During the last few days a lot of discussing has happened behind the stage of the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT - and it is triggering more worthwhile posts as well. As the idea of the E2.0 SUMMIT on Oct 6-8th is to represent a community and expertise hub for the European Enterprise 2.0 community this is a great thing to have, we really want to reflect the common Enterprise 2.0 discussions (especially from an European point of view).

So as we’ve been working on the scope and concept of the SUMMIT with several members of the advisory board - who were very active in contributing ideas and overall evaluating the topic list we’ve been devising. Calling on this round of experts in the field is only natural: We want the event to be attractive for both thought-leaders and practitioners, and we want to attract all the essential players of the E 2.0 industry. So we called on our “trusted” circle of people to provide the feedback we need and add ideas.

By now we can tell you that we’re finished with putting up the structure and scope side of the agenda for the October 6-8 event in Frankfurt. You may have a sneak preview here - now we are entering the stage of staffing the panels with the right people. So from the big picture the event structures as follows:

• Day 1 / Oct 6th: WikiCamp ‘09 (besides the regular workshop day)
• Day 2 / Oct 7th: plenum sessions in the morning, then fourparallel panel sessions (each 50mins - means 4×3 panels on Day 2)
• Day 3 / Oct 8th: 3 parallel panel sessions in the morning (each 50mins - means 3×3 panels on Day 3) plus 2 plenum sessions in the afternoon

So in total we’ve got 5 plenum sessions and 21 single track sessions for the E 2.0 SUMMIT. Each of these tracks is designed to be of interest to a distinct set of people, and tries to avoid conflicts with thematically related parts. Additionally we’ve included some industry panels (telco & banks), and several open
space orientated sessions.

For the “trusted” circle of experts feedback we can say that the biggest topic of the behind the scenes discussions was the dichotomy between orderly processes (read BPM) and the fuzzy world of Social Software (read Enterprise 2.0), how to deal with it, and basically how to tackle the topic at the conference. So while we all shared understanding a nice thread evolved that covered things like:

• How do we prevent that social software works out to be just another “silo” (”build a wiki, and they will come”)?
• How can we integrate social software into existing domains, usage arenas and task specific systems?
• What are the best ways to start with social software in the enterprise?
• How do we ensure that social software implementations turn out to be “complementary and integrative”? Is it a good idea to marry up SNS functionality with BPM software

Especially the last point triggered a lively discussion, whether the structured processes that go with BPM (and its systems) are preventing collaboration. Granted, this discussion isn’t of interest to everybody, but it has an audience beyond (enterprise) information architects and systems people for sure. Especially, it’s a question that arrives sooner or later in a corporations travels towards Enterprise 2.0, and members of various departments should listen:

• people (well, hailing from companies and/or departments) that are interested in improving specific business processes (e.g. quality assurance, customer service knowledge, etc.), and IT people who need to integrate legacy systems with Web 2.0
• communications department - they are interested in improving communications (and being more conversational needs more flexible processes, not more structure and control)
• Intranet & ECM management teams - interested in enhancing existing activities with Web 2.0 elements, so they need insights into when and where to ease process policies, and when and where to control things more tightly
• knowledge management and e-learning people - interested in better knowledge sharing, like w.g. leveraging collective intelligence (which needs altered processes as well, probably more flexible ones)/actions
• business development is fundamentally interested in changing the company (for more innovation, for better/more outcome/output or for cost reduction, for innovative business models, etc.) - all with heavy process implications
• overall the management board and people dealing with strategic planning …

To cater for these needs we have structured the conference into four main parts that shall

1. facilitate visionary and forward-looking discussions about collaborative performance of Enterprise 2.0
2. support the emergence of strategic discussions, like e.g. whether open innovation is an interesting arena for Enterprise 2.0 (we think it is!)
3. provide “hands-on” best-practice discussions and
4. provide space for more technology- and tool-oriented implementation discussions.

So connecting Enterprise 2.0 towards BPM will be a part of the conference discussions, especially in the panel “Best-Practices for Process Management 2.0″ and - in a more abstract way - in the panel “New Models for the Enterprise: Being Open, Collaborative & Disruptive”. I guess we will find time and space to discuss how to make our corporations more adaptive and flexible, or as Lee Bryant said it “how can we re-design businesses and organisations around the ideas of flow, aggregation, networks and collaboration?”.

Recent conversations about Enterprise 2.0 have, it seems to me, become increasingly focused on return on investment (ROI). This is a rational consequence of any number of factors — in order to deploy these technologies in any sensible fashion, it is necessary to demonstrate that doing so will bring a return on the investment needed that is greater than its cost. If we accept that, in the recent past, much of the activity surrounding the meme has been of an experimental nature (where there is, by definition, a high tolerance for risk), and also accept that many of these experiments, within the context of their constraints, have been successful, then we can expect that these results will begin to move the meme into the mainstream. This clearly seems to be happening. Insofar as it is, the meme thereby now commands some degree of management attention, so this increased focus on ROI is both correct and obviously understandable.

But…

Preparing an argument about the ROI of E2.0 that is both true and logically consistent is no simple task. That’s not because we don’t have enough case studies — it’s not because we don’t have enough data. It’s not because we can’t quantify benefits, or assign costs properly (well, actually, it is, but not in the sense that most people usually mean, in my experience). It’s because, most of the time, we’re using words incorrectly.

Words are a big deal. People mostly use them without (much) conscious thought, and therefore, underestimate them. That’s unfortunate, because they are the primary tools of thought, and choosing the right ones essentially determines whether our thoughts are robust, or not.

A huge part of any conversation about ROI is the underlying economy of the organisation in which the investment is taking place. And for various reasons, this economy is often misunderstood, ignored, obfuscated or just plain badly described. That fact, in turn, means that subsequent conversations about problems dependent upon it have an imperfect basis — a conversation about ROI in this context is a conversation about a house built on quicksand. It will sink.

And to the extent that many people are not even aware of the quicksand — not aware of all of the misunderstandings and incorrect assumptions about the underlying economy of the organisation — they often fail to perceive that the house is sinking until it’s gone. This leads to a certain degree of bewilderment, eventually, when they go searching for it on the plains of the organisational economic quicksand, in vain.

I’m not an economist. Even if I wanted to try and describe the abstract economy of an enterprise in this post (which I do not, lacking the patience for it — be grateful, reader!), I could not. I lack the words to do so. But I can, for whatever reason, perceive these economies, so what I can do is offer some examples of them at work. Perhaps, if you are not yet aware of them, this will help you perceive them as well. If you are aware of them, then the examples may help clarify my argument here.

Consider the common example of a governance board. Let us assume that we are dealing with a very large organisation — one for which the term “enterprise” would not seem a poor fit — it has 20k employees and revenues of several billion dollars. This organisation has set a high level, strategic goal to “control costs”. Moreover, it has iteratively specified that goal to mean, among many other things, “attempt to maximise reuse of assets”, a goal which, in a further iteration, has then been specified to mean (or correlate to) the following goal for the IT organisation: “conform to a documented enterprise architecture”. This latter goal, finally, is achieved by attempting to rationalise the use of IT assets across the organisation. The entire enterprise will use one and the same email system, for example: the scenario where two (more or less otherwise) independent business units each use their own, differing email systems will not be allowed. The “governance board” is a tool to achieve this goal — once established, all new IT efforts must be subjected to its scrutiny, and the members of this board are tasked with enforcing this goal.

Hmm. But like the House of ROI, this too is built on the quicksand of the enterprise’s economy. What does that mean? Consider this further development of the scenario: shortly after being established, the board finds itself overwhelmed. At any given time, there are hundreds, even thousands of efforts, initiatives, projects and whatnot, across the enterprise, that need to be scrutinised for compliance with this goal. The board cannot keep up. So, typically, the response to this reality is this: the board sets a price. It sets a gatekeeper rule that says something like: “Any project with a projected cost of more the $X must be approved by this board”. Projects that cost less, do not. This is a simple risk management strategy, on its surface, and on that surface, perfectly sensible. The load on the governance board is reduced to something it can cope with, but the organisation is nevertheless confident that the goal is being managed, balanced with the risk associated with a particular effort.

Below that tidy surface, though, the economic quicksand upon which it sits is the context for fascinating effects. Among other things, what happens is that the marketplace of potential projects, within the organisation, reacts to the price. Let’s assume, for the sake of developing the scenario to its conclusion, that you are the new project manager of an attempt to roll out an implementation of an enterprise wide social networking platform. One of the criteria that you will be judged on (where both those criteria and the process of judging people by them are part of the mysterious economy!) is the amount of time you take to complete this task. You examine the overall mechanism, and notice two things: one, the scope of your project is large, and two, it will cost enough that it will trigger the governance board process. “Hmm,” you think, “what does that mean? What impact will this have on my project plan?” So you go take a look at what the governance board is doing, and discover two things that, from your perspective, are appalling. First, you learn that the duration of the process of approval — the time it takes for the board to review your project and issue a “go” or “no go” — is 6 work weeks. Second, you learn that there is a queue of projects waiting for approval — the soonest point in time that your project could be evaluated, even with the newly implemented “fast track” mechanism for “strategic projects”, is two months from now.

You know instantly that this is unacceptable. For one thing, the governance board review is part of the initial setup process — you need a “go” from them to proceed to implementation. The only way to work those 3.5 months of delay into your schedule is if you continue to work on the project while waiting — delegate the governance board to its own, parallel stream. But that means assuming full responsibility for the risk — if you’ve called it wrong (or failed to make a convincing enough case), and the board says “no go”, you will have committed resources and expended funds in vain. That’s not likely to lead to a glowing appraisal for you.

So you look at the price tag for the governance board process, and begin figuring out how to break your project up into multiple, smaller ones, such that they will not be subject to the process. You react to the price.

Consider another, real world example: in a large organisation I know of, there is an ongoing effort to move IT efforts, across the enterprise, in a direction that conforms with a fairly rigidly defined service oriented architecture (SOA). One of the stumbling blocks to doing this is expertise — the people who understand the SOA, as defined by and for this enterprise, are not numerous, and individual projects need only transient access to them, typically. The organisation responded to these factors by establishing a “SOA Centre of Excellence (COE)”, where it clustered the experts. The intent is / was to “hire out” the COE’s expertise to individual projects. However, the COE is sinking into the quicksand, a year or so later — its services rarely invoked, the SOA it is tasked to evangelise largely ignored and absent from the organisation’s new and ongoing efforts. How did this happen? Why did it happen? It’s the economy, stupid. A key economic concept is one of incentives — pricing is all about negotiating them. From the start, because of the high fixed costs (mostly personnel) associated with the COE, the “cost” of using its services was widely perceived as being higher than the benefits derived (which were not seen as being significant in the immediate, small-scale context of most projects). This amounted to a disincentive.

Some time after inception, the organisation, frustrated by the lack of uptake of the COE, did the following two things: one, it changed the governance board process. For any project of a cost above $X, it added a mandatory step to the review process — the SOA COE had to review the project and determine if it was “SOA relevant”. Number two, and further, if it did determine that a project was “SOA relevant”, that project was then obligated to purchase a unit of the COE’s services, to ensure that subsequent designs and whatnot were “SOA compliant”.

This change — which quickly became known as the “SOA tax” — had an interesting, and entirely rational result. It caused the complete destruction of the SOA COE. Projects began to actively attempt to not be “SOA relevant” (to avoid paying the tax) — whether, in some absolute sense, they really were, or not. This, in turn, accelerated the funding problems that these measures had been intended to solve, so that within a year, the COE had effectively been dismantled.

I have literally been in situations where I have seen agitated project managers turn to a hapless architect and say “You! Go through all 260 of these documents, and remove or obscure everything that might even slightly resemble the word SOA! Do it now!” And I have also seen those same sorts of managers, deep in panic mode, literally tearing a project up into bizarre, otherwise completely nonsensical chunks, merely to ensure that each chunk was small enough to avoid some such gatekeeper price tag.

These behaviours, however, are completely rational within the context of the overall enterprise economy.

So, what does this have to do with Enterprise 2.0? Well, like SOA, E2.0 is a meme that explicitly, deliberately attempts to cross silo walls. Indeed, like SOA, E2.0 derives the bulk of its value as a function of its success in doing just that. For that reason, and again like SOA, it is supremely sensitive to the vagaries of the true enterprise economy. Sensitive in a way, and to a degree, that a meme with a smaller scope (”let’s do CRM for the sales guys” defines a very small subset of the overall enterprise economy) is not. This is the truth that underlies all of the various discussions of “top down vs. bottom up”, “executive sponsorship” and whatnot.

Thus, the precise meaning of the words you are using is of utmost importance: when you speak of “ROI”, if you are not doing so with a meaning for the words “return”, or “investment”, that is broad enough to include things like the ways participants are judged (rewarded) or the various mysterious costs (like the price of the governance board, or the SOA tax) of the enterprise economy, then you are probably engaged in a futile exercise. If you think that ROI is a matter of getting some numbers into an Excel spreadsheet, then you are probably building a house on a foundation of economic quicksand. It will likely sink, and that would be unfortunate.

Postscript: I was inspired to write this post by two other blog posts, recently read. The first, an excellent screed by Venkatesh Rao about the myth of “culture change” in large organisations (”There is no such thing as culture change“), speaks about linking E2.0 efforts to real incentives within the context of an organisation’s structures and behaviours. The second, which I found as a consequence of the reactions to my comments on the first, via the typical torturous path of weak ties, is a blog post by Paula Thornton called “Crossing the chasm” (search (Ctrl-F) her post for “small is the new black”, which made me laugh out loud). The twisted intersection of those posts, in my (twisted) mind, led to writing this one. If you are one of those strange folk who have actually read this far, I strongly encourage you to click through and read these posts as well. Venkat’s, in particular, would make a great panel at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit. Also in this same vein, and highly recommended, are Venkat’s series of posts about his “cloudworker” meme, in particular, “Cloudworker Economics“.

During the last week I was pushing the finalization of the first draft of the programm for the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT (still waiting for some feedback from my advisory board!). We are still far away of having a complete speaker’s list but we have thoroughly discussed the topics for the conference (you might want to have a sneak preview at looking at this Google Doc!) - as this is the foundation to select the right cases and speakers. While researching a little for this matter I came along an older post of Susan Scrupski from the ITINSIDER blog: “Reality Check 2.0” - that she wrote in Nov last year as the on-going economic downturn had not yet reached the sentiments of the E2.0 evangelists in the US. It’s a very good analysis of the situation esp. the comparison towards former IT development like the emergence of BPM, Outsourcing or ERP during the economic crisis of the late 80s and early 90s:

Now, no disrespect to my late GenX and GenY readers and friends, but Boomers have some experience here that may prove helpful. Those of us who were engaged in the technology workforce in the late 80s and early 90s had to move fast to help our customers cut costs and work smarter. For me, that meant the birth of Business Process Reengineering and Outsourcing. For others, it meant the birth of Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP. Now, you could argue whether any or all of these initiatives actually delivered the results intended, but the fact remains: lots of software developers and consultants made a huge market in downtime adversity.

From there she argues by citation of some other E2.0 thought leaders as Mike Gotta and Stowe Boyd that E2.0 could be a chance to lead towards “business transformation” (as mentioned by Mike Gotta) or to “reinvent the Enterprise IT” (phrased by Stowe Boyd) if focused on the bottom line. Mike Gotta answered to this in a later post that it’ll be “time for ‘pragmatic due diligence’ when it comes to social software”.

As from my observations for Europe and esp. Germany I can firmly support the line that some E2.0 enthusiast need to get more realistic on what can be achieved with Enterprise 2.0. A lately discussion (unfortunately only in German) in our XING Enterprise 2.0 group shows how theoretical and therefore “soft” the discussion is about the outcome of Enterprise 2.0. But then I also have to adjust that as Europe and esp. Germany is always lagging behind the adoption of new web-based business ideas and esp. Germans are more critical about innovation the hype about new approaches never reaches that far as in the US - therefore we are probably already closer to the bottom line. But still the discussions about the potentials regarding Enterprise 2.0 are not anymore concrete than in the US. And a lot of people are looking for the savior when it comes towards Enterprise 2.0.

The last two Enterprise 2.0 FORUMs have shown that there are some reoccuring characteristics of sucessful perceived E2.0 projects that - from a qualitative perspective - might turn out to be the critical success factors. In regards to our on-going discussions about the topics of the Enterprise 2.0 programm I would therefore like to make some summing-up on these aspects:

• Competitive ways towards Adoption: Mike Gotta brings it towards a nice point: “IT organizations usually follow a Plan-Build-Run framework that often means Plan-Build-Runaway after the system is deployed. But since many social applications are not transactional or process-specific in a traditional sense [..] it means we need to establish methods around adoption practices to gauge how people really get work done and how work models change as a result of social applications.”  IMHO social applications always rely on the momentum of the interaction of a critical mass therefore the good old P-B-R will tend to be less successful than more hands-on approaches like “think big and start small”. For this I always like to refer towards a conversation with JP Rangaswami at reboot last year (that I have unfortunately not have registered!). He explained to me that he is quite fine with people installing and trying out new applications. Choosing the right technology is a competitive approach - the winner is the solution that has the biggest impact and critical mass.
• Leveraging the power of feedback: At the last Enterprise 2.0 FORUM Frank Schönefeld brought up a nice systematization for the feedback mechanisms of social applications. It structures the benefits of feedback on five levels (from the more concrete to less concrete) :  “social creation” (benefits from the collective intelligence and actions in creating information, cross-links etc), direct feedback (benefits from cross-linking people and information by trackbacks, comments, bookmarks and feed subscriptions), systemic feedback (benefits from new relations/interconnections between people and information) and social feedback (benefits from gaining positive feedback, authority and acknowledgement). So IMHO the success of projects tends to relate to the realized level of these feedback mechanisms.
• Changing organizational patterns: At CeBIT there has been a nice panel discussion on the “Future Workplace” including the above mentioned Frank Schönefeld as well as Dion Hinchcliffe, Willms Buhse and Philip Vanhoutte. Moderated by Sascha Alexander (Computerwoche.de) they talked about the changes that are deriving to companies as Enterprise 2.0 and GenX/GenY are entering the workspace. The focal point of the discussion led to new organizational patterns (more remote, open and collaborative, project-based, interdisciplinary working) that have to be created within the enterprises to lever the potentials of Enterprise 2.0.
• Being Complementary and Integrative: This is probably common sense for all IT-based activities but from the critics regarding the E2.0 hype paroles this need to be said: No one can run a business only with social applications - social applications are a supplement and enhancement for existing information technology. Therefore it needs to be integrate at some point with business applications to be business-critical in the long run.

Well - these are my 2 cents on “Enterprise 2.0″ and the economic crisis. BTW - I guess I will choose the title of this post as the title of the introduction panel for the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT. As this discussion might be a good start for the conference.

Or France, or Japan, or Brazil? Or, indeed, anywhere that is not an “Anglo/Saxon” culture? Now, wait, wait — before you flame on! (or worse), hear me out. It’s hard to talk about the issue I want to raise here without raising some emotional reactions as well — often rather heated ones. That’s understandable, but it may also hinder us from having a conversation about a very interesting topic.

Important caveat number one, therefore, is the one I raised in my very first sentence — despite my (deliberately) provocative headline, I think that what I’m about to speculate about applies to some degree in any society that that is not a progeny of England (and even that formulation will be fighting words for some in the USA, Canada, Oz, New Zealand and particularly Ireland or Scotland — but I am thinking in almost biological terms, here. You may well dislike your parents, but you can’t change who they are). I will use Germany as the basis for my speculation, because it’s the non-Anglo/Saxon culture I know best, and not because I want to pick on Germany or Germans in particular. I love Germany — it is my home; my wife, daughter, large parts of my family, and many close friends are all German. But I do believe that certain aspects of German culture, and their implications with respect to social software, can be used to illustrate points about a broader theme, and so I will use them to try to do so. OK?

This is slippery, and dangerous terrain, and it is essentially impossible to venture out onto it without falling, and making a fool of oneself. I will surely be no exception here. But I am convinced that there is something important lurking out on those dangerous plains, and I think we would all be well served by finding some way to call attention to it. What is Anglo/Saxon culture? What is German culture? How do they differ? Frankly, I’m no expert in such matters, and not really qualified to voice an opinion on them, in many people’s eyes. But I will now proceed to forthrightly go ahead and do so anyway.

And therein lies a fascinating difference between the two cultures: Anglo/Saxon culture encourages — even lionises — such acts. German culture does not.

Now, having said that, here comes important caveat number two: there is no such thing as absolute truth, and there are certainly no absolute truths with regard to sociology or politics or cultural differences. These are not binary states, of which I speak, but points near the median of a very analogue — Gaussian — distribution. For every rule, there is an exception, and indeed, the exceptions sometimes make the rule. Etc. I understand and acknowledge that. However, there is nevertheless value to be found in examining the median in such distributions, and when I say “German culture does not”, that’s what I am aspiring to do. OK?

It may be impossible to ever come up with “the” definition of something as amorphous as a human society or culture, but any fool can see immediately, upon leaving the one she was born into, and visiting another, that they exist. And that they have differences. These differences are typically expressed as stereotypes and prejudices, many of which are the product of nothing more than ignorance (and often, its correlate, fear). But some of these stereotypes will have a kernel of something approximating truth at their core.

Thus, for example, in 1758, the Württembergischer publisher Karl Friedrich Moser wrote: “Every nation has its principal motive. In Germany, it is obedience; in England, freedom; in Holland, trade; in France, the honour of the King”. This is an absurd exaggeration, verging on hyperbole, and particularly in the modern world, one which many Germans would vigourously object to — and rightly so. To the latter point, and despite that, I might respond by doing the following: let us fast forward the lens of our attention to the early 1970s. And turn that lens on the anarchist and terrorist elements that surrounded people like Baader and Meinhof. Even before violence became a tragic element of the student protests in the late 1960’s, there was an element of distrust and frustration with the established order that took the form of an outright contempt of reason — a disdain for Wissenschaft, and a belief in the instincts of the Basis (the collective) as a useful guide to behaviour, as opposed to reason. These sorts of ideas are the clear and unmistakable descendants of German Romanticism of the late 18th and early 19th century. And the contrast between these stereotypes — the idea of an extreme affinity for obedience versus the inchoate Sehnsucht and open contempt for reason embodied by Romanticism — is profoundly illustrative of the complexity of German culture. This is a culture that produced both the Prussian hierarchies of Bismarck’s Ämte, and the theories of Karl Marx. It has a long, complex and unique history, of which one quite prominent thread is an ongoing, recurring struggle between the needs and desires of the individual, and those of the group in which that individual resides.

The history of Anglo/Saxon culture contains such a thread as well. It is not necessary — or even useful — to engage in a conversation about the merits of these two contrasting threads. All that I wish to do is make the following point: in each of the two cultures, the thread exists, and they are different from one another. The history of the the struggle between the individual and his society is a different story in Anglo/Saxon culture than it is in German culture. And the product of these respective threads — the day to day realities in which we now find ourselves — are also different.

To what extent, then, can we expect that practices regarding social software, as developed and espoused by an English-speaking, Anglo/Saxon culture, to be a seamless fit in a German-speaking culture? I think it must be obvious by now that I think the answer is: to no extent at all. Indeed, to the extent that software of any kind embodies social and cultural norms, to what extent is it reasonable to expect that the design of a software artefact produced in an Anglo/Saxon culture will be optimal in a German one? Again, I think the answer is clear: it is not at all reasonable to expect such a thing.

On the other hand, we live in a “globalised” age, one where every culture is exposed to many of the same influences, to an extent never before known in the history of our species. Communication technologies — particularly television and the Internet — are the enablers of this. No culture now exists, on the planet, that has not been exposed, to some degree, to Baywatch. Many cultures — and certainly all of the more affluent cultures — have their own version of Big Brother — in Germany, this past month, the local version of the British reality show “I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!” was watched by an extraordinary number of people.

And lurking within that observation, I think, is the essence of a problem currently confronted — and as far as I can tell, largely unacknowledged — by social software systems in general, and certainly Enterprise 2.0 punditry in particular. Most of the social software currently “in play” in the market, and certainly virtually all of the commentary on the themes it provokes (like Enterprise 2.0) are products of Anglo/Saxon cultures — representative of Anglo/Saxon thinking. This is an understandable consequence of their provenance, perhaps, but it is nonetheless insufficient. Just as “I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!” can only be successful in Germany in a version that is German in nature (and then it can be very successful indeed), we are in need of an articulation of Enterprise 2.0 that is German in nature. And one that is Spanish, one that is Japanese, Russian, Chinese and so forth. Lacking such an articulation, we are likely to find ourselves lost in the quagmire of discussions that purport to be about “das Ding an sich”, but which are (also) about differences between two cultures. We need to tease those two thing apart from one another — such that, hopefully, we can concentrate solely on talking about “das Ding an sich”.

And to those Germans reading this who are now shaking their heads, perhaps annoyed, perhaps merely perplexed (and perhaps both), and thinking, “Why? Why do we need such a thing? What value is there in the Anglo/Saxon definition of ‘Enterprise 2.0′ that could possibly prompt me to want a German version of it?”, I would say the following. As someone who is in the rare position of being able to read something like Andrew McAfee’s definition of Enterprise 2.0, and “see” it with both the eyes of a native Anglo/Saxon, and (to some debatable but undeniable extent) the eyes of a German, I say to you: if there is a concept that is more uniquely, perfectly German than the one of “emergent structure”, implied by McAfee’s theory, then I would like to hear about it. ;D

So what would a German version of Enterprise 2.0 look like? What would it entail? Well, I’m not sure. But this forum is as good a place as any to debate and define it. Certainly, there are some obvious characteristics — German social software will need to have a slightly different relationship to hierarchies, authority and expertise than Anglo/Saxon software will. And German social software will have to take into explicit account both such “soft” factors, as well as the “hard” realities of everyday existence — such as German laws, customs and norms regarding things like privacy. But I am sure of one thing — without it, social software will not “work” in Germany. Or anywhere else.

What do you think?

Following a link on Martin’s Delicious recommendations I stumbled upon Richard Dennison’s note about the new BT case study - which is already quite interesting to read (see also this video!). While being on Richard’s site I came along another interesting post about the Intranet evolution which again hijacked me to some thoughts about the decentralization of information systems as underlying idea of the Intranet 2.0 evolution. Have a look at my other post and let me know about what you are thinking.

Note: See this as a practical example of the creative power of social media - talked about here.

In a recent post Bernard Lunn of RWW lists some objections CIOs have towards social media. He comes up with the following issues:

Unpredictable scaling issues.

Security against IP loss.

Integration.

Loss of productivity.

Accidental brand damage.

I would say most of them derive from the software-as-a-service concept Bernard implies towards social media - but with all those open-source offerings like Wordpress, DokuWiki et al, elgg, Laconi.ca and others the corporate implementation of social media is not limited towards SaaS concepts. And regarding the best-practices like for example BT they are mainly installing and implementing software tools rather than using services (- I think I will interview JP on this at our E2.0 FORUM this week!).

The security discussion regarding “the loss of intellectual property”, the productivity issues as well as the fear of “accidental brand damage” are in fact some critical aspects that need a mind change - but for these cases the co-workers are faced mostly (at least for Germany) with the situation that they are limited to access only certain business sites. Maybe you are laughing but I know of a bunch of companies that are not even able to access Facebook, Twitter or even XING. So here you have the situation you don’t even think about social media but about the danger of the Internet.

So bringing back the question towards this post and asking you, my dear respective Enterprise 2.0 experts, what are your answers to the CIO’s objections?

The discussions about micro blogging services have reached another peak these days with Yammer winning the beauty contest at TechCrunch50. Despite all reservations regarding Yammer not being very innovative this incident at least turned on the light on looking at micro blogging services as Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Identi.ca or as well Yammer (see full list of tools at Jeremiah Owyang) as a corporate tool.

I do not want to rewrite everything that is said about corporate micro blogging but 1) give a little differentiation towards the discussions, 2) sum up a short recap of some interesting German discussions on this topic and 3) come up with some thoughts about some requirements on the side of the user’s perception and understanding of this tools.

Regarding the first aspect - in a lot of discussions about Twitter, Yammer and Co. I miss the differentiation between the scope of its application. Well - as Yammer provides micro-blogging towards a closed network, and Twitter is fairly open in the cloud - we have to distinguish the use of these tools for external corporate communications (for which Yammer is not very applicable) and internal communications and collaboration purposes. So for me corporate is not corporate - and if I want both with one tool neither Yammer nor Twitter is the right choice - implementing my own Laconi.ca instance would therefore be a better approach - combined with Twhirl as a desktop client.

As this community blog is mostly about internal communications and collaborations issues I will focus my second point on the German discussions that are limited to this. (Regarding the external communications potentials I wrote on our German Social Web WORLD Notizblog.) Joachim Niemeier - moderator of our upcoming E2.0 FORUM - had published a very nice post discussing some arguments for the application of these tools and some usage scenarios. His arguments for the usage of these tools include the following:

Provisioning of an easy-to-use communications instrument

Easy documentation of discussions and decisions in form of “micro-information”

Documentated contextual feedback on these micro-information (not getting lost in any email chain communication)

Provisioning of methods to identify the cooperation/project partner (within my organization) and to build up a common understanding of my work/project

Well - these arguments for these tools are kind of the aims as well as the problems to be solved. I would still add some more mediate argument. A lot of critics on social software - esp. on micro blogging services - includes the vast amount of noice and distraction it produces. As I wrote on our Notizblog regarding social media providing noise with social bindings and mechanisms for agenada setting I see this noise implies a great potential for any creativity process - this breaks the thing again down towards Tim O’Reilly’s word of “fostering the collective intelligence” with Web 2.0. Within the discussions and informations exchanges there are a lot of ideas for innovations - and esp. micro-blogging services are very effective on this because they limit the idea spreading on a number of characters and make it very easy to distribute them.

Regarding the usage scenarios Joachim Niemeier brought up the following ideas:

Defining processes

Debriefing projects

Project management in general

Dirk Röhrborn complented these thoughts with another systematic approach on the usage scenarios:

Micromessaging (short messaging)

Awareness / Serendipity (transparency towards the business activity)

Microdocumentation (structured documentations)

Microlearning (learning in small units)

And yes - here I also would add the item of “Supporting creativity processes”.

Last but not least - I would like to start a discussion about the requirements to introduce these tools towards my organization. As an social software idealist I instantly started a Kongress Media network on Yammer after I heard about it - because as a geo-dispersed organization we are very much suffering from the information overload the email exchange is bringing to us. (Therefore I am eagerly following the results of Luis Suarez’ experiment!) But still - I believe that micro blogging could solve some of our problems - but my folks are very hardly adopting to any kind of social tool - and at last to the newest gadget that is out there in the world. So how do I get there? Dirk Röhrbein is writing in his post about the understanding that is needed for the success of these tools. So I assume we need Twitter to succeed for the masses before micro blogging can be implemented in a substantial way - as weblogs also had to be adopted by the masses before corporate blogging had become acceptable. But maybe it only lacks the best-practices. In the discussions at Joachim Niemeier’s post Martina Goehring as well as Martin Böhringer are talking about some micro blogging best-practices - maybe I or Joachim Niemeier can convince them in writing down their experiences in a guest post at this place - until then I open up the discussion to let you tell me your experiences.