Michael holds a B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University and earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Cognitive Science, and a M.S. in Computer Science, from Indiana University.  His Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For: Web Searching as Query Refinement,” examined Web user search behaviors and the usability of Web search engines.

Prior to joining McKinsey, Michael served as the first Chief Information Officer of the City of Bloomington, Indiana, where he re-architected the enterprise architecture using Open Source technologies and led a project that resulted in Bloomington becoming the first community in the world to offer both live and archived video streaming of public meetings on the Web. Before that, Michael was founder and executive director of HoosierNet, Inc, a nonprofit cooperative Internet service provider that provided dial-up and broadband access to the Internet to consumers, nonprofits, governments and businesses.

Michael Chui’s session at the E2 Conference is called Patterned Response: Case Studies in Successful Big Data Deployments. This session will look at some common big data patterns: classes of problems and the solutions that work for them.

Attendees will learn:

• Common problem/response patterns for big data
• Approaches to tailoring customized approaches to typical Big Data challenges
• Best practices for tools, technologies and operations in Big Data initiatives

Register for the E2 Conference with priority code SMBLOG13 and save up to $400* on your E2 Conference Full Event Pass.

*Discount calculated based on the on-site price and not combinable with other offers. Offer good on new registrations only. Prices after discount applied: Full Event: $1,699.00 Conference: $1,299.00, Workshop: 699.00, Keynote & Expo: $50.00

Business is evolving – how do you keep up? E2 Conference is the largest and most important gathering for people like you — professionals seeking new ways to advance their businesses with the latest in next-gen enterprise applications.

9 Evaluate the best tools in one place

Meet with the hottest vendors in social, mobile, cloud, big data and analytics under one roof — from established leaders to creative startups — to discover the right tools and technologies in the Expo Hall.

8 Networking

E2 Conference provides multiple opportunities for attendees to network and engage with one another in the classroom, over breakfast and lunch, or during an evening reception.

7 Get real-world solutions to your real-world problems

Hear case studies from large companies and learn how forward-thinking users are putting enterprise applications to work to create opportunity and solve business problems.

6 “How To” Workshops

Full and half-day workshops on Monday take a deep dive into the tools, techniques and strategies you need to make new technologies work for you.

5 Unlock innovation

Learning how to take advantage of new enterprise technologies, applications and practices helps to create an innovative, more productive work environment.

4 Save Money

Moving your infrastructure to the cloud, leveraging social tools, and supporting online collaboration add up to huge savings for your organization. Find out how to get started here.

3 Stay ahead of the curve

After spending 3 days at the E2 Conference, you’ll return to the office ready to share how technology trends on the horizon today will impact your business tomorrow.

2 Talk to the experts

Only at the E2 Conference can you learn and network with the industry’s best and brightest in an intimate setting for 3 days.

1 Unbiased, comprehensive content

Spanning three days, the E2 Conference provides you with over forty thought-provoking keynotes, sessions and workshops, covering critical topics including social, mobile, big data, analytics and more.

With a Full Event Pass, you’ll gain access to the entire three-day E2 Conference program including deep-dive workshops, keynotes, conference sessions, sponsored content, the demo pavilion, networking receptions and more. Register with priority code SMBLOG13 and save $400* on the on-site price of Full Event & Conference passes/

*Discount applies to On-site Pricing for Full Event and Conference passes only, and is not combinable with other offers. Prices after discount is applied: Full Event: $1,699. Conference: $1,299. Keynote + Expo: $50.

I recently read an article about a survey that said 10 of the top 50 cloud services used by people while at work are services to store and share files online. The article correctly points out that while there is a huge demand for this, no single dominant player has emerged yet. To me, it also means that the collaboration riddle remains unsolved.

Social business, project management, file sharing, those of us in the collaboration space describe ourselves by many terms, but we have all fallen short.

While Dropbox and others have fixed the email attachment problem, and apps like Mailbox are making email a more pleasurable experience, we still haven’t given people a better way for them to work with their colleagues. True, we have given them ways to share files, we have given them corporate IM tools, we’ve even eased their need for Microsoft office.

However, collaboration in the workplace is about culture; it’s about understanding how people want to work together. It’s not including every possible feature, it’s not about offering 10 GB, 20 GB, or 100 GB of storage.

For a social collaboration product to truly be successful. We need to focus on a few things:

• Ease of Use, especially in the beginning – Most products that try to bring more than simple file sharing are difficult to get started with. When you add a social element, either things get disorganized, or people don’t know where to begin. This leads to products not being used at all, or certainly not using them to their potential.

• Start from the bottom up, not the top down – It’s regular non-IT department employees that need to bring these products into the business, share them with colleagues and nurture their usage and uptake. This is not happening near enough. When the CEO sends out an email saying. You should not be trying to sell a collaboration product, you should try to seed it.

• File sharing is so 2010. Yes, you need it, but dozens of companies to it. Yes, we all know Steve Jobs quote, and he is right. File sharing is only a small portion of helping people work together better.

The long-term vision and opportunity for collaboration products is very interesting, compelling and potentially disruptive across multiple product categories, from file sharing to social and email, to voice and video. But first, we need to move past square 1.

Samepage.io is a sponsoring the social collaboration track at E2 in Boston. To continue the conversation, look for the Samepage hoodies or stop by our booth.

Over the last few years, certain themes have taken over the collective imagination of technology and business professionals including:

• The Rise of Cloud Computing
• The Advent of “Social Business”
• The Flock to Mobile
• The Opportunities provided by Big Data

That these themes have become dominant is not simply happenstance – they are a product of the tectonic shifts in business and technology. Through scientists’ and engineers’ flights of imagination, these enabling ideas were invented and made possible. It is now up to all of us to make them stick, to make sense of them, and most importantly apply them to the way we conduct business.

Which brings me to my excitement about the upcoming E2 Conference in Boston; there, we’ll find the right combination of the high-level views of the changing world of enterprise software and the “practical” view of ways in which each of us is implicated in this sea-change.

I’d suggest you join me there.

Romi Mahajan is president of KKM Group. Prior to joining KKM, Mahajan was chief marketing officer of Ascentium Corp. A well-known speaker on the technology and media circuit, he serves on a variety of advisory boards and speaks at more than a dozen industry events per year.

Robert Ross’ session at the E2 Conference is called Big Data: Architecting Systems at Speed. Most people think the fundamental problem presented by Big Data is one of volume. It’s not. It’s speed: How to process realtime streams of information rapidly enough to make meaningful decisions quickly. Creating systems that do this requires fundamentally rethinking how data processing is architected. Designers need to know things like:

• What are the tradeoffs and benefits of distributed systems like Hadoop and Cassandra?
• When can fundamental principles of transactional systems like ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) be sacrificed (and when can they not?)
• What are the benefits of NoSQL?
• What are the challenges and best practices involved in delivering Big Data analysis at speed?

Attendees will learn:

• Key characteristics of technologies used in realtime Big Data processing
• Best practices for designing and architecting realtime Big Data solutions
• How to navigate the consistency tradeoff: When (and why) to sacrifice ACID for the greater good

Register with priority code SMBLOG13 and save up to $600* on your E2 Conference Full Event Pass.

*Discount calculated based on the on-site price and not combinable with other offers. Offer good on new registrations only. Prices after discount applied: Full Event: $1,499.00 Conference: $1,099.00, Workshop: 599.00, Keynote & Expo: $50.00

The integration of our professional and personal lives is triggering an incredible shift in the way we work and reward employees today. When Facebook eventually opened its doors to literally, everybody and their mother…and your coworkers and your manager and your future employers, it tore down segregated social circles and forced its users to become even more social (read: open).

Facebook made it desirable and easy to share everything: your high score on a game, baby photos, a promotion, a relationship, and everything you’d be okay admitting to at least some subset of your “friends” as parsed by your privacy settings. This desire to share, or rather, when given the opportunity to do so quietly from behind a keyboard or smartphone, has highly influenced the way we work.  It allows those comfortable with social media to be self-indulgent and self-deprecating without the backlash or reaction of other’s eyes. We’re headed into the heads-down (on your device) digital age and enterprise applications are nurturing this movement.

I am 25 years old. Before we entered the workforce, my generation learned to appreciate each other with “likes” and “comments”, subtle (though persistent) nods to one another – “hey, you’re cool; I validate you”.  And now, as we zip up our hoodies and step into our first office jobs, we continue to need validation. We need our managers to “like” our work and “comment” on our projects.  This form of validation is quickly becoming integrated into the enterprise applications we’re using. When compared to other tools for managing performance, I feel more engaged with the software boasting interactive elements.   With my employer able to see projects from start to finish instead of a final project in presentation format, they’re better able to measure my efforts. How many times did I edit this document? How long was I logged in for? What did you start with and what did you end with?

With this hyper-engagement comes an influx of data and the question of how to measure it. How do you measure and quantify engagement?  And once employees know their engagement is being measured, how does that influence stress or performance anxiety?   I’m interested in seeing how the data we’re creating informs employee evaluations.

To overgeneralize, four types of employees are surfacing, the types that engage through performance technology but aren’t comfortable making noise in a meeting, those who are comfortable speaking up in meetings but don’t really see the point in using the technology, those who are great at both, and those who don’t engage in either arena.. Performance is tricky because we don’t all work the same way. But through the development of new software we are able to capture a employee behavior. And it’s easier to measure a click than a hand raised in the air — or is it?

In the People, Process and Engagement track at E2 Boston, we’ll tackle how enterprises are learning how to leverage new and emerging technologies to unite people and process, plus talk about the current performance technology and the ways we can improve it. Register for this track and more with priority code: SMBLOG13

Comments welcome.