Just like last year, we have set up an Advisory Board for the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT 2010. The members of this board reassure the quality of talks and discussions at the conference and support us with their knowledge and experience in setting up the event. Now that the SUMMIT is getting closer and the program is set, we asked them about their expectations and the “hot topics” they are looking forward to the most. In this post, our female members have their say.

Jenny Ambrozek is the founder and lead consultant of SageNET LLC, USA. She is committed to promoting dialogue and best practices for building organizations to succeed in a global, networked, and mobile 21st century world. Her views on the upcoming event are as follows:
"The Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT is an outstanding conference, in giving practitioners the microphone to share their learning with peers. The event perfectly meshes fresh voices and perspectives with access to industry thought leaders.
Andrew McAfee set the stage four years ago with “The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” . The growing trend, I see, is the increasing importance of addressing organizational structures for successful Enterprise 2.0 initiatives. See for example, recent talks by Clare Flanagan and Mark Masterson. I’ll be paying close attention to the consensus on next practices for architecting participation throughout organizational ecosytems.
In 2004, 72% of respondents to the Online Communities in Business study reported they could not measure ROI. In Frankfurt I’ll be watching for new approaches to assessing value created through use of social technologies. What methods are Enterprise 2.0 project leaders using, beyond simple activity and participation metrics, to establish return to their businesses?"

Anu Elmer is the Vice President Communications at the Swiss Reinsurance Company. She has been consulting large-scale projects in change management, communications and training for more than ten years. Currently, she is the core team member of the Collaboration Initiative which rolled out a social business platform to all 11,000 employees in 2009 and is now looking into further integrating it and extending it to external communities. Regarding the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT, she is especially looking forward to networking with the E2.0 experts from different industries and to an inspiring exchange of ideas.

Ellen Trude has been with Bayer Business Services GmbH/Germany for more than 25 years now. She is a staunch supporter of the 2.0 concept and currently working as training consultant for social media and special projects concerning collaborative platforms at Bayer. She says about the conference:
"The confernce theme ‘Setting the path towards an open and agile enterprise’ reflects my expectation: By sharing experiences, case studies and knowledge, we will get the power, motivation and arguments to discuss with sceptics within our own enterprises. We get support for our firm conviction to continue the E2.0 way or to finally get started with it.
I am actually looking forward to all the conference topics. If I had to rate I, would choose ‘New Leadership Concepts’ and ‘Managing the Change’ as my hot topics concerning Enterprise 2.0 challenges. In the best practice track, I am especially interested in ‘Fostering Knowledge Sharing’ and ‘Strengthening Collaboration’. These sessions reflect the two cornerstones on our path: the management-driven change and the employees’ experience and recognition of E 2.0 behaviour and working."

It seems that the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform was foreseeable. The workmen on the platform saw a lot of problems with the technique, but were afraid to inform the management of Transocean (owner of the platform). I won’t judge about the company and reasons of the accident (but I am very sad about it), but it shows that you can avoid problems with the right communication culture.

To discuss the advantages of Enterprise 2.0 we are talking about motivation and better processes, but rarely about prevention of problems which can harm a company strongly.

At first glance it seems to be profitable to keep some topics secret or setting pressure on employees to be quiet, but most of the times it isn’t. Cultivation an open communication culture will help to avoid such bad management decisions. Such problems guiding to a disaster will pop up earlier and needs to be fixed before a catastrophe will happen. Sometimes one person with the right knowledge or idea can help a company to survive, if a disaster can be avoided. This person can avoid it, but need a voice which can be heard by enough people.

It’s not possible to install an open culture without the right tools. In bigger companies it can be done by brown bag meetings. Enterprise 2.0 offers the right tools, but the more important part is to adopt it the right way. Things like training are needed, but it’s an important factor to involve the top management. They must support it. It’s in their own interest. Nobody is perfect. Using the wisdom of the crowd will be the attribute of successful companies in future. Enterprise 2.0 does support it perfectly.

The social messaging study driven by n:sight arrived at the next stage. During the last days we got the input from ESME , bluekiwi, Flowr and Communote. All of these vendors offer their solution as SaaS (software as a service) and server installation.

SaaS is a good option for small companies or testing with small groups. You just need an account and you can start. Bigger companies will switch to the server installation, when they will start running social messaging with the all employees.

I made the experience on my workshops that’s much better to show something than explain the features. SaaS can also be used to start with your group and present the result to your management afterwards. Especially, if you use an open source solution like ESME or if it’s a free offer for small groups available like bluekiwi, Communote and Flowr provides.

All solution provides several options to do status updates. I like especially the option to create polls offered by bluekiwi and Flowr. It’s a nice way to ask colleagues about their opinion.

Tagging is a very important function to organize the content. It’s needed for any Enterprise 2.0 application. All four solutions provide tagging for status updates. A useful function is auto suggestion related to tags like offered by bluekiwi, Flowr and Communote.

API and other interfaces as input for status updates are available by all solutions. So it will be easy to connect other systems. Communote provides a XMPP interface to connect messaging solutions like ICQ or Windows Live Messenger. So it’s easy to integrate chat which is used nowadays in a lot of companies.

I am looking forward to read the next input from other vendors. You will be able to read more details when the study will be ready in September.

At the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 in Milan, Mark Tamis from Net-7 and Esteban Kolsky from ThinkJar talked about “A new era of customer engagement with Social CRM”. Their point of view on this complex matter is the following:

Why is the social customer becoming an important subject these days? Simply because people trust other people – even if they do not know them or only know them from the Internet – more than any company. Instead of watching a company’s ad and then buying the product, potential customers are turning to friends to ask for advice or post a request in some relevant online forum to find out about other people’s experiences. So, instead of seeing the product you want to sell through the eyes of your company, you now have to see it through the eyes of the customer.

Therefore, they say, the new business model is going to be twofold: In addition to focusing on internal Enterprise 2.0 operations, external aspects have to be included as well - namely the social CRM (client facing operations).  Thus, the new business model must be a hybrid of both internal and external communities. This means that employees and customers have to work together very closely in the near future as customers want to become part of the process themselves. So after evolving into a social enterprise, the next step will be a “collaborative enterprise” where there is major interaction with the ecosystem (customers, employees, partners, suppliers, channels).

According to Mark and Esteban, the following things have to be taken into consideration:

1. Customers are more connected to each other than to the producing company > The company has to become part of the communities to become a trusted entity
2. Customers follow the direction provided by the social network > Natural effect of herding
3. Organizations follow the direction provided by the technology > But they should follow the direction provided by their strategy
4. Convergence of social CRM and E20 occurs in communities > This takes a lot of time!

Of course, this is a very long and time-consuming process. And according to the presenters, a company first needs to be entirely E 2.0, before developing into a collaborative enterprise. Many companies are already at different stages in this process and the crucial point is always the maturity of the company: The change in the mentality is a long way to go.

A more detailed insight on Mark Tamis thoughts is provided by him in his blog.

So much about the presentation in Milan. Social CRM is currently a very trending and highly debated topic among the evangelists. The integration of the customer in the business process is also not a new topic (see the discussions about mass customization). But the integration of socially interacting customers is a new one that is relevant to various fields of business processes such as communications, marketing, sales etc. Each of this disciplines are experimenting in the one or the other way with the social web - a holistic view on this topics must be the end solution but is still far away from yet being realized.

Or do you think differently?

The Enterprise 2.0 Forum in Paris this week started with a review of the Boston event two weeks ago by Richard Collin and Bertrand Duperrin. They introduced some Enterprise 2.0 best practices. One example was the successful CSC Project. SCS started Enterprise 2.0 as a pilot project and reached round about 45.000 of their 90.000 employees after 6 month. You can read some more details on my article: Recap of the E20 practices at csc

The Boston organizers did a survey about the challenges of E20 adoption with the following results:

1. Resistance to change 52%
2. Difficulty in measuring ROI 42%
3. Integrating with existing technologies 41%
4. Security concerns 32%
5. Budget 25%
6. Product knowledge 23%
7. Tools not enterprise ready 22%

Major topics are the resistance to change and the difficulty to measure ROI. Budget is only for a quarter of the companies a problem. You can see on this result that it’s very important to run an E20 project as a change management project. Motivation of the employees is the key for success.

Measuring ROI is still a problem. It’s possible on some topics like reducing meetings etc. but it’s difficult to show a complete picture. Top management would like to see these figures, but it’s probably not the best way to examine only figures like the ROI.

The quotation of JP Rangaswani described it probably the right way: “I’ve never seen a document describing the ROI of restrooms or urinals.” So it’s mandatory to use Enterprise 2.0, but I think the management won’t approve E20 projects just because of a statement like this. We need to continue describing the ROI as good as possible.

On the afternoon I joined the open space of the event. Culture change and the adoption process for E20 was the result of the brainstorming to prepare the workshop of the groups.

1.) What is your name?

Cai Kjaer

2.) Who are you and what are you doing?

I am a Partner in Optimice which specialises in optimising business relationships. We use Social Network Analysis and Value Network Analysis as two of our key techniques to identify relationship patterns and then improve business performance. On the ‘fun’ side we assist event organisers accelerate networking by connecting people who share overlapping interests. You can see an example of this here. We are also the company behind one of the leading survey tools to collect survey data for organisational network analysis, ONA Surveys.

3.) How did you get to the E2.0 topic?

We are passionate about networks and communities and have been on the forefront of this movement for many years. The rise of Enterprise 2.0 and the enabling technologies have really made the term “social networks” much more real for business executives.

4.) What is your understanding of the core concept of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

Exploiting the capacity to connect people within the organisation, between organisations and between the organisation and its stakeholders (customers, investors etc).

5.) What are the main potentials of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

The ability to staff to connect and collaborate are cornerstones, so the potential is substantial from many perspectives, e.g. business improvement and innovation. But in addition to allowing staff to easily connect with each other, companies also have the potential to be much more proactive in the way they support collaboration. This is because participants leave a ‘digital footprint’ that can be analysed and support focused where it will generate the highest return.

6.) What are the main challenges, threats and issues of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

I remember in the early days of Knowledge Management how the focus was actually on sharing of knowledge. But the concept was new to many organisations, everyone was trying to align it with something tangible.
The technology community then threw tons of IT at it and for many organisations KM then became the implementation of a database or a document management system containing lots of ’stuff’, but little of real business value.
This is the greatest fear I have for Enterprise 2.0. That what is essentially about letting people connect and collaborate becomes an IT initiative centered around rolling out a blog, wiki or similar. We need to ensure that we work out WHO needs to collaborate and WHAT value should be exchanged between the participants. Then we can look for the most appropriate Enterprise 2.0 tool to help achieve this.

7.) Please give us three tags that describe your person and work best?

Business Relationships, Social Networking and Collaboration

8.) Please give us a link to articles/contributions that describe your views best?

• Read our papers on Managing Sideways and The Partnership Scorecard

9.) Please give us three names of colleagues that you would refer to as brothers-in-spirit?

1. Laurence Lock Lee
2. Ross Dawson
3. Rosario Sica

Today Twitter is a mainstream application. Millions of people are using it for sharing information and networking, because it’s fast and useful. What does it mean for using social messaging in enterprises?

I think we’ll see the same development like on the web with Twitter. It will work in companies as well. I had the following topics in mind coming to this conclusion.

Simplicity

It’s very easy to use. Just a link and a very short introduction are needed to start. You don’t need training. Simplicity is one reason for a low acceptance threshold.

Fast
Nowadays people expecting news just in time when information appeared. Social messaging is the right tool to meet this requirement. The communication with social messaging is close to real time. Any new topics are spread out immediately.

Getting to the point
The number of characters is limit. It’s not possible to write long prose. So the authors are forces to write short and concisely. The readers are getting quickly the point of the message. Social messaging save time and the content is better.

Networking
A user just need to invite people to follow him/her and a network of people is set up. From that point they can start to share information or to interact with each other.

Company Indicator
Social messaging shows the pulse of the organization. You can easily see which topics are hot. It can be used by the employees not to miss important information or by the management to do the right decisions. It’s like making the kitchenette public.

Notice board
Everybody can write his/her own notice board. It can be used by the CEO or every employee. You just need to take care that the right people follow you or select the right authors to follow.

Several news channels in one
On TV/radio you are able to get information from one channel only at the same time. You need to switch, if you want to get information from several topics. With social messaging you are getting information about all topics you are interested in close to real time. You just need to follow the right guy or to monitor the right terms. A list with most used terms will help to identify new important news

Expert finder
Searching for topics you will easily find people which are writing a regularly about this topic and you can easily check whether they are creating useful content. You can just follow or contact these experts.

Chat
Chat is used in private live by a lot of people or by some companies. It’s really useful to communicate with other people, but the existing tools are not so good chatting with several people at the same time. On social messaging the user can easily decide whether he will chat with the community or with a certain person only. To find older posts is also possible. Older posts are stored locally on chatting tools.

Scalable
The size of the company doesn’t matter. It can be used easily from a company with 5 people or a big group can use it. It’s only a matter of some server capacity and memory.

Social messaging is a real good connector and communicator. It’s probably the best news board which can be used in a company today. We will see it in a lot of companies soon.

We are providing a seminar in Germany about social messaging. Please, use this link for more information:

“Social messaging im Unternehmen”, 13.July 2010 in Frankfurt

I would like to know your optinion. Therefore I created a poll about this topic.
Do you think that social messaging will be the killer application of Enterprise 2.0?

It’s not a pilot anymore. It was too successful to stay in pilot phase. 50% of the employees are joining the (pilot) project after 6 month. CSC started Enterprise 2.0 as a pilot project, but not as a small one like usual. The project was limited by time and not by focus. “A small pilot project with a limited amount of people doesn’t reflect the whole company” commented Mark Masterson.

CSC is a consultancy and IT technology company with 94,000 employees in more than 90 countries. The project started with a presentation for the top management. His advice was to be well prepared. You need to show that you understand the business. Than a CIO will listen and support an E20 project.

I guess it was the right decision to run the project as change management project and not as an IT project. The IT infrastructure is needed, but generally it’s not the most challenging part. To change the user behavior is the biggest challenge on projects.

Some of his suggestion to run a successful Enterprise 2.0 project:
• Do not start just to do collaboration. The target needs to bring value for the business like collapse time and distance.
• Involve top managers of local entities
• Start with content. Otherwise the people will have only one look and they are gone
• Face to face meetings are helpful
• Allow private content. It’s not burning time. IT helps to reach the business targets. People must be able to play and the company will earn the benefits.

Mark presented a well done project in a enjoyable way. It shows that you can’t plan to go viral, but you need to plan it well and you need enough resources.

On June 9 and 10, the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 was held in Milan. Organized by Emanuele Quintarelli (aka @absolutesubzero), the event covered the latest development, trends and innovations in the Enterprise 2.0 field. Interestingly, the conference did not only look into the classical topics regarding E 2.0 inside the company, but also had tracks on the “outside” aspects like Social CRM and Sales Communities.

The day before the conference, there were additional workshops, e.g. on E 2.0 innovation, HR, or governance. I attended the one held by Sameer Patel (@SameerPatel) about the strategic aspects from inception to the launch of a E20 initiative. The focus here was on the business aspects of the successful E 2.0 implementation in an enterprise. I was positively surprised that almost all workshop participants were very well familiar with the topic of E 2.0 and already implementing or working with E20 tools. So Sameer was facing a “tough crowd” as he rightly put it. The concept of the workshop also included an interesting vendors’ panel where three experts answered the proposed questions of the participants. The session closed with a best practice case by Lago, a furniture manufacturer, who presented their socially enabled Intranet “Olga”. So we discussed the topic of E 2.0 from three different perspectives: consultant, vendor and user.

For me, the most lively and active part of the workshop was the vendors’ panel with blueKiwi, BroadVision and Telligent.

At one point of the discussion Sameer asked the vendors whether it was more successful to introduce Enterprise 2.0 top-down or bottom-up. Carlos Diaz (blueKiwi) said that at blueKiwi only a maximum of 15% of companies are doing it bottom-up, the rest is top-down. In his opinion, the top-down approaches were in the long run more healthy and better functioning – because when the management believes in the idea, then there will always be enough money, human resources, time etc. to carry the project properly. For clients trying to do it bottom-up, this is a much more difficult process.

That all makes sense, of course. But isn’t the whole idea of E 2.0 about breaking down hierarchies and letting things emerge? Mandating the use of Web 2.0 tools inside the company is contrary to this, but seems to work out in the end. Do we have to become a bit less idealistic about the idea of the free emergence of these tools and just put up with the fact that top-down is the better working and more commonly used approach? IMHO, no management can really force its employees to micro-share, blog etc. if they don’t want or aren’t ready for this yet. On the other hand, if started on grass-root levels, a strong backing from the management at some stage is essential, isn’t it?

Looking forward to your comments!

1.) What is your name?

Michael Dekner

2.) Who are you and what are you doing?

I am a scientist for a small biotech company in the antibody engineering field. Although I am an active member of the Austrian Web 2.0 community with a focus on twitter, I would describe myself more as a social media enthusiast than as an Enterprise 2.0 expert. I try to evangelize people about E 2.0, Web 2.0 and bring people together who are interested in these topics. I also tweet under the nick @querdekner

3.) How did you get to the E2.0 topic?

I started to take an interest in E 2.0 at around the same time I started to study applied knowledge management. After joining the Enterprise 2.0 Forum on XING, I went to the E 2.0 SUMMIT in Frankfurt. Currently I´m working on my master thesis connected to E 2.0.

4.) What is your understanding of the core concept of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

Tapping into the knowledge that resides in all the people working for one organization and thereby improving collaboration, innovation and knowledge management.
As McAfee puts it, it is not primarily about technology! I see E 2.0 more as a cultural phenomenon than a technical breakthrough.

5.) What are the main potentials of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

Increased employee engagement, faster and better collaboration and problem solving as well as improved decision making processes.

6.) What are the main challenges, threats and issues of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

Cultural issues in every imaginable form.

7.) Please give us three tags that describe your person and work best?

Social media enthusiast, learning, biotechnology

8.) Please give us three links to articles/contributions that describe your views best?

• The Content Economy by Oscar Berg
• Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration
• Enterprise 2.0: Collaboration and Knowledge Management Renaissance

9.) Please give us three names of colleagues that you would refer to as brothers-in-spirit?

There are quite a lot of people I would like to mention but since this list would be very long I just pick the first three who come to my mind:

1. Stephan Schillerwein
2. Martin Koser
3. Haider Shnawa