My 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes: Second Wednesday Keynote
Posted by Bill Ives on Wed, Jun 22, 2011
Here is another in a series of notes on the 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. This covers the second keynote on Wednesday. This year they have multiple keynote speakers in each session. This one includes: Sara Roberts, President/CEO, Roberts Golden Consulting, Inc., Ross Mayfield, President Chairman and Co-founder; VP of Business Development, Socialtext, Bert Sandie, Director - Technical Excellence, Electronic Arts Inc., Tyler Knowlton, Chief Strategist on Digital Innovation for the Chief Trade Commissioner, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (DFAIT), and Deb Lavoy, Director, Product Marketing, Social Workplace, OpenText
Sarah talked about why your employees will be running your enterprise in five years and why you should let them. She started by taking us to NYC and asked what can we learn from the streets of NYC. Good pedestrians walk to the side and look over shoulder of person in front of them – letting that person run interference. In our organizations we apply a lot of rules, often conflicting with each other instead of letting people go with the flow.
Now we have technologies that are letting the big act small. These technologies will give workers a better chance to make choices. Companies are losing control because of this but it is a good thing. Today the top execs are suppose to set the strategy and everyone else just follows orders. This can inhibit innovation and good decisions. She gave a nice example of employee empowerment at a bank so the teller could address the individual needs of customers.
Employees are becoming less passive. Many high performers use technology outside the approved channels. Then there are ranting sites like Glassdoor.com. Companies are losing some high performers. Many employees are not fully engaged in their work. Others have to work around the system to better serve customers. We need to give more power to these top employees.
Some rules to help here: Create guidelines for action. If you give too many options it can be confusing. Allow bold discretion. Ask the experts. (and go beyond to this to crowdsourcing). No one sits on the side lines. The new social tools can help here.
Ross next talked about the social evolution (not revolution). He said that what happens next in business can be found on the Web. You then need to adapt these capabilities to the enterprise. The revolution has already happen on the Web, now we are in an evolution stage. There is an established category of enterprise social software with established use cases.
He took us back to look at the start of Web 2.0 – first – Wikipedia. At Socialtext they adapted wikis for the enterprise. In 2003 the rise of Blogger and Google bought them. People started to look at consumer software in a new light. They added blogging to Socialtext. In 2004 Google offered its Web-based spreadsheet and they added a spreadsheet to Socialtext. Then Twitter started and micro-blogging entered the enterprise. This changed everything. In 2007 Open Social was started by Google. In 2008 – Adobe offered Air. In 2009 Facebook offered Openstream. In all cases Socialtext adapted these capabilities for the enterprise.
Things are different inside the enterprise so there are different adoption patterns and uses from the Web. Companies are not Web communities. Ross said in social software knowledge sharing is a by-product of getting things done, unlike old school KM. (I agree with first part of this statement. However, people like to beat up KM but when it was done right, it was process aligned and more similar to what is E 2.0 now.) KM is also one of the longest running business approaches.
Bert talked about changing culture within enterprise 2.0. He said it is our hardest problem. He asked if your company has a road map for culture, like they have one for technology. (I was part of a panel at the first E 2.0 conf in 2007 - “Of course it is 90% people and 10% technology” – about how people pay lip service to this idea – they still do and many speakers still bring it up for this reason.) Bert said they do a lot to explicitly address the culture of sharing issue to change behaviors. Good for them.
They also spend a lot of time on environments to stimulate collaboration. This was a big idea in the 90s – still very relevant. Remove the physical barriers – create nice coffee spaces.
Also leverage organizational structure. These are constantly changing (just as they did in the Roman army to give the impression of change). Bert mentioned that cross-team collaboration is important but needs to be fostered and enabled.
Deb next talked about the phrase “people are our most important asset” that execs often pay lip service to. Now with the new tools you can support people more but Deb wondered if this phrase is true. In the firms they have worked with they have found one single predictor of success. It is a sense of purpose. Even the best people are not successful without a sense of purpose. They now have a contest for the best stories of a sense of purpose with a 10 grand prize. She introduced an example from one of their clients – Tyler Knowlton.
Tyler Knowlton works for the Canadian government and was responsible for digital communications around the G20 Summit in Toronto. They were asked to apply their Web facing approaches to reduce email by a senior official. They had a very diverse team of tech people, artists, political scientists. He discussed how boundaries can help creativity. When he was in art school, one teacher said you could only use black paint. He applied the same principle of constraint.
They are now working with other governments as they prepare for their G20 Summits. The challenge is how to maintain the initial excitement.
Paige Finkelman the LaunchPad chair talked about this contest where companies are invited to talk about what is new in 2011. The contest was on Twitter. The eight finalists did three minute videos. Then the field was reduced to four who now presented 3 minute pitches. The four were; Acquia, (for Commons) Commons is Open Source Drupal. Bryan House discussed examples. I have written about them on The AppGap – you can find the coverage there (see Acquia Provides Drupal Commons to Support Open Source Enterprise Collaboration).
Next Principles was covered next. They provide a SaaS solution that bridges social media and CRM. He showed a demo of their event monitoring and analytics solution looking at this E20 conference.
Podio was the next firm. It allows you to build apps. Saba was the last entry. It supports social learning and Saba was the winner.