Two days ago Simon Wardley published a short list of people you want to know for answers to questions within the field of emerging enterprise technologies - while being very pleased that he mentioned this “very young” information ressource I would like to add some more people to his list:

Enterprise 2.0: Sören Stamer of Coremedia (though he is the CEO of a software company - he really changed his company by means of Enterprise 2.0 - he is also the co-editor of the very nice book “Die Kunst, loszulassen!” - see the video with his speach of the Enterprise 2 Open @ Cebit below ) same with Frank Roebers of Synaxon ( a big German based electronics reseller - German video interview)

Sevenload Direkt

As a warm-up dance for the Enterprise 2.0 FORUM on Sept. 18th in Cologne, Joachim Niemeier, the moderator of the E2.0 FORUM, conducted some interviews with our speakers. Below you’ll find a English translation with the key content of the interview with Prof. Dr Michael Koch of the Universität der Bundeswehr, München, who is teaching and researching in the field of cooperation systems.

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Questions by Joachim Niemeier (JN) / Answers by Michael Koch (MK)
JN: What are the key questions within the E2.0 area you are working on?

MK:

• I am working on this topic in two areas.
• First as a researcher (already since the times of CSCW and Groupware) on identifying success factors for the use of social software within the enterprise; esp. for the use of social networking solutions and open-source social software systesms.
• Second as a practioneer because my research group has the task of implementing a social software solution to support the collaboration in research and education at the Universität der Bundeswehr; within this area we are analysing and testing some kind of integrated blog, wiki and social networking solution.

JN: As you work on this topic already for many years let me ask you shortly whether Enterprise 2.0 is not just old wine in new skins?

MK:

• A lot of the questions within this field are the same; e.g. integration of the technical solution within the organization and how-to solve this integration from a sociological and technological perspective.
• But there is a key differnce towards the older days: while office automation, CSCW and Groupware have been set up and made to use within a “top-down” approach, the key idea of E2.0 solution is to let grow the use and utility of social software within a “bottom-up” approach - with the benefits of the individual as key target.
• Therefore the key element of those project is not anymore the acceptance of the technology but the motivation of people getting involved and participating.

JN: How would you explain the notion of Enterprise 2.0 towards a corporate manager?

MK:

• E2.0 is the use of flexible web-based tools to enable a better communcation and collaboration within the organisation.
• Though it is still about technology it is about the notion of technology to change something.
• Social software as the underlying technology approach can change the way communcation and collaboration is organized within the organisation towards a more flexible approach.

JN: How is Enterprise 2.0 changing the enterprise?

MK:

• Within the enterprises E2.0 is leading towards a more flexible, participative as well more integrative (in means of including customers, co-workers and partners) way of collaboration.
• This increase of participation will overcome hierarchical structures and their communicative limitations.
• This will lead towards changes because co-workers can access information easier.

JN: How is the key “promoter” for the E2.0 project in your organization?

MK:

• I think in this point the university is not very much different from any enterprise: the key “promoter” for the E2.0 idea are the member of the organization itself - means the academic research fellows and the students.
• Those know social software tools already from their private use - and want these also for work; e.g. a working groups wants a wiki to collaborate within a research project or others want somekind of blogging tool to support and inform their students.
• Also in a second point the academic organisation is not very different from the corporate organisation: the IT department does not have enough ressources to support these adhoc demands.
• Therefore my group is trying to develop an integrative solution while combining “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches. As in corporations we cannot force any department to use a solution, but we can make it easier to use it. Therefore we are analysing the requirements and want to choose the best solutions and provide advices to how to use this.

JN: What are the key barriers for the enterprise 2.0 topic? What are your advices for this topic?

MK:

• A big danger is that the topic is positioned too technical; a typical pitfal is to provide a technology but not to provide advices how to realize the benefits with it.
• Therefore we are not only installing a central wiki and a multi-user blogging solution within our organisation, but also are collecting “success stories” how to facilitat the benefits with these tools; that is what we call “user-orientated documentation” - we are not only documenting how to use the features of the tools but also what benefits they provide.
• From our experience it makes no sense of pushing the users in some kind of “formal template” approach (means providing templates for setting up informational structures); in the extreme case this will lead towards the avoidance of the new tools; this means we need some new kind of quality assurance for the usage of web 2.0 and social software tools within the enterprise; a good quality method is the “gardening” approach - someone is in charge for structuring the content and assuring the quality while not building barriers for the users.

JN: What are your three wishes regarding a successful E2.0 deployment in your organization?

MK:

• Actually it is just one big, but very concrete wish: social software solutions must be better integrative. So far the existent solutions are very modular in its own concept but very monolithic when it comes to the integration with other solutions; even open source solutions as WordPress or Twiki are very hard to integrate with each other; businesses need more complete solutions therefore I hope the open source solutions will grow together on a higher level.

JN: What are your expectations for the Enterprise 2.0 FORUM?

MK:

• I am looking forward towards an open exchange of information and hope to get to know more E2.0 practioneers as well as their cases and experiences.
• I will talk about two studies where we have evaluated the success factors of the use of social networking services within corporations; within the first study we have conducted an online research on what social networking services are, which functionalities they include and with what expectation they have been set up; in a second study we have analyzed case studies on the corporate use of social networking services and its challenges.

JN: What will happen when the generation Y will enter the enterprises?

MK:

• From my perspective today the students know a lot of tools and services as StudiVZ or Facebook; but IMO it is not clear to many students how these tools can be used effectively within organisations; therefore I believe that the students nowadays are not any further then the enterprises; but this generation will add some more pressure towards the enterprises in order to use social software tools - though they will not enrich the enterprise with some kind of application expertise.

JN: What role is web 2.o playing with the academic processes?

MK:

• I see some kind of single usage of Web 2.0 within the universities but cannot say that a lot of faculties or big parts of the academic institutions are using Web 2.0 intensively.
• There are some examples for using blogs and wikis to support the academic courses; a good appliance is shown by my collegue Barbara Niedner (http://www.unibw.de/sp/lehre/dozent?mid=2&id=29) with her courses on “Generation 2.0 - Kommunikationswissenschaftliche Betrachtung des Web 2.0″ (Generation 2.0 - from a communication science perspective on Web 2.0) or “Uni-Flirt Podcast”.
• With the academic research we are using the whole bandwith of wikis, weblogs (instead of mailing lists) and social tagging services; here you have to distinguish the use of tools within the closed context of academic projects and a public publication of information; we have experienced that the use of weblogs is not favorable for all kind of communications; and weblogs will also not substitute the classical academic publication processes; but if you want to approach some alternative target groups weblogs are a effective way of publication; e.g. in my research field of the “applied sciences of informatik” contacts to enterprises and practioneers is very important and for the dialogue with these target groups weblogs are very helpful.
• Also the networking within the academic sphere is slowly getting in motion; academic weblogs like the Wissenschafts-Café (http://www.wissenschafts-cafe.net) are being organised; and there are a lot of projects going on under different names like Grid, Science 2.0 or E-Science/E-Research - focusing on supporting the cooperation and the knowledge management within the academic sphere (see http://scholarz.net/, http://www.researchgate.net/, http://www.scilink.com/).
• And to mentioned as well - all those projects are been developed bottom-up.

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

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

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

1. What is your name?

Suw Charman-Anderson

2. Who are you and what are you doing?

I’m a Web 2.0 expert, and I provide advice and consulting for companies interested in improving collaboration and communication within their business.

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

I’ve been working as a Web 2.0 consultant for over four years, and I have focused much of my attention on understanding how and why some people adopt social tools, and others don’t. Social software is ‘elective’, so people can choose whether or not they want to use a blog or a wiki, so how do we introduce these tools in such a way that people are drawn to them? It’s an important question to address if social software is to be a success in business.

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

For me, Enterprise 2.0 is really about mending some fundamentally flawed business management ideas and practices. For decades, there’s been this idea that competition between teams and departments increases production, but instead it can cause unhealthy competitive behaviour that damages the not just the company’s profits, but also creates an unpleasant working environment. Co-operation and collaboration, on the other hand, can both help businesses become more efficient and productive, and can create a more collegial atmosphere which is more enjoyable to work in.

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

The careful application of Web 2.0 tools to the enterprise is a challenge, but companies that do so successfully can reap many rewards, including:

• reduce the duplication of effort by ensuring teams working on similar projects are talking to each other
• capture knowledge and wisdom through people’s natural desire to communicate, thus helping new starters get up to speed more quickly and ameliorating loss of knowledge when people leave
• easily share that knowledge across teams, departments and countries
• form tighter, more loyal teams by improving interpersonal relationships
• decrease the amount of email being sent by moving communications on to more appropriate tools
• improve collaboration by providing better environments for working together
• make data more findable, and re-findable, thus decreasing the amount of time wasted looking for information

There are many benefits to Enterprise 2.0, some of which can be realised very quickly and easily, but all of which can help create long-lasting positive change.

The main potential of the Enterprise 2.0 idea is something that I have touched on above briefly as well, which is capability to disrupt the traditional corporate space, bringing into the game concepts like corporate responsibility, ownership, accountability, trust, openness, flexibility in such a way that every single knowledge worker has got the opportunity to build further up on their passion for whatever the subject matter by reaching out, connecting and collaborating with other peers, in an environment where openness & transparency are key to help nurture a trustworthy environment where innovation is the main beneficiary. That’s the potential that Enterprise 2.0 has been having all along. Nothing to do with the tools, nor the processes. Just the people

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

Adoption can be a real challenge. The technology is cheap and easy to install, but unless some thought is given to what the tools are going to be used for, and by whom, they can end up languishing on the intranet, unused. Companies are happy to spend money on servers, software and licences, but are often reluctant to spend on the one thing that all Enterprise 2.0 projects rely on - people. I always recommend that companies start thinking about implementation, roll-out and adoption even before they have decided on what tools they are going to install. They have to have a comprehensive strategy that is focused on the users and how the tools are going to help them do their job on a daily basis.

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

collaborative, creative, curious

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

Google Tech Talk
Adoption Strategy for Social Media
The Importance of Pigheadedness

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

1. Euan Semple
2. Stephanie Booth
3. Kevin Anderson (my husband, so I’m a bit biased, but he’s done some truly ground-breaking work in the field of Journalism 2.0)

1. What is your name?

Luis Suarez

2. Who are you and what are you doing?

I am a knowledge manager, community builder and social computing evangelist at IBM. I work in a program within IBM Software Group to help accelerate the adoption of social software within the enterprise for all of the Sales workforce and, as an extension, for the entire of IBM. I am co-leading a community of over 400 Social Computing evangelists across IBM help bring forward some more awareness on the impact of Enterprise in the corporate world.

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

Initially, I got involved with Enterprise 2.0 back in 2002 when I was first getting exposed to blogging, both personal & corporate blogging, as a tremendous opportunity to offer knowledge workers with the possibility of having a voice on whatever the subject matter and share their passion with it. From there onwards, in 2003 I got started with my own corporate blog, behind the firewall, and from there onwards I became a social computing evangelist at IBM helping accelerate the rate of adoption of everything related to 2.0, not just with the social software tools, but also with the implications of the social aspects of the 2.0 movement.

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

My understanding is that Enterprise 2.0, just like Web 2.0 in the consumer space, has never been, and will never be, about the tools nor the processes, but about the people, and how they are now finally empowered to connect with other fellow knowledge workers to share their knowledge, collaborate and become much more innovative as a result of that. It is a changing game where productivity takes a new height and where interactions happen in a much more open, public and transparent space than anywhere else in the past, which surely shakes the ground within the corporate world, because everyone now is able to share that voice and their passion on whatever drives their day to day activities. To me Enterprise 2.0’s core concept is changing the workplace to make it a better place where knowledge workers will have learned how they are no longer in control, they are part of a conversation that they need to nurture on a daily basis and that they now have got a much more important job in helping foster their trust skills with other knowledge workers to continue collaborating and sharing what they know in a much more open & responsible manner.

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

The main potential of the Enterprise 2.0 idea is something that I have touched on above briefly as well, which is capability to disrupt the traditional corporate space, bringing into the game concepts like corporate responsibility, ownership, accountability, trust, openness, flexibility in such a way that every single knowledge worker has got the opportunity to build further up on their passion for whatever the subject matter by reaching out, connecting and collaborating with other peers, in an environment where openness & transparency are key to help nurture a trustworthy environment where innovation is the main beneficiary. That’s the potential that Enterprise 2.0 has been having all along. Nothing to do with the tools, nor the processes. Just the people

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

I think that the main challenges that the idea of Enterprise 2.0 face are actually the people themselves. The cultural aspects of changing people’s behaviours and how they need to understand that the way they have been working all along may not have been the most productive because of that risk control, secrecy attitude. It will require a substantial amount of effort and energy to over this challenge, because to me it is the only one that is prohibiting for a wider adoption of Enterprise 2.0 within the corporate world. The tools are now incredibly easy to use, the IT infrastructure is as robust as it ever was (And if not, people would move outside of the firewall, something most companies would not be able to afford), the processes get a complete re-work where openness and trust play a key role. And, in the end, like I have said just before, the main challenge is the cultural shift and how willing knowledge workers would be to make it happen. People need to understand that they need to begin feeling comfortable of having a public voice inside of the enterprise where their voices are heard and where they are part of a conversation, a mutual conversation where everyone benefits from. That’s our challenge to overcome.

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

Social Computing, Evangelist, Gran Canaria

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

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/jobs/29pre.html
http://www.elsua.net/2008/07/28/giving-up-on-work-e-mail-status-report-on-week-24-six-months-on/
http://www.elsua.net/2008/07/16/i-freed-myself-from-e-mail’s-grip-additional-commentary-part-i/
http://www.elsua.net/2008/07/16/i-freed-myself-from-e-mail’s-grip-additional-commentary-part-ii/

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

1. Martin Koser, Germany
2. Thomas Vander Wal, US
3. Ed Yourdon, US
4. Dennis Howlett, Spain (Bonus name! :D)

One mission of this site is the community bonding around E2.0 experts and practioneers. This said I want to start a series of expert profiles. For the beginning I will work through my network of people I know - but I am very open for any suggestions of people you know who are worth to be featured here.

There two more things I have to let to know about today - at first about this nicely growing Friendfeed room (http://friendfeed.com/rooms/e20). Come, join the room and share your insights with us - as Friendfeed is becoming more and more an effective, collaborative monitoring tool.

Next - as one cannot change group names on Facebook I have just created a new group under the title of “Enterprise 2.0 Community“. I see this group as a replacement for our “Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT” group that we have set up in December last year for the E2.0 SUMMIT in Hanover on March 4th. Hopefully everybody on the former group will also join the new group - so we can extend our discussions and knowledge sharing from here to there.

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

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

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

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

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