Rachel Happe of The Community Roundtable recently launched an effort to help community and social business leaders better understand how executives support, invest in, and adopt social technologies themselves. In order to articulate the executive journey, Happe and her team spearheaded a research initiative called The Social Executive; and UBM proved to be a worthy case study, illustrating our own journey in establishing an internal social network.

The study highlights UBM’s implementation of The Hub, the perspectives of key senior executives, and some of the groundbreaking innovation made possible by a more networked communications structure. It illustrates the importance of both executive leadership and engagement, covering CEO David Levin’s early decisions and his personal use of social tools and how those decisions helped to unify company culture and made collaboration and employee engagement easier and more prevalent, ultimately leading to innovations that would not have been possible otherwise.

The E2 team is proud that our company is a shining example of social collaboration in the enterprise. Read more about the UBM case study.

For more case studies and to further the discussion, consider joining us for the E2 Conference in Boston, June 17-19.

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

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.