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?

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

This is a short notice that there’s now a video of an interview I did several weeks ago with T-System MMS’ Frank Schoenefeld on the topic of Enterprise 2.0, adoption challenges and outlook for Enterprise 2.0. Then his book was still in the making, but he’s finished now and I will try to get my hands on it ASAP.

Björn published the video on the German-based ECM WORLD weblog - I embedded it here directly (but be aware it’s in German!)

Sevenload Direkt

Frank Schoenefeld is a deep thinker on Enterprise 2.0 and his contained views and perspective is doing the field a good service. Moreover he’s got first-hand experience as T-System’s MMS experimented a lot with internal social software, and has evolved quite a bit since then. See for example Franz Patzig’s account of the changes he’s seen while coaching them with their internal BarCamp-alike, Open Space unconference initiatives. So, even when he’s a CTO by title, there’s much to learn from him on questions of implementation and utilization of internal collaboration platforms, and we’re glad to have him amongst the speakers at the upcoming E20SUMMIT.

Update: There’s also a long interview with him at besser 2.0 too, but it’s in german language again.

Blogpost crossposted from frogpond.posterous.com, video via youtube.com

YouTube Direkt

Everybody is liking and linking this video - so am I - but I am adding a link to Oliver Marks in ZDnet (Social Media Revolution?) - he’s got some valid points there:

How did we get from that quality of presentation to claims that ’social media’ is the biggest shift (in what?) since the industrial revolution? The retread music and borrowed visual style actually does people making sense of the rapid pace of change in society due to technological innovation a diservice: it makes their job harder.

Moreover these videos may 1. add to exaggerated expectations, 2. have nothing to do with the real world (of enterprises) and 3. lose their fascination quickly. Better bring something substantial to the next executive Enterprise 2.0 discussion (you may try: “it’s the economies of collaborative performance, sir”).

We are busily preparing the conference program for E2.0 SUMMIT and have now strengthend our team by the support of Kai Nehm as a new Kongress Media team member. He is in charge to help us out on our E2.0 community efforts in regards to this blog and our Facebook as well as XING communities.

Especially for Germany the exchanges between the E2.0 thought leaders and the corporate world has still to be enforced - this is why we are doing our kind of conferences with a high percentage of case study discussions with corporates, our E2.0 luncheons as well as the attempts on XING and Facebook. Kai, who has just finished a bachelor thesis about E2.0 at Universität Stuttgart with Prof. Joachim Niemeier, will therefore provide some ground research on what has been said and published in this sphere, conduct some more profile interviews with some bright people and initialize some more valuable discussions here, there and there.

Give him a warm welcome!

What is the intention? Well - the whole E2.0 SUMMIT is about bonding the European community around the E2.0 topic. Therefore we are already provide the weblog at blog.enterprise2open.com as well a newly Posterous blog at e20summit.posterous.com. All the actions are aggregated on our FB page - with that we hope to provide some value to the E2.0 discussion.

The E20SUMMIT page at facebook.com is a place to both connect the E20SUMMIT community and collect information and discussions about the conference.

• Thinking about “Design Thinking” | Manage by Designing | Fast Company

  tags: no_tag

  • I grow more bothered by the week with the phrase “design thinking.” I know full well that I am fighting a losing battle, but I think it is an unfortunate term for describing what designers have to offer to other disciplines, which seems the most common reason for using the term. As is a way of talking about what designers can contribute to areas beyond the domains in which they have traditionally worked, about how they can improve the tasks of structuring interactions, organizations, strategies and societies, it is a weak term.
  • For it is not in the modes of thought that designers most distinguish themselves, but in their actions. Designers act differently than analysts or decision-makers. Design is an extreme activity. It tends to call on all of the faculties of those engaged in it. It is contextual. It is embodied. It uses the whole person’s mind and body, left brain and right, hand and heart, analysis and taste. And it never gets enough of any of them.
  • I think it is so much more powerful, demanding, and relevant to invite lawyers, doctors, politicians and business people to design rather than to engage in design thinking.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Being at reboot made me miss out not only the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston but also Kongressmedia’s Intranet Summit 2009. Sad thing, normally I would have been there for meeting other consultants like Saim or Stephan and above all meeting practitioners and getting to know more about their intranet projects and approaches.

Good then to have fellow bloggers Frank Hamm and Saim Alkan compile extensive documentation on the talks (to be found in the documentation wiki open to the attendees), write up their learnings and impressions (Saim: Der Wert eines Inranets - live vom Intranet-Summit 09 #its09 and 2. Tag: “Der Wert eines Inranets” - live vom Intranet-Summit 09 #its09, Frank: Review zum Intranet Summit with links to nine (!) further blog posts, all german posts alas).

In my mind this blogger-generated extra content is a definite added value to being at a conference, it’s a mark of excellence that separates good from very good conferences. That said, “excellent conference” may mean different things to different people, but I am sure that “blogger relations” (some hold that installing a “blogger hub” is the way to go, like Braden Kelly expands upon in Conferences 3.0) make a difference. And for the things to avoid see Gerald’s list - things that make conferences less attractive.

What’s on your mind - are there other things of importance for the upcoming E20SUMMIT and the ECM World?

Well, a lot of interesting stuff happened last week - and some very lucky people like Lee Bryant, Stowe Boyd or JP Rangaswamy were experiencing both the Enterprise 2.0 conference and reboot, while I only managed to go to Copenhagen, some of my write-ups are here and here.

So it’s playing catch up a bit, which is easy as some good content is distributed as video. Like here I blogged about a video interview with IBMs Suzanne Minassian on the new Lotus Connections and more. I will add some more posts and observations from the E2Conf either at frogpond or (probably as crosspost) here.

And there are more additions to the video backlog, like the recording of the dinner talk with Dion Hinchcliffe we arranged at CeBIT in preparation of the E20SUMMIT. You can see me sitting in the back, listening in on closely to what Dion says (although I met him already at the hotel and accompanied him to the restaurant, chatting) - this was an intimate setting and lots of good questions got asked. Sound quality isn’t that good (and you can hear the restaurant staff shuffling around) but Dion is coming across quite clearly (”RoI is famously hard to measure on Enterprise 2.0“)