1.) What is your name?

Cecil Dijoux

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

I have been working in the IT industry for about 20 years in different european countries for different types of companies (SMB, Global Companies, Start-up, Public organizations) in different industries (travel, Apparel, Mobile services).

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

Regardless of all the differences, I have always been confronted with the same problem : knowledge management in highly complex environment. And it has never been as criticicaI s in my current position. I am currently working as Support Team Lead in a software company making PLM solutions for the apparel industry. PLM are enterprise-wide complex solutions, both from the functional, technical and integration perspectives. The latter being critical : different people from the company with different types of knowledge, globally distributed. I have started to blog 3 years ago on different topics (culture, web, society, social networks) and working on this Enterprise 2.0 presentation back in October 09, I’ve just found out that all the different topics I was addressing until then (bar the music maybe) was all somewhat relevant and interlinked in the E2.0 context. This has been a revelation : all of a sudden, I’ve found my blogging voice. I love this idea of participating to this great global conversation.

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

Empowerment of knowledge workers. I have read quite a few books on management and I am a big fan of Peter Drucker. I believe Enterprise 20 is a great opportunity to fulfill moder management promises : participatory management, trust, emergence.

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

I am a strong believer that Enterprise 2.0 is key to have more engaged people. And this is a win win : more engagement leads to happier people, a more innovative context, more productive company, more transparence, less politics etc … Elyahu Goldratt said that all companies have three goals, or rather they have one goal which is to make three types of people happy : shareholders, customers, employees. Enterprise 2.0 is spot on to achieve these 3 goals.

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

I believe that the main challenge is a cultural one for adoption. And it lies at middle management level. Bringing internet tools into the enterprise brings the internet culture : disintermediation, reputation, emergence etc … And middle managers usually are not very comfortable with these principles. Michel Crozier, the famous french organizations sociologist wrote about this middle management resistance to change.

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

Culture, Social, Digital

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

1. Enterprise 2.0 : leveraging collaboration platforms to foster knowledge, innovation and productivity
2. Enterprise 2.0 explained to our managers in 10 principles
3. Réseaux sociaux dans l’entreprise.fr : les 5 obstacles culturels (French only)

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

1. Vincent VanWylick
2. Frederic Brunel
3. Oscar Berg

This is a short notice that there’s now a video of an interview I did several weeks ago with T-System MMS’ Frank Schoenefeld on the topic of Enterprise 2.0, adoption challenges and outlook for Enterprise 2.0. Then his book was still in the making, but he’s finished now and I will try to get my hands on it ASAP.

Björn published the video on the German-based ECM WORLD weblog - I embedded it here directly (but be aware it’s in German!)

Sevenload Direkt

Frank Schoenefeld is a deep thinker on Enterprise 2.0 and his contained views and perspective is doing the field a good service. Moreover he’s got first-hand experience as T-System’s MMS experimented a lot with internal social software, and has evolved quite a bit since then. See for example Franz Patzig’s account of the changes he’s seen while coaching them with their internal BarCamp-alike, Open Space unconference initiatives. So, even when he’s a CTO by title, there’s much to learn from him on questions of implementation and utilization of internal collaboration platforms, and we’re glad to have him amongst the speakers at the upcoming E20SUMMIT.

Update: There’s also a long interview with him at besser 2.0 too, but it’s in german language again.

1.) What is your name?

Mark Masterson

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

I’m an enterprise architect with CSC, and a blogger. I’ve worked as a parasite of the financial services industry in Frankfurt and London for the last 20 years. I’ve spent the last two years researching, and working with clients of all sizes on cloud computing, SaaS and Enterprise 2.0. Other research interests and development experience are focused on BPM and distributed systems in enterprisey organisations, as well as systems management and performance engineering. In a previous life, I was a UNIX sys admin, and have the scars to prove it. I also jumped out of helicopters, and drove trucks full of missiles around in the dark whilst going entirely too fast in the first Gulf War. I am a founding member of the 2.0 Adoption Council.

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

I started working for CSC, and discovered that they needed it. Seriously. In 2006, almost immediately after joining CSC, I blogged about the terrible state of things there, from my perspective. Mere days after that, in the process of researching what might be done about that, I stumbled across the term “Enterprise 2.0″ for the first time, and wrote a slightly snarky post titled “OMG, it’s Enterprise 2.0!“. In that post, I concluded by saying

“In any case; to the Woodrow’s, Phil Wainewright’s and Susan Scrupski’s of the world, here’s my message to you: I’m CSC, I get it, and I’m working on it. Watch this space.”

Now, in late 2009, I am helping to lead an initiative at CSC to roll out Jive’s SBS platform to all 92k employees, and I am convinced that it is already transforming the company.

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

It’s about enabling collaboration, which itself is dependent on the visibility of the social graph and structural holes within it and the information that has value to the organisation, as well as sophisticated and low-barrier means of communicating about these things. There is a host of enabling technologies, but in my view it’s about what they get used to do. It may also be about the emergence of a new form of organising people and systems to do work, but the jury will be out on that one for quite awhile yet.

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

It enables more efficient, functionally rich business interactions, at a lower cost. It may also help free the battery humans.

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

Fear of change, as with any significant, transformational event. I am also deeply concerned about people underestimating its impact — something I think that happens largely because they can’t see the forest for the trees. At CSC, we’ve seen things like the outsourcing team in Viet Nam coming into direct contact with fierce debate between a cadre of green Australians and a cadre of climate change sceptics in our Texas offices. These sorts of cultural collisions are new — not in their nature, of course, but in their scope and speed. We aren’t well prepared for that.

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

Troublemaker, thinker, sexy (the latter being a placeholder for the attribute “tends to crack completely inappropriate jokes”).

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

• Social processes: if you add social software to BPM, do you get Enterprise 2.0’s killer app?
• Structural holes, or “Why is Enterprise 2.0 a good idea?”
• Can social software “work” in Germany?

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

• James Governor
• Simon Wardley
• Lee Bryant

1.) What is your name?

Susan Scrupski

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

have been tracking the evolving sector in Enterprise 2.0 since 2006. I am primarily interested in the adoption challenges of Enterprise 2.0 in large organizations. I am very interested in products and platforms in the space, and I’ve launched the world’s first private customer community for early adoption at www.20adoptioncouncil.com.

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

I was first drawn to tracking the SaaS market, but then veered toward the Enterprise 2.0 sector.

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

It’s the introduction of social and collaborative principles to the large organization. It involves the use of certain technologies, but is centered more squarely on a profound change in accepted organizational behavior and a philosophical reinvention of work.

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

Increased employee loyalty, merit-based recognition, greater agility to leverage human potential, lower IT costs, faster results, improved decision-making.

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

Corporate politics, fear of loss of control, corporate-wide strategic vision for Enterprise 2.0, silos, security, governance.

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

Community organizer, Agent provocateur, Friend.

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

• http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/04/state-of-enterprise-market.php
• http://itsinsider.com/2008/06/16/a-years-summary-of-personal-reflection-ii/
• http://itsinsider.com/2008/04/22/corporate-antisocial-behavior-the-enemy-is-us/

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

• Oliver Marks
• Dion Hinchcliffe
• Andy McAfee

1.) What is your name?

James Dellow

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

I’m a consultant working in the field of social computing. I work for Headshift, a specialist social media and enterprise social computing consulting company. Headshift was founded in the UK, but has been operating in Australasia since 2008.

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

Many people mistake me for a ‘techie’, but I have never worked in an IT department. During the early part of my career I found myself in the position where I was the person who was the go-between for business and IT. I became interested in Enterprise 2.0 through my experiences in knowledge management (formed at Ernst & Young), and then later as a consultant working with a range large organisations (particularly with CSC) - as a result I have an appreciation for both the organisational and technology challenges that Enterprise 2.0 aims to change.

I also completed a Master of Business & Technology at the University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia) in 2005 - so my feet are firmly planted in the grey area between social and computing.

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

I approach Enterprise 2.0 with a management perspective - heavily influenced by systems thinking - that takes into account the relationship between the social and technology aspects of applying Web 2.0 inside an organisation. This means results will vary between organisations because of the complexity of those relationships and the environment where they exist.

In practice this means I don’t believe simply installing a blog or a wiki makes you ‘Enterprise 2.0’. But equally, without the technology its doesn’t work (at least at the scale we need - Andrew McAfee captured this well in his SLATES model). In my own thinking I’ve tried to distinguish between Enterprise 2.0 and other applications of Web 2.0 inspired information management technologies under the theme of Intranet 2.0.

Also, despite my background in knowledge management, I don’t treat Enterprise 2.0 as the next iteration of knowledge management although its is very complementary.

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

I’ll answer this in a round about way. When we look at the evolution of our modern industrial society (embodied in the classic organisational structure), information and communication technologies (ICT) have been at work in the background supporting and shaping this evolution. Critically they have allowed organisations to scale, while also extending their organisational span of control so they can achieve their objectives in at least a semi-cohesive way.

However, with this growth and globalisation the actual environment for organisations has become more complex. As a result the command and control approach that ICT supported in the past is failing to keep up.

To operate effectively, we need systems that allow people to work in a way where social controls direct action and allow problem solving, not fixed hierarchical processes that are inflexible and often out of date. The experience of Web 2.0 on the Internet is already demonstrating that there is a better way for organisations to learn from.

This doesn’t mean the future won’t be transactional either - Amazon and eBay are all examples at one end of the Web 2.0 spectrum that mix efficient high volume transactions with social controls.

But as we move towards Enterprise 2.0 we need to remember that its not just about changing technology, at the same time society and the shape of organisations will also be changing. As a result, the workplace might also become a little more fun and interesting because of Enterprise 2.0.

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

To quote Clay Shirky,

“Every story in [Here Comes Everybody] relies on a successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users”

This gets back to the point that there are set of complex interactions at work that determine how successful any organisation can be with adopting Enterprise 2.0 as a way of organising. However, many people choose to only focus one aspect. This is a recipe for failure.

On the organisational side, Enterprise 2.0 is a clear challenge to existing organisational power structures. Information is power only if information access and flow can be controlled - but Enterprise 2.0 changes that rule and some people will be threatened by it.

On the technology side many of the strengths of the Web 2.0 model are hidden from the average Internet user - however, when we move Web 2.0 into organisations much of that hidden Web 2.0 infrastructure (both technology and people) is missing. Unfortunately, traditional enterprise IT management often works at a tangent to the Web 2.0 approach, so there is some ‘pain’ associated with this change.

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

business-and-technology, systems thinking, collaborative

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

You’ll also find more articles here, but three selected are

• Intranet 2.0
• Sharepoint and Enterprise 2.0
• Error! This Enterprise upgrade requires Change Management 2.0 is installed

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

• Jon Mell
• Kim Sbarcea
• Cai Kjaer

1.) What is your name?

Henriette Weber

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

I tell people that I am a social marketing rebel extraordinaire - which means that I use social marketing to transform businesses inside out. My tagline is that I make companies not look like asses online and make companies into thrustworthy, remarkable and authentic players in the world of both the social web - but also offline.

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

I got into E2.0 because I can see there’s a lot of things about 2.0 that companies haven’t grasped yet. It breaks my heart. Basically I think that the companies who are not succesful in enterprise 2.0 will probably not survive in the long run - there’s so much out there that companies need to embrace to follow the demand of their clients. Which they don’t do because they can’t measure it (and how stupid is that ?). I followed up by creating an ebook on “why every company should be a rockband” which evolves the rockbandism that is needed for companies to become different kinds of companies. I really firmly believe that rockbandism is putting Enterprise 2.0 on the map and mind for a lot of companies that haven’t been thinking about it before.

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

My understanding is that Enterprise 2.0 is the answer to the transformation we need companies to do these days. We can’t keep building companies on structures that date back to the industrial revolution. Whatever Enterprise 2.0 may be for you - it makes you more human and likable - and how cool is that?

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

We as companies get to learn how to be close to our clients - not using scattergun techniques to talk to them, but where we have them in our backhand if we need them for something that gives value to them.

I think the potential is limitless - also because we can use Enterprise 2.0 to become better companies, in terms of user experiences and of making people become better.

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

The challenges are the companies themselves. My sense is that the system is the failwhale here - seriously it are the structures we have been taught as kids and as companies. That failing is bad and control is good. The web is anarchistic. The challenge is that companies can’t or won’t embrace the chaos of the internet these days.

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

socialmarketing, returnoninvolvement, rockbandism

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

Uh hard - currently that would be, (but they change all the time):

• http://www.toothlesstigerpress.com/rockbands - my ebook on rockbandism
• http://henrietteweber.com/2009/04/15/thoughts-on-shared-branding/ thoughts on shared branding
• http://henrietteweber.com/category/boatworkingpan/ - my shared economy IRL startup: “coworking boat pan”

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

• Brian Solis
• Paula Marrtila
• Annika Lidne

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?

• 20+1 reasons not to launch an Enterprise Social Software project
• Enterprise 2.0 : my predictions for 2009
• My definition of enterprise 2.0

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

• Jon Husband
• John Tropea
• Gil Yehuda

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?

• To Be or Not to Be a New Media Strategist
• How Blogging Brings Dialogue to Corporate Communications
• Multilingual (a collection of my works around language issues in online settings)

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

• Suw Charman-Anderson
• Euan Semple
• Henriette Weber

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:

• Predicting the battle over collaboration infrastructure in 2009
• Forrester on the Future of Enterprise 2.0 Technologies
• The Rules of Engagement in Community

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

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?

• On designing microinformation apps & experiences
• On micromedia convergence
• On learning in microcontent-driven environements

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.”