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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

YouTube Direkt

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

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

Hello again, sleeping beauty that you are - Enterprise 2.0 community. I am glad to be back and to have some good news for you: I am your freshly appointed community manager, giving you company right until the upcoming E20SUMMIT in Frankfurt, Germany, 6.-8. Oct. 2009 and probably consecutive SUMMITs too.

When Thomas Koch and Björn Negelmann of Kongressmedia asked me about this task I didn’t need much time to ponder - I knew both of them from various Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 events before, enjoyed their conferences several times and know that they’re both enablers and drivers of Enterprise 2.0 both in Germany and internationally. And we’re sharing enthusiasm for the opportunities that Enterprise 2.0 can bring and will cooperate now even closer to advance the field.

So, in parallel to me working as a freelance, independent enterprise collaboration consultant with frogpond I will also be your community manager, listening to your questions, ideas and contributions. And I will contribute some of those as well, and ask for your feedback. There’s lots of things on the slate, we’re planning to bring international “thought leaders” like Dion Hinchcliffe or Lee Bryant in touch with Enterprise 2.0-companies, -consultants, -scientists and -users - all this under the subline “E20SUMMIT - Improving Collaborative Performance”.

So join the conversation, of course here but also in the Facebook Groups Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT Community. Moreover, there’s Xing and LinkedIn ready to “bond the Enterprise 2.0 Community”. And there’s Twitter too, follow me there for #e20summit updates and “just-in-time” information (sorry, some german tweets may be in the mix).

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?

Or France, or Japan, or Brazil? Or, indeed, anywhere that is not an “Anglo/Saxon” culture? Now, wait, wait — before you flame on! (or worse), hear me out. It’s hard to talk about the issue I want to raise here without raising some emotional reactions as well — often rather heated ones. That’s understandable, but it may also hinder us from having a conversation about a very interesting topic.

Important caveat number one, therefore, is the one I raised in my very first sentence — despite my (deliberately) provocative headline, I think that what I’m about to speculate about applies to some degree in any society that that is not a progeny of England (and even that formulation will be fighting words for some in the USA, Canada, Oz, New Zealand and particularly Ireland or Scotland — but I am thinking in almost biological terms, here. You may well dislike your parents, but you can’t change who they are). I will use Germany as the basis for my speculation, because it’s the non-Anglo/Saxon culture I know best, and not because I want to pick on Germany or Germans in particular. I love Germany — it is my home; my wife, daughter, large parts of my family, and many close friends are all German. But I do believe that certain aspects of German culture, and their implications with respect to social software, can be used to illustrate points about a broader theme, and so I will use them to try to do so. OK?

This is slippery, and dangerous terrain, and it is essentially impossible to venture out onto it without falling, and making a fool of oneself. I will surely be no exception here. But I am convinced that there is something important lurking out on those dangerous plains, and I think we would all be well served by finding some way to call attention to it. What is Anglo/Saxon culture? What is German culture? How do they differ? Frankly, I’m no expert in such matters, and not really qualified to voice an opinion on them, in many people’s eyes. But I will now proceed to forthrightly go ahead and do so anyway.

And therein lies a fascinating difference between the two cultures: Anglo/Saxon culture encourages — even lionises — such acts. German culture does not.

Now, having said that, here comes important caveat number two: there is no such thing as absolute truth, and there are certainly no absolute truths with regard to sociology or politics or cultural differences. These are not binary states, of which I speak, but points near the median of a very analogue — Gaussian — distribution. For every rule, there is an exception, and indeed, the exceptions sometimes make the rule. Etc. I understand and acknowledge that. However, there is nevertheless value to be found in examining the median in such distributions, and when I say “German culture does not”, that’s what I am aspiring to do. OK?

It may be impossible to ever come up with “the” definition of something as amorphous as a human society or culture, but any fool can see immediately, upon leaving the one she was born into, and visiting another, that they exist. And that they have differences. These differences are typically expressed as stereotypes and prejudices, many of which are the product of nothing more than ignorance (and often, its correlate, fear). But some of these stereotypes will have a kernel of something approximating truth at their core.

Thus, for example, in 1758, the Württembergischer publisher Karl Friedrich Moser wrote: “Every nation has its principal motive. In Germany, it is obedience; in England, freedom; in Holland, trade; in France, the honour of the King”. This is an absurd exaggeration, verging on hyperbole, and particularly in the modern world, one which many Germans would vigourously object to — and rightly so. To the latter point, and despite that, I might respond by doing the following: let us fast forward the lens of our attention to the early 1970s. And turn that lens on the anarchist and terrorist elements that surrounded people like Baader and Meinhof. Even before violence became a tragic element of the student protests in the late 1960’s, there was an element of distrust and frustration with the established order that took the form of an outright contempt of reason — a disdain for Wissenschaft, and a belief in the instincts of the Basis (the collective) as a useful guide to behaviour, as opposed to reason. These sorts of ideas are the clear and unmistakable descendants of German Romanticism of the late 18th and early 19th century. And the contrast between these stereotypes — the idea of an extreme affinity for obedience versus the inchoate Sehnsucht and open contempt for reason embodied by Romanticism — is profoundly illustrative of the complexity of German culture. This is a culture that produced both the Prussian hierarchies of Bismarck’s Ämte, and the theories of Karl Marx. It has a long, complex and unique history, of which one quite prominent thread is an ongoing, recurring struggle between the needs and desires of the individual, and those of the group in which that individual resides.

The history of Anglo/Saxon culture contains such a thread as well. It is not necessary — or even useful — to engage in a conversation about the merits of these two contrasting threads. All that I wish to do is make the following point: in each of the two cultures, the thread exists, and they are different from one another. The history of the the struggle between the individual and his society is a different story in Anglo/Saxon culture than it is in German culture. And the product of these respective threads — the day to day realities in which we now find ourselves — are also different.

To what extent, then, can we expect that practices regarding social software, as developed and espoused by an English-speaking, Anglo/Saxon culture, to be a seamless fit in a German-speaking culture? I think it must be obvious by now that I think the answer is: to no extent at all. Indeed, to the extent that software of any kind embodies social and cultural norms, to what extent is it reasonable to expect that the design of a software artefact produced in an Anglo/Saxon culture will be optimal in a German one? Again, I think the answer is clear: it is not at all reasonable to expect such a thing.

On the other hand, we live in a “globalised” age, one where every culture is exposed to many of the same influences, to an extent never before known in the history of our species. Communication technologies — particularly television and the Internet — are the enablers of this. No culture now exists, on the planet, that has not been exposed, to some degree, to Baywatch. Many cultures — and certainly all of the more affluent cultures — have their own version of Big Brother — in Germany, this past month, the local version of the British reality show “I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!” was watched by an extraordinary number of people.

And lurking within that observation, I think, is the essence of a problem currently confronted — and as far as I can tell, largely unacknowledged — by social software systems in general, and certainly Enterprise 2.0 punditry in particular. Most of the social software currently “in play” in the market, and certainly virtually all of the commentary on the themes it provokes (like Enterprise 2.0) are products of Anglo/Saxon cultures — representative of Anglo/Saxon thinking. This is an understandable consequence of their provenance, perhaps, but it is nonetheless insufficient. Just as “I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!” can only be successful in Germany in a version that is German in nature (and then it can be very successful indeed), we are in need of an articulation of Enterprise 2.0 that is German in nature. And one that is Spanish, one that is Japanese, Russian, Chinese and so forth. Lacking such an articulation, we are likely to find ourselves lost in the quagmire of discussions that purport to be about “das Ding an sich”, but which are (also) about differences between two cultures. We need to tease those two thing apart from one another — such that, hopefully, we can concentrate solely on talking about “das Ding an sich”.

And to those Germans reading this who are now shaking their heads, perhaps annoyed, perhaps merely perplexed (and perhaps both), and thinking, “Why? Why do we need such a thing? What value is there in the Anglo/Saxon definition of ‘Enterprise 2.0′ that could possibly prompt me to want a German version of it?”, I would say the following. As someone who is in the rare position of being able to read something like Andrew McAfee’s definition of Enterprise 2.0, and “see” it with both the eyes of a native Anglo/Saxon, and (to some debatable but undeniable extent) the eyes of a German, I say to you: if there is a concept that is more uniquely, perfectly German than the one of “emergent structure”, implied by McAfee’s theory, then I would like to hear about it. ;D

So what would a German version of Enterprise 2.0 look like? What would it entail? Well, I’m not sure. But this forum is as good a place as any to debate and define it. Certainly, there are some obvious characteristics — German social software will need to have a slightly different relationship to hierarchies, authority and expertise than Anglo/Saxon software will. And German social software will have to take into explicit account both such “soft” factors, as well as the “hard” realities of everyday existence — such as German laws, customs and norms regarding things like privacy. But I am sure of one thing — without it, social software will not “work” in Germany. Or anywhere else.

What do you think?

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

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

• http://www.headshift.com/blog/2008/07/free-the-battery-humans.php
• http://www.headshift.com/blog/2003/04/readmedoc.php
• http://www.headshift.com/blog/2008/06/is-enterprise-20-about-selling.php

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

• Ross Mayfield
• Jevon MacDonald
• Livio Hughes

Following a link on Martin’s Delicious recommendations I stumbled upon Richard Dennison’s note about the new BT case study - which is already quite interesting to read (see also this video!). While being on Richard’s site I came along another interesting post about the Intranet evolution which again hijacked me to some thoughts about the decentralization of information systems as underlying idea of the Intranet 2.0 evolution. Have a look at my other post and let me know about what you are thinking.

Note: See this as a practical example of the creative power of social media - talked about here.

In a recent post Bernard Lunn of RWW lists some objections CIOs have towards social media. He comes up with the following issues:

Unpredictable scaling issues.

Security against IP loss.

Integration.

Loss of productivity.

Accidental brand damage.

I would say most of them derive from the software-as-a-service concept Bernard implies towards social media - but with all those open-source offerings like Wordpress, DokuWiki et al, elgg, Laconi.ca and others the corporate implementation of social media is not limited towards SaaS concepts. And regarding the best-practices like for example BT they are mainly installing and implementing software tools rather than using services (- I think I will interview JP on this at our E2.0 FORUM this week!).

The security discussion regarding “the loss of intellectual property”, the productivity issues as well as the fear of “accidental brand damage” are in fact some critical aspects that need a mind change - but for these cases the co-workers are faced mostly (at least for Germany) with the situation that they are limited to access only certain business sites. Maybe you are laughing but I know of a bunch of companies that are not even able to access Facebook, Twitter or even XING. So here you have the situation you don’t even think about social media but about the danger of the Internet.

So bringing back the question towards this post and asking you, my dear respective Enterprise 2.0 experts, what are your answers to the CIO’s objections?

The discussions about micro blogging services have reached another peak these days with Yammer winning the beauty contest at TechCrunch50. Despite all reservations regarding Yammer not being very innovative this incident at least turned on the light on looking at micro blogging services as Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Identi.ca or as well Yammer (see full list of tools at Jeremiah Owyang) as a corporate tool.

I do not want to rewrite everything that is said about corporate micro blogging but 1) give a little differentiation towards the discussions, 2) sum up a short recap of some interesting German discussions on this topic and 3) come up with some thoughts about some requirements on the side of the user’s perception and understanding of this tools.

Regarding the first aspect - in a lot of discussions about Twitter, Yammer and Co. I miss the differentiation between the scope of its application. Well - as Yammer provides micro-blogging towards a closed network, and Twitter is fairly open in the cloud - we have to distinguish the use of these tools for external corporate communications (for which Yammer is not very applicable) and internal communications and collaboration purposes. So for me corporate is not corporate - and if I want both with one tool neither Yammer nor Twitter is the right choice - implementing my own Laconi.ca instance would therefore be a better approach - combined with Twhirl as a desktop client.

As this community blog is mostly about internal communications and collaborations issues I will focus my second point on the German discussions that are limited to this. (Regarding the external communications potentials I wrote on our German Social Web WORLD Notizblog.) Joachim Niemeier - moderator of our upcoming E2.0 FORUM - had published a very nice post discussing some arguments for the application of these tools and some usage scenarios. His arguments for the usage of these tools include the following:

Provisioning of an easy-to-use communications instrument

Easy documentation of discussions and decisions in form of “micro-information”

Documentated contextual feedback on these micro-information (not getting lost in any email chain communication)

Provisioning of methods to identify the cooperation/project partner (within my organization) and to build up a common understanding of my work/project

Well - these arguments for these tools are kind of the aims as well as the problems to be solved. I would still add some more mediate argument. A lot of critics on social software - esp. on micro blogging services - includes the vast amount of noice and distraction it produces. As I wrote on our Notizblog regarding social media providing noise with social bindings and mechanisms for agenada setting I see this noise implies a great potential for any creativity process - this breaks the thing again down towards Tim O’Reilly’s word of “fostering the collective intelligence” with Web 2.0. Within the discussions and informations exchanges there are a lot of ideas for innovations - and esp. micro-blogging services are very effective on this because they limit the idea spreading on a number of characters and make it very easy to distribute them.

Regarding the usage scenarios Joachim Niemeier brought up the following ideas:

Defining processes

Debriefing projects

Project management in general

Dirk Röhrborn complented these thoughts with another systematic approach on the usage scenarios:

Micromessaging (short messaging)

Awareness / Serendipity (transparency towards the business activity)

Microdocumentation (structured documentations)

Microlearning (learning in small units)

And yes - here I also would add the item of “Supporting creativity processes”.

Last but not least - I would like to start a discussion about the requirements to introduce these tools towards my organization. As an social software idealist I instantly started a Kongress Media network on Yammer after I heard about it - because as a geo-dispersed organization we are very much suffering from the information overload the email exchange is bringing to us. (Therefore I am eagerly following the results of Luis Suarez’ experiment!) But still - I believe that micro blogging could solve some of our problems - but my folks are very hardly adopting to any kind of social tool - and at last to the newest gadget that is out there in the world. So how do I get there? Dirk Röhrbein is writing in his post about the understanding that is needed for the success of these tools. So I assume we need Twitter to succeed for the masses before micro blogging can be implemented in a substantial way - as weblogs also had to be adopted by the masses before corporate blogging had become acceptable. But maybe it only lacks the best-practices. In the discussions at Joachim Niemeier’s post Martina Goehring as well as Martin Böhringer are talking about some micro blogging best-practices - maybe I or Joachim Niemeier can convince them in writing down their experiences in a guest post at this place - until then I open up the discussion to let you tell me your experiences.