Having already introduced our female Advisory Board members , it is now the guys’ turn. Some of them have told us their expectations and focus topics for this year’s conference.

Bertrand Duperrin is a Consultant at Nextmodernity in France, carrying out consultancy missions in the field of new management, information, and communication technologies. His career began in an HR and management consultancy where he mainly focused on collaboration issues. His goals: to make social networks serve organizational performance and value creation in such domains as innovation, sales performance, or collective efficiency.
"Enterprise 2.0 has reached a tipping point and I think attendants are now expecting two kinds of things, and I hope they’ll find it there.

1. Cases with concrete business results. I mean not only evidences that people are actively using enterprise social platforms but also that it improves the way business is done. We’ve been talking about usages for years, now it’s high time we talk about actual business value.
2. Speeches that replace the Enterprise 2.0 paradigm in the global enterprise context. It’s clear that social activities need to articulate with business ones, that they’re not two separate bubbles : doing one’s job means mixing, articulating both and finding the right balance. Many businesses have the impression they’ve been asked to serve the Enterprise 2.0 cause for years for the Enterprise 2.0 sake, they now want to understand how Enterprise 2.0 can serve business, with concrete, logical and undisputable arguments.

In one sentence I expect a focus on business, execution and delivery, Enterprise 2.0 being not the final goal but only a means to serve business needs."

Franck La Pinta is Employer Brand Marketing Manager at the Société Gérérale HR department in Paris. He defines and builds the employer brand and the strategy of actions to implement, including the use of web and social media for internal and external objectives. Naturally, he is especially interested in the HR aspects of Enterprise 2.0:
"I want to meet companies which are changing in 2.0 and which are leaders in the use of social network to help this conversion. I am especially interested in hearing about the part of HR in Enterprise 2.0 and how HR can help the conversion of companies."

Dr. Frank Schönefeld is working for the German T-Systems Multimedia Solutions GmbH as Chief Technology Officer and one of the drivers of the Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 topics at the company. He is responsible for innovation and technology development and deployment.
"I think the E20 Summit is "the" conference for applied Web 2.0 in companies, organizations and institutions. Hence I expect a lot of best practices from people working in this field. On the other hand I know that a lot of forerunners (and -thinkers) and individual experts are there - so the definition of what is leading edge in Enterprise 2.0 in Europe is given there. And this tension of expert knowledge and applied practices makes the conference that useful.
At the conference, I first hope for some clarification of the relationship of Intranet 2.0 concepts and Enterprise 2.0. Second I would like to get some input with respect to activity streaming inside an enterprise - seen as a generalization of the microblogging (Twitter-)concept. That is that my SAP application tweets to me, that some of my account numbers have been changed."

Jamil Ouaj is Communications Manager at the Deutsche Bank, Germany. He is responsible for the worldwide and cross-divisional online communication in the division Group Technology and Operation at Deutsche Bank. He is actively involved in the strategy around Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 and leads on internal projects such as dbWiki, an online encyclopaedia and dbClub a social networking platform.
"The E 2.0 Summit is a great opportunity to get a refresh on the latest happenings and developments of Web 2.0 in corporations. I am very much looking forward to hearing the different enriching views and information from Enterprise 2.0 experts and to having in-depth discussions and exchange with the participants of the E 2.0 Summit. It will be important to focus the debate on the ground of reality so it is fruitful for all.
Hot topics will certainly be the question of the adoption of the E 2.0 tools and E 2.0 world in general: How are they established nowadays? What strategy is being implemented in the different corporates to increase the adoption? What are the next concepts and developments within the various corporates with re to E 2.0? And finally is there, in spite of exceptions, a global shift from bottom-up to top-down in all this, and if yes how does it look like?"

Analyzing the results of the N:Sight Research GmbH Social Messaging vendor study is in progress. We are able to provide some insights with this article. Most solutions are available as SaaS (Software as a Service). They follow the trend to use applications on the web to avoid hosting it on a server. It’s a good solution as well to test Social Messaging with a small team. Some companies won’t allow running a system outside the firewall. 70% of the solutions allow an installation on a server and 50% offer both solutions.

Read more on N:Sight blog:

Social Messaging vendor study - first insights

Two weeks ago we published the concept of our new Ambassador Program for this year’s Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT and the application period started.

Now, the twelve ambassadors for the SUMMIT are finally chosen - here they are:

Gabriela Avram (Ireland)

Isabelle Ayel (Spain)

Xavier Bartholomé (Belgium)

Michael Dekner (Austria)

Cecil Dijoux (France)

Andreas Genth (Germany)

Dr. Marco Kalz (Germany)

Martin Koser (Germany)

Hanns Köhler-Krüner (Germany)

Gudrun Porath (Germany)

Emanuele Quintarelli (Italy)

Ton Zijlstra (Netherlands)

All twelve are highly motivated E2.0 bloggers and enthusiasts. As ambassadors, they get free entrance to the conference and communicate, promote & represent the E2.0 SUMMIT to the whole E2.0 community and the public at large. We are looking forward to their coverage of the E2.0 SUMMIT before, during and after the conference!

1.) What is your name?

Harold Jarche

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

I’m an independent consultant and writer and I help organizations make sense of the Web for community building, collaboration, professional development and communication.

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

I have seen over the past two decades how work and learning are merging as we become more networked and our roles get more complex. I believe that democracy is our best structure for political governance and that it should be the basis of our workplaces as well. As work and learning become integrated in our networked society, I see great opportunities to create better employment models. I know that we can do better than structured hierarchies of power and control, cookie-cutter job descriptions, generic work competencies and boring, dead-end jobs.

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

E2.0 is about a shift in how we do work, moving from hierarchies to networks. Complex work in networks means that information, knowledge and power no longer flow up and down. E2.0 means giving up control and harnessing the power of networks. It is as radical as was Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management in 1911.

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

The potential of E2.0 is organizational survival. Enterprises that don’t share knowledge and power will meet the fate of Enron, BP and others. They will be overcome by complex events that cumbersome industrial age decision-making processes cannot manage.

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

The main threat is cultural. People in charge of most organizations today got there by doing things the traditional way of the MBA mindset. They feel they do not need to change and few are willing to give up power and authority, even if it is for the good of the organization.

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

Networks, Wirearchy, PKM

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

• A framework for social learning in the enterprise
• A personal learning journey
• Agility and autonomy

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

1. Jay Cross
2. Thierry de Baillon
3. Jane Hart

Social messaging enables users to interact and share information. It includes micro blogging and micro sharing, but the most important aspect is to provide and receive information. Users can collect it as in passing.

Read the full article on n:sight // networked insights blog:

Social Messaging – A Definition

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."

Today Twitter is a mainstream application. Millions of people are using it for sharing information and networking, because it’s fast and useful. What does it mean for using social messaging in enterprises?

I think we’ll see the same development like on the web with Twitter. It will work in companies as well. I had the following topics in mind coming to this conclusion.

Simplicity

It’s very easy to use. Just a link and a very short introduction are needed to start. You don’t need training. Simplicity is one reason for a low acceptance threshold.

Fast
Nowadays people expecting news just in time when information appeared. Social messaging is the right tool to meet this requirement. The communication with social messaging is close to real time. Any new topics are spread out immediately.

Getting to the point
The number of characters is limit. It’s not possible to write long prose. So the authors are forces to write short and concisely. The readers are getting quickly the point of the message. Social messaging save time and the content is better.

Networking
A user just need to invite people to follow him/her and a network of people is set up. From that point they can start to share information or to interact with each other.

Company Indicator
Social messaging shows the pulse of the organization. You can easily see which topics are hot. It can be used by the employees not to miss important information or by the management to do the right decisions. It’s like making the kitchenette public.

Notice board
Everybody can write his/her own notice board. It can be used by the CEO or every employee. You just need to take care that the right people follow you or select the right authors to follow.

Several news channels in one
On TV/radio you are able to get information from one channel only at the same time. You need to switch, if you want to get information from several topics. With social messaging you are getting information about all topics you are interested in close to real time. You just need to follow the right guy or to monitor the right terms. A list with most used terms will help to identify new important news

Expert finder
Searching for topics you will easily find people which are writing a regularly about this topic and you can easily check whether they are creating useful content. You can just follow or contact these experts.

Chat
Chat is used in private live by a lot of people or by some companies. It’s really useful to communicate with other people, but the existing tools are not so good chatting with several people at the same time. On social messaging the user can easily decide whether he will chat with the community or with a certain person only. To find older posts is also possible. Older posts are stored locally on chatting tools.

Scalable
The size of the company doesn’t matter. It can be used easily from a company with 5 people or a big group can use it. It’s only a matter of some server capacity and memory.

Social messaging is a real good connector and communicator. It’s probably the best news board which can be used in a company today. We will see it in a lot of companies soon.

We are providing a seminar in Germany about social messaging. Please, use this link for more information:

“Social messaging im Unternehmen”, 13.July 2010 in Frankfurt

I would like to know your optinion. Therefore I created a poll about this topic.
Do you think that social messaging will be the killer application of Enterprise 2.0?

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

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