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!)

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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.

I have done a short online video interview with Gonzalo Higueras from blueKiwi and Yan Neugebauer from Prisma EDV yesterday. Unfortunately we have had some technical problems regarding the quality of the recording for the desktop sharing and therefore for the demo (well, I guess Skype is not the best solution for that).

Anyway - the video still gives a good idea of what blueKiwi is about: It’s a kind-of enterprise microblogging solutions like Yammer or Communote. But as in comparison to the other approaches it differenciates in terms of structuring and organizing the discussions. While Yammer is very much focussed on group discussions and the idea of Communote is centered around a semantic tagging approach of micro discussions, blueKiwi (from perspective) is very much focussed on the discussions of ideas/issues/documents. So I would say this is more suitable to use cases where the motivation is to initiate some specific innovation processes - where as the other two approaches are better off for enhancing a general flow of communications within the company.

Another aspect that was pointing out by Gonzalo is the integration possibilities with document management systems (while this is very interesting the standardization of this approach has to be checked!). At this point the developments in the solutions market will be very interesting - as big players with strong DM background as IBM, Microsoft, Open Text and ORACLE are strongly pushing into this.

So here we go with the video:

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The last two days there has been some discussions (see here and here) about the announcement regarding the alliance of Hinchcliffe & Co with Michael Krigsman’s Asuret for a so-called “Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0” service offering. As Dion Hinchcliffe was in Munich until today I took the chance of interviewing him what this buzz is all about - and we talked about this new approach as the next stage in the maturity lifecycle of E2.0 consulting service. But here we go - make your own opinion about it:

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What do you think about the approach? Is the “proactive risk monitoring and governance” (as I would call it) the missing point for securing the success of E2.0 initiatives?

Last week there was another Enterprise 2.0 related event in Germany - the DMS EXPO. Martin and Thorsten Zoernert discussed the event and the open question to be addressed by the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT already here and here (unfortunately only in German!). One of the featured speaker at the conference of DMS EXPO was Stefan Pfeiffer, the German market manager for the IBM Lotus-brand. He is an well-known market expert on the topics of ECM/DMS as well as E20 - as he is in this business already quite a while. As IBM is a sponsor of our event I thought it might be of interest in having a short interview with him about Lotus Connections, the views on the German E2.0 market and his expectations for our event. And as we did this quite interactive on Facebook - I am happy to share his answers here with you also publicly.

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21st century media literacies from JD Lasica on Vimeo:

This is a nice set of interviews, well rather short one question one answer dialogues with my friend Euan Semple.

Euan is a very thoughtful person and - obvious with his experience on the use of social media within organisations - the fifteen questions get good answers. And I like his little remarks (like social media being so un-business like from the outside, how it helps to keep the I small in RoI).

Right, to get involved with the social web both inside and outside of an enterprise does not present an immediately obvious ROI like process automation of old did. But it can empower organisations to become more adaptive and able at learning, ie. improving knowledge retention, creating collaborative environments, and encouraging a knowledge sharing culture.

Unluckily the player can’t be embedded (well, embedding 15 videos is a drag anyway) so you have to got to guruonline to watch them.

Euan explains how most companies are starting to feel pressured to jump head first into social media because everyone is talking about it, although it would be imperative for most businesses to at least investigate social media, throwing too much at it isn’t necessarily going to help.

Euan also acknowledges that social media can be perceived as being a tool for the younger generation, but that generation is now starting to work within your organisation and with them they will bring the tools which they’re used to using on a day to day basis. This doesn’t mean you need to ban social networking sites like Face Book and MySpace in your office, it means you need to encourage these staff to use these tools in a manor that can benefit your business and you need to trust them to do this. Euan justifies this by pointing out that they may be more likely to ask their existing peers within that network if they encounter a problem rather than going through the usual time consuming channels. This example is not just limited to the more junior employees; encouraging staff to participate in social media can speed up trouble shooting and enable any solutions found to be shared.

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“)

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

After occupying roundabout 80% of the screen in my interview with Vassil Mladjov of Blogtronix, I am really glad that Jeff Schick, vice president social computing of IBM is featured a bit more in the interview below:

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We talked about his views of Enterprise 2.0, the changes the social web brings to the corporate environment, working smarter with social software in the enterprise, how innovation may profit from social software enabled workspaces and how Enterprise 2.0 fits into the overall strategy of IBM. And later on Peter Schütt, key knowledge management person at IBM Deutschland GmbH is entering the room and the three of us talk about cultural differences between Europe and the U.S.

There are a lot of noteworthy things Jeff says, let me underline just some of them:

• technologies for business purposes that improve performance - that’s Enterprise 2.0
• the real E 2.0-RoI is in efficiency, competitiveness (yes, client satisfaction), and innovativeness
• we’ll see much more adoption - a lot of drivers are combining here, like e.g. digital natives entering the workforce (and people bringing capabilities they’ve learned outside into organizations)
• Jeff was talking about IBM citizens, not employees - I really like that quite a lot, it’s telling something about valuing (and respecting) the people inside your organization

ps. this was my first take of video interviewing at this year’s CeBIT, my questions sound a bit muffled, but anyway - it’s supposed to be more about the guest and so both camera and microphone were centered on Jeff.

Next part of the CeBIT interviews - up on the slate is Vassil Mladjov of Blogtronix. Like in the interview with Craig Hepburn both of us had lots of fun (notice Vassil handing me a big pack of dollars for supporting further “independent consulting and analysis” …).

With Vassil I talked about the benefits of integrated platforms vs. best-of-breed solutions, his perspective on the european market for Enterprise 2.0, how to enter this space and how smaller vendors compare to the big solutions that are present as well.

See for yourself, and please excuse that the interviewer is occupying like 80% of the screen space, when recording this it looked OK …

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Disclaimer: I was joking up there, no money was exchanged (and if it were we wouldn’t have taped it …)