Recently, OpenText has announced very loudly an “integrated approach to Enterprise 2.0″ (see this page). As Craig Hepburn, Director of the Social Media Strategy at OpenText Web Solutions Group, is part of our upcoming conference I was quite eager what this buzz is all about.

We talked about 30 mins about the solution approach, the market and its development. Here are my notes to the interview:

• The OpenText 2.0 strategy consists of several product components - the more traditional compenents come from the LiveLink (for internal collaboration approaches) and Vignette (for external approaches) product. On top OpenText offers an updated version of the FirstClass groupware and messaging solutions. Besides traditional groupware and messaging functionality it provides a social network feature that brings a web-based social application towards the OpenText document and content world underneath.
• Like the other big players with ECM background this approach (1) provides a holistic and integrative view to the enterprise (if integrated the right way!) and (2) enhances the 1.0 document-/content-related business process by social information - but (3) is therefore also limited to the boundaries of these content/document object and the structuring of the information by business processes (in contract towards to the more flexible wiki information structure).
• Craig Hepburn points out the importance of the cultural background of companies - in this he sees also the main difference between E20 projects (and the E20 adoption in general) in the US and in Europe

For the full interview watch this:

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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.

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?

Unfortunately the processing of this video at the Sevenload site took more time than expected. Anyway, in the following you find a nice fireside discussion with Dion Hinchcliffe - interviewed by Dr. Frank Schönefeld from T-Systems during a press event we made at CeBIT 2009. Mainly they are discussing the latest developments on E2.0 in general, its adoption in the US and Europe as well as how to evaluate the effects of E20 activities. On the last aspect Dion pointed out that “ROI is famously hard to measure on E2.0″ and his urge to put together more case studies in order to evaluate the effects.

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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 …)

During my three days at CeBIT I interviewed a number of Enterprise 2.0 people, like

• Jeff Schick and Stefan Pfeiffer of IBM
• Frank Schönefeld of T-Systems MMS
• Dirk Röhrborn of Communardo
• Craig Hepburn of OpenText
• Vassil Mladjov of Blogtronix
• Joshua Wold of Atlassian
• Wolf Ingmar Faecks of Sapient
• and, last but not least, Mark Masterson of CSC, my co-Blogger here

Björn has done a good job editing and dubbing the footage, so now here’s part 1 of the video interviews, done in preparation of the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 summit.

With Craig Hepburn of OpenText I talked about social capital, how email is for old people, locating and leveraging knowledge in organizations, how OpenText is understanding the Enterprise 2.0 market and how they’re tailoring their offerings, enjoy:

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Lots of information have been already distributed through out the net about the Enterprise 2.0 FORUM / Cologne, that took place already nearly two weeks ago. Now we finished cutting and setting up all the recorded video materials - so here we go with the presentation of Suw Charman-Anderson talking about the “adoption strategy for social software”.

Well - actually she was talking about “training a cat” - and how the cat will not do anything without a reward for doing it. So as the first key point of successfully adopting social software she advised to think about a rewarding system. Further aspects she is talking about were

• the importance of identifying the problem on the day-to-day work of the individual that can be solved by social software
• the user-centric adoption as bottom-up approach that has more potential to be successful than the top-down approach
• the need of a leadership by engagement - I would do the reference towards Rod Beckstrom’s catalyst personnas
• for the implementation of social software projects she proposes a “trojan mice” aproach in the means of small projects introduced into the ongoing organisation (to grow securely)

Many more interesting advices may be taken from the video:

Video

Actually the importance of the rewarding system was also a big issues being discussed in the open space session. (I am just working on a transcript of the discussions - will translate this also to English soon!)

There are two aspects regarding the rewarding system I’d like to share with you:

1. the grade of participation in social software projects must be part of the evaluation by the objective agreement
2. participation in social software projects must be transparent to be socially acknowledged (means the need for activity streams!).

What advices do you have on this?

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)

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The videos of the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT are now online, check them out, nice stuff and worthwhile content in there, including Simon Wardley’s introduction

Link: sevenload.com

and Dion Hinchcliffe’s keynote:

Link: sevenload.com