I attended a mashup* Event on Enterprise 2.0 in July at BT’s spectacularly plush little auditorium in London (you can watch the whole event on video at that link). It was a pleasant evening, characterised by hearing JP Rangaswami speak (the man is a walking recruitment advertisement for BT: “This could be your boss. Why work elsewhere?”) — and finally getting to meet him, briefly, in the flesh — as well as by my friend Simon Wardley’s purported swan song of an Enterprise 2.0 talk (and if you know Simon’s love of ducks, you’ll understand why that was a crack most worthy of a wince).

But the most interesting thing for me about the evening was the audience. This was not a tech heavy audience: most of the folks attending were business, with a smattering of vendors hoping to sell to them. And of the business types, the majority tribe was marketing and communications people. They seemed to be there to try and understand how they could use these new tools to enhance their role and control the impact of them (which, if done properly, ought to be a win for everybody: consider the meme of the “Authentic Enterprise”). That was an interesting coincidence for me, as I had, just that week, been engaged in a bruising battle within my own organisation over the idea of opening up the floodgates and allowing the outside world to see (via blogs) some of our talented people actually thinking and working. My primary antagonist in that debate (still ongoing) is marketing (supported by their stormtroopers, the lawyers). So I couldn’t resist the temptation to generate some heat, and, as the panel opened up for questions, the one I posed was this:

“There’s a common refrain heard in the echo chamber of Enterprise 2.0 bloviation that ‘IT is the enemy’: that these tools empower business people to work around a lumbering and prohibitive IT, yada, yada. But are IT people really E2.0’s greatest foe? Or is it marketing / communications? Is it the people in charge of ‘the message’, who are now confronted with (some) loss of control over it?”

That generated some mild uproar, as expected, and a number of “That’s nonsense” responses from the crowd. But to be honest, none of the answers we heard that night from the panel really took a strong stance on the issue. So, to my mind, the question is still an open one.

What do you think?

This is just a short notice that I blogged a summary of the interview our event moderator Joachim Niemeier did with Christian Kuhna, Head of Internal Communications of the adidas Group, who is presenting at the upcoming Executive Forum at my site:

• usage areas of Enterprise 2.0 at Adidas
• Adidas’ current intranet situation, and the aims and goals they are pursuing
• who is engaged as an inner-company proponent of Enterprise 2.0
• Mr.Kuhna’s expectations for the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Forum

As the interview is only available in german language (you can find the full text of the interview at the conference site) I thought it a good idea to try giving you an english writeup - and I couldn’t resist adding some remarks and thoughts to it. So while I am looking forward to meeting Mr.Kuhna at the event to discuss things, until then I would also appreciate your take.

After the introduction note by Martin I want to briefly say hello to the readers of this blog. I am the conference chair of Kongress Media and therefore in charge of several E2.0 events - for example the Enterprise 2.0 Executive FORUM on Sept. 18th in Cologne with Suw Charman-Anderson and JP Rangaswami as international speakers as well as several well-known German E2.0 practioneers and experts. Do not miss the Early Bird price of 690 EUR - valid until Aug 15th.

Next in line after the E2.0 FORUM is the Web 2.0 EXPO EUROPE in Berlin - for which Kongress Media is a partner and I am supporting TechWeb as a member of the advisory board. The W2E EUROPE is not a specific E2.0 event, but will also cover this discussion in parts - also with a talk by JP Rangaswami and some more interesting speakers.

After the W2E EUROPE the ECM WORLD SUMMIT on Nov. 10th - 12th is the next, major event in our event schedule - covering the E2.0 aspect from a more “old school” angle. The ECM WORLD SUMMIT - formerly known as Contentmanager.days - is the industry event for the information management industry in Germany. It discusses trends and success factors from “old school” information management (including content, document and knowledge management) towards new approaches on a more participative level. E2.0 will be a keynote topic - and I am still looking for the right speaker on this. Feel free to propose me some appropiate experts!

Following the ECM WORLD SUMMIT we will have a rather smaller but nonetheless interesting event on Intranet Management in Switzerland on Dec 2nd - the Swiss Intranet FORUM. This event will also not be exclusively focussed on the E2.0 discussion, but as Intranet projects are on the change towards the E2.0 paradigm this topic will take a substantial part of the discussion.

Well - and then some kind of an Enterprise 2.0 Area at the CeBIT 2009 will be our following event - as a new follow-up of our successfully organised CeBIT Content Management Arena @ CeBIT. As Martin already mentioned it in his post we are still collecting material and suggestions for this. So far the following facts are set: there will be an E2.0 area at CeBIT 2009 in Hall 6 as an open conference with national and international speakers, best-practices and some kind of open and participative format each day. Join in, give us your thoughts and suggestions and be part of a great E2.0 community gathering!