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Archive for the ‘Expert Profiles’ Category

Experts profile: Bertrand Duperrin

1.) What is your name?

Bertrand Duperrin

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

I live in Paris, France. I’m consultant at blueKiwi Software, in charge of helping our clients to build and implement their social networks strategy and drive results through it.

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

In fact I started from E and got the 2.0 part by luck.

For years ago I was working at a leading management consultancy firm. I was involved in many projects aiming at improving leadership, making people collaborate more effectively and I realized we were stuck in old principles that prevented us from fully achieving our goals.

At the same time I launched a blog, just to discover what it was. A few weeks later I was in contact with many professionals, having very interesting discussions with them. At this moment I realized that I was achieving in my private life what I needed to do at work and that it was easier for me to share and discuss ideas, to connect with people, outside that inside my company. I thought there was something to learn from that experience and started to focus on “management 2.0″ in summer of 2005. Then I slowly got closer and closer to the Enterprise 2.0 topic. I joined blueKiwi in its early days in 2006 because it was an unique opportunity to put my ideas at work in a 2.0 minded company which goal was to empower such ways of running business.

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

It’s a wide concept in which so many things were put that it’s very hard to really express the whole concept. According to me Enterprise 2.0 is two things :

• new management rules to run businesses in the current context, taking both economic issues (knowledge economy) and environment issues (social economy) into account.
• using the right technology to empower it.

I want to make it clear that in my understanding, organizational and managerial issues come far before technology.

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

The main potential is to align businesses with their environment. I mean that the way companies operate is more and more disconnected to what’s happening outside of their wall. The consequence is a systematic incapabilty to improve their internal efficency and to achieve what their environment expects from them. What means :

• Building a “pull” organization that is aligned with the market and client’s needs in order to deliver more value not by increasing pressure on people but by removing organizational constraints.

• Enable company-wide collaboration by an optimal (human) ressources sharing in adhoc processes. Each employee being a specific resource because of its own expertise and being able to deliver a specific service, this approach leads to building a Service Oriented Organization.

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

• Think enterprise before think 2.0
• Don’t mistake enterprise 2.0 for web 2.0
• Focus on adoption instead of deployement.
• Understand that the purpose of corporate communities is not the communities themselve but getting things done, delivering a process.

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

management 2.0, alignment, systemic

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

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

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Experts profile: Stephanie Booth

1.) What is your name?

Stephanie Booth

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

I’m a Web 2.0 Strategy Consultant from Lausanne, Switzerland. I help my clients learn about social media and understand how it impacts what they are doing, and how best to use it to reach their goals.

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

Ten years ago, I became fascinated with the way the internet was connecting people and changing the way we communicate. I soon started blogging and became a very active online citizen. I spent a few years working in a big company and quickly understood that the online tools I was familiar with could help the organisation work more efficiently, and make the employees’ lives better. After a couple of years as a teacher, I became a full-time Web 2.0 consultant focusing, amongst other areas of interest, on the use of social media in the enterprise.

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

Enterprise 2.0 is as much about introducing modern tools in the workplace as addressing cultural, management, and strategic issues. Web 2.0 tools connect people directly and tend to chip at The Machine. The core principle would be relaxing command-and-control, which goes with empowering employees and putting the humans back in charge (vs. The Machine).

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

Given the right context and commitment, E2.0 ideas can lead to increased visibility and findability of knowledge internal to the company (what some would call “better Knowledge Management”), less silos and duplicate (or even contradictory) projects, more organic connections across hierarchies, increased employee satisfaction and recognition, better use of ressources (intellectual, skillsets) already present in the company.

What I see as the most important potential of introducing this new mindset in the enterprise is making companies and organisations better places to work in, for employees and managers. There is a huge amount of waste of human resources in the business world due to unhealthy or even toxic work environments. By reconnecting people through their human-ness, E2.0 has the potential for helping make workplaces healthier and more enjoyable, in addition to the more purely business benefits.

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

I think the main challenge to E2.0 is the command-and-control culture, which goes hand-in-hand with the blame culture: if something goes wrong, it has to be somebody’s fault, so to avoid being the one at fault, one takes steps to control people or processes around oneself as much as possible.

On a more concrete level, resistance to change is clearly an issue. When introducing new tools, processes, or mindsets, one needs to be very attuned to what is going on psychologically with the people involved. Resistance is normal, and forcing through it is usually counter-productive. Understanding the context and the company culture in which one is introducing E2.0 tools, methods and mindsets is crucial.

Luckily, E2.0 can be introduced gradually in a given setting. The software involved is usually cheap (if not free) and readily available. It is possible to stage series of small-scale experiments or encourage individual initiatives by making top-down buy-in explicit. E2.0 does not have to be a revolution.

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

culture, strategy, enthusiastic

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

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

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Experts profile: Gil Yehuda

1.) What is your name?

Gil Yehuda

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

I’m an independent consultant – which is a fancy way of saying that I’m in between jobs right now. Most recently I was the Forrester Analyst who covered Enterprise 2.0 for Information and Knowledge Management clients.

Prior to that I was an Enterprise Architect at Fidelity Investments, where I implemented E2.0 tools and behaviors in some of their larger business units.

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

When I was an Enterprise Architect, I realized that I had tons of responsibility but no authority. I also discovered that no matter how much I knew about my field, there was always someone who knew more than me. So rather than trying to be the smartest and the most powerful architect – something I knew I’d never be – I chose to be the most helpful and socially-connected architect. I put together a virtual organization using social networking tools and this transformed the relationships between the development, architecture, and engineering groups. We proved to be more agile and less expensive. Then other groups sought my help to copy the model for their initiatives. Later I learned that I was following the E2.0 themes, so I dove in to learn more about the field that I was instinctually drawn to.

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

At its core, E2.0 is a shift in mindset and behavior. In many cases, the new behaviors need to be supported by new tools.

I see three phases to the E2.0 idea. In the first, organizations realize that facilitating knowledge exchange between employees who are connected by weak-tie relationships is an essential part of running a modern scalable business. In the second phase, Enterprises reach outside of the corporate walls for cooperation with customers and partners. In the third, we lose the name “E2.0” and just say “this is who we work with and how we work.”

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

The success of many modern corporations is based primarily on the effective use of their knowledge economy. Their knowledge economy is composed of knowledge, people, and the effective exchange of knowledge and people. The E2.0 idea seeks to provide companies with the tools and behaviors that facilitate a knowledge economy using the proven successes of the Web 2.0 Internet. In the most basic sense, E2.0 is not an optional set of tools that companies can choose to budget for, or defer. Businesses will eventually adopt the behaviors that E2.0 supports at its core, or will fail
to compete with those who do.

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

I see three main challenges to the idea:
1. Timing is essential to the success of an E2.0 initiative. Most organizations start too late.
2. E2.0 must acknowledge that companies have to follow rules, regulations, and risk management processes. Unfortunately, these rule are often used to stifle innovation rather protect interests.
3. Lack of technology integration is a barrier. Companies want E2.0 tools to fit within their infrastructure and leverage their existing investments in enterprise software.

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

Insightful, Collaborative, Passionate

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

In addition to the papers that I wrote for Forrester clients on the Forrester site, I’d include these three articles, one of which I wrote:

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

What a difficult question — only three names?! There are so many. OK, I’ll try.

  1. Jessica Lipnack
  2. Bill Ives
  3. Rachel Happe


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Experts Profile: Martin Lindner

1.) What is your name?

Martin Lindner

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

I am a consulting researcher, or a researching consultant for “Enterprise 2.0″ and “Learning 2.0″. My field of expertise is microcontent/microinformation, and how it affects the workplace, the enterprise, and indeed the knowledge workers themselves. I’m working out concepts how new clouds, flows and feeds can be designed that help people to swim in the sea of (micro-)information?

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

I come from academic Media Studies, was a digital Web-immigrant after buying an iMac in 1999, becamea e-learning professional fundamentally frustrated with “e-learning” from the start, soon got heavily involved in the “Web 2.0″ before it got that name, then I worked four years as Principal Researcher for a small “Research Studio” that tried to develop “microlearning” and “microinformation solutions”, acting like a research-driven start-up. I did a “microcontent widget” development project there, and some Information Management consulting

From 2005 to 2008 I’ve been program chair of the “Microlearning” conference, which was all about “learning and knowing in microcontent environments” (a.k.a. “Web 2.0″, “the cloud”). We had brillant international experts in the field which came to be “enterprise 2.0″ right from the start. So I became a node and a a catalyst in an emerging international network of experts, entrepreneurs and practitioners from established organisations and enterprises.

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

E 2.0 is the effect of Web-technologies and Web-practices within the “walled garden” of the enterprise. Like the tagline of Lomdon’s brilliant E 2.0 pioneer Headshift says: “Smarter, Simpler, Social.” One may add also: smaller, cheaper, more flat, more human, network effects by default …

Right now, I see three natural starting points, from where one may end up with an E 2.0 concept: (1) needing more dynamic and effective forms of knowledge circulation; (2) needing more direct, spontaneous, authentic forms of internal and external communication; (3) needing to create more simple, intuitive and self-organizing workflows for modern knowledge/information workers. Historically, (1) and (2) were represented by “wikis and blogs”, but then, with the new wave of feed-based meta-applications, we came to learn that the whole Web 2.0 and E 2.0 thing is all about easy creation and circulation of microinformation.

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

Every enterprise, even if it is just consisting of one person, is existing on three levels: (1) on the level of management (the abstract structure of functions, roles and budgets); (2) on the level of teams/projects (the “we”-perspective); (3) on the level of the single worker (the person staring at a PC/laptop screen and wielding a mobile phone). In traditional enterprises, the connections between these three levels had been hardwired. The building was the hardware, the hardwired organisation itself was the Operating System. This has changed with PCs, with e-mail, and now, even more dramatically, with the impact of the Web. “Enterprise 2.0″ is the name for finding ways for organisations, teams and sigle workers to adapt to the resulting “Digital Climate Change”.

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

Today, most enterprises are made of structures and ideas from quite different stages of evolution. There are elements from the 1950s (the bureaucracy of “line organisations”), from the management theories of the 1980s (like project management, the fantasy of controlling everything with numbers and charts, etc.), and now, increasingly, also from the business and work philosophy of software-driven start-ups.

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

pragmatist, ethnologist, analyst

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

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

  1. Lee Bryant (CEO, headshift.com), because he is the walking impersonation of E 2.0 as it should be
  2. Thomas Vander Wal (InfoCloud Solutions), because of his both practical and visionary work on Info Clouds and Folksonomies
  3. Teemu Arina (Dicole Oy), another E 2.0 impersonator, also a pragmatist and avant-gardist at the same time
  4. and (bonus!) and Chris Langreiter (langreiter.com), because he is a brilliant exponent of the kind of humanities-informed software development that is the real driving force of Web 2.0 innovation, and will have to drive E 2.0 innovation too: “E 2.0 is not made of people. It is made of people who make software apps that make communications that make people getting sucked in.”

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Experts profile: Dirk Röhrborn

1.) What is your name?

Dirk Röhrborn

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

I am Co-founder and managing director of Communardo Software GmbH. At Communardo I am responsible for the software development of enterprise 2.0 solutions (based on platforms like Atlassian Confluence and Microsoft Sharepoint) as well as our enterprise microblogging online services Communote.com.

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

Enterprise 2.0 has been my main area of interest right from university - without the ‘2.0′ name of course. As a student I developed collaborative document management and customer relationship management solutions based on the groupware Lotus Notes at firms like Price Waterhouse and IBM Germany. In my first job I helped to build a team of consultants for knowledge management at a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom. In 2001 we started off Communardo. Since then, our main topics have always been communication, collaboration and knowledge sharing solutions for business customers.

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

For me, enterprise 2.0 stands for the combination of two fundamentally important concepts: an open-minded collaborative company culture and the widespread use of social media in business. In both terms we are rather talking about paradigm shifts in the business world than looking at specific methodologies or tools.

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

An open-minded corporate culture unleashes the creative potential and physical strength of employees and stakeholders within a company. Web 2.0 or social media tools like wikis, blogs, social networks or microblogs help them to communicate and collaborate better and more efficient to achieve their targets. While the industrial revolution was all about making the labour workers more productive, enterprise 2.0 is all about making knowledge workers more efficient and foster engagement and self-fulfillment at the same time.

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

The main challenge IMHO is to find a way to change an existing corporate culture towards the right direction, i.e. from a command-and-control to a participatory style. From a technical perspective, the main challenge is to build tools that are as simple and ergonomic as possible. Especially the last two issues have been our main concern in software development recently

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

enterprise, communication, collaboration

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

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

  1. Joachim Niemeier
  2. Frank Schönefeld
  3. Martin Koser

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Experts profile: Euan Semple

1) What is your name?

Euan Semple

2) Who are you and what are you doing?

I am an independent consultant helping large organisations understand the web and what they can do with it.

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

I managed the introduction of weblogs, wiki’s, and online forums at the BBC 10 years ago - long before Enterprise 2.0 or even Web 2.0 were even thought of.

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

It was basically Andrew McAfee’s attempt to map what was happening in the Web 2.0 environment into the organisational world. It was more than just a technology but also the behaviours and practices that would need to change as a result of it.

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

There is the potential to revolutionise the world of work. The relationship between employees and employers has been changing anyway but the advent of new communication technologies that make it very easy for employees to communicate with each other allows for a completely new ways of organising work. Much of the administrative and bureaucratic work that takes place in businesses becomes unnecessary as information flows more readily around the business. This will mean managers learning a whole set of new skills and ways of influencing people.

6) What are the main challenges and threads of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

One of the main challenges is just how different this is from what people are used to. People are used to hierarchically controlled communication channels and clear, relatively slow changing, working practices. The pace of change and unpredictability undermine many of our normal ways of doing things. This is very unsettling for people and it should never be underestimated the degree of readjustment that change on this scale calls for.

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

social, inspirational, practical

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

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

  1. Doc Searls
  2. David Weinberger
  3. Stowe Boyd

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1) What is your name?

James Governor

2) Who are you and what are you doing?

I am an industry analyst, who founded my own company, RedMonk, which we like to think of as “open source analysis”

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

We live it. RedMonk began as a pretty traditional boutique analyst firm looking at enterprise IT, but our extensive use of blogs and social media, and deep exposure to open source business models, led us into the Enterprise 2.0 space. We see ourselves as bridge builders between the traditional enterprise and the “cool kids”.

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

E 2.0 is about focusing on people and community, within your organisation, and investing accordingly. IT shouldn’t be there to replace people through automation, but to augment their capabilities.

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

To become more creative. Is it likely a traditional enterprise would create a Google for example? With E2.0 thinking it’s a lot more likely. Traditional organisations often require employees to leave in order to innovate. Enterprise 2.0 encourages and nurtures employee innovation.

6) What are the main challenges and threads of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

The cultural changes required to support less hierarchical working patterns are the biggest obstacles to *anything* 2.0…

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

Extrovert, wide-ranging, fun

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

  • http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2005/01/13/things-to-do-in-the-analyst-busi ness-when-you-are-dead/
  • http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2007/07/27/why-open-source-software-is-soci al-media/
  • http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2008/03/13/15-ways-to-tell-its-not-cloud-co mputing/

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

I will give you 4 -

  1. Stephen O’Grady, co-founder RedMonk
  2. Michael Coté, RedMonk analyst
  3. Tom Raftery, RedMonk analyst to cover our new sustainability business
  4. Tim O’Reilly

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  • 1 Comment
  • Filed under: Expert Profiles
  • It’s been a long time for this “sleeping beauty” to awaken again, but now it’s just the time to get things going again - because there are some exciting community events ahead. For example the second Enterprise 2.0 FORUM on Feb. 12th in Cologne with Dave Terrar and a lot of different German cases - starting from A as ABB to V as Vodafone. We have just begun with our pre-conference interviews - and in the notion of the community blog I’d like to publish an English transcript of the interview with Dr. Frank Schönefeld, COO of T-Systems Multimedia Solutions:

    1) Dr Schönefeld, you are a speaker at the upcoming E2.0 FORUM in Cologne and will be having a talk about the de-mystification of Enterprise 2.0. What can we expect? Can you give us three keywords prospecting your talk?

    The notion and idea of Enterprise 2.0 has been recently surrounded by some myths - for example we are speaking of “the dawn of the emergent collaboration”, of “wikinomics” or the power of “everybody”. What I am aiming for is to clean up the myths to reveal the core idea - in the hope something will rest.

    2) Your talk is focussing on the structuring the value proposition of enterprise 2.0. What is your motivation behind this approach?

    Enterprises are not buying any myths in times of crisis. They only get convinced if they understand what costs savings, productivity increases or new opportunities can be realized [by this apporach] within the organization or with partners, customers or any other stakeholder.

    3) The last E2.0 FORUM has shown, that successful E2.0 projects are characterized by the following: “Think Big, Start Small and Move Fast” What do you think about this statement?

    I believe that the initial phase of social software as the new thing has already passed the enterprises. Enterprises have made their first experiences and for the most of them it was just another YANT - Yet Another Nice Tool. In my opinion we have to settle the ground for the conviction that todays known Intranets will change within the next five years and that Enterprise 2.0 will give a lot of input to these. Therefore - “think different and act” - would be a better statement in my beliefs.

    4) In regards to your systematisation what is your initial point to start from? Is it the target dimension to start from to gain the needed momentum for the project?

    I believe you have to analyse the target dimension closely to understand and target the benefits. But in the adoption process the benefits can be realized and summed up on different dimensions.

    5) How do you think about Enterprise 2.0 regarding the ongoing economic situation? Is enterprise 2.0 a way out or a deadlock for the situation?

    Forrester has reduced its optimistic market forecast during the last weeks but is still predicting 15 to 25% growth for the Web 2.0 Collaboration Software Market. Not bad for a crisis, isn’t it? But all jesting aside we are just testing the acceptance for the topic in the market ourselves. And we have to constat, that the interest is stll existent but the path towards a decision is a long one.

    What do you think about the myths and the value proposition of Enterprise 2.0?

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    Expert Profile: Lee Bryant

    1) What is your name?

    Lee Bryant

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

    Co-founder and director of Headshift

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

    I founded and ran a web agency in 1996 that specialised in knowledge communities, as we called it then. I left to set up Headshift in 2003 when we saw the beginnings of social tools and their impact. Prior to that my background was in politics and media, where I learned the value of building your own networks and how to write by synthesising and linking. This all led me to conclude that introducing lightweight, human-scale social networking techniques to enterprise IT could have the potential to transform the inner workings of modern organisations.

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

    E2.0 is about the consumerisation of enterprise, in the sense of transferring what has been shown to work well in the Web 2.0 world behind the firewall. It is about smarter, simpler, social tools that support individual needs and empower people to get their job doen easier and faster and with less time cost, but in a connected way that enables the organisation as a whole to benefit from the network effects of aggregate behaviour.

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

    • Cost saving
    • Time saving
    • Greater ambient awareness leading to collective intelligence
    • Simpler, low friction collaboration
    • Bringing greater flow to information sharing
    • Generating signals of relevance and importance to create more focus
    • Building a web of links between people and content that can enhance organisational DNA

    6) What are the main challenges and threads of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

    The biggest threat is from entrenched, backward IT departments who are not focused on business needs Related to that is the threat posed by misunderstandings of the nature of risk In terms of operationalising E2.0, the culture of shrink-wrapped software sales is potentially a problem, as this has conditioned IT people to believe that tools solve problems, which means they are always looking for a one-size fits all software solution to human problems.
    Finally, business cultures that place process above people and do not trust them to fulfil their work can also pose barriers to adoption of social tools.

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

    participation, human, engagement

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

    9) Please give us three names of collegues that you would refer to as brother-in-spirit?

    • Ross Mayfield
    • Jevon MacDonald
    • Livio Hughes

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    There’s an english summary of the latest pre-conference-interview up at my site (”Pre-Conference interview: dbWiki - building a Web 2.0 corporate knowledge base“). Joachim Niemeier talked to Dr. Matthias Büger, Vice President, Group Technology and Operations and Jamil Ouaj, GTO Communications of Deutsche Bank AG.

    One thing I analyzed is the understanding and rationale that’s standing behind the support and introduction of corporate social networks. Well, as always there are different takes on this subject, and you may find flaws in my analysis, from the blog post:

    [...] I guess that for employees it’s important that their professional networks aren’t confined by the narrow limits of one organization (they’re no life-timers, are they?). And I am seeing more and more “natural optimizers of personal professional value” - these people value and master relationships no matter what company the other nodes are in, companies need to loosen up their borders anyway and they’re doing it in other places too [...]

    The other thing relates to project management for Enterprise 2.0 initiatives, here I would argue for a more light-weight approach, but I can surely see their point too. Here’s a clip of what I wrote:

    [...] Banks they put so much attention on risk management, governance and diligence that it seems hard to approach things differently. See, while I hold project management dear, I also like the light-weight aspects of Enterprise 2.0 and the swiftness it brings. Hence I would rather argue for the creativity and agility of “planned and controlled experimentation” than the security of coordination meetings, processes and all (”Abstimmungsrunden und Teilprozessen”).

    Well, this promises to be an interesting conference, let’s explore this space in real-time and if you’ve got remarks and/or ideas feel free to leave them here or over at my personal site.

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    E 2.0 links

    Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT at Facebook