I had one of those midnight “wake up and go Doh!” moments last week.  A common feature across nearly every conversation I’ve had about Enterprise 2.0 subjects hit me. Everybody says “Enterprise search is broken.” In fact it is one of the first things to come up. But then people move on. As Churchill once said, people often stumble across the truth, but most pick themselves up and move on. I am guilty too. I first “stumbled” 3 years ago, and it’s taken me this long to say, “wait a minute, I never thought that through.”

People move on because they seem to assume that this is incompetence at work. Search is sooo 1.0, right? It’s been solved, and we’re just fumbling the execution, right? You usually get some sort of ironic joke along the lines of “wow, it is so easy to find stuff out there on the public Web, and here with all our resources, we can’t even do search right.”

And then the conversation tends to move on to more obviously “2.0″ things like blogs, wikis, how to increase participation, and my personal pet peeve: annoying moaning about “culture change.”

Hold on. Rewind. Let’s go back to search and think for a moment. I have a theory here, and I’d like to see if all you smart E 2.0 guys agree. I have reached a radical conclusion: broken search is the problem, but fixing search is not the solution. Search breaks behind the firewall for social, not technical reasons.

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Are you an enterprise 2.0 company up to something cool in 2010? Launch Pad wants to know about it. The Launch Pad contest has been a part of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference for many years, providing a platform for innovation to shine on the keynote stage.

Who qualifies?

The contest is open to all enterprise 2.0 companies - big or small - that have released or announced something new in 2010. A new product, a new version, a new partnership or integration point - so long as the announcement was made this year, it counts.

How do I enter?

Well, things start off rather simply. Beginning August 9th, 2010, you have until August 30th, 2010 to make your Twitter pitch to the Launch Pad hashtag: #e2conf-lp. We want to hear, in 140 characters or less, what makes you Launch Pad worthy.

Then what?

After Twitter submissions close on August 30th, myself and the esteemed Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad Jury will vet the entries and choose our 8 favorite. Those 8 will then be asked to create a 3 minute video demoing their product. We’ll open up a community vote on September 20th, 2010. The four videos with the most votes will be asked to demo on the keynote stage at Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara on November 10th, 2010. The contest culminates with a live audience vote to select the Launch Pad winner. More info on rules and key dates here.

Any cool prizes?

Of course. In addition to the exposure our Launch Pad qualifiers receive with their involvement in the program, our Final Four receive a special publicity package to help get as much buzz as possible out of the contest.

To get a taste of what our previous winners have submitted, take a peek at our video archive.

Looking forward to your Tweets starting August 9th!

After just coming back from E2.0 in Boston it’s safe to say that most vendors in the space (or so it seems) are moving in the same direction, towards enterprise collaboration, and when I say “enterprise collaboration” I literally mean collaboration for the enterprises, as in large companies.  Which leaves me asking, “what about small and medium size businesses?”  The small and medium size businesses in the E2.0 space are being under served in my opinion.  It also makes one wonder if a small or medium size business has the same needs as an enterprise business to begin with.  I say no.

From speaking with various companies of different shapes and sizes (and from owning a small business, Chess Media Group) I can say that while Enterprise size organizations are interested in collaboration many small businesses (and some mid size as well) are not.  Again, this is an observation but it seems as though smaller businesses are more interested in business management tools as opposed to collaboration tools.  The business I run works with a handful of people and the issue that we run into is that we are using multiple tools to do things such as share documents, invoice clients, email market,  project manage, time track, and keep track of contacts.  We don’t have trouble collaborating on things that needs to get done but we do run into challenges when it comes time to using multiple tools to run our business.

It wouldn’t make sense for many smaller organizations to use Sharepoint, Jive, Cisco’s Quad, or a host of other “collaboration” tools on the market today, but what about an overall business management tool (there are several possible candidates that I am aware of)?  Something that allows me to access Gdocs, Mailchimp, Freshbooks, integrate my contacts, and do anything else I need to manage my small business from one platform/interface?

Larger organizations with hundreds or thousands of employees have specific departments that handle these tasks and their challenges are based around finding the right people and information to get their jobs done in the best way possible.

So let me ask you, are business management tools more suited for small and medium size businesses whilst collaboration tools are more relevant for larger companies?  What have you seen?

Jacob is the Principal of Chess Media Group, a Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0 consultancy.  Jacob also blogs on Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0, you can find him on Twitter @JacobM.

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!

Okay, I am going to milk my 15 minutes of fame as an E 2.0 “influential” to pitch you some pure vaporware. When I am not starting flame wars around E 2.0 culture change, I manage a research team within the Xerox Innovation Group, that is building a technology called Xerox Trails. The technology allows you to blaze and follow “trails” through Web content. Right now, the consumer incarnation of the technology, a product called “Trailmeme,” is in limited invitation-only beta. Read on for an invite code. What I’d like from you E 2.0 evangelists and champions is help brainstorming and dreaming up the ideal enterprise version of this technology, which is on our roadmap for a year or so down the line. At a higher level, I am interested in discussing a more conceptual question: how do you make sense of the huge mess of documents on a typical Intranet, hosted on multiple internal sites and technologies? This is the problem of enterprise document integration (EDI).

Continue Reading »

Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco 2009 is a wrap! This week has been phenomenal, with tons of press coverage, photos and buzz. Amongst all the great keynotes & general sessions at the conference, I wanted to take a moment to reflect and recognize the Launch Pad program and our Four Finalists.

After making it through two rigorous rounds of voting, CubeTree, The Garland Group, Twiki and XWiki made it to the Final Four and presented live on the keynote stage on Wednesday, November 4, 2009. Each of the presenters had 5 minutes to demo their product, and after each company had their turn, the audience participated in a live text-to-vote, courtesy of our friends at Mozes.

The results tabulated in real-time percentages, and with 42% of the vote, CubeTree was crowned the Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco Launch Pad winner. When CubeTree’s CEO & Co-Founder was asked to explain how he felt about winning Launch Pad in 140 characters or less, Carlin Wiegner succinctly replied that he was happy. Nice one Carlin.

I wanted to personally thank Steve Wylie, the Enterprise 2.0 Conference GM, for letting me serve as chairperson for the compeition. Big thanks to Carlin, Brad, Jitendra, Milind and Ludovic for doing such a great job and helping to make this program a huge success! Cheers guys.

First posted on CloudAve

A live blog of the presentation….

Christian Finn, Director of SharePoint Product Management, and Alina Fu, Product Manager, Social Computing talk about the SharePoint 2010 offering.

An interesting approach – Christian and Alina ran a “speed dating” session trying to message the major thrust of 2010. Christian pushed the big customers who use SharePoint to collaborate and, with honesty, admitted the failings of an ActiveX-centric approach.

Personal connections, finding subject matter experts, consumer features for the enterprise. 2010 has a dynamic newsfeed directly to an individual site. Personal profiling linked with contextual search.

2010 has a better user experience across blogs and wikis – unleashing the creativity of the users. Enabling the use of podcasts within the product.

User rating and commenting of content inside or outside of SharePoint. Tagging linked to newsfeeds.

The security question - “It’s Microsoft so it’s safe”. Content management extends to the social media content.

Flexibility – 2010 enables advances customization, within the browser for an individual user or a team. A full range of APIs and tools to customize the look, feel and functionality.

And the speed date is over… And the audience goes wild… (not so much)

First posted on CloudAve

Tammy Erickson, President of nGenera Innovation Network proclaimed that 2009 will be remembered as the year of “A-ha!”. Her presentation was very much in the spirit of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. Erickson pointed out some problems impacting upon the adoption of enterprise 2.0 and the changes needed to mitigate those problems. She believes that the train is leaving the station for enterprise 2.0 but that the fundamentals need to be addressed.

Problem #1;

• Old approaches have been mastered
• Technology enables a very different level of performance
• Competition will shift the playing field

Erickson believes that Enterprise 2.0 is as game changing as the telex was in days gone by. The twentieth century icons where those who had the ability to master scale and cost. The steel mills, the auto makers. Today’s organizations are simply not optimized for the future. Reason #1 - they’re optimized with;

• Division of responsibility
• Specialization
• Strict accountability – providing excellent control

Going forwards though, enterprise 2.0 mobilizes intelligence;

• The utilization of complex knowledge
• Innovation through the contributions of many
• Harnessing the smallest units of knowledge

Reason #2 - traditional organizations are underpinned by;

• Loyalty, reciprocated with protection and care
• Individual autonomy
• Identification with organizational units and individual managers
• Based on planning

Whereas new organizations have different assumptions;

• performance based arrangements
• collective purpose
• identity with shared objectives
• they’re based upon coordination not planning

The ten factors that shift organizations – enables of collaborative capacity.;

1. Highly engaged, committed participants
2. Trust-based relationships
3. Networking opportunities
4. Selection, promotion and training based on collaboration
5. Organization philosophy supporting a “community of adults”
6. Executives who create a “gift culture”
7. Leaders with both task and relationship management skills
8. Productive and efficient behaviors and processes
9. Clearly defined individual roles and responsibilities
10. Important challenging tasks

Reason #3 – The strategic role. Today the paradigm is

• This is something we have to do to keep Gen Y happy – the recession put paid to that!
• It’s extra, nice to have like fitness centers and day care
• We don’t even know what “it” it

Contrasted with the future organization

• 2.0 supports a broad range of activities – with clear business objectives
• Each best achieves through different organizational approaches and supported by different technologies

Driving outcomes through collaborative intents;

• Connect previously unrelated ideas
• Access untapped people or expertise
• Distribute work or risk
• Co-create
• Detect emerging patterns or trends
• Pool judgments
• Determine group-wide preferences
• Air and debate multiple views
• Influence views or norms
• Coordinate in time and space

Problem #4 – The technology itself. The concerns are;

• It’s overwhelming – and difficult to harness
• The solutions are heterogeneous and disconnected
• Not secure or necessary relevant

The coming realities;

• Unifying approaches
• Ways of partitioning and aggregating data
• Ability to manage relationships

Problem #5 – Engagement

• Management 101 dictates
• Directed activities
• Clear instructions

Participation 2.0 means;

• Individual discretion
• Dealing with rich content that flows through infinite links
• Forming and maintaining complex relationships
• Having trust, a stake, a voice, an impact and a community bond

If you haven’t done so already, be sure to take a moment and peruse our 8 Launch Pad quarter-finalist videos and cast your vote before tomorrow evening.

Our 8 quarter-finalist were chosen to by the E2 team as the best, brightest and most innovative tools from the general pool of submissions. We’re now looking to the E2 community to check out their 3 minute videos and select your favorite. Please note that you can only vote one time for the vid you would like to see move to the next round.

The 4 finalists with the most votes will be announced on October 16 and provided the chance to a give a 5 minute demonstration of their application live on the keynote stage at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on November 4.

Are you one of the 8 quarter-finalists? Help get the word out to your network to start voting using #e2conf-lp and #e2conf.

Rock the vote!

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 ;-)