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?"

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!

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:

Sevenload Direkt

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."

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?

The Enterprise 2.0 Forum in Paris this week started with a review of the Boston event two weeks ago by Richard Collin and Bertrand Duperrin. They introduced some Enterprise 2.0 best practices. One example was the successful CSC Project. SCS started Enterprise 2.0 as a pilot project and reached round about 45.000 of their 90.000 employees after 6 month. You can read some more details on my article: Recap of the E20 practices at csc

The Boston organizers did a survey about the challenges of E20 adoption with the following results:

1. Resistance to change 52%
2. Difficulty in measuring ROI 42%
3. Integrating with existing technologies 41%
4. Security concerns 32%
5. Budget 25%
6. Product knowledge 23%
7. Tools not enterprise ready 22%

Major topics are the resistance to change and the difficulty to measure ROI. Budget is only for a quarter of the companies a problem. You can see on this result that it’s very important to run an E20 project as a change management project. Motivation of the employees is the key for success.

Measuring ROI is still a problem. It’s possible on some topics like reducing meetings etc. but it’s difficult to show a complete picture. Top management would like to see these figures, but it’s probably not the best way to examine only figures like the ROI.

The quotation of JP Rangaswani described it probably the right way: “I’ve never seen a document describing the ROI of restrooms or urinals.” So it’s mandatory to use Enterprise 2.0, but I think the management won’t approve E20 projects just because of a statement like this. We need to continue describing the ROI as good as possible.

On the afternoon I joined the open space of the event. Culture change and the adoption process for E20 was the result of the brainstorming to prepare the workshop of the groups.

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!

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

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

The International Forum on Enterprise 2.0

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

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston

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

Value of the conference towards the E20 discussion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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