Expert Profile: Cai Kjaer

6 Jul

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.