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).

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The one we’d all been waiting for – ever since the Rasmussen brothers announced Wave at Google I/O in May, we’ve been waiting for some hard examples of the power that Wave can bring. Gregory D’Alesandre (Dr Wave), Product Manager for Google Wave ran presented three examples of Wave integrations from Novell, ThoughtWorks and SAP.

Every time you use any sort of communication technology you’re trying to achieve a goal, to get something done. With Google Wave the idea is that rather than understanding the “end goal”, users can start a Wave which can conform with the shifting objectives over time. D’Alesandre gave an introduction to Wave for the one or two people in the audience who haven’t seen it before. He explained that Google use Wave internally a lot and they find that all current communication technologies are a poor replacement for face to face interactions however every now and ten it’s better to interact electronically (he gave the example of a 12 person meeting with everyone trying to talk at the same time) – Wave enables this mass interaction without so much noise (although I’d have to say it does introduce significant dissonance as heavy users of multiple person IM will know).

The Wave team has purposely avoided giving lots of lock-down options to Wave – if you allow people to lock their content down, Wave becomes very email-like – openness and flexibility increases the collaborative potential.

D’Alesandre talked about Wave as a platform and invited their platform partners to show their offerings.

First up Alexander Dreiling, Program Manager from SAP who demoed two gadgets that SAP has built – Gravity is a gadget that allows business process modeling to be collaboratively built. See the demo video below;

Second up, Chad Wathington, VP, Product Development, ThoughtWorks demoed the integration of Wave with a software development project management tool. I covered the offering in more depth in another post but basically it allows for tasks to be created relating to a project all from within Wave and have them reflected in the project management tool. As I said in my post – this integration doesn’t show much more than could be achieved with a standard email/PM integration.

And lastly Andy Fox, Vice President Engineering from Novell showed their integration using the Wave federation protocol – Pulse. Pulse aggregates multi channel communication as well as a list of relevant contacts – it’s effectively a social CRM/communication offering. It brought to mind Gist’s offering and, while it helps aggregate lots of data, it does little to ease the burden of the firehose of information. The addition it does bring is the enablement of visibility in real time – but it does raise some question as to the value of asynchronous vs synchronous communications.

Some interesting integrations… but yet again nothing entirely ground breaking.

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

In case you missed it, last week we announced an impressive keynote line-up for the Enterprise 2.o Conference in San Francisco.  I’d like to briefly touch on the keynotes from Microsoft SharePoint and Google Wave because there’s been so much talk about their potential to disrupt the market.

Christian Finn, Director of SharePoint Product Management, Microsoft

Why is this a big deal? Well because the SharePoint team at Microsoft will be digging into SharePoint 2010.  2010 has been referred to as a  “day of reckoning for the enterprise 2.0 vendors” because many third-party products have come into existence due to shortcomings in past SharePoint offerings.  Of course the big questions to be asked are:

1. Is 2010 finally “good enough”?

2. How will it affect smaller vendors and Microsoft partners in the market?

3. What impact will 2010 have on the nascent Enterprise 2.0 market overall?

Gregory D’alesandre, Product Manager, Google Wave

How much do you know about Google Wave? There has been a lot of speculation about what Wave is, why it’s important and how it’s going to disrupt communications and collaboration as we know it. After all, Wave has been developed by the same team of brothers who developed Google Maps years ago. So far the Wave Team have only made the software available to a small group of developers but later this month the they roll out a “Preview” version available for early pilots.

Does Google Wave have a strong play in the Enterprise?  You’ll need to come to the Conference to see firsthand what all the hype has been about and judge for yourself.

Implementing Enterprise 2.0 technologies and approaches can be a key driver of competitiveness and profitability.

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Ross Dawson is globally recognized as a leading futurist, entrepreneur,keynote speaker, strategy advisor, andbestselling author. He is Founding Chairman of four companies: professional services and venture firm Advanced Human Technologies, future and strategy consulting group Future Exploration Network, leading events firm The Insight Exchange, and influence ratings start-upRepyoot.

Luis Suarez, IBM Knowledge Manager, Community Builder and Social Computing Evangelist keynoting at Web 2.0 Expo Europe, Berlin 2008.

Let’s free ourselves from the email grip! Use social tools for more efficient knowledge sharing.

See link for NY Times article titled I Freed Myself From E-mail’s Grip:

GetSatisfaction is an interesting new approach to leveraging the power of the Web for fun (and maybe profit)? The idea is to create an open market place for customer support. Got a question about a particular company or product? Go to http://getsatisfaction.com/, enter your question, and hopefully within a few minutes you get a response via e-mail from someone in that company. There’s a pretty compelling business model there if you can leverage this sort of service to reduce calls to your contact centers. There’s also some interesting opportunities to meld this service with microblogging services such as Twitter.

One of the key ways that UC can benefit an organization is by reducing human latency. The idea is that if you can shorten the time it takes people to find the subject matter experts that they need to solve a particular problem, you can achieve demonstrable benefits such as increased sales, increased customer retention, or greater efficiency of contact center operations.

Most vendors here at VoiceCon San Francisco are spending a lot of time talking up UC as a way to reduce human latency, but few are saying “how” you classify and identify subject matter experts. Typically you hear discussions around grouping people by role, but what is missing is the merging of social computing and UC so that your employees (and perhaps even customers & partners) can self-identify experts based on concepts such as tagging or rating user profiles. It’s not hard to see how a company can integrate something like Lotus Connections or Microsoft SharePoint with Teligent Community server to let your users create the knowledge base that allows individuals to find the experts they need for a given problem.