Sara Roberts is President and CEO of Roberts Golden Consulting, Inc. a Management consulting firm specializing in change management consulting, internal branding and strategic transformation. She’s speaking at the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Conference on organizational change and had this to say about “QWERTY Organizations” in her guest post on the Cisco Blog:

The QWERTY Complex: Un-jamming our organizations to thrive through change

Navigating in today’s workplace can be disorienting.  It seems that the minute we reorganize, restructure, merge, shift… we need to do it yet again to keep up with new demands.  We lament, when are things ever going to be normal again? Things are changing so fast.  We can’t possibly keep up! In our organizations, we often point to ‘agility’ as critical to our success – yet the ironic part is that our organizations are still trying to command and control our way into being more nimble.

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Sara will take the stage at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference to make her case on “The Ex-CXO: Why Your Employees Will be Running Your Enterprise in 5 Years, and Why You Should Let Them” and she’s one of the facilitators of  Organization Next a new program we’re featuring this year.

If you’re interested in community management be sure to check out this track update from Ted Hopton. Ted is a community manager at UBM and chairs the track on “Community Management Inside the Enterprise”.

If you’re an online community manager, the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston is the place to be this month. Whether you’re managing an external community or an internal community for employees, you’ll find an entire track of conference sessions tailored to your needs.

I’m an internal community manager and the chair for the Community Management: Inside the Enterprise track. I’m excited about the practitioners we have on the program for Boston, and I know they are eager to share their experience with you. In fact, I think you’ll find all of our speakers to be approachable and interested in connecting with fellow practitioners, so I recommend introducing yourself after a session you’ve enjoyed. I’ve met some terrific people at the Enterprise 2.0 Conferences and formed lasting professional relationships.

If you’re new to community management, you shouldn’t miss Trisha Liu’s Crash Course for New Community Managers. You’ll not only learn from her considerable accomplishments, but you’ll have the chance to ask whatever questions are on your mind and connect with a roomful of peers in situations similar to yours.

I’m intrigued by Kevin Jones’ session on Enterprise 2.0 Failures – And What We Learn From Them. I guess I’m a bit of a cynic, so when I spend days hearing from people about all of their successes, it makes me wonder about the problems they have and aren’t talking about. Kevin’s session should provide a healthy contrast by tackling the subject of failures head on.

As a numbers geek and metrics guy, I’m especially looking forward to Rawn Shah and Hardik Dave’s perspective in Match Your Measurement Methodology to Your Situation. And I’m curious to see what Eric Ziegler and Abha Kumar envision for the future in A Day in the Life – Enterprise 2.0 in 2016.

I know I am going to have to make some tough choices, too. For example, Rawn and Hardik’s measurement session is at the same time as Who Leads Social Business and What Does Leadership Look Like?, presented by Keri Pearlson and my good friend and fellow founder of the Community BackChannel, Jamie Pappas. Maybe I can get a colleague to attend one and I’ll go to the other, and then we can compare notes.

So, whether you come alone or with your colleagues, I hope to see you in Boston!

Ted Hopton, Community Manager, UBM

Did you know that there’s just a few days left to submit your session ideas for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. But this is not so much a “Call for Papers” as it is a “Call for Ideas” – an invitation for you to weigh in, share your thoughts and suggest how we can turn good ideas into great sessions.  We’re using an application that specializes in true crowd-sourcing and idea generation, not simply gathering and voting on sessions. Can the Enterprise 2.0 community, the people who are passionate about leveraging social and collaborative thinking in the enterprise, use these same principals to truly create and shape exceptional conference content? I believe so, but it will take your help!

Here’s how you can participate:

1. Suggest a topic – It does not need to be a fully fleshed out session.  Half-baked ideas are welcomed!

2. Comment – Take a look at the current submissions with an eye for making them better.  Does the submission resonate with you or does it miss the mark?  We want to know.

3. Suggest speakers  – Have you seen someone speak and thought “she would be great at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference”?   Now is your chance to tell us!

Thanks for your participation!

My colleagues at InformationWeek Analytics are doing some important research on Enterprise 2.0 applications and I’d like to personally invite the Enterprise 2.0 community to take part.  Please see the note below from InformationWeek.com Editor-in-Chief, Alex Wolfe.

Thanks for participating.

Steve

InformationWeek Analytics is conducting a survey to determine what’s important to you when you’re choosing Enterprise 2.0 applications, and how vendors stack up against a list of criteria rating the performance, applicability, cost, and reliability of their software. The results will be an IT pro-driven assessment of the vendors and will published in an upcoming issue of InformationWeek as well as an in-depth InformationWeek Analytics report.

Here’s your chance to let vendors know what’s important to you, and where they need to improve their apps or strategies.

Since the readers of the Enterprise 2.0 blog are people who have experience with, and opinions on, these apps, I’m posting a notice here to invite you to weigh in. You can take the survey by clicking on this link.

The survey will take under 10 minutes to complete.  Your responses will remain confidential and will only be reported in aggregate.

Once again, to take the survey, please click on the link.   The survey closes on or about Nov. 5, so please go there at your first opportunity. Thanks to everyone in advance for their input.

Alexander Wolfe
Editor-in-Chief, InformationWeek.com

Is Enterprise 2.0 the chocolate to Social CRM’s peanut butter? In a recent InformationWeek post I commented on the maturing Enterprise 2.0 market and our path towards deeper integration of social and collaborative applications with pre-existing business work flows and applications.

Debates continue on whether legacy apps will evolve enough to provide this collaborative functionality baked into the work flows they support or whether a new category of enterprise software will establish a platform agnostic social application layer that will cut across and intersect with multiple existing applications. In either case, one area that seems to be accelerating towards deeper social software integration is customer engagement and the associated world of CRM.

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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.