As the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT is a European conference, we certainly need to discuss the multi-cultural challenges of introducing E 2.0 in international companies. Last year, Craig Hepburn from the UK hosted the panel consisting of E 2.0 experts from all over Europe: Bertrand Duperrin/France, Mark Masterson/Germany, Emanuele Quintarelli/Italy and Dr. Frank Schoenefeld/Germany.
Here is last year’s video of the session:

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In the following I have listed the aspects that I found most remarkable and interesting in this discussion:

• Cultural differences do not only occur on a geographical level, i. e. between people from different countries, but also between a sales guy and someone from the IT department.
• A big challenge for Enterprise 2.0 is measuring its value: How do we account for people who benefit from E 2.0 without actively participating themselves? Some people from other cultures benefit from a collaborative environment, e. g. because they can easily find the information they need/solve a problem etc. But you cannot see or measure that value, because these people do not actively bring themselves in and do not want to speak out.
• Mark experienced an interesting pattern at CSC: For whatever reason, blogs (that address a huge, not-specified number of recipients) are more used by collegues with an Anglosaxon background while tools for discussions (where you address a limited, specified number of recipients) were used by people from all kinds of nations. So different people from different nations seem to prefer using different kinds of tools.
• We should spend more time understanding the different cultures and include that knowledge into the process of the developing a (flexible) software. The ultimate, perfect solution would of course be a system in which the end users themselves can make it fit them better via feedback loops.

This year, Bertrand Duperrin will be the host for the discussion on how to overcome cultural boundaries for Enterprise 2.0. An interview with him on his views and expectations for this year’s Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT is about to follow soon.

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.

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?

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!

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.

The last two days there has been some discussions (see here and here) about the announcement regarding the alliance of Hinchcliffe & Co with Michael Krigsman’s Asuret for a so-called “Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0” service offering. As Dion Hinchcliffe was in Munich until today I took the chance of interviewing him what this buzz is all about - and we talked about this new approach as the next stage in the maturity lifecycle of E2.0 consulting service. But here we go - make your own opinion about it:

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What do you think about the approach? Is the “proactive risk monitoring and governance” (as I would call it) the missing point for securing the success of E2.0 initiatives?

While cleaning up my inbox I stumbled upon some old mail conversations of our advisory board regarding a dogmatic discussion about whether Enterprise 2.0 is an "evolution" or "revolution". From my last post on the classification of use case it becomes clear that I am very much on the "evolutionary" side of the discussion when it comes to how to fit the social applications into the enterprise application stack. But on the organisational dimension of the discussion I very much agree on the arguments that successful E2.0 initiatives need a reframing of the organisational structure of the enterprise. But instead of bothering you with my opinion I would like to point out some of the great statements from the discussions of our advisory board.

The discussion all started with a statement of Mark Masterson regarding the missed aspect of integrating social applications with the enterprise business solutions:

As I’ve said elsewhere , I think that we spend much too much time talking about implementing social networking software silos ("build a wiki, and they will come"), and much too little about baking SNS into existing domain and task specific systems. Bjoern, you suggest something quite similar in your recent post , where you speak about this under the "Being Complementary and Integrative" bullet point.
I have elsewhere made the argument that one way to approach the problem would be to marry up SNS functionality with BPM software (read it here ). But not everyone is convinced that this is a good idea — there are some who responded to that (and other, similar ideas elsewhere) that BPM would be
poison for SNS — that the structured processes a BPMS implies are anathema to collaboration, never the twain shall meet.

In response to this Lee Bryant brought up the point that just enhancing the excisting processes with a layer of interaction to support crossfunctional sharing of knowledge and collaboration is not enough because a complete reframing of the idea of the organisational structure is needed in order to be successful in Enterprise 2.0 initiatives.

Existing businesses have structure and they have process, but as Mark says, the problem lies in trying to automate or de-humanise process, rather than with the idea of process itself. In terms of structure, a  question on my mind is how we can re-design businesses and organisations around the ideas of flow, aggregation, networks and collaboration, rather than just think about how we can work within the existing structures that we find in large businesses today. For example, looking at the segmentation you have applied to the audience  and tracks, I find it interesting to note that Intranet and ECM departments should simply not exist. Arguably, neither should central knowledge functions, which are better located within lines of  business. So the question is, what are the organisational design implications of E2.0 tools, techniques and ideas?

Last but not least I want to include the propositions of Bertrand Duperrin on this - whom I would put on the "evolutionary" side of this discussion as he proposed foremost a "rethinking" of some key corporate values in order to really foster the network effects of social applications in or above the "flow":

1. think in terms of system (dynamic flows) rather than organization (set org-chart)
2. Think "global improvement" (macro vision) rather than "functional optimization" (micro vision)
3. Think "increase performance" rather than "cost reduction"
4. Think "pull" (listen to the client’s voice..and client may be internal) rather than "push" (offer and product approach)
5. Think "individual" (what he is, what he knows, what he likes) and not "function" (what he has, what he must do, his status)
6. Think "ongoing experimentation" (permanent beta with quick retro-action loops) rather than according to the "test/validation/production/generalization".
7. Think "immediate generalization" (in order to make it possible for unexpected things to emerge) rather than "progressive generalization" (because it contradicts the economic benefits driven by the network effects)
8. Replace "think" by  "act" in the previous points
9. Don’t use hierarchy as a substitute for trust.

So - what do you think on this? What are your experiences? At the E2.0 SUMMIT will be addressing this discussion with different sessions - to really get a in depth understanding of it and eventually to provide some strategic implications. In order to enhance this discussion upfront I would be very interested about your opinions and views on this.

What is Enterprise 2.0 all about? IMHO - this is the most asked question when talking about this topic. As several bright heads have said before instead of theoretically talking about the Enterprise 2.0 vision we need to talk about use cases and case studies that show and unveil the power of this so-called “social business“. At the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT we have defined four different use cases that are going to be discussed along different best practices presentation. And while setting up an explanation of these use cases two days ago I ran along this nice post of Larry Hawes discussing the “nexus of business process & ad-hoc collaboration” that led me to an idea of a more broader view on the topic to be discussed in the following.

In his post Larry Hawes refers to post of Sameer Patel discussing the difference between ECM systems and social software:

ECM enables controlled, repeatable content publication processes, whereas social software empowers rapid, collaborative creation and sharing of content. There is a place for both in large enterprises. Sameer’s suggestion was that social software be used for authoring, sharing, and collecting feedback on draft documents or content chunks before they are formally published and widely distributed. ECM systems may then be used to publish the final, vetted content and manage it throughout the content lifecycle.

This relates to my understanding why enterprises need such thing as social software - because they need to change and to innovate in order to be more competitive in their markets. Consequently they have to discover new opportunities, ideas and information that is describing or representing these. And as a result from the organizational perspective companies need some kind of “reframing” of their business model.

Inspired by the post of Larry Hawes I would therefore describe the difference between established enterprise business applications and Enterprise 2.0 on a dimension of how the application is supporting the “reframing” process (I am explicitly not talking about “change” or “transformation” here because IMHO “change” is a consciousness thing needed to be done before and “transformation” might go far beyond the needed “reframing” in order to be up-to-date to customer and market expectations).

On this dimension established enterprise business application are “securing the precedent”. They support the planning-and-control-organization of the current operations by registering and certifiably documentating business incidents. The applications provide insights towards the historical status-quo of the business operations and can be distinguished by the business entity it is focussing on. On the one side there are established and defined processes and on the other side business-relevant data and unstructured information that have to be managed throughout their lifecycle.

If we take the scenario of Larry Hawes regarding the customer service issue there are business incidents - commonly in the sphere of knowledge working - that exceed these pre-defined processes and information structures. For these incidents the staff needs to move beyond the status-quo of defined processes and stored information. Former approaches to this used special methodologies like delphi studies and artificial intelligence toforcast the future in order to discovery new opportunities. At this point - social software offers a new approach - as it provides a way of harnessing the collective power of a interconnected setting of people to discover and ventilate new ideas - by externalizing and opening up data about information chunks, knowledge and process execution towards the crowd.

In regards towards this dimension of “reframe” I hence distinguish two further steps: first the “discovery” and second the “exchange”. This takes account of the idea of the learning organization that focuses on enhancing its systems to continually increase the organization’s capacity for performance. It also supports a phrase I first came along in a presentation of Lee Bryant: “It’s all about managing feeds & flows, and not objects“.

Along with the differenciation of business processes and business information, it helps again to keep apart four different use case scenarios of Enterprise 2.0:

1. Unveiling & associating information & knowledge (Knowledge Management 2.0):
   This is about working collaboratively on a state of externalized business knowledge e.g. project/process documentation, service issue/process documentation or sales-orientated product & market documentation. Giving access and authoring as well as sharing possibilities to the crowd creates the chance of someone adding not expected, but very valuable information towards the knowledge base and therefore enhancing it.
2. Support conversation & communications flow (Internal Communications 2.0):
   This is about the exchange and open discussion of new opportunities, ideas or gained knowledge throughout conversational systems as weblogs or microblogging infrastructures. This supports the distribution and ventilation of new ideas throughout the company - eventually reaching out to people that can give valuable feedback to ideas.
3. Supporting & enhancing ad-hoc collaboration (Collaboration 2.0):
   This is about supporting ad-hoc initiated team working to solve issues and problems that go beyond the pre-defined scope of problems or issues. As this would have been solved in offline circles of expertise so far Enterprise 2.0 approaches allow this to be solved on in a digital Enterprise-wide manner.
4. Supporting the learning organization and providing a market of ideas (Innovation Management 2.0):
   This is about interconnecting business entities with people and information about their tasks, interests and competences. Community-of-practices are a common tool for this approach though in times of social software this would rather implemented by an internal social network that is giving even a broader access to people and the relevant information flows within the enterprise.

Just to be clear the above mentioned use cases are not directly linked to technological solutions but certain social software concepts fit better to the one or the other use case. Therefore wiki solutions provide a good approach towards the collaborative knowledge work. While weblogs and microblogging solutions are better in giving access to the flow of information. And social networks provide advantages for supporting collaboration and the learning organization.

At the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT we will discuss different best practices for these four use cases and I will sum up my insights regarding the fit of this matrix towards the practical use out there in a post after the conference. But before this I would be very interested in your thoughts on this!