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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Posting here after a long time. Looks like E 2.0 Boston was a big success; wish I could have attended.

I thought the E 2.0 gang would appreciate a pointer to a new book by Rob Salkowitz, Young World Rising, where he examines the bottom-up revolution being created by young entrepreneurs in parts of the world with a young and growing working-age population. I have previously talked about Rob and his work on the interplay of demographics, generational effects and 2.0 technologies (in my SM vs. KM post, and in my review of Rob’s previous book, co-authored with Dan Rasmus). This is easily his best work so far.

I posted an interview with Rob on the Trailmeme blog, with links to the book. Rob shared some fascinating views on technology and demographics, and I have included a brief introduction to his work for those who are new to this important subject. Check it out.

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!

Haven’t posted here in quite a while, so hello again to those who remember me. I just posted a piece on my team’s blog at blog.trailmeme.com, looking at an issue that might be of interest to this audience:

Soldiers, Privateers, Mercenaries and Web Technology

One of the fun aspects of Web product development is that you get to think up usage scenarios, and interesting personas to go with them. A few months back, an old classmate, who now works for a big Wall Street firm, emailed asking if we had an enterprise version of trailmeme available. We don’t, and at that point we didn’t even have fully-thought-through ideas; we only had some poorly-defined conceptual vaporware for potential enterprise markets. But the email got me thinking, and a startling thought hit me: the old idea that you develop a Web 2.0 product for consumer/SMB users and harden/evolve it for enterprise users is changing very rapidly. This is because the enterprise itself is changing very rapidly, due to the emergence of three very different IT-user personas, who demand very different future enterprise IT strategies. The three user personas I’ve defined are soldier, privateer and mercenary. Depending on which one dominates the future of work, enterprise IT could evolve in three very different directions. Which means the enterprise design for products like trailmeme could evolve in radically different ways.

One of the more radical conclusions in the article is that perhaps there is no real need for a separate category called “Enterprise 2.0″ software/IT, given the way the workforce (and as a result, the enterprise) are changing, with blurring boundaries and increasing numbers of people employed in non-traditional models.

Read the full post at here

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!

Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco 2009 just ended and was a huge success!  Thanks to all who attended, all of our speakers and exhibitors, and all of the Enterprise 2.0 staff.  Now it’s time to think about Enterprise 2.0 Boston!  The Call for Papers for E2 Boston 2010 is open now through Friday, December 18^th.   This year we’ve partnered with Spigit, Inc. to create a brand new Call for Papers submissions, collaboration and voting experience in the true spirit of Enterprise 2.0.

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, 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 Execution
• Driving Adoption and Organizational Change
• Social Tools and Applications for the Enterprise
• Case Studies
• Technology Foundations of Enterprise 2.0
• Social Tools and Applications for the SMB
• Social Media, Marketing and Customer Engagement

The form requires the usual information including a title, description, session format, and all pertinent speaker information. But this time around, 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 Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston, 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.

The feedback of the community will be the primary criteria for selecting the sessions for Boston 2010.  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 December 18^th, the official voting period will begin in January 2010. 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. Proposals with the most votes will be part of the E2 Boston 2010 Conference.

We want the Enterprise 2.0 community to collaborate, give us their most exciting ideas and experiences, and tell us what they want to see in Boston next year.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact mfarrell@techweb.com or (415) 947-6250.  We’re looking forward to reading your submissions and cultivating a meaningful discussion around the experiences and ideas that are the future of Enterprise 2.0.

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.

It’s difficult to miss Dries Buytaert in a crowd.

Standing at least 6′ 3″ tall, his spiky head of blond hair is easily recognizable. Known in the open source world as the founder of Drupal, co-founder and CTO of Acquia and instrumental player in Drupalcon, it’s obvious that Dries is a very clever and busy guy.  I caught up with Dries at the recent OSCON 2009 in San Jose, CA and he graciously took the time to answer a few questions about how he manages to be so successful.

1) You are the founder of the Drupal content management system and CTO/Co-founder of Acquia. How did a Belgian like yourself get involved in CMS?

I was a student at the University of Antwerp in Belgium around 1999. I was doing web development with CGI and Server-Side Includes, but I wanted to learn more about technologies like PHP and MySQL. Also, at the same time, we had the need for an internal messaging system at our student dorm. So, I wrote a simple message board. Then when I graduated, I decided to move my internal message board onto the internet.

After I relaunched my internal message to the public internet as drop.org in 2000, I continued to build on it for a year or so and added a lot of features. More than anything, it was an experimental platform to learn from and apply new web technologies such as RSS feeds, blogging and content and user rating.

As my experiments evolved, they drew the attention of an audience that was also interested in the future of the internet. This audience provided suggestions and was active with state of the art web technologies and they increasingly began providing me with feedback. At a certain time the feedback took on such a level that I thought I should provide the engine to them so they could start their own experimenting and applying their own suggestions to it. This is how it got moved to open source, and also how the community started.

So it was mostly by accident, and it quickly got out of hand.

2) Why did you feel the need to form Acquia and what does Acquia contribute to the Drupal community?

Acquia helps accelerate Drupal usage by contributing to the advancement of Drupal, and by offering products, services, and technical support to simplify the deployment and management of Drupal websites.

As a thriving open source project, Drupal changes at such a rapid rate that it can be challenging to find the most useful and relevant modules, keep systems secure and up to date, and find real-time expertise and support to quickly resolve issues. By reducing or eliminating these issues, Acquia improves the effectiveness of organizations already using Drupal and brings the power of Drupal within reach of more organizations who are exploring Drupal for the first time.

3) There were over 1,400 at Drupalcon in Washington DC, 2009. What is driving this community’s significant growth year over year?

A huge community has grown up around Drupal, with thousands of active contributors to the open source project, including more than 4,000 community-developed modules for extending Drupal functionality. Drupal’s thriving, vibrant ecosystem is the very reason that Drupal is so successful – it is its greatest strength.

4) There are a lot of open source projects out there today. What makes Drupal unique?

Drupal has been a pioneer from the start by embracing new technologies and being on the front lines when it comes to web development.  But what separates Drupal is its modularity – the combination of a core package and then task-specific modules that can be added as needed.

This modularity was part of Drupal’s initial design. I was sort of shocked that most of the other systems didn’t have a modular design — to me, with my background as a computer science student, that felt like a very natural thing to do.

Drupal’s modular design makes it attractive to both technical and non-technical users.  If you look at Content Management Systems, they have eliminated the traditional role of the webmaster.  This role has evolved more into a role of content editor.

My vision for Drupal is to do the same for the developers (role). I think there is a lot of room to eliminate the traditional web developer.  Eliminating might be a bit too strong, but re-define the role of the web developer at least. The way we try to accomplish this in Drupal is with a modular approach so users can build web sites quickly without having to do any programming.  In other words, one does not have to be a true developer to build a feature rich and interactive web site. I hope we can make a big step forward with this in the next five years.

5) Can you name some of the biggest sites that run on the Drupal platform?

A diverse list of organizations are using Drupal including Lifetime Television, MTV UK, Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Brothers Records, New York Observer, Forbes, The Onion, Harvard University, Amnesty International and tens of thousands more.  I believe there are two primary reasons people have chosen Drupal.  The first is the Drupal community – it consists of thousands of passionate, talented people who believe in the future of the Web and invest their time and energy to contribute to the project.  Second, Drupal’s modular architecture makes it a flexible platform to build great websites.

6) What are the most common barriers to open source software adoption in the enterprise?

The biggest barrier is education - people are afraid of things that are unfamiliar.  The good news is that “open source” as a category of technologies is pretty mature in the enterprise - particularly in the data center.  Technologies like Linux, Apache, Eclipse and others are now standard tools in any data center infrastructure.  The next step in this evolution is for business buyers, outside the data center, to adopt solutions built on open source applications, like Drupal.

7) How do you overcome these objections?

This is where Acquia comes in – Acquia gives organizations the confidence they need to adopt Drupal based solutions.  They can access the same level of customer service support and guidance that they have come to expect from proprietary software products – in many cases, better customer service – while taking advantage of the innovation and value of open source Drupal.

8) What’s next for Drupal? Can you share any future plans with us?

We are currently working on Drupal 7.  We are focused on improving Drupal in a number of ways – adding lots of new features in core (e.g. a new database backend, better file and image handling, improved access control, theme system improvements) but also improving usability and scalability.

Longer term, I see tremendous opportunities for the semantic web and search.  For Drupal, this means making Drupal emit structured information. Hundreds of thousands of Drupal sites contain vast amounts of structured data, covering an enormous range of topics, including product information. Unfortunately, that structure is hidden deep in Drupal’s database and doesn’t surface to the HTML code generated by Drupal. As such, search engines can’t pick it up as a product, and they’d fail to include it in their world-wide product database.

Technologies like this disintermediate so many existing websites and organizations that it makes my head spin. It is too great an opportunity for us to pass up on. By adding semantic technology to Drupal core, I think we can make a notable contribution to the future of the web.

9) Is it true that the genesis of the name Drupal was actually a typo? What’s the story there?

Yes. Initially, I wanted to register the site under the Dutch word “dorp” which in English means “village” or “small town”. While registering the domain, I made an error and typed “Drop” instead of “Dorp”. I was shocked to see that Drop.org was still available, so I decided to keep the domain. As such, the first Internet website powered by an online version of Drupal was Drop.org. Drupal did not get its name until I released it as open source software in early 2001.

Thanks again for your time Dries!

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.