Just let me guess - the hashtags “#e20forum” and “#e20conf” will reign the E20 Twitter discussions during the next weeks. There is not much to add on this but that I expect some interesting discussions and forward-thinking on the E20 adoption problem during the next week.

But for those who might not be familiar with this ever on-going conference circus I would like to introduce you to the upcoming events.

The International Forum on Enterprise 2.0

As a starting point for the E20 discussions in June you might listen (or still join the conference crowd) in Milan. Emanuele Quintarelli (aka @absolutesubzero) has put together again a very international set of speakers to come and discuss the E20 topics in the heart of south of Europe. With a workshop part on June 9th and the main conference on June 10th (plus an open event) the Milan event will be a compremised discussion about E20 and beyond - because Emanuele also included the external marketing 2.0 view on the conference agenda. This is interesting as the discussions on the internal and external “social business aspect” are joining at the point of “social CRM” - though I believe for an E20 conference it might still be very early putting together both stakeholder groups (the internal information/process/collaboration people and the external marketing/communications people). But anyhow - the conference line-up is very interesting - with a lot of E20 evangelists but also some interesting cases as there are De Lage Landen, Intel, CSC, Barilla and others. We are looking forward to the conference and are happy to meet you there.

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston

An interesting point of these two conference is that quite a view speakers of Milan will also speaking the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston (held on June 14-17th). There is not much to say about the Bosten event as this is the E20 event of the year. Though for our German and European community the line-up would be running too short on corporate representatives it will definitely set the path for the further discussions of the Enterprise 2.0 problems as most of the experts and evangelists are attending this conference - just have a look at the speaker’s list. I am very much looking forward to this as Kongress Media is a conference partner for this and I could arrange some spare time to attend the event - so please contact me to meet up.

Value of the conference towards the E20 discussion

In regards to my expectations about what will be the outcome of these two conferences I would say that the discussions will definitely point our that there is no way of return towards the “social business concepts”. Reflecting our discussions lately at the E20 FORUM Cologne and the Intranet SUMMIT (that is addressing the corporate intranet people that are mainly coming from corporate communications and are still very much top-down organized and thus very much reluctant towards the social idea so far) the E20 virus has reached the next stage - the management awareness for the topic is high, corporate development departments are interested to dive into this and the early stage people from internal communications are looking to find a way to justify their existance. So there is a strong movenment within the enterprise towards the topic and the discussions at the upcoming conference will hopefully support this and drive it towards the next level. What are your thoughts - just let me know!

Upps - I nearly missed this one … my Skype interview with Emanuele about the Milan conference. Unfortunately I somehow mis-arranged the sound settings - I hope you can still get some value out of it:
Video

The headline of the post represents somehow the project background and conference expectations of the attendees at the third E20 FORUM in Cologne. Though still most of the attendees are coming from corporate communications, there are already some HR and org people at the conference. And for most of them it is not a question of whether to implement or how to promote the E20 idea to the management but how to conciliate the different exisiting E20 initiatives in the corporation and how to drive the further adoption of it on a enterprise-level. Breaking down the situation I would say that most of the attendees are at stage 2 of the evolution process I have explained in my last post. Fortunately we have chosen intentionally five case studies for the conference program that discuss the progress of the adoption on a enterprise level.

As the conference is still running I cannot yet make any conclusion about the key lessons learnt but we will publish some more results and eventually some videos in the near future. Especially from the introduction talk of Euan Semple who had just finished his talk. Here are some tweets with key statements of Euan (aka @euan):

• enterprise20: #e20forum @euan 5 things to remember for managing the e20 revolution: trojan mice, patience, tolerance, ownership, leadership!
• e_trude: #e20forum If we participate people in developing (for example) guidelines via wiki there will be no problem of implementation.
• JoachimNiemeier: Euan Semple: Social media is effective for managers in managing risks #e20forum
• JoachimNiemeier: @euan The usage of social media will allow managers much more influence #e20forum
• JoachimNiemeier: @euan The perception of control most managers have is a false one #e20forum
• JoachimNiemeier: RT @e_trude: #e20forum Euan Semple: “help people to connect outside their normal circles.”
• e_trude: RT @JoachimNiemeier: Should everyone get involved in social media? from @euan - http://bit.ly/dkcoHd (expand) #e20forum
• e_trude: #e20forum #e20f Euan Semple: “help people to connect outside their normal circles.”

Now we have a very lively discussion about the bouquet of initiatives at Deutsche Bank - the key statement of this presentation is the advice to provide easy-to-use tools (not the big framework implementation) so buttom-up initiatives are supported to emerge.

Image Caption: Jamil Ouaj, Deutsche Bank, in discussions with the attendees

While the conference is still running I am already thinking about focus for the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT on Oct 26-28 in Frankfurt. Keeping on the structure of last year’s conference we will have two tracks again - one with expert talks and discussions and one with case studies. For the case study track I am actually looking for interesting cases and will be happy for people suggesting some interesting cases on this form.

The main theme for the conference is meant to capture the actual project issues of European E20 issues in autumn. As we are just learning that E20 is a kind of consolidation stage before enterprise the enterprise level the key of discussions must be around adoption but also how to drive the generation of business values by E20. Therefore the theme is defined around the following tagline: “Setting the path to an open and agile enterprise.” Besides the adoption issues that should be addressed mainly within the case study track topics seen behind the tagline are the following:

• value generation from a transparent enterprise
• fostering the potentials of the knowledge network
• leadership & governance for E20 initiatives
• driving transformation & business innovation
• talent & skill management 2.0
• personal social dashboards for the reduction of complexity

As this is a work in progress I am quite interested about thoughts and ideas on this first draft of important topics for the E20 discussion in autumn.

Recently we have been quite busy in preparing and organizing events that did not leave time to systemize and arrange my collected thoughts about all those discussions and informal exchanges I had with experts and practioneers in the field of Enterprise 2.0 during the last months. Today I am quite locked to nothing more than accompanying Bertrand at his pre-conference workshop for our E20 FORUM in Paris tomorrow. This leaves time to sort out my ideas that are turning around my head already for weeks.

It’s about the emergence of the E20 idea within the corporations. A lot has been said and written about the necessity and potentials of the new forms of collaborations and communications by using social software. Quite a few contributions have even predicted a big bang of change in the enterprise world. Others have criticized this vision and labelled the E20 thingy a “crock”. The truth is - as always - in the middle because E20 - as so many other business innovations - is not emerging in one step but is dependent on a cultural change within the corporation that again happens slowly.

So to explain the state of E20 we have to take a differentiated view on the different stages of the E20 emergence in the corporations. For each stage I see different people being involved in the diffusion process of this idea. They have different motivations regarding the E20 subject that serve more or less towards the big vision of E20. But they all contribute their share towards the diffusion process of this idea. Therefore I’d like to compare the diffusion of this idea with the dissemination of a virus:

(0) At some point someone is initiating some social software projects in the corporations - mostly under the radar of any strategic decision. These projects are mostly departmental projects with a small group of co-workers involved. There are quite some examples in which the IT departments started using some kind of wikis for documentating IT projects. In other examples some tinkerers (and yes I am not talking about the Generation Facebook but about tinkerers because I do not think it is a matter of age!) have installed or introduced some kind of social software e.g. microblogging service as Yammer in their departments. According to the image of the virus dissemination I’d like to describe this stage as “localized infections”.

(1) At the second stage I have observed quite a lot of companies in which the communications department came along the Web 2.0 thingy in the first place. Quite a lot of them have perceived this Web 2.0 thingy as a new way of communication format - in the terms of using social software to get people more involved into the messages corporate communications wants to send out. This in mind they might install corporate blogs to initiate discussions and feedback channels or add wiki or social networking functionality to the intranet in order to centralize the knowledge capturing and sharing. In regard to my analogy to the virus dissemination I’d call this the “first outburst” - as these initiatives have created quite a lot of attention within the enterprises. But in the long term most of these project could not gather any critical mass of participants because they have been set up as top-down initiatives to improve the impact of corporate communications and not been used to enhance the information flow. But we must not underestimate the effects of these projects. Because even they might have failed or not as supportive for the E20 vision in the long run, they are important for the further dissemination of the E20 virus - as they show the strategic relevance of social software within the corporation. This said these project will be indirectly supportive towards the growth of the grass-rooted projects.

(2) Eventually the growth of some of these grass-rooted projects will call the attention towards the department that is in charge for the organizational development. They will analyse and try to “decode” the effects of these projects. Eventually they might realize the business value generated by the improved information flow and the enhanced knowledge sharing within these projects. They might try to take over the control of these initiatives and turn them towards a corporate initiative. This is the point at which steering committees are been created and the subject of E20 becomes a strategic issue. But though there are thoughts about the enterprise-relevance most of the enterprises in this stage will not reorganize completely at this point. Because the realized business value is mostly generated “above the flow” and not “in the flow” of the business value chain. And as the enterprise is driven primarily by the success of the value creation in the line of business and not by some kind of enhancement in collaboration and information flow - only service companies that are primarily dependant on knowledge sharing for the business lines will succeed with the E20 thingy already at this point. Examples are for example CSC or Booz Allen Hamilton.

(3) Therefore the next stage in the diffusion process I see within those projects that deploy social functionalities towards the IT systems of the line of businesses. Examples for this I see in the Business Innovation Community project of Daimler (that is an open innovation platform installed by the business development department), the social enhancement towards CRM processes as well as the emergence of “personal learning networks” promoted by HR departments. According to my analogy I would call this stage the “virus variations” stage as in most cases there are more than one department that start a strategic E20 initiative.

(4) Finally as each of these different initiatives grow towards strategic relevance the management board eventually sees the demand to “streamline” the initiatives in order to effectively balance the benefits on the enterprise level. At this point they will approach the crossroads of the E20 success or failure as the “streamlining” can be organized as a top-down centralization of the projects which will kill the grass-rooted movements of each project. Or - the “streamlining” will lead towards a deconstruction of the business model because the management board as well as the corporation is “viciously infected” by the idea “to let loose” and “to open up” in order to gain new business value.

As a result the enterprise might eventually reach the final stage of a new form of organization that I do not want to describe at this point - as it would be quite hypothetically as I have not come along enough examples that resemble this stage.

To reply upfront to the critics of the above describe sequence of diffusion stages - there is no statistical evidence to this image, it is only a personal observation and conclusion towards the different stages of E20 infection. It might be an answer towards the question why the “big bang theory” won’t work for this kind of projects because the E20 thingy is a cultural change that must emerge slowly to all parts of the corporation and leads eventually towards a change of the business model.

Looking forward to any comments.

1.) What is your name?

Dr. Frank Schönefeld

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

I am the CTO of T-Systems Multimedia Solutions GmbH, responsible for delivering innovation inside our organisation as well as outside - for our customers.

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

Just by the pure needs of my organization.

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

For a group of N people you have potentially 2**N (-N-1) interactions among individuals, subgroups and groups. Try to structure, leverage and exploit that huge number of opportunities.

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

Bringing the social potential of an enterprise to its optimum - by better collaboration, creating better customer experiences and using the creative potential of other stakeholders.

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

In the beginning you need trust. The rest is (good) project management.

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

Curious, encouraging, 2.0.

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

• An Interview about my book on Enterprise 2.0
• My blog
• On the reasons for business and rules for long living companies

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

1. Dion Hinchcliffe
2. Dirk Rörhborn
3. Joachim Niemeier
4. Willms Buhse

Sorry - I can’t count to three for this.

1.) What is your name?

Craig Hepburn

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

I am currently Director of Social Media Strategy at Open Text focusing mainly on how some of the worlds largest companies are adopting social media strategies for their business both internally for collaboration but also externally facing for their partners and customers. My role is to develop the business use cases and help these companies implement social media solutions.

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

I have over 10 years experience in web development and online business where I have helped some of the worlds largest companies such as STA Travel, BAA and Rentokil Initial develop their web business strategies but it was only a few years a go I realised the potential of Web 2.0 while head of Web Strategy at STA Travel. I soon realised that web content when integrated with social networks provided a very powerful communication network, we were lucky enough to develop some of the very first cutting edge 2.0 applications at STA Travel with Facebook, Google, MySpace and Travel Blogs which led me to be featured on the cover of Revolution Marketing magazine in the January 2008 Edition and was voted one of the UK’s rising stars in the digital marketing sector. It was at this point I was approached by Open Text to help develop their 2.0 strategies with customers and it soon became apparent that social business design and Enterprise 2.0 was far more exciting than I had ever realised. We are currently going through a major shift in how people and business come together, we are seeing the start of the human API where companies need to integrate with their employees and customers via social constructs and connected networks.

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

To me Enterprise 2.0 is much simpler than people realise - How can any company bring together Content, People and Process in a more social application to output a more efficient, innovative or engaging experience that benefits that core companies business.

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

When planned and implemented correctly the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 are massive in my opinion, we will soon see the rise of social customer service solutions where a global company can tap into their connected networks to support themselves, product development can engage with their partners, customers and employees to get realtime feedback on products or services that can be improved and developed at a lower cost more efficiently or simply how a marketing departments can engage with their customers directly through social networks and online widgets.

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

Our biggest challenge is education, understanding and readiness, some companies are still trying to figure out 1.0 but as some of the more innovative companies start to showcase and realise the real ROI of business we will see E2.0 mature and evolve as its an organic principle that will constantly be developed by the thought leaders and community.

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

Innovative, Inquisitive, Passionate

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

1. Social Media brings new hope to the Commercial Enterprise
2. Technology in 2010
3. Social Business Design: The Enterprise is Dead. Long Live the Enterprise!

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

• Daniel Kraft
• Antony Mayfield
• Mark Finch

1.) What is your name?

Anthony Poncier, I’m based in Paris, France.

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

I’m a management and organization consultant, specialized in Management 2.0 (impact of social media on management, processes…). I’am also a blogger, on those topics (http://poncier.org/blog).

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

I have been browsing the internet since 1992-93 and I’m still thrilling about the evolution of the net. I have collaborated for several years with NGO’s about community, social network, participative processes, identity management on the internet… I am now focusing my activities on the web 2.0 tools and services and their impact inside organizations. Both during my Phd and when I was teaching at the french university, I have appreciated and developed the use of Knowledge Management.

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

Collaboration, empowerment of employees and partners/customers are the core concept of E2.0. At this time these aspects are still a cultural shift to be achieved. Social media have triggered those concepts to exist.

Enterprise 2.0 is also, a way to capture informal knowledge, conversations and identify experts and expertises, to enable co-innovation and co-creation.

Therefore it’s a new way to manage people and information inside/outside the enterprise. What matter is not the marketing concept of “enterprise 2.0″, but the reality of the way people think and interact.

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

Involvement of all the stakeholders through trust and autonomy.

Creation of a more participative management.

Developpement of people leadership through empowerment.

In addition, I hope that people will be happier inside the enterprise. If it’s only a way to get more profits, it’s a non sense, it has to be a win-win strategy.

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

Governance, fear of loss control (top-down), fear of change. Installment of social media tools inside the enterprise without adapting the management attitudes (tools do not mean collaboration).

Convince the middle management that E.20 is not their enemy. More leadership and coordination instead of micromanagement and Gatekeeper attitudes.

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

Management 2.0, sharing, openness

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

1. Management 2.0 : Manage Collaboration inside Enteprise
2. Management 2.0 : quel rôle pour le management de proximité dans les organisations collaborative
3. Management 2.0 : leadership et collaboratif

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

• Dion Hinchcliffe
• Jon Husband
• Rachel Happe

1.) What is your name?

My name is Jon Husband, and I live in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

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

I am a middle-aged man who considers himself an observer of human systems and human behaviour, a systems thinker, a listener and facilitator, and a techno-anthropologist.

In less fancy language, I am a strategy, organizational design and change researcher and consultant.

I am also a member of the ITA Alliance, a brain-trust of 5 organizational-and-social learning thought leaders and practitioners, with me as the sixth ‘hanger-on’.

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

Getting to the E2.0 topic has been a (very) long road for me. I got interested in the “sociology of work” in the early 70’s at the beginning of university. Ten years later I found myself at the start of my career consulting to and facilitating in organizations.

From the mid-80’s to the mid-90’s I was a Senior Principal with the global HR and organizational effectiveness consulting firm Hay Management Consultants. Thus, I was equipped with the theoretical and practical background of organizational design and all of the core elements of how an organization’s strategy, its capabilities and the motivations and competencies of its people converge into more (or less) effectiveness.

From the mid-90’s on, I have been an independent thinker, writer, consultant and change agent. I have worked with OD (organizational development) principles and processes, immersed myself in the Internet and social media, and I began thinking about the large and long-term impacts of the interconnected digital infrastructure we call the Web on our established ways of doing thins, our core assumptions about how humans live and work, and what this means for established institutions and the institutions yet to be created.

I created the word and the concept of “wirearchy” in 1999, as I began to realize that massive change would eventually be visited upon information-and-knowledge intensive enterprises of all stripes. Over the next 5 or 6 years, I began speaking about the concept, and also created a blogging / KM-related start-up. Then, in 2006, along came the term Enterprise 2.0 and it seems clear that it fit alongside what I was already doing. I have been writing and speaking in that area since.

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

Let me first say that generally, I think the term Enterprise 2.0 is relatively vague and may be as much of a hindrance as a help in assisting organizational leaders and decision-makers see and deeply understand that large and important changes to the nature of knowledge work are underway, and are accessible to the objectives of improving productivity, capability and effectiveness. That said, Andrew McAfee’s recent new book has helped frame the issue in more accessible and practical ways.

Effective collaboration in the face of constant competition, turbulence, and change has been an issue for the last twenty years. We have seen successive waves of calling for … continuous learning, learning organizations, flexibility, resiliency, knowledge management, improved speed-to-market, employee engagement, the critical need for innovation, and so on.

It’s clear that hyperlinks and the Web, improvements in user interfaces, database capabilities, search, etc. have brought the possibility of large increases in the effective use of information and knowledge by knowledge workers. It’s also clear that many organizations have completely “wired” their processes with information systems. And further, it’s also clear that the Web (cloud computing) and ecosystems of increasingly-interconnected information systems bill bring further changes and new models to the game.

But, most organizations still use work and organizational designs coming out of the period dating from the 1930’s through the 1960’s (see Hamel, Malone, Drucker, Stan Davis, etc.)

For me, the notion of Enterprise 2.0 denotes a growing understanding that the enterprise will be surrounded and embedded in ecosystems of electronic / digital functionality and capability which also includes humans as core participants in interactive co-creative processes.

That, to me, means massive (eventual) change to organizational structures and rhythms, not to mention leadership and management philosophies and practices .. and I think the notion of “2.0″ denotes the next version, no ?

In short, organizational transformation towards the (often distant) responsiveness and effectiveness suggested by the promises held out by an engagement-driven information-and-knowledge based society.

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

Greater and more pertinent and practical involvement and engagement of customers and employees in what an enterprise produces / provides, how it creates the offerings, how it rides the waves of (continuous) change and how it becomes and remains a vibrant living system in a larger eco-system.

It also, I think, holds the idealistic potential of making many aspects of ‘work” more interesting and more engaging for many individuals, which I believe is a critical issue in an increasingly knowledge-based society where talent will always be at a premium.

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

There are several important ones, I think.

1. The core assumptions about how organizations are structured … in other words, the core design principle(s) of hierarchy, division of labour, measurement of (increasingly) intangibles that make up significant proportions of economic value.
2. The deep (current) embedded-ness of increasingly questionable core assumptions about power, status and decision-making.
3. Effective and sustained “culture change”
4. The knotty problem of what and how established management concepts and practices (may) need to change, i.e. work design, compensation, performance management
5. The impact of customers and markets in perpetual motion combined with hyperlinks, open API’s, the Web, etc, on business processes
6. Transition to a new paradigm for the IT function .. less gatekeeper, more facilitator, business partner with line management and HR, cloud computing, managing the line between ‘open’ and ’secure’.

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

Open, collaboration, respectthepastbutseizethefuture

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

I write on a regular basis for one of the E2.0 arena’s well-known blogs, FASTForward .. www.fastforwardblog.com. The 3 articles below are drawn from that blog.

Will Enterprise 2.0 Drive Management Innovation ?

Employee Engagement as a Core Goal for Enterprise 2.0 Adoption ?

Exploring an HR Framework for Enterprise 2.0

l

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

• Euan Semple
• Stuart Henshall
• Harold Jarche

As we have already experienced in the discussions at E20 SUMMIT Frankfurt there is only little knowledge about the state of E20 projects in Europe. We want to change this - with this blog, the related events and now some research initiatives. As I am a passionate researcher by heart (that was my obsession before I entered the event organization sphere!) I have set up a first shot - questioning the external perspective of the state of E20 with a research on E20 consultants. And as we are preparing the E20 FORUM / Paris I am starting the research by limiting it towards a French but also Belgium perspective.

So here we go - behind the following URL below you find a Google form with some questions about the state of E20.

bit.ly/frenche20state

I would like to encourage every French consultant (from the one-man-show towards the members of the big consultancy firms) to take part in this research. The conducted data will handled anonymously. The research is set up as an open source project - so we will share all the results from the research and grant free access to the results to everybody after closing it.

Please retweet, re-post and spread the word to everybody. We need at least a 100 returned forms to be somehow valid and representative.

In order to assure the authenticity of the answers we have built in a little hurdle for the participation. Though we do not relate your answers to your person we want to know who is taking part and what is his/her background. Therefore we ask you to request a “research ID” at research (at) n - sight (dot) de that is queried in the last question on the questionnaire. Only the returned forms with a identified “research ID” will be counted!

UPDATE / Feb 02: In order to give you an incentive to take part in the survey we’d like to announce a raffle of 2 free tickets to the E20 FORUM / Paris among all participants of the survey by Feb 15th.

1.) What is your name?

Oscar Berg

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

I live in the city of Lund, Sweden, and work at Acando, a Swedish management consultancy with operations in Scandinavia and Northern Europe. I work as consultant with strategy, business development, architecture, conceptual design, and change management, primarily with global businesses.

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

I think it was quite a natural move for me, something that happened almost without me noticing it. I have worked as business analyst, usability architect and business developer with improving content management processes, collaboration, knowledge management and communication with the help from IT and web technology in particular since the mid 90ies. My passion for creating solutions to make people communicate, share and collaborate across barriers such as time, location and culture has led me to Enterprise 2.0. As I started blogging about things that interest me such as Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, KM, ECM, Collaboration and Enterprise Architecture in early 2007 on my blog www.thecontenteconomy.com, I got in contact with a lot of other people within the emerging Enterprise 2.0 community which has been very stimulating. It has made me invest a lot of time and effort in this field, because I feel I am getting a lot back from other people in the Enterprise 2.0 community. I also see an intersection of all my interests in Enterprise 2.0.

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

The Internet and the web in particular has enabled a shift in how people communicate with each other, enabling rich and frequent two-way communication with a reach, immediacy, usability, and accessibility (due to low production cost) that can’t really be compared to any advance in communication technology in human history (yes, that might provoke some, but that is my personal opinion). We are no longer limited to the previously bad scalability of communication, cooperation and collaboration technologies, something which not only makes us question large and hierarchic organizations but also makes it theoretically possible for a single individual to manage and operate a business on a global scale – with the help from a network of contributors, including customers.

To me, Enterprise 2.0 is fundamentally about trying to understand and using what we know about this shift today and to apply it in an enterprise context to help enterprises fulfill their purposes. It is not just about implementing social media or deploying social technologies in an enterprise. Rather, it requires a thorough understanding the values, principles, culture and human behaviors that make communication, sharing and collaboration happen in such an easy and natural way on the social web. We need to look at what kind of values can be created for enterprises and how they will need to transform themselves to enable this value creation.

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

Given my understanding of the core concept of the Enterprise 2.0 idea, there is a diversity of potentials. Here are some of the potentials that I am currently focusing on to help customers utilize:

Improving findability, discovery, maintenance and reuse of information, thereby reducing human latency and avoiding time spent on searching and managing information, reducing waste and rework, and avoiding reproduction of information that already exists.

Creating ambient awareness that allows people to know what goes in in their work environment and when it is their turn to contribute - despite that the people and resources are physically disconnected by time, location, culture.

Facilitating the capture and sharing of tacit knowledge, as well as allowing ideas to flow and finding their way to people who can make them happen, thereby fueling innovation.

Enabling more efficient and effective communication, sharing and collaboration within teams and within an enterprise as a collective, as well as allowing new co-operations and collaborations to emerge by allowing people who otherwise would not find each other to find each other, connect, and build trust in each other.

Enabling the people within an enterprise to aggregate, maintain and share a collective body of knowledge and intelligence with the enterprise as a collective.

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

The technocratic focus on Enterprise 2.0 that believes that the tools and technologies themselves will help to solve the kind of problems we are addressing that I am seeing all over is worrying me. Installing a social software platform won’t make a difference unless the enterprise as collective is not ready for a transformation of its culture, practices, attitudes and behaviors. It won’t be possible to create real value from Enterprise 2.0 technologies without such a transformation taking place.

Lack of leadership commitment and alignment with business vision and strategy is a key challenge when trying to create value with Enterprise 2.0. Grass-root adoption is not enough – although value can emerge as parts of an enterprise transforms itself, the enterprise as collective won’t transform unless the leadership supports this transformation. So any grass-root approach to Enterprise 2.0 must always be complemented and supported by a top-down approach which is supported by top management.

Finally, fear of making mistakes that prevents a more agile and pragmatic way to explore, understand and validate potential business benefits is a major obstacle to creating value with Enterprise 2.0. Failing is inevitable, and daring to fail is crucial to succeed.

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

simplicity, collaboration, web

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

• Enterprise 2.0 and Collective Collaboration – Part II
• Winning with employee engagement
• The Age of Transparency – Rebuilding trust

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

I have so many people I admire and respect in the Enterprise 2.0 space, but since I must pick three names:

1. Gil Yehuda
2. Paula Thornton
3. Sameer Patel

1.) What is your name?

Cecil Dijoux

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

I have been working in the IT industry for about 20 years in different european countries for different types of companies (SMB, Global Companies, Start-up, Public organizations) in different industries (travel, Apparel, Mobile services).

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

Regardless of all the differences, I have always been confronted with the same problem : knowledge management in highly complex environment. And it has never been as criticicaI s in my current position. I am currently working as Support Team Lead in a software company making PLM solutions for the apparel industry. PLM are enterprise-wide complex solutions, both from the functional, technical and integration perspectives. The latter being critical : different people from the company with different types of knowledge, globally distributed. I have started to blog 3 years ago on different topics (culture, web, society, social networks) and working on this Enterprise 2.0 presentation back in October 09, I’ve just found out that all the different topics I was addressing until then (bar the music maybe) was all somewhat relevant and interlinked in the E2.0 context. This has been a revelation : all of a sudden, I’ve found my blogging voice. I love this idea of participating to this great global conversation.

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

Empowerment of knowledge workers. I have read quite a few books on management and I am a big fan of Peter Drucker. I believe Enterprise 20 is a great opportunity to fulfill moder management promises : participatory management, trust, emergence.

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

I am a strong believer that Enterprise 2.0 is key to have more engaged people. And this is a win win : more engagement leads to happier people, a more innovative context, more productive company, more transparence, less politics etc … Elyahu Goldratt said that all companies have three goals, or rather they have one goal which is to make three types of people happy : shareholders, customers, employees. Enterprise 2.0 is spot on to achieve these 3 goals.

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

I believe that the main challenge is a cultural one for adoption. And it lies at middle management level. Bringing internet tools into the enterprise brings the internet culture : disintermediation, reputation, emergence etc … And middle managers usually are not very comfortable with these principles. Michel Crozier, the famous french organizations sociologist wrote about this middle management resistance to change.

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

Culture, Social, Digital

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

1. Enterprise 2.0 : leveraging collaboration platforms to foster knowledge, innovation and productivity
2. Enterprise 2.0 explained to our managers in 10 principles
3. Réseaux sociaux dans l’entreprise.fr : les 5 obstacles culturels (French only)

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

1. Vincent VanWylick
2. Frederic Brunel
3. Oscar Berg