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!

First posted on CloudAve

Oliver Marks and Sameer Patel – two of the leading lights in Enterprise 2.0 (that is experience in actually doing it rather than merely talking about it) presented this session. Their aim with the session was to move from “pontification to real world discussions” – a noble objective.

In discussing “the Big Idea” around Enterprise 2.0,the presenters pointed out that the ultimate sell comes from articulating the realistic business value propositions – Enterprise 2.0 technologies are just that, technologies. They’re not a holy grail of themselves and their needs to be a valid business case to sell the change. They cautioned attendees from comparing the business case for Enterprise 2.0 with the general Web 2.0 trends – web 2.0 is fundamentally a desire driven activity, whereas in a work setting people generally want to do their 9-5 and do what they have to do – no more.

People’s fundamental driver is “What’s in it for me?” – those trying to ease adoption of Enterprise 2.0 need to realize this and provide some sort of value to those making the decisions and end users. Understand the incentive structure in place, the politics and culture of the organization and the people within it.

In terms of the governance, risk management and compliance discussion, Oliver and Sameer recommended that this discussion happens early and happens openly. Discuss the issues and the plans at an early stage in order to (hopefully) get them onside. Explore the real reasons for negativity – is it really because of risk or is there a hidden agenda at work?

Oliver gave some examples of the ad-hoc shadow IT department that exists within many enterprises – where people faced with rigid and difficult enterprise grade software use cloud services like Zoho and Google docs in order to simply get their job done. It’s important to frame the context of the solution for management – help them understand the landscape within which the solution exists.

Joining the presenters before the break were a panel made up of Chris Mcgrath from ThoughtFarmer, Scott Schnaars from Socialtext and Tom Kuegler from PBWorks. Some points from their panel;

• Scott advised looking at the other priorities the CFO may have to balance against the enterprise 2.0 proposal.
• Chris brought up the reality that most collaborative solutions will come up against SharePoint and corporate IT will often take the perspective that collaboration happens only through SharePoint.
• Tom suggested that the only approach that was really viable was to kneecap IT in order to get solutions moving within an organization – using a bottom up approach to prove the initial concept to the business.
• Chris raised the point that you can build a fantastic collaborative platform within Sharepoint – but that you have to physically build it. Third party products enable those collaborative gains to be made more quickly then a complete design and build process.He also suggested that gains through social software tend to be serendipitous – as such it’s very hard to show a ROI pre deployment – how do you put metrics on serendipitous gains?
• Tom said that the approach really needs to be one of replacement – it’s no use going into an enterprise trying to pitch a tool which is completely different to what they currently do. Enterprises prefer like-for-like comparisons and replacements.
• Chris suggested that internal salespeople trying to pitch an idea to internal management utilize the assets of the vendors who are pitching everyday – tell them the requirements and let them help create collateral.

With getting executives on board it is critical that the requirements gathering is robust. Sameer discussed the “switching costs” involved in adopting new technology. It’s not simply the CAPEX involved in deploying a solution; there’s the business risk, the training, the deployment time etc. Ensure your proposal utilizes case studies from organizations in a similar space – make the pitch attuned to the company itself.

In terms of execution planning always be looking to mitigate the risk of the project and ensure you develop the right metrics to track expectations and actuality.

Oliver and Sameer invited Bevin Hernandez from Penn State University Outreach to tell their tale of developing sand deploying a social software offering. Their project planning document is interesting (image below and, yes, it’s the back of a napkin). For a more in-depth view – check out this post on the ThoughtFarmer site.

All in all it was an interesting session. I’ve posted before about Enterprise 2.0 and specifically the problems needing to be overcome to ensure its adoption and success – it’s nice to spend a few hours discussing more than just the shiny gadgets but an in-depth look at what can make this stuff actually happen.

First published on CloudAve

I read the other day that the United Nations is currently embarking on a project with the aim of overhauling its ERP systems. This project apparently has a USD300 million budget and according to the tender document;

presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to equip the organization with twenty-first century techniques, tools, training and technology

The UN is currently running around 1400 different information systems that tell a sorry tale of inefficiency including;

• up to 40 full-time employees used to process interoffice and interagency vouchers
• Most duty stations, and many organizational units within duty stations, contain their own stand-alone finance, human resources, supply chain, central support services and information technology areas

So it seems the project is a logical way to drive some efficiency gains while also opening up the United Nations to collaborative and productivity tools that are currently unavailable to them. But I can’t help but think it’s looking at this the wrong way – some functional aspects of the project include;

• $76 million for "2597 work months" of system build and implementation services.
• $14 million for travel, which presumes 1285 trips will be taken by "ERP team members, subject-matter experts and corporate consultants" at an average air ticket cost of $6000. Each trip will also get $202 for "terminal expenses" and $5000 for 20 days worth of per diems, for a total cost of about $11,000 per trip.
• $1.8 million for office furnishings to support 234 workers, including 80 core staff, 66 subject matter experts, eight consultants and 80 system integrators, or about $7700 per person.
• $6.7 million for office rental, based on an annual rate of $14,300 per person
• $564,200 for long distance telephone calls, teleconferencing and videoconferencing
• $18 million for hiring "limited replacements" for subject matter experts involved in the project
• $16 million for software licences and maintenance fees

So some thought from me on how to do more for less…

• Ditch the travel – most of these sorts of trips are mere Junkets (and given the budget figures, business class junkets at that). Hire consultants that can work remotely with a need for high frequency face to face sessions
• Ditch the “long distance telephone calls” – use Skype or another service to avoid large costs. Invest in a collaborative platform that allows for IM, voice, document sharing across large groups of users
• Ditch software licenses – build on top of OpenSource tools and technology – sure there may be some customization costs but it avoids the noose of license fees and upgrade paths
• Ditch the office rental – contract people that can hot desk, remote work work from somewhere other than the high rent United Nations locations
• “Subject matter experts”? ditch that – there are a bunch of people who, for an organization liek the United Nations, would happily give some time and skill. Crowdsource the bulk of this work – faster, cheaper and generally better
• “System build”? – Nope – use off the shelf OpenSource frameworks and customize to suit the use case

I contend that an agile approach, the use of OpenSource, a modern approach towards workplace management and a move away from UN bloat could see this project completed for a third of the budgeted cost, with greater extensibility and faster than otherwise.

Cool – anyone else want to join in submitting a proposal to the UN? An opportunity to leverage the collective wisdom of the Enterprise 2.0 community to drive some better outcomes for the global community – or something ;-)

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.

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.

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!

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!

See also my companion post on ZDNet

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.

[This post was cross-posted from ITSinsider.]

Interest in the 2.0 Adoption Council has been fantastic. Over forty members have filled our ranks. Each of our members has an extremely demanding day job. Educating, motivating, cajoling, rationalizing, bargaining, organizing, tracking, recruiting, and learning are all part of the job skill requirements. The “Internal Evangelist” (IE) has to carefully balance the needs of the business with an incredible responsibility to drive change in the organization with tools and practices that are outside of the comfort zone of most large enterprise employees, not to mention the pockets of organizational resistance predisposed to preserving Enterprise 1.0.

For this reason, I have decided to award an “Internal Evangelist of the Year.” One member of the 2.0 Adoption Council will be selected to exemplify the tenacity, courage, and sheer energy it takes to inspire a large enterprise to embrace the principles and practices of Enterprise 2.0. The award will be announced at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

“…the job of the internal evangelist is far, far more difficult. These folks toggle between fighting the good fight every day and then slipping uneasily into a sort of DMZ where they can peek out into the broader community for support and the rejuvenation they need to go on fighting another day. It’s often a thankless job with no clear roadmap for advancement, yet the majority of them do it because they believe in the principles of the 2.0 movement. I celebrate them!”

Please feel free to nominate someone who you believe is deserving of this award. If they’re not a member of the Council already, I will be happy to extend an invite. Refer the individual to me on my LinkedIn profile. We’re still screening candidates via LinkedIn.