Today we take the wraps off of our conference agenda for Enterprise 2.0 Boston. Our program will be a bit larger this year but more importantly, it has been organized differently, and now has track chairs for each of the major conference themes. By doing this we hope to create a more complete and cohesive set of sessions within each track on important trends, challenges and opportunities. This agenda also reflects an Enterprise 2.0 life-cycle approach, from strategy setting and vendor selection to application deployment, adoption and performance analysis. Below are my thoughts on the tracks we’re announcing today but we’re not done yet! Over the coming weeks expect some additions to our Keynote program, the start of our Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad program and some evening fun we have in the works as well.

Strategy: From a “track” view on the agenda we plan to set the tone for the week with a newly created “Set Your Enterprise 2.0 Strategy” series of sessions. This track tackles the “why” of Enterprise 2.0 with an underlying theme of how to use Enterprise 2.0 to bring specific value to business, how to execute on a strategy and how to measure the results. The track explores the intersection of Enterprise 2.0 with different functional areas in business, from sales to supply chain to HR and product development. As an industry we have made tremendous progress in introducing social and collaborative strategies into business. The good news is that businesses are taking notice and making initial investments in people and technology. The better news is that this is just the beginning. Now that social and collaborative initiatives are showing up on the corporate agenda, the next opportunity lies in applying them to the traditional applications and processes that form the backbone of business. There’s a tremendous amount of ground yet to cover in Enterprise 2.0.

Tools: With clear objectives established we can explore the options for “Social Business Applications and Platforms”. As our industry has matured, so too have the tools and platforms that drive it. Enterprise 2.0 is rife with vendors and applications to pick from - from startups to major vendors, point solutions to software suites and full-blown platforms. Navigating this ever-changing landscape of innovation, software features, partners and platform ecosystems is no simple task. This track is invaluable in helping you avoid missteps and future-proof your technology investments. Within the social applications and platforms theme, we’re also calling out two related tracks on search and video. Search is often overlooked in Enterprise 2.0 but is ever more important as the volume of information explodes. Search in the context of Enterprise 2.0 is extremely powerful and is an area we wanted to dig into a little deeper this year. Be sure to check out our track on how to “Use Search to Tame Complexity and Discover Opportunity.” And there’s no question that video continues to grow in importance in business as it already has in the consumer world. Our track on “Emerging Video Applications and Enterprise Collaboration” looks at the latest trends from “YouTube” style video usage to high-end telepresence systems.

External Community: Now more than ever businesses are looking outside their organizational boundaries for a competitive edge. The track on how to “Integrate Social Media and Community Approaches” into an Enterprise 2.0 framework addresses this head-on. While most social media discussions tend to revolve solely around marketing and PR, we believe the value of social media goes well beyond these functional areas into other parts of the business such as customer service, sales and product development. Extending social media for marketing, PR and beyond is a key theme this track explores.

Application Delivery & Integration: With a well thought out strategy and a complete understanding of the available tools, we shift to a track we’re calling “Delivery Strategies: Deploy, Connect and Mobilize.” This track weighs today’s application deployment options such as the cloud and SaaS against traditional, on premise hosting. There’s no question that the software world is going through a radical transformation as enterprises gain acceptance of infrastructure, platforms, software –and everything else as-a-service. Understanding these changes in the context of deploying social and collaborative applications is vital. With new choices comes increased complexity and more heterogeneous application environments. Connecting these applications requires new skills and an understanding of development environments, APIs and the integration glue required to make it all work together seamlessly. And with the volume of Smartphone devices being used by the workforce, businesses must also understand how vendor choices and deployment options affect the availability of applications to a mobile workforce. This track explores important developments in mobile but from a deployment standpoint, assessing the options across native mobile enterprise applications, mobile middle-ware, web-based and widget-based access to applications.  The development of this track is in direct response to attendee requests for more technical sessions.

Adoption: There is no better way to learn than to hear from practitioners. These are the pioneers of Enterprise 2.0, forging a path that can often lead to unforeseen challenges and frustration but also to great lessons learned and hopefully success. The “Adoption in the Enterprise for Practitioners” track is chock full of case studies and best practices on all aspects of Enterprise 2.0 with the goal of driving executive and user support and deeper integration into the fabric of the business culture.

Workshops: The tracks are each complimented by related workshops.  We have some fantastic new workshops this year as well as a couple of the most popular courses from our last conference. These are deep dive sessions and generally more instructional in nature.

Call for Papers: Lastly, a big congratulations to the people selected to present from our call for papers.  We have announced the following sessions and have a couple more awaiting approval.  We also have a number of panel discussions in the works and will be sure to consider the people who submitted through the call for papers for those sessions.

Extending MITRE’s Reach: Business Networking for and Beyond the Enterprise- Donna Cuomo, Chief Information Architect, The MITRE Corporation and Laura Damianos, Lead Artificial Intelligence Engineer, The MITRE Corporation

Using Chaos Theory Principals to Overcome Information Overload within the Enterprise and on the Web- Thierry Hubert, President, Darwin Ecosystem and Bill Ives, VP of Social Media, Darwin Ecosystem

Joining E20 Apps Together for Better Integration, Productivity and Measurement - Lee Bryant, Director, Headshift

Enterprise 2.0: It’s no Field of Dreams (CSC Case Study)- Claire Flanagan, Senior Manager, KM and Enterprise Social Collaboration, CSC, and Simon Scullion, Service Development Manager, CSC

Enterprise 2.0 Lock Down in a Highly Regulated Environment - Abha Kumar, Principal, Information Technology, Vanguard and Andrew Lazzaro, Manager, Information Technology, Vanguard

The Dark Side of Enterprise 2.0 - Redux - Greg Lowe, Social Media, Alcatel-Lucent and Kathleen Culver, Transformation Architect, Alcatel-Lucent

Innovation Through E2.0: Three Case Studies that Make the Business Case - Mark Fidelman, EVP, MindTouch

Social Learning 2.0 - Marcia Conner, Senior Enterprise Strategist, Pistachio Consulting

We’ll have many more updates in the coming weeks.  I look forward to seeing you all in Boston!

I’ve been looking back at some of the video footage from our Enterprise 2.0 Conference this past June in Boston and reminded of our opening keynote address from Jascha Franklin-Hodge called my.barackobama.com: The Secrets of Obama’s New Media Juggernaut . What a great speaker and great way to kick off the conference.

I’m just as excited to hear from Tammy Erickson, our opening keynote speaker for the E2 Conference in San Francisco next week. Tammy was recently added to the global “Thinkers 50” list along with the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and she focuses on building strategies that will help business succeed.  Enterprise 2.0 is often driven from the ground up, through grass roots efforts that start small and take root across the enterprise.  But the Enterprise 2.0 message and the mandate for business managers is equally important and one that Tammy will deliver loud and clear next week.

See you at the conference next week and in the meantime, please enjoy this past talk from our video archives.

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

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.

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’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!

I mentioned we are going to have a healthy dose of customer case studies at the San Francisco Conference, right?  This next session was submitted by Art King who is Global Infrastructure Architect at Nike.  I’m always impressed when big brand enterprises are willing to share their experiences.  So thank you Art for taking the time to submit the Nike story and congratulations on being selected:

Internet Collaboration Transformation at Nike
The impact of numerous Internet properties and tools has had a profound hidden effect on our Enterprise. We are restructuring our landscape to enable “Business Class” service delivery with the goal of a “Consumer Experience” (more user empowerment, trust, and less friction). Our goal is establishment of an Internet based Collaboration Foundation for an, apparently, borderless enterprise with appropriate levels of technical controls and personal governance.

Art King, Global Infrastructure Architect, Nike, Inc.

The following session proposal identifies the “dark side” issues that can undermine the productivity gains we’re trying to achieve with Enterprise 2.0 efforts.  The abstract reminds us that the relationship between people and technology is tricky business and requires careful consideration.

The community have spoken and would like to hear more.  Congratulations to Kathleen Culver-Lozo and Greg Lowe (greg2dot0) from Alcatel-Lucent on their session proposal:

The Dark side of Enterprise 2.0 - The potential of seamless contact with anyone anywhere at any time seems to promise improvements in productivity, most ROI calculations overlook the hidden costs to this ubiquitous access. A growing body of research is showing the already overly interrupt-driven, multi-tasking work environment can be detrimental to productivity and even the quality. Further, on-line access and collaboration is still less effective than in-person meetings. Finally, these technologies align better with some individuals’ personalities. This session will explain how to look into the psychology of the individual and the organization to anticipate where these misalignments lie and provide strategies for mitigating them.

Kathleen Culver-Lozo, Program Manager - Enterprise Transformation, Alcatel Lucent

Greg Lowe, Social Media Architect/Program Manager, Alcatel-Lucent

If you’ve been following the ongoing debate about the merits of Enterprise 2.0, you’ll likely agree that we need to hear from more companies actually doing this stuff and that can point to specific business value as a result of their efforts. Our agenda for the San Francisco Conference will include a heavy dose of cases studies and customer perspectives that will get right to the heart of the value of Enterprise 2.0 in hard business terms.

With that in mind, I’d like to announce the next winner in our call for papers selection process. Kaiser Permanent is one of the largest health care providers in the US with 8.6 million members and 200,000 people on staff.  This session was submitted by Miles Appel from Kaiser Permanente and Gia Lyons (@gialyons) from Jive Software.  Mike and Gia, please join us in San Francisco to present your session on:

Making Health Care Providers Social: Kaiser Permanente’s Enterprise 2.0 Adoption
Kaiser Permanente’s success as a premier health care organization depends on connecting approximately 200,000 physicians, nurses, employees, and contractors to promote collaboration, the sharing of best practices, and overall continuous improvement. KP IdeaBook is a socio-collaborative environment that helps make this happen. Learn how we’re rolling out KP IdeaBook in a way that creates excitement and sustained adoption, while balancing the risk of introducing an open environment in a regulated industry and a traditional culture. We will also share how our Enterprise 2.0 vendor is helping us to develop adoption strategies.

Miles Appel, Executive Director, Intranet Web Capabilities, ISG, Kaiser Permanente

Gia Lyons, Strategic Consultant, Jive Software

Congratulations Miles and Gia!

Back in July we opened our Call for Papers for the inaugural Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. We received an astounding 450 submissions from people willing to share their thoughts, strategies and experiences around Enterprise 2.0.

The Call for Papers went to a public vote which 929 people completed. Yes, that’s an impressive response but what’s more impressive is that 929 people managed to get through the very painful 16-page survey! So thank you to everyone who submitted sessions and weighed in during this process.  We have a much better system planned for Boston 2010 that will be able to accommodate this volume of participation. Stay tuned.

Over the next few days we’ll announce the winning sessions here on the blog, in no particular order. So on behalf of the 929 people above, our advisory board and TechWeb Team I’d like to first invite Stewart Mader (@slmader) and Thomas Vander Wal (@vanderwal) to present at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.  Their session:

The One Year Club: Five Things Companies Learn After a Year of Enterprise 2.0 Adoption

At the outset, organizations are often eager and excited about the benefits they anticipate from cultivating adoption and use of social and collaborative tools. But talk to those same organizations six months or one year after they’ve started, and you’ll hear a different story. Some organizations have experienced measurable success, others are struggling with a range of adoption and use issues, but all will tell you to watch out for several factors they didn’t anticipate. We’ll discuss these factors, and show you how to plan for each as you start, restart, or continue your adoption efforts.

Stewart Mader, Founder, Future Changes

Thomas Vander Wal, Principal & Senior Consultant, InfoCloud Solutions

Congratulations Stewart and Thomas!