It was fantastic to meet so many customers this year struggling with the issue of adoption in their enterprise. The following is a post I published today on my ITSinsider blog. I hope you will join this community of your peers so we can share the burden and the joy of bring 2.0-style democratization and collaboration benefits to your company.

Cross-posted from ITSinsider:

Yes, the baby was born in ‘06, started crawling in ‘07, and now is running around like a maniac with boundless energy in ‘09. The Enterprise 2.0 movement is now a healthy child, growing stronger and more willful every day (just a cabinet door away from getting into trouble…) I returned from the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week rejuvenated, as I’d hoped to.

The number UNO issue on the minds of this year’s customer conference attendees was: HOW THE >>>> DO WE DO THIS??? Customers wanted to hear from other customers, not us (the so-called experts in Enterprise 2.0). The best sessions for me were definitely the unconference sessions where real practitioners could talk frankly about their challenges and share their successes.

Listening to customers during the conference, as well as culling the data that has been coming in from various surveys, I’ve decided the time is right to launch a community for “Internal 2.0 Evangelists.” As I’ve been a 2.0 Evangelist for the broader sector (and I thought my job was difficult), I realized 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!

So, that said, I’ve begun the 2.0 Adoption Council on LinkedIn. Once we reach a critical mass, we will be moving the Council to a more fluid socio-collaborative platform. If you are a customer of a large enterprise rolling out an enterprise 2.0 initiiative, you are invited to join the Council. Here is a LinkedIn invite I sent to some key customer contacts that explains the Council’s mission and goals:

You can reach me on LinkedIn on my profile if we’re not already connected. Send me a note you want to join, and I’ll send you an invite. The Council is free; there are no strings attached.

What is the difference between micro-blogging and private IM chat rooms? Simplicity – micro blogging is much easier to use and understand. Things get los t easily in forum threads – they’re too bulky and too hard to wade through. Micro blogging tends to be more public and optional and allows for easier discoverability. Google is great for results, but not for answers. Micro blogging is near real time - it’s important to differentiate that from real time which causes disruption.

Continue Reading »

Cross posted from CloudAve, specialist cloud computing blog.

It’s always nice to see something that’s not completely US-centric in technology, this panel included a great cross-section of European enterprise 2.0 visionaries. In the audience were participants from all around the world – South Africa, Canada, Europe (and Australasia believe it or not).

Parochialism – collaboration and community works very differently in different cultures, the example was given of private enterprise social networks working well in Europe, but not in Japan were workplace culture is completely different. There is a cultural chasm within organisations, both departmental and geographical – the best way to bridge that is to bring people together and enable them to communicate. Obviously though language barriers make that problematic - most of the time cultural differences online are rooted in language differences. I suggested that part of the problem is that English speakers tend to have an arrogance that others should default to their language – the panellists pointed out that “English is the Latin of the modern world” – a really interesting discussion ensued looking at cultural context around language, the example was given of the word “rubber” which has a remarkably different meaning in the UK and Australasia from what it does in the US, so that is a socio-lingual issue rather than a language one only.

Continue Reading »

Wednesday, June 24 12:30 – 4:30 pm

Enterprise2Open (tag #2open) is open to anyone who would like to attend. This open event blends some pre-scheduled content with an open grid where the attendees fill in the sessions they either want to discuss or present themselves. As the official “unconference” of the event, Enterprise2Open is the perfect place to connect with other attendees and share your knowledge and experiences.

To propose a topic and for more details, please visit the Enterprise2Open wiki.

Register for your Free Enterprise2Open pass, which gives you access to all of the conference activities listed on our ‘What’s Free‘ page.

Enterprise2Open 2009 sponsored by -

Thoughtfarmer are the creators of social intranet software which adds a social layer to the basic address book and read only web pages of 1.0 style intranets.

All users can now add and edit content so long as they have security restrictions permission. As well as updating their personal contact details and profile, Thoughtfarmer gives access to blogs, feeds, work stream views and Twitter style social connections.

Customers essentially come from two different places: people who’ve never had an intranet and are starting from the round up and those upgrading from an older intranet to Facebook and Wikipedia style functionality.

ThoughtFarmer runs on a fully Microsoft environment of Windows Server, SQL Server, Active Directory & Exchange and is often used as a replacement for SharePoint.

Chris says Sharepoint often winds up as a glorified shared drive and to make it good you have to embark on a full development project which can can take 18 months. while ThoughtFarmer is often integrated with SharePoint the fact that it can be installed and up and running within a very short period often leads to it becoming the de facto collaboration solution.

Sharepoint are strong in parallel for compliance, document discovery and other structured, tracked data.

While 80% of customers are using the product globally across their entire organization it is often used as a departmental solution at companies such as Electronic Arts.

As a Canadian company ThoughtFarmer are very familiar with the need for multilingual capabilities and have customers all over the world, multiple language packs and support the Google Translate API.

Chris says that launching from top down takes a big marketing effort and sites a core value of enterprise 2.0 as the difference between working above the flow and working in the flow - providing a better way to work makes a huge difference.

Chris cites great usage of customers such as resort developer WATG, and design company IDEO as groups of people who don’t allow software to get in the way of innovation and in person collaboration.

IDEO are an industrial design company who have evolved into an innovation and design company with eight  international offices and 500 employees.

Starting out historically with small project teams using lots of post it notes, it was hard to collaborate across organizations that are spread out across the world. IDEO looked for ways to build tools to build communities around common interests, passions and expertise in order to become one interconnected organization. Allowing employees to reveal what they’re interested in and working on was seen as being of great value.

They started by building a design team to attempt to see internal processes as a client engagement to craft an appropriate environment for IDEO work practices.

The goals were to build a system that targets process friction points and addresses them without overwhelming people with new processes and tools.

The IDEO Intranet environment is contained in a custom Ruby wrapper, using ThoughtFarmer for wikis, Movable Type for blogging and some legacy asset and data applications.

This was IDEO’s fifth attempt at launching wikis before they got it right. Email is still alive and strong as a primary communication medium but wikis are getting stronger usage. Internally people now find health claim forms and other bureaucratic materials through wikis instead of email.

The system has had a very enthusiastic uptake internally, becoming very integral to the way people work. There is now a high level of internal blogging.

Although aware that every culture is different, IDEO offer consulting to other companies based on their experiences creating their internal collaboration environment.

Back in January I posted about the potential for legal battles over Twitter account names as squatters began to move in, or in some cases even fraudulently impersonate other individuals or organizations. The concern I had at the time was how the potential legal battles could impact Twitter as a company, and whether or not they could handle the deluge of filings. Today, Twitter’s official blog notes that in response to fraudulent account usage they are testing a verified account capability.   

Continue Reading »

The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) has 65k members around the world in a community that provides education, research, and best practices to help organizations find, control, and optimize their information.

AIIM is also known as the enterprise content management (ECM) association.

President John Mancini defines research, training and evangelical surfacing of information as their core values.

• The historical problems around managing paper content and now digital assets is discussed, with electronically stored information production increasing rapidly in volume.

• John created a very successful Ning community site over a single weekend which is thriving but now has the classic silo problem of information being locked into it.

• Traditional IT departments can be very locked, and therefore shadow It is a huge issue.

• The business value of Twitter is largely around ad hoc, informal, uncontrolled, user oriented content to get around static IT.

• Regulated industries have a huge problem with multiple content buckets from a legal perspective, there is clear delineation of who is responsible for discovery.

• Enterprise content management professionals tend to think in a records management mentality instead of how to keep tabs on unstructured communication.

• Emphasis is on ‘thou shalt not’ instead of how to tackle these issues in many member organizations.

• Few members have confidence in their ability to reproduce and use email as a system of documentation so who knows where we are with blogs, wikis and Twitter…

• Twitter is used by AIIM internally, and also track Twitter activity to drive users back to the AIIM website.

• AIIM is seeing some uptake of Twitter in their member base but are in the vanguard of usage. The world of content management in the 166,000 smaller businesses is ripe for more agile, flexible content management than the larger solutions in the ECM industry.

• The issue of bespoke solutions dependent on size and need comes up and John comments that Enterprise 2.0 is not a monolith.

So here we are just a couple weeks away from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.  We have been working for eight-plus months on the agenda and we are ready for a great event.  Personally, I’m just ready to get to Boston and hear from all the great speakers we have lined up! Like Stowe, I recently had the opportunity to speak with Ulrike Reinhold about Enterprise 2.0 and cover some of our highlights and goals for the upcoming conference.  There are a lot of great programs at this year’s event that didn’t get a chance to cover in the interview. So here are some of the important links to check out our program:

• Keynotes and General Sessions
• The entire agenda by day
• Enterprise2Open (the unconference portion of the agenda)
• Evening in the Cloud
• LaunchPad
• Open Enterprise 2009 (research project and innovation award)

Tandberg’s new compliance appliance could be a precursor of a potentially growing market around compliance enforcement for emerging collaborative technologies. Tandberg’s offering is designed to help companies archive and manage video conferences to support compliance and auditing needs. We’ve already seen similar developments as companies like Akonix, IMLogic and FaceTime emerged to support compliance needs in light of use of instant messaging. I expect to see similar appliances or applications popping up to support enterprise usage of services such as Twitter, Google Apps, and Facebook to name a few. We’ll discuss this topic at Enterprise 2.0 on Wednesday at 3:30 in a session entitled “Privacy, Data Ownership and Identity in an Increasingly Virtual World” - hope to see you there!