Unified Communications/Audio-equipment maker Plantronics is running a contest with a prize bundle worth $1400 for the most creative photograph showcasing how you work. The  Show Us How You Work To Win! contest can win you a collection of “office of the future” goodies including cool headphones, an iPhone, and not one, but TWO netbooks. So go on ahead and enter. I am a judge for this year’s contest, and as some of you may recall, the winner of last year’s Plantronics Telewho contest, so I can assure there really is a nice big prize here. Here’s an example of the sort of picture they are looking for. I am sure you guys can top this one though!

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!

I’ve been spending some time lately with social business and collaboration consultants, Oliver Marks and Sameer Patel, discussing where we’re headed with the Enterprise 2.0 industry and the role the Enterprise 2.0 Conference plays as a catalyst for this market. Oliver and Sameer spend their days helping companies - large companies - understand how best to leverage social and collaborative tools.  But what I find refreshing in our conversations is that they move very quickly to focus on what we’re trying to achieve with these technologies and strategies.  How are we utilizing Enterprise 2.0 to achieve demonstrable and measurable results?

As an industry we’ve spent a lot of time discussing the merits of social and web 2.0 tools in business.  That’s been an important part of the Enterprise 2.0 conversation as I firmly believe that the disparity between consumer technology and business technology has largely fueled the Enterprise 2.0 market.

At our Boston conference I heard time and time again, “it’s not about the tools, it’s about adoption.”  The burning question was how to change the business culture to better utilize these tools. There’s no question that culture and adoption play a massive role in being successful with Enterprise 2.0 but there’s more to this.

What many Enterprise 2.0 experts and practitioners fail to recognize are the end results they are trying to achieve.   Yes, replacing the corporate intranet with a wiki is generally a major step forward for businesses. But the promise of Enterprise 2.0 goes far beyond that, into functional areas within the organization that can also benefit from the underlying framework, strategies and tools that comprise Enterprise 2.0.  That’s where the real value lies and that’s also the trickiest part to fully understand, dissect and integrate with an enterprise-wide strategy.

With Oliver and Sameer’s help and guidance, our San Francisco conference is going to tackle this challenge through a series of sessions and half-day intensive workshop that Oliver and Sameer will co-chair. The workshop will address how to build a business case for enterprise-scale performance acceleration - a must attend program for anyone tasked with driving a company-wide Enterprise 2.0 strategy.  The breakout sessions will look at how an Enterprise 2.0 strategy can unlock value in specific functions within business including; business partner networks; customer support and collaboration networks.

Oliver and Sameer are putting tremendous effort into this program to provide attendees with actionable information and best practices. We hope to build on this program at future events so please let us know how this resonates with your interests or suggest topics you’d like them to address:

@olivermarks

@sameerpatel

@swylie650

Further discussion on this topic from Oliver and Sameer:

Enterprise 2.0 and the Paradigm of Social Partnerships - Pretzel Logic

How To Sell Collaborative Business Performance Internally - ZDNet

Today was an interesting day in the Enterprise 2.0 echo chamber that reminded me of my favorite short poem by Robert Frost,

“We all dance around the circle and suppose. The secret sits in the middle and knows.”

A spirited debate erupted this morning in the blogosphere and on Twitter whether the Enterprise 2.0 meme should be retired in favor of the newly popular Social Business meme. The best quote I heard all day was from Megan Murray at Booz Allen Hamilton, the firm that won this year’s Open Enterprise 2009 case study . Ms. Murray wrote,

“In the end I’m not concerned with what we call it. I’ve got work to do.”

The secret, in this case, is that there are millions of enterprise professionals around the world that simply are not tuned into this hair-splitting debate. Whether we’d like to admit it to ourselves or not, large organizations are predominantly still hierarchical fiefdoms. Worse? Senior management and executives still make the big, expensive decisions on strategy and execution. We can continue to debate all the nuances of what Enterprise 2.0 is or isn’t or if it should be at all, but in the end, the good news about enterprise-wide collaboration and “social” innovation will be told and sold in small, leather-chaired conference rooms around the world. And, my prediction is that it will be told and sold by top drawer management consultants like Tammy Erickson.

Tammy is both a McKinsey Award-winning author and executive speaker. As President of nGenera Insight, she has conducted ground-breaking, extensive research on changing demographics and employee values and, most recently, on how successful organizations work. Tammy has co-authored four Harvard Business Review articles and the books Retire Retirement: Career Strategies for the Boomer Generation and Workforce Crisis: How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills and Talent. Her blog, Across the Ages, was one of the first Harvard Business Publishing Discussion Forum blogs. You can also find her blogging at Huffington Post.

I was the board member who nominated Tammy to open the conference this year in San Francisco. My position for supporting Tammy was rooted in the need to elevate the conversation of enterprise transformation to a senior management/executive level. Although we had many other good candidates, I felt Tammy was unique in her ability to raise the conversation to a more strategic level and connect the dots to business value. I hope you welcome her to our community.

And, I hope it’s not lost on anyone that Tammy is, well, female. Our old friend Tom Davenport, who originally pooh-poohed the Enterprise 2.0 meme, gives Tammy a ringing endorsement. I have had the pleasure of seeing Tammy speak to executive audiences; she rocks the house. I hope our tight-knit e20 community will be as delighted. I’ve already cautioned her not to call “it” by name.

Mobile workers are getting left out in the cold as battles between vendors continues. I mentioned a few weeks ago the dispute between Google Voice and Apple over allowing Google Voice into Apple’s iPhone store. This week comes news that Microsoft is delivering enhancements to its Office Communicator Mobile, which only runs on Windows Mobile and Nokia Symbian devices. Microsoft also announced new partnership with Nokia. Great, but according to our research, the vast majority of business smartphones are, and will continue to be BlackBerry’s, while 38% of companies are adding support for iPhone over the next year. Enterprise mobile planners are increasingly getting stuck in the middle of efforts by mobile providers to own the operating system, the device, and the software. A trend that appears to be accelerating at the expense of innovation.

Yesterday, I did something that suggested to me that we are at an important tipping point in the psychology of Web 2.0 adoption. Within an hour of hearing the news of Facebook acquiring Friendfeed, I signed up for the latter, using my Facebook login info. I’d known for a year that Friendfeed is a great dashboard service that integrates your social media presence, but I had not joined. Apparently I wasn’t alone. Friendfeed was at one point described by TechCrunch (I think) as ‘a great service nobody will ever use.’  So how do you interpret actions like mine?

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This week brings news that Apple rejected Google’s application to make its Google Voice mobile application available for download via the iPhone application store. Google Voice users are instead stuck using Google’s web portal to manage their voicemail accounts.

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David Gilmour is senior vice president, Collaboration Technologies at Oracle. During this discussion we cover Oracle’s Beehive collaborative product and associated strategy. I highly recommend listening to this 16 minutes on large scale enterprise issues as there are some pertinent points here highly relevant to the entire Enterprise 2.0 space regardless of company size.

Beehive is a new product launched at last fall’s Oracle Open World which unifies collaboration messaging, mail serving, team workspace and collaboration spaces, social networking and web video conferencing all in one package.

The intent is to unify and simplify infrastructure and make acquiring these tools less expensive and fragmented.

In big companies unifying user experience across all the different types of user artifacts is a challenge and Beehive seeks to address this.

On top down and bottom up models there is a challenging zero sum trade off between top down and grass roots adoption with fundamentally different goals and contexts driving use cases.

The Oracle philosophy is to split the world into a tight core of services which is managed tightly; by keeping a grip on this, information management and IT are able to control compliance and risk issues while allowing knowledge workers to operate much more loosely at the edges.

This is achieved with a unified environment running one standardized storage architecture, which eliminates the fragmentation caused by attempting to daisy chain multiple applications and their associated storage.

Plugging open source tools into this core architecture is one of the dreams of enterprise 2.0, says Gilmour, with the core sustaining the edge.

Oracle are all for openness and giving customers freedom to do what they want to do.

“One of the not much talked about subjects that lies behind the enterprise 2.0 discussion is that historically there’s always been a very bright line between the process worker where you are typically working with a business application such as a call center, roll up of general ledger, HCM systems, where the worker is engaged in a process that somebody else has designed but inevitably you hit some problems, road blocks, and we have to step out of that process, go over here, collaborate, leverage other users, be in the much more fluid world of user to user publishing, content creation and interaction”

You wind up with a completed transaction which solves the problem, plug that in as the new process and keep doing what the business does.

“That process of disengaging, collaborating and reengaging is very awkward in many situations, and there is a huge amount of frictional loss that happens back and forth across that boundary”.

Oracle are leading the charge in supporting the core operational aspects of the business - which are what pay the bills - by giving IT the core platform to manage tightly so other processes can be loose. Enterprises are inherently social but there is a huge difference between process work and knowledge work.

Customers appreciate the ability to integrate the complete centralized solution out of the box with built in extensibility possibilities.

Three core drivers for Oracle product design: cost containment, breaking the zero sum nature of compliance, and avoiding social software chaos with shadow IT fragmentation.

These measures are designed for large scale enterprises who have scaling issues particularly in the current climate of mergers and acquisitions.

(Apologies for sound quality, we had telephone interference).

I had the opportunity to interview Lee Bryant, CEO of the UK-based consultancy Headshift, and the result was a somewhat long, but extremely interesting series of insights based on his work in many enterprises.

Some of the topmost insights:

• The Economy — “People are still living on last year’s budgets,” so a lot of the momentum now is still based on last year’s decisions. He expects a point of decision for many companies in the near term, which could lead to the tail-off of earlier projects. “Paradoxically, the worst you are hit [economically] the better you come out of it.” Lee suggests that those that who accept the new economic realities quickly are the first to adapt, and may get a leap based on that.
• ROI — Some shell-shocked companies are continuing to fund large, expensive, and perhaps not that beneficial projects, while requiring highly detailed ROI analysis for a $50K experimental project, which is choking off innovation.
• The Rise of the Social Web — Lee has a great historical sense, and suggests that we are at a turning point, like the start of the industrial era. “We have our own railroads, our own telephone system,” meaning the social web, and we have a chance to reorganize our economy around new sorts of scale, new kinds of efficiency and prodcutivity. This is going to be disruptive, but will lead to an new economy.
• Change Management and Culture — Lee makes the case that the meme about people being resisting change is a bit off the mark. People are open to adopting new things if they actually help, and will resist various vacuous arguments about ‘you need to change ot die’ or psuedo-mystical mumbo-jumbo about emergent values and so on. He has found it best to position these tools in the simplest most straightforward and business-oriented way.

I found myself wishing that the conversation could have gone on longer, even though it ran over 20 minutes. Lee and I will be overlapping at several conference in the next month, and I will be sure to talk to him again.

Jeremiah Owyang, a leading social media thinker at Forrester, took some time with me to share observations about the state of practice and the future of enterprise 2.0.

A few highlights:

• Jeremiah recently found that 53% of surveyed marketers are going to increase spending on social media, despite the downturn. Companies are starting to think about the extended enterprise: “People will begin to connect more with colleagues outside the comany, and get work done with them.”

• He quoted John Schwartz who predicted that firewalls would be extinct in the near future. Legal, personal, and true secrets may be locked down, but more and more people will be using open solutions.
• Jeremiah maintains that crowdsourcing support, and other functions, will be a fruitful area. If he were still the intranet manager at Fujitsu, a former role for him, he’d be looking at that now.
• Looking at Forrester itself, Jeremiah revealed that only 18% of the company is active in one project, the in house use of Yammer as a microstreaming platform. They are seeing good productivity paybacks from remaining connected, asking questions, and getting responses in real-time. Still, it will take a while to get real support from senior management.
• Regarding microstreaming (Yammer, et al), Jeremiah thinks they are more natural to business people than blogs. He very naturally transitioned from that into a discussion about mobility and presence, which I have long considered the killer aspect of IM. He seems to think it is a killer side of microstreaming apps, as well.
• The speed of social technologies adoption has been enormously fast, and will become ubiquitous in five years, and in ten years, we won’t use the term Enterprise 2.0 anymore.

I found Jeremiah’s naming names of products to be quite exceptional: generally specific products haven’t been mentioned much. Notably, the ones we hear the most are Twitter and Yammer.

The entire experience with Jeremiah was informative, and I certainly plan to speak with him again, as we develop some deeper analysis of the sector, to get his feedback.