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!

First posted on CloudAve

Andrew McAfee, from the Center for Digital Business, MIT Sloan School of Management, believes we’ve reached a tipping point in terms of the acceptance of the tools and techniques of enterprise 2.0.

McAfee sees some positive signs and some danger areas - “We have the opportunity to snatch defeat out of the jaws of success”. The way that’ll happen;

• Declare war on the enterprise
• Allow walled gardens to flourish – an interesting analogy to Napoleonic land division in Paris where smaller and smaller lots were created all divided with hedgerows – let’s not go there…
• Accentuate the negative – the risks aren’t quite as bad as people make out, don’t dwell on them
• Try to replace email
• Fall in love with features - “what’s the simplest possible thing that could work”
• Overuse the word “social”

Andrew is the father of the Enterprise 2.0 term – while his shtick is getting perhaps a little tired – he’s still got a valuable voice to add to the discussion.

A recent report suggests that businesses are trying hard to block access to social networking:

[via press release

The survey was developed by Robert Half Technology, a leading provider of information technology (IT) professionals on a project and full-time basis, and conducted by an independent research firm. It was based on telephone interviews with more than 1,400 CIOs from companies across the United States with 100 or more employees.

CIOs were asked, “Which of the following most closely describes your company’s policy on visiting social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, while at work?” Their responses:

Prohibited completely 54%
Permitted for business purposes only 19%
Permitted for limited personal use 16%
Permitted for any type of personal use 10%
Don’t know/no answer 1%

I am not surprised by the attempt at blocking access. Businesses view us as parts of the corporate machinery, and our reason for existence is to work on behalf of the company. That’s why we get so little vacation time, sick leave, and maternity/paternity leave in comparison to other nations.

Here, only 19% will even allow use for business uses, only!

Of course, there is nothing to stop people from using their phones to remain connected on these services if the companies block them at the firewall. This is an escape hatch, but still a pain.

In a world where social networks are increasingly playing the role of early warming system and primary information resource, organizations that impose these sorts of draconian solutions will suffer, not benefit.

By way of @ITSinsider, @tweetmeme and @elsua… I just caught this interesting slideshow on Enterprise 2.0 initiatives at Adidas Group by Christian Kuhna.  Funny that just a couple weeks ago I announced that Nike would present at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference on their internal collaboration strategy.

So it would seem that the leading Enterprise 2.0 markets are  government and, uh… shoes.

Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco’s Call for Papers closed on Tuesday after receiving a mind blowing number of submissions - 446 to be exact. It’s great to see the community is as enthusiastic about the San Francisco show as we are, and really reinforces the need for Enterprise 2.0 on the West Coast.

Some highlights and prevalent topics include:

• Tons of case studies and tales of adoption
• Mobility
• Cloud computing
• Micro-blogging & emerging platforms in the enterprise
• Driving the social media bus
• Building an Enterprise 2.0 culture
• Internal & external communities

A big thank you to all that took the time and effort to submit an abstract. Steve and the Advisory Board have got some reading to do.

The Enterprise 2.0 team is gearing up to build the the program for the first annual San Francisco conference coming this November and we’d like to hear your success stories, case studies and the valuable lessons you’ve learned working with E2 tools and technologies in your organization. Submit your proposal through the Call for Papers, open until July 31. We’re looking for sessions and workshop proposals in the following topics:

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Cross posted from CloudAve - specialist cloud computing and SaaS blog

Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Chief Technology Officer & Founding Partner, Blue State Digital looked at the strategies and tactics that helped put Barack Obama in the White House. Blue State is a five year old company that helps leverage social media for primarily issue or event based clients – from elections to humanitarian disasters to fundraising events.

Some statistics;

• Over 1 billion emails sent to over 13 million email addresses
• Over 1 million SMS subscribers
• Over 200000 offline events planned via the web
• Organised 35000 volunteer groups
• 14.5 million hours of YouTube content viewed
• Raised $770 million

Lessons we can learn from the online Obama campaign

1. Drive Action - be true to medium, think about the use case
2. Be Authentic - don’t do press release to email, send email from a person within the organisation, ensure a consistent voice
3. Create Ownership - turn users into advocates, crucial to turn people into active rather than passive participants, connect people with each other, solicit ideas from the community
4. Be Relevant
5. Create a Strong, Open brand - consistent, professional, polished
6. Measure Everything – emails, online advertising, engagement, fundraising

If you were unfortunately unable to join us this week in person at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, we have a special surprise for you!

Join us for E2TV!

Here is this week’s LIVE broadcast schedule -

Evening in the Cloud
Monday, June 22 | 4:30 - 8:00 pm EDT

Conference Keynotes
Tuesday, June 23 | 8:30 - 11:30 am EDT
Wednesday, June 24 | 8:30 - 11:30 am EDT
Thursday, June 25 | 12:00 - 12:30 pm EDT

Stay tuned afterwards for technology demonstrations live from the Expo Pavilion floor on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Keynote livestreaming courtesy of aptly-titled company - Livestream.

This is a piece about manufacturing productive dissent online, a subject about which, I am beginning to think, I know something. My first piece on this site, which I posted on September 28 last year, received 46 comments. A clear watershed divide emerged between those who hated my stance on “social media vs. knowledge management,” and those who loved it. It also got an unexpectedly large number of blog reactions, considering that I am at best a D-list blogger. Though I was slightly taken aback by the intensity of the reaction, (enough that I toned it down a bit, since I have far less energy for online debate than I did 10 years ago) that first piece set the tone for my blogging here. In the six months and some weeks since, I wrote 14 original, long op-ed type pieces here, which averaged around 9 comments apiece.  That’s thrice the average on my own blog, where I tend to use a completely non-provocative voice. So I thought I’d do a quick overview and share my initial conclusions about the art of manufacturing productive dissent. These thoughts were triggered by the most extreme reaction I’ve gotten so far: some guy disagreed so much with the views I expressed when Stowe Boyd recently interviewed me, that he somehow dug up my phone number and left a slightly alarming message on my voicemail. He then spewed some venom at me on Twitter.  Certainly, a time-to-take-stock event.

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The truly unique characteristics of Twitter are its simplicity and lack of specific purpose or application. Twitter is merely a digital conversation; albeit one that’s constrained to short statements of 140 characters or less. Like any conversation, you choose to talk to one other person at a time or broadcast out to many. You can make your conversations private or public. You can choose to blather, or to comment on everything from walking your dog to world affairs. You can follow and share your thoughts with thousands of people or you can offer your attention to a select few.  As with any live conversation, contribute something particularly witty, funny or unique and your comment could be repeated to millions of users by Twitter’s digital word of mouth, also known as a re-tweet. At its core, Twitter is just a platform for simple conversation and that’s what makes it unique.

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