I greatly enjoyed this years Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. This is the third year that I have participated and I feel it has gotten better each year. The best part was meeting new people and engaging with others I have know for a while. I went to some session but also had other things to do locally so did ot see as many as I wanted to. I also saw a number of the vendor exhibits and talked with them. Many are ones that I have covered on the AppGap and met previously via the phone. I did notes on all the sessions I attended and here are the links.
My Notes on Dion Hinchcliffe Enterprise 2.0 Conference Workshop – Part One
Dion Hinchcliffe Enterprise 2.0 Conference Workshop – Part Two
My Notes on Mike Gotta’s Reality 2.0: Getting Started with Enterprise Social Networking
Thoughts on Twitter and Business for Enterprise 2.0 Conference
A Few Thoughts from Enterprise 2.0 Conference Session on Future of Social Messaging in Enterprise
A Few Thoughts from Enterprise 2.0 Conference Session on Does Social Media in Matter in Marketing
More importantly, I have enjoyed the notes from others. Here are some of them with a few comments.
Enterprise 2.0 Conference 09: A re-cap. Is an excellent post by Sameer Patel. He said that there were a good number of practitioners from companies and a good number of tactical sessions. He thought the conference was a success for those who wanted to be able to put learning to work and I agree.
Sameer covered a number of sessions I missed and this is appreciated. Mike Gotta moderated Community & Social Network Sites: Think Adoption, Not Deployment. In it Dan McCall, Kishan Mallur and Erik Johnson cited specific examples how they generated buzz on the cheap, got influencers to become evangelists, and created a sense of ownership. Another of his was Lee Bryant’s Transition Strategies for Enterprise 2.0 Adoption and Sandy Kemsley wrote at length on it (see below).
In Metrics in the Hands of Users. Marc Smith, Kate Niederhofferand Daniel Debow kindled a great discussion on how to drive, visualize and measure performance via less geeky constructs. He also covered Reality 2.0: Getting Started with Enterprise Social Networking by Mike Gotta that I also attended. I only skimmed the surface of what Sameer offers and you should read his entire piece.
Transition Strategies for Enterprise 2.0 Adoption by Sandy Kemsley looked at Lee Bryant of Headshift session on adoption challenges for 2.0 technologies. Sandy reported that Lee said that points out that we can't afford the “high-friction, high-cost model of deploying technology and processes, but need to rebalance the role of people within the enterprise.” Having experienced much of the unnecessary and expensive pain of old school large scale systems integration I would agree.
Sandy said that many of the behavioral use cases “focused on things that people were already doing, and just tweaking the methods that they use to do them. That makes it a lot less threatening, and therefore much more likely to be adopted.” In the past, I always looked to add knowledge management to enhance existing business processes and then measure KM’s enhancement of these processes. In 15 years, I never saw a successful knowledge management system that did not do this. Sandy uses Lee’s session as background to share her own ides and it is an excellent read,
Enterprise 2.0 conference impressions were provided by Oliver Marks. I always enjoy his posts at ZDNet. He said that Enterprise 2.0 is still considered in many quarters almost a fashion statement compared to enterprise software as the heavy duty infrastructure. I agree and for now one does not replace the other. They need to integrate and co-exist. In this context, he added that from his perspective the Sharepoint ’shared drive’ approach to structured data workflows is robust, but much of the current collaboration functionality is waited to be released. However, Microsoft plans to release some of these enhancements in October. He mentioned that Christian Finn of Microsoft did tell him that Bing, which leverages the innovations of the semantic web technologies world to provide linked contextual answers, is a purely consumer play, while the FAST technologies are the enterprise search engine for the enterprise. I look forward to seeing what they do. There is more in Oliver’s post.
Looking back on Enterprise 2.0 was provided by Irwin Lazar on the conference blog. He notes Enterprise 2.0 is real, and perhaps more importantly, the business benefits are real (and so are the challenges). I agree and have been saying for several years. I find that the constant improvement to this conference keeps validating it. He added that we need to keep measuring this success and referred to Telligent’s work. I have interviewed them, like their metrics, and am working on an AppGap post covering this conversation. In his final point he noted that lines are blurring between social computing and unified communications. Read him for the details.
Post #e2conf thoughts – installment 1 was provided by Gil Yehuda, another blogger I greatly respect. He liked the conference and noted that most attendees were well informed. I found this last year and told a number of vendors who I interviewed for AppGap that it was a conference to talk with the experts rather than meet new customers. This was even more the case this year. At the same time Gil said need to further clarify what we mean when we say Enterprise 2.0, it started to get pretty slippery at times. I agree here also. That was the case with our Twitter session as I noted yesterday.
Gil gave a good example from a session I missed, Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Chief Technology Officer & Founding Partner of Blue State Digital who spoke about the lessons we can learn from the Obama campaign. Gil wanted to hear more enterprise related issues such as the “culture change” process that the Obama campaign had to accept internally as it shifted into a new strategy. I would agree. I think that the Obama campaign was the first to move from Web 2.0 to enterprise 2.0 and have discussed this (e.g., Rolling Stone Magazine and More on Obama’s Use of the New Web). I would love to hear more from an insider.
My last summary comes form someone who did not attend the meeting, The secret sauce to successful Enterprise 2.0 adoption was nicely written by Oscar Berg from Europe. He quoted a number of summaries, including some of mine. He started with Hylton Jolliffe discussing the new direction in our FastFoward blog. “While selecting the right tools for the job can certainly prove a barrier to adoption for some organizations, even after they select the right tools they are always faced with the more formidable barrier to adoption - one based on social, cultural and business process issues.” I look forward to being part of this discussion.
Oscar also referenced Ben Kepes on Community & Social Network Sites: Think Adoption, Not Deployment that picks up on this theme. Ben noted that you need to reach out to existing communities of interest to drive adoption and pre-determine community champions to answer the initial questions until critical mass is reached and the community self-perpetuates. These are both long-standing best practices that remain useful in enterprise 2.0 adoption. There is much more in Oscar’s post.
I am sure there are other excellent summaries of the conference. Please add any that you feel are useful in the comment section of this post. Thanks in advance. I look forward to more next year.
Post Script - Here are more that I just learned about. Andrew McAfee How Beautiful it is, and How Easily it can be Broken Susan Scrupski And they’re off… Postcard from Enterprise 2.0 Boston and Doug Cornelius Enterprise 2.0 Keynotes on Tuesday
Bill, this is a great summary...I will be bookmarking this to our Social Sites portal. I also penned a short blog post on some of my observations here: http://blogs.newsgator.com/daily/2009/06/musings-on-the-enterprise-20-conference.html
Already looking forward to next year!
Posted by: Karyn German | July 02, 2009 at 10:30 AM
Karyn - Thanks for the llnk. I am doing an interview with Newsgator for a blog story on the 15th. Bill
Posted by: bill Ives | July 02, 2009 at 02:15 PM