but an ongoing and unending process of innovation.

In effect, we need to shift to a much more agile and adaptive way of thinking about social and collective action within businesses, and managing in a very different world than we were even a few years ago, back when Enterprise 2.0 might have seemed like a great term. Nowadays that term may be holding us back and confusing folks that haven’t been as close to the discussion as we have.

I’m thrilled to announce that Bert Sandie (@bsandie) from Electronic Arts is going to present a case study at E2 San Francisco. Bert is Director – Technical Excellence (cool title) and is tasked with driving EA’s internal social networking, knowledge management solutions, collaboration and innovation. Bert spoke on a Microsoft customer panel at our Boston event and got great reviews.

Our agenda of case studies and customer speakers is growing and now includes:

• Electronic Arts
• Nike
• Booz Allen Hamilton
• Kaiser Permanente
• Medtronic
• Metlife
• Eli Lilly
• CSC
• EMC
• Alcatel-Lucent

Here is the session Bert will present in November:

Collaboration 2.0 inside Electronic Arts
The presentation will provide insight into EA’s internal social collaboration strategy, successes and failures, solution, insights, best practices. Specifically, we will look at our integrated social networking, knowledge management, community and search solution.

Bert Sandie, Director – Technical Excellence, Electronic Arts, Inc.

Congratulations Bert!