Quick update from my post on E2’s involvement with NSTAR’s Walk for Children’s Hospital…
We made it!
Steve Wylie, Natalia Wodecki, Liz Wakefield & myself donned stylish Enterprise 2.0 sweatbands and walked 7 mile for Children’s Hospital Boston on Sunday. It was a great experience to join the Boston community for one common goal: to raise money and awareness for a great cause.
Here are some photos from our walk.
It’s great seeing the #e2conf stream come alive - folks are pouring into the Westin Boston Waterfront from all around the globe to gather at Enterprise 2.0 with one common objective: to listen, learn and share their stories about collaboration in business.
Just as Enterprise 2.0 brings together like minded E2.0 adopters from all parts of the world, the World Cup 2010 in South Africa simultaneously has fans glued to their screens to support their talented countrymen play the beautiful game. Good news for all you soccer fans at Enterprise 2.0 - the Westin has set up a massive screen for the games in the Lobby, and you can grab a schedule from the Concierge (I’ve already snagged mine).
Tomorrow the conference begins at 8:30 am with workshops running till 4:15 pm, and afterwards we have a special program taking place on Monday night starting at 4:30 pm called Evening in the Cloud.
For all you #e2conf veterans, Evening in the Cloud will be a familiar program as this is our 3rd year doing it in Boston. Each year the format has changed slightly, and this year the topic is Which Collaboration Backbone is Right for You?
David Berlind will open the program with a 30 minute overview of the cloud collaboration market, the major players in the market, and touch on why the market is changing so rapidly. After his overview, Sean Poulley from IBM will provide a 15 to 20 minute demo of LotusLive Online Collaboration Services, and then join Bill McNee, Founder and CEO of Saugatuck Technology and Yuvi Kochar, Vice President of Technology / Chief Technology Officer of The Washington Post Company for an hour long discussion about choosing one’s cloud collaboration partner.
Panel Moderator:
Panelist:
Panelist:
William S. McNee
Founder and CEO, Saugatuck Technology
Panelist:
Sean Poulley
Vice President, LotusLive Online Collaboration Services
After the panel concludes, a cocktail reception will begin and the audience will have a change to grab a drink, mingle with the panelists and get a closer looks at LotusLive. Evening in the Cloud is open to all registered Enterprise 2.0 attendees. Look forward to seeing you tomorrow night!
Enterprise 2.0 Boston 2010 is just around the corner and I’m looking forward to a conference filled with compelling speakers and sessions, and getting to know more of the Enterprise 2.0 Community personally. Before the conference begins, however, I’d like to get Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara and its Call for Papers on your radar and in your calendars.
E2 Santa Clara is scheduled for November 8 – November 11th, and the Call for Papers is open now through Wednesday, June 30th. We’ve partnered with Spigit, Inc. again to create a collaborative and transparent Call for Papers submissions and voting experience. You’ll find all of the following information about how to submit on the Call for Papers site but here’s some important items to remember.
First off, if you participated in the Enterprise 2.0 Boston Call for Papers, you should already have received an email inviting you to the Santa Clara Call for Papers. If this is your first time participating, you’ll need to sign in and create an account to either make or review a submission. Submissions can be tagged with one of our pre-populated technology topics or a unique topic of the submitter’s choice.
Technology areas include:
Strategy, Planning and ExecutionCase Studies
Driving Adoption and Organizational Change
Social Tools and Applications
Technology Foundations of Enterprise 2.0
Social Media, Marketing and Customer Engagement
The form requires the usual information including a title, description, session format, and all pertinent speaker information. All submissions made will be immediately viewable on a discussion forum, allowing for increased transparency in the Call for Papers process.
We encourage all who submit, all who plan on attending E2 Santa Clara, and anyone interested in Enterprise 2.0, to review the submissions, and give us feedback. Submitters will be allowed to edit their submissions based on this feedback, and can also attach files with supporting materials to submissions. Inviting friends/colleagues to view submissions and publishing your submission to a variety of social networks is also made easy. Lastly, submissions are searchable by technology area, keyword or speaker.
After the Call for Papers closes on June 30th, a Community Vote will begin on July 5th and end on July 16th. The feedback of the community will be one of the primary criteria for selecting the sessions for Santa Clara 2010. However, all sessions are subject to final review and approval by the E2 Advisory Board. Receiving the most votes does not automatically mean your submission will be included in the conference. In addition to the wisdom of the crowd, creation of a balanced program for the different Technology Areas will be considered.
There are three stages defining the selection process:
Proposal Collection: This is the opening stage. All proposals start in this stage. Community feedback is encouraged.
Community Vote: This is the second stage. After the Call for Papers closes on June 30th, the official voting period will begin on July 5th and close on July 16th. Proposals will advance to the voting stage when they achieve certain levels of community feedback and approval.
Selected Sessions: This will be the final stage. Advancing here is based on community votes and the approval of members of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference Advisory Board. The Advisory Board will only review the session with the most votes. Top number of votes does not mean automatic inclusion in the conference.
We want the E2 community to collaborate, give us their most exciting ideas and experiences, and tell us what they want to see in Santa Clara in November.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at mfarrell@techwebcom or (415) 947-6250. I’m looking forward to reading your submissions and cultivating meaningful discussions around the tools and ideas that are the future of Enterprise 2.0.
I’m attending this week’s annual SAP customer/partner conference: SAPPHIRENOW (Twitter hash-tag of the same name to follow numerous tweets). It’s the first time I’ve been here, mainly because things like ERP and BI have seemed like foreign languages to me given my background in real-time communication and collaboration, but what I’ve seen so far has been eye-opening, and exciting: the continued integration of social computing into business process management systems.
A mighty thank you to all those who submitted their entry to Enterprise 2.0 Boston Launch Pad 2010. The jury has voted and we have selected our 8 Launch Pad semifinalists. They are, in alphabetical order:
Congratulations and best of luck to these 8 as they advance to the video round and compete for the the chance to demo live at Enterprise 2.0 Boston in June. If your company has been chosen, please email me at paige at techweb dot com so I can send you instructions with next steps on submitting for the video round.
This post first appeared at Diversity Analysis
I spent some time recently talking with Terri Griffith, a lovely lady who also happens to be a professor of management at Santa Clara University. Terri’s focus is on the “implementation and effective use of new technologies and organizational practices.” Terri hunted me down after seeing a post I recently wrote about the disconnect between technological tools and the culture within the organizations that are attempting to deploy those tools.
Over 30 minutes or so, Terri and I had an energetic conversation about technology implementation, and the wider Enterprise 2.0 space. I’ve said many times before that it concerns me that most Enterprise 2.0 commentators have a high level perspective on organizations and thus miss the all to important aspect of how culture on the shop floor is an impediment to adoption. Or, to put it more correctly, how technology fails to design products based on the realities for shopfloor workers.
All this got me thinking about my role in a former life, in which I consulted to organizations helping with Design Strategy (capitalization intentional). In this role I attempted to build cross functional teams that could ideate outside of the constraints of the status quo, while empathetically hearing the perspectives of others. Often when doing this work we would defer to the concept espoused by design consultancy IDEO, that organizations should look for individuals who fitted the mold of “T-shaped people”
According to IDEO, T-shaped people:
have two kinds of characteristics, hence the use of the letter “T” to describe them. The vertical stroke of the “T” is a depth of skill that allows them to contribute to the creative process. That can be from any number of different fields: an industrial designer, an architect, a social scientist, a business specialist or a mechanical engineer. The horizontal stroke of the “T” is the disposition for collaboration across disciplines. It is composed of two things. First, empathy. It’s important because it allows people to imagine the problem from another perspective- to stand in somebody else’s shoes. Second, they tend to get very enthusiastic about other people’s disciplines, to the point that they may actually start to practice them. T-shaped people have both depth and breadth in their skills.
I’ve had a notion I’ve been tossing around now for five years or so and it’s one of triangle shaped people. I don’t want to push the metaphor but humor me a little on this one and I’ll explain. You see the problem I see with T-shaped people both in IDEO’s definition and from what I’ve seen in practice, is that these people have a very thin veneer of broad knowledge – connect many of these people together and, beyond the thin veneer, there are huge functional gaps between them.
Rather than merely semantics, this is a major risk for organizations as much damage can be done by groups that, from appearances at least, have broad ranging skills. When let loose on projects, this thin veneer can soon develop cracks and be the cause of project failure.
Triangle shaped people are very different however. They begin with a broad skill base but, rather than only having this breadth over a very fine depth, their skill base narrows gradually as it deepens – these people are balanced and have much higher levels of what I call skill volume than the T-shaped individuals.
The thesis goes that T shaped people collaborate but don’t increase an organizations skill volume much if at all. Triangle shaped people however greatly increase skill volume in a "sum of the parts" type way.
Beyond skill volume however, triangle shaped people have an important benefit when working in groups. In a cross functional group staffed with triangle shaped people, members alongside each other have much more closely aligned areas of deep knowledge – for this reason, an approach that encourages triangle shaped people can result in a deepening of knowledge across the entire team.
It’s an area I’m re-energized about and one which I’m looking forward to collaborating with Terri on further.
Cross posted on Diversity
I saw a tweet the other day that heralded the fact that someone I know who runs a business support agency had begun using microblogging service Yammer. Great you might say… well maybe.
I’ve had previous conversations with this particular individual (who shall remain nameless for obvious reasons). A year or so ago I was surprised (actually somewhat flabbergasted) to receive an email from his PA telling me that this person had been impressed by an article I’d recently written. The email was all of eight words long – and I can’t help but wonder how much more time it took this person to instruct his PA to write it than it would have done to write it himself.
One thing I enjoy about the dealing with software companies directly is that (generally) no matter what level you sit within an organization, you’re a technologist at heart and hence embrace different communication technologies. I’d be shocked if any of the SaaS CEOs that I’m in regular contact with actually had a PA let alone had their PA write their emails.
This is in contrast to another organization I’ve been involved with (and yes, I’d love to name and shame but I won’t) this organization is a multi billion dollar business involved in selling telecommunication products and services and alas, a large number of the workers within the organization seem unable to use the phone let alone email.
But all of this isn’t merely an exasperated rant – rather it’s a cry to think about culture, not technology. All the microblogging, collaboration, e-this, i-that and mobile everything else technology in the world is of little effect if the people within the organization have a culture that doesn’t encourage responsiveness, dialogue and open-communications. So please people – focus on the system, not the technology….
Google announced several new features for Google Docs today. Most of these are designed to improve the UI to take advantage of advancements in browser capabilities, but the most notable new feature is the ability for up to 50 individuals to simultaneously collaborate on a document in real-time. This feature shows the first application of Buzz technology into Google Docs and leaves one anticipating the integration of DocVerse to enable co-editing of Microsoft Office documents directly within Google Docs.
There’s a lot of vendors and noise in the Enterprise 2.0 market - in an effort to pay tribute to the folks that are making strides, innovating and solving business problems creatively, the Launch Pad program provides an opportunity and platform for companies to toot their E2.0 horns and get some well deserved recognition.
The competition invites all companies and developers, large and small, to enter their application. There is no fee for entry, nor do do you need to be an exhibitor at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference (although if you are, that’s cool too). The bar for entry is set very low - simply Tweet to #e2conf-lp and tell us in 140 characters or less why you are ‘Launch Pad worthy.
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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.
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!
@e2conf on Twitter
Jun 14th, 2010 |
