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“)

To support our efforts in bonding the community we organizing some bi-monthly “Enterprise 2.0 Community Luncheons” in different cities in Germany - and would like to motivate anybody who is interested in doing so elsewhere. We announced the first round of Enterprise 2.0 Community Luncheons for Hamburg, Cologne and Frankfurt on our XING group “Enterprise 2.0″.

I am happy to see anybody at one of these events - or organizing some more community bonding events elsewhere.

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?”.

Preceeding the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT (you know, Oct 7. & 8. in Frankfurt) Björn and I are planning to host a BarCamp-style meetup of Wiki-consultants, -developers, -users and all people generally interested in enterprise wikis. Given that Oct 6 is pre-conference workshop day anyway we’ve thought that WikiCamp ‘09 is a nice and fitting name. That said, we’re organising a nice venue and will look for all the necessary gadgets like beamers, working wifi etc. (and I guess we’ll also find some sponsored catering). Ideally a diverse mix of people from the german (and international) wiki community will then get together, and take the opportunity of an idea and/or concept development day, where:

• the people behind various wiki engines can meet up, interact and network
• lessons learned can be exchanged and told, bridging the experiences of both wiki practitioners and consultants
• we’ll discuss the future role of wikis in the context of Enterprise 2.0
• we’re open for more ideas, hints, wishes and proposals, … (go ahead now, voice your ideas in the comments, what do you think?)

Update: Here’s the WikiCamp’09 wiki, to collect and systematize ideas.

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.

Underneath the curtain of a static web announcement lots of content-related discussions regarding the program of the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT 09 are happening. From a small circle we have now extended our advisory and feedback board to a number of well-known Enterprise 2.0 experts including (in alphabetical order of their lastname) Lee Bryant, Willms Buhse, Bertrand Dupperin, James Governor, Dion Hinchcliffe, Martin Koser, Mark Masterson, Joachim Niemeier, JP Rangaswami, Frank Schönefeld, Luis Suarez, David Terrar, Thomas Vander Wal and Simon Wardley. After this preparation we will enter a more public discussion about the to-be-discussed topics as well as speakers and panelists to get involved at the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT - 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 means we want to reflect the common E2.0 discussions esp. from a European viewpoint and to attract big parts of the E2.0 industry members.

A already finalized thought about the E2.0 SUMMIT is the main emphasis on structuring the discussion around the “ROI” (and its synonyms like ROC, RONI, metrics, value/benefits) question of Enterprise 2.0. And we found our own notion for it - we want to discuss the “collaborative performance”. Therefore I already invited Kjetil Kristensen, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). He holds a PhD from the Department of Engineering Design and Materials at NTNU, and is focusing on collaborative performance in dispersed teams. He will give us an insight talk to his research results.

But the idea is not to stop the discussion on the conceptional and theoretical level. As Joachim Niemeier has put it in our internal discussion:

“bridging ’strategy’ and ‘implementation’ by modern (management) thinking is critical. [Discussion the performance and metrics of E2.0 .. ] we should at least start with the classical candidates: Balances Scorecard, Maturity models, (European) Excellent Models, Staged Approaches. Even more: we could organize a ‘metrics workshop’, we could have a look at ‘Wiki visualisation’ and so on.”

Does anybody has some further practical insights on these approaches?

Some other question that is still driving the advisory and feedback circle is the discussion about to what extend we have to discuss the infrastructual convergence and commoditization of Cloud Computing, Unified Communications and Collaborative Systems at the event. If you know Simon Wardley, you know his comments about this in advance - as he argues:

“There is a strong connection between E2.0 and Cloud Computing but it is in the underlying themes.”

My question is not the relevance of the underlying developments in general but the relevance to the corporate world in continental Europe. As I see most of the E2.0 interested corporate people at the very beginning of the E2.0 (r)evolution, I don’t (yet) see this aspect as a more than 1 or 2 sessions covering topic. Or can anybody give me some counter-arguments?

And while we are discussing about E2.0 services - I also have the question about the importance of a “launch pad” for E2.0 services at the event. The boundaries of the enterprise in terms of integrating external application in business processes are very tight IMHO - in continental Europe. But as an industry event we need to leverage the chances for the service provider … so yes or no?

I would be very happy if I could stir up the discussions about the program with this post - so I am eager to read your feedback.

On CeBIT friday - right after the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT Meetup - Dion Hinchcliffe hosted the first european Enterprise 2.0 TV show. On the panel there were:

• Coremedia’s Sören Stamer
• Frank Schönefeld of T-Systems MMS
• Craig Hepburn of Opentext (see my interview with him)
• Aidan Troy from IBM
• Peter Fischer from Microsoft and
• Steve Bjorg from Mindtouch.

Quite an impressing list of experts and I am looking forward to checking out the video recordings on the Dion’s Enterprise 2.0 TV show. Here’s a nice picture of the relaxed wrapping-up after doing the show:

This post-recording picture by Dion Hinchcliffe - standing in the background is Martin Lindner, see his expert profile here, talking with Frank Schönefeld is Kai Nehm (picture above by him)

Coming Friday the Enterprise 2.0 community (includes you, the reader of this community blog) is invited to meetup and mingle at the E2.0 Meetup on the CeBIT Webciety Area. I can tell you that I am definitely looking forward to this, especially after having been extremely busy the two days before.

So come over into the T-Systems lounge, listen to the panel discussion with Dion Hinchcliffe, Dr. Frank Schönefeld (T-Systems), Aidan Troy (IBM), Peter Fischer (Microsoft), Craig Hepburn (OpenText) and Sören Stamer (Coremedia) and get into the conversation with fellow Enterprise 2.0 people.

Please register at the Facebook event page if you want to participate (if you can’t be in Hanover for the CeBIT don’t worry - the CeBIT Webciety programme will probably be streamed online, follow Webciety news on Twitter to stay up to date). If you’re interested in coming to the event but need a ticket read on:

Participants of the E2.0 Meetup can receive a complimentary (free) ticket for CeBIT by following this procedure:

1. Contact me (either via Twitter or Web) or comment/trackback this post if you need a ticket for the CeBIT. Please state your mail.
2. You will receive a ticket code via mail.
3. After a registration on the CeBIT website you will be sent an email
4. There will be an PDF-file attached to the email
5. Print this PDF-file.
6. You have a one-day free ticket!

Though targeted on the adoption of social software, the discussions at last week’s Enterprise 2.0 FORUM have always emerged to the question about the ROI of the Enterprise 2.0 strategy very quickly. Especially the talk of Dr. Frank Schönefeld turned the discussion towards the economic measures and dimensions of Enterprise 2.0 (he promised to me that an English version of his talk will soon be available on Slideshare!).

In times of budget limitations and reductions this is quite sensible - but no clear and satisfying answer can yet be given for this question. Therefore the already defined punchline “Improving Collaborative Performance” of the planned Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT in October is more than relevant for these times of economic tension and I want to share my thoughts about the concept of this planned event with you on this weblog as well as to encourage you to give me some feedback.

So what’s the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT with the claim “Improving Collaborative Performance” about? The core discussion of this year’s E2.0 SUMMIT addresses the conceptional and organizational dimensions of gaining collaborative advantages and efficiency by adding social and collaborative action as well as intelligence to the company. Cutting it down - the questions to be discussed are the following:

1. How to conceptionalize, realize and gain collaborative performance?
   => discussing the value chain of an collaborative enterprise, the economics of sharing, processes of open innovation
2. What are the main drivers for collaborative advantage and efficiency?
   => discussing communications, processes, infrastructure as well as (self-)management
3. What are the key values of a collaborative culture?
   => discussing the key characteristics as open, transparent and decentralized as well as others - and how to realize the cultural change in a multinational environment as we have in a lot of European companies
4. How to introduce and adopt social and collaborative approaches within the company?
   => discussing the steps of adoption especially in the context of multinational companies

As you might realize - I am very much focussing on the extracting the economic benefits of Enterprise 2.0. I have therefore invited Kjetil Kristensen from Norway who did very interesting academic work on this topic. Furthermore Dr. Frank Schönefeld of T-Systems MMS is also working on a conceptionalization of the business values of Enterprise 2.0. Who else is focussing on this topic - please contact us!

Besides the visionary talks I am also looking for straight-forward cases as the high-procentage of practice talks is one of Kongress Media’s own key value propositions - in comparison to other conferences. So I appreciate any proposal of anyone or any matter for this visionary event. We hope we will support and trigger innovative ideas before and after the event - it’s our goal to help bond the European Enterprise 2.0 community more closely together.

Besides my german language summary at frogpond I suppose it’s important to compile some impressions for the non-german speaking Enterprise 2.0 community. And when one of your keynote speakers travelled all the way from London to Cologne it’s even more timely. I already did my best in twitter-translating the german-language talks for him (neat if you have companies like Vodafone among the best practices that present in German but sport english slides). Yes, David Terrar triggered off the conference day with a well-received talk on community building in the Enterprise. See the embedded slideshow below on “How to build vibrant communities”.

While I knew David before (we first met at the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 in Varese, but didn’t find any time then), I enjoyed it a lot to have time for discussions this time - and we’ve had great conversations both at the pre-conference dinner and on conference day itself. He and Thomas Koch of Kongressmedia made me miss a good part of the afternoon starting session.

And here’s the Harvard video of John Chambers David mentions (seen also at Oliver Marks):

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