Another Enterprise 2.0 is in the books! This year’s show featured a lot more diversity in terms of content and focus, moving beyond a social networking and into areas such as video, organizational strategies, and policy/governance. But perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the show was the evolution of collaboration beyond stand-alone platforms and into the very fabric of the organization.
The clock is ticking and today is the last chance to submit for the Enterprise 2.0 Boston Launch Pad.
What do I have to do?
Not much. Just Tweet to #e2conf-lp and tell us in 140 characters or less why you deserve to present at Launch Pad.
What makes me Launch Pad worthy?
If you’re launching a new product, recently formed a new partnership, are sporting a new integration point or have added a new feature between January 1 and December 31, 2010, we welcome your Tweet. It can be a peek behind the kimono of future announcements or something your company just recently rolled out. We also require that your company is in the Enterprise 2.0 space. Here’s a brief list of the types of technologies we consider E2.0.
Does it cost anything to enter?
Nope. There’s no fee to enter and if you make it to the Final Four, you’ll get the chance to demo in front of a live audience on the keynote stage. Check out some footage from the Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco Launch Pad last November to get a taste of what the live contest feels like.
You’ve got till end of day today to Tweet to #e2conf-lp - good luck!
Calling all E2.0 vendors!
You have 4 more days to get your Launch Pad Tweets in - we’ll close submissions end of day on Monday, April 19th.
You’ve probably been working hard and polishing those 140 characters to get them just right. To enter simply Tweet to #e2conf-lp. After the 19th, our Jury will chose their 8 favorite Tweets and if selected, you’ll move on to the next video round.
What’s in it for you?
More information on key dates can be found on the official Launch Pad website. Best of luck to everyone submitting!
First published at CloudAve
At last year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco, the highlight presentation for me was one given by Kathleen Culver and Greg Lowe from Alcatel Lucent. Their presentation was an excellent look at some of the benefits of Enterprise 2.0, and then some of the detrimental impacts that those benefits can bring.
Last week I posted about one of these very pitfalls, telling the tale of social media being used in a professional setting by a bully trying to build themselves up by dragging others down. Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Council founding member, practitioner and thought-leader Susan Scrupski left a comment reminding me of the presentation Greg and Kathleen gave. I reached out to Greg who graciously agreed to let me use the presentation and write a blog post around it.
What’s interesting for me about their presentation is that, despite there being some skepticism about Enterprise 2.0 generally, most commentators are couching that skepticism in terms of “where is the value” type questions – looking to prove the real benefit from the tools we’re all evangelizing, These commentators tend to be a little hypocritical, using these social media tools to build their own personal brands while at the same time pouring scorn on the value of the same tools within the enterprise.
Kathleen and Greg however take the benefits the tools bring as a given, but then parse those benefits in terms of some real risks that go alongside them. They do so along several themes – flexibility, accessibility (both geographical and chronological, context specificity, information availability and retrievability.
It’s an excellent presentation and well worth a few minutes viewing.
Key is their summary – bear in mind these are two Enterprise 2.0 proponents who, despite understanding the risks, still see the value in the tools. Their advice in order to mitigate the risks?
Kathleen helpfully provided a link to the references they used in the talk. Again this reiterates a bit of a theme of mine relating to the perils of enterprise 2.0 definitely not a reason to avoid using the tools but something to bear in mind.
As part of a new offering that fellow CloudAve blogger Krishnan Subramanian and I are developing, I’m looking at doing some work in this space in the next few months – hoping to develop some whitepapers and practitioner guides touching on these issues – watch this space for more.
First published on CloudAve.com
I have a friend called Jennifer (name and details changed, obviously). At school she was a loner without many friend who, as loners often do, overcome loneliness by bullying smaller kids in the playground. Jennifer managed to gain “friends” by doing this, although they weren’t really friends, rather individuals who were scared that they’d become the target unless they joined in with Jennifer’s shenanigans.
Well, luckily for her schoolmates, Jennifer grew up, studies and entered the workforce where she was forced, at least to a certain extent, to forego her bullying behavior in the interests of fairness, due process and the common good.
Until today that is…
You see the advent of social media in its various guises has given Jennifer the opportunity to once again throw her weight around and make life difficult for others. Involved in a part of an organization that makes extensive use of social media type tools, Jennifer has a wide following in her vocational field and uses this following to bully others the way she used to use her heft to do so all those years ago in the schoolyard.
Now my enterprise friends will tell me bullying in the work place has always existed but social media and enterprise 2.0 tools have extended the reach an individual can communicative with – this is an unquestionably great thing when it comes to collaborating on specific projects, but it’s also a dangerous thing when used inappropriately.
I’ve spent long time talking with Enterprise 2.0 practitioners, attending enterprise 2.0 events and hearing about the barriers to adoption. Generally we’re grasping to find either good case study examples of enterprise 2.0 being put to work or fixes for the oft mentioned barriers to adoption – none of however 9at least in public) are prepared to front up and tell the stories of Enterprise 2.0 gone wrong and used for ugly purposes.
And in this we run a real risk – by burying our heads in the sane and not “outing” the dark side of social media, we play into the hands of those who view the blogosphere, Twitter and social media generally as a complete waste of space. If we don’t tell the stories, and develop ways of avoiding the pitfalls these tools enable, they’ll use the same tales to discount E20 outright.
So here’s a plaintive call to those using social media generally and Enterprise 2.0 tools more specifically: Don’t hide the use-cases that feel uncomfortable, rather use them as case studies, develop solutions and show that like a community of old, so too can a virtual community stand up and police its own.
Everyone would be a little happier if we did that…
Bill Pray blogged today on the Supreme Court’s decision to take on a case involving the privacy rights of an employee’s use of a government-provided mobile device for personal text messaging. This case further highlights the growing concerns around privacy and compliance as companies embrace emerging communications applications. In almost every conversation I’ve had with end-user organizations the topic of compliance is front and center as they evaluate tools such as SMS, Instant Messaging, Microblogging, and social computing platforms. Our recent SRO session at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston explored many of these issues as well. Bottom line is that its wise to involve your governance and compliance officers early on in as you develop your enterprise 2.0 strategy.
This is the one in answer to a recent post by provocateur Dennis Howlett in which Howlett asked whether Enterprise 2.0 is in fact a crock. Moderated by David Berlind from TechWeb he had a bevvy of Enterprise 2.0 practitioners.
Therein lies the Big Lie. Enterprise 2.0 pre-supposes that you can upend hierarchies for the benefit of all. Yet none of that thinking has a credible use case you can generalize back to business types - except: knowledge based businesses such as legal, accounting, architects etc. Even then - where are the use cases? I’d like to know.
Five principles;
Greg Lowe from Alcatel-Lucent talked about their desire to unlock institutionalized knowledge and enable collaboration. Berlind asks why that desire is any different now from in the past. Lowe’s answer was that tools and technologies available today enable those aims. Claire Flanagan from CSC and Bruce Galinsky from Metlife agreed that it’s the technologies that really enable the promise of sharing and co-creating.
Berlind asks how that actually transforms the workforce. Megan Murray from Booz Allen Hamilton says this is happening no matter – expectations are higher on both the organization’s and the employee’s sides. Enterprise 2.0 technologies are enabling that to happen faster, better and more readily.
Berlind asked about the cultural change that needs to occur within an organization. Bryce Williams from Eli Lilly agreed and said that they see Enterprise 2.0 as a gateway to moving the organization into a more open approach – it’s the “starter drug” to get the organization hooked on open communications.
Jamie Pappas from EMC mentioned that Enterprise 2.0 isn’t a cure all or fix all – it’s an enabler and relies on the advocates throughout the organization to adopt it.
Much discussion about business process – have we hit the wall in terms of agility? No – it’s just baby steps and there are profound benefits yet to be realized.
Governance, there is a culture shift happening and the technology needs to keep up. One good approach can be called “participatory governance” where those who have skin in the game develop the governance models for those tools but do so in concert with the traditional governance approached.
The intellectual property concerns. All panelists agreed that organizations need to stop not trusting their employees. People are generally inherently good and those who are not will always find ways to maliciously expose data. Sure put good governance in place but beyond that trust the people to do the right thing. “I can’t stop you from doing stupid things but I can make it visible when you do them”.
In terms of the business value the difficulty is that its very hard to show true metrics for the gains that can be made form enterprise 2.0 – there are significant anecdotal benefits that need to be extrapolated to an organization-wide benefit. Booz Allen Hamilton gave an example where a 3000 employee reply-all email was analyzed and once the cost of people replying and unsubscribing was taken into account, there was an internal cost of $250000 – enterprise 2.0 can solve many of those issues. Extrapolating that up through the organization, the contention is that if a simple thing like reply-all can create such costs for an organization, high level operations can drive huge benefits.
It was very much a case of the converted preaching to the converted – it’ll be interesting to see what the originator of the title has to say about what the panelists had to offer.
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
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;
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.
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)
@e2conf on Twitter
Jun 28th, 2010 |
