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 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

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!

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

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.

In fact, Paul Greenberg, author of the best selling book CRM at the Speed of Light, 4th edition, has been addressing this lately and will be sharing his thoughts on Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM convergence during his keynote address at the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Conference in November. Paul is the authority on CRM, often referred to as “The Godfather of CRM” and his book is referred to as “the bible of the CRM industry” so when Paul talks… people listen. The abstract of his keynote address is as follows:

E20 & SCRM Converge: Customers & Employees Together at Last
As business progresses in the 21st century, one thing becomes clear. The customer has been dramatically transformed by a communications revolution that impacts how and when he or she interacts with people and institutions and what they expect of those institutions. But there are two things that characterize this social customer that go beyond that – 1. They are also employees and 2. Employees need to be interacting among themselves in order to understand how to best serve and communicate with those customers. Enterprise 2.0 was created to improve the internal collaboration among employees so that businesses would benefit by the increased effectiveness of their processes, by better corporate knowledge and by significant morale improvement. Social CRM was developed as the programmatic response of the company to the social customer’s ownership of the business conversation. But now, with the increasing sophistication of the tools, and the increasing stridency of customer demand, there is a clear need for E2O and SCRM to begin to co-mingle. Paul Greenberg, author of CRM at the Speed of Light, 4th edition, will be discussing how they can combine, why they should and what your business can do on a practical level.

Paul asserts that in order to engage with and respond to customers through various social channels (SCRM), business must first learn to engage internally through their own social and collaborative channels. Why is that? Social networks have essentially opened a floodgate of customer engagement. Today’s customers are empowered to communicate with businesses on their own terms and expect immediate attention. This new reality requires businesses to adopt more sophisticated social tools and establish real-time access to the right information and expertise across their organization. The customer expects it.

But in order to serve the new demands of the social customer, businesses must achieve vastly greater information fluidity in their internal communication, information surfacing and knowledge expertise. Without it, the value of social customer engagement will be considerably less fruitful – even harmful.

Without a culture of collaboration and the systems to support it internally, businesses will make potentially deadly mistakes. Information locked in one departmental silo, never reaching the front line sales representative could be the difference between winning a customer or losing them to the competition. Without better collaboration and information sharing a sales rep in one part of the business could mistakenly undercut a colleague or perhaps mistakenly sell a product at or below cost.

As external engagement with customers increases, a business’s ability to formulate sound data and expertise and respond to the customer in near real time will be the name of the game.

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!

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