In the wake of the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum, Smartcompany magazine has published an interview with me titled Web 2.0: Our winning ways. It begins:

Entrepreneur Ross Dawson is a leading international expert on the way businesses are using web 2.0 in Australia – and he has good news.

After lagging behind our international counterparts in the enterprise 2.0 stakes, Australia is starting to catch up in its use of blogs, wikis, social networks, social search and virtual worlds.

Ross tells Amanda Gome what’s hot, how businesses are benefiting – and what’s destined for the 2.0 dustbin.

A few brief selections from my responses to the interview:

At last I am very encouraged. The response from people at the conference shows there is a lot happening. Up until now organisations have been shy about putting up their hands and talking about what they are doing. Up until now there has also been disparate things being done by different users in different departments. But now things are being squarely addressed by executives at the top of the company so people are prepared to talk about it.

Companies are striving to create more value from the participation of their employees, customers and suppliers by using web 2.0.

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In the wake of the Enteprise 2.0 Executive Forum, Peter-Evans Greenwood, CTO of Capgemini Australia, has written in considerably more detail on his thoughts on culture and generational change, which he and others spoke about on the final panel on the path forward.

I have a theory. It seems that most people learn something in their early to mid 20s, and then spend the rest of their career happily doing the same thing over and over again. …. Once they’ve established what it is they do they just want to keep doing it, hoping that the world will remain as it was in their early adulthood.

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If change is the driver in our organizations, but our organizations are resistant to change, then the biggest challenge we face in not technical but the strategy we use to manage change. It’s quite easy to define a technically and economically possible solution that would provide a boost to our business, or even deliver a step change in capability. But if we cannot get our organization to deliver and then adopt the solution, all our work will be for naught.

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So what does this mean for the IT department? No matter how important our success is to the success of the company as a whole, IT is a cost center; value is created at the business coal face, not in the IT department. It’s not our job to deploy the new Enterprise 2.0 solution that will revolutionize the business and then force the business to change. We need to focus on the users, rather than thinking in terms of technologies and IT assets, understand the challenges they are facing and provide them with tools and techniques that they can use to innovate themselves. IT as facilitator rather than asset manager. Or as I heard in the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum the other day, give them they structure they want and focus on managing the flow rather than trying to force them to do something a particular way.

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We’ve already had a fair bit of media coverage for Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum. Some of the media coverage includes:

Janssen-Cilag dances Enterprise 2.0 jig (Computerworld)

“Pharmaceutical giant Janssen-Cilag has overhauled its enterprise applications to introduce collaboration with a wiki that integrates IT asset management and even micro-blogging.”

Wikis may be working for Westpac (The Sheet) [Note that registration is required.]

[UPDATE: The full story is available on The Financial Standard]

“The arrival of Gail Kelly at the helm of Westpac may accelerate the bank’s adoption of “Web 2.0” tools such as blogs, wikis and social networks, allowing staff to share information freely and collaborate online.”

Exploring the future of Enterprise 2.0 (Melcrum)

“Run from 8.30am-2pm the event took place at breakneck pace, and covered a massive amount on the topic of social media and Web 2.0 in the workplace. There was much talk of knowledge and knowledge workers, easing employee frustrations, helping individuals to do their jobs more easily, differentiating to attract and retain the best talent and increasing employee engagement (yes, all of this in just 5.5 hours).”

There was also last week’s coverage of Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum:

Social networking sites help boost business: expert

“Facebook, Instant Messenger and other online networking tools aren’t mere workplace distractions — they improve the way we do business.Future Exploration Network chairman Ross Dawson says that a firm’s success increasingly hinges on its ability to share knowledge and expertise both with its employees and external clients.”

I understand there is a fair bit of media coverage yet to come – I’ll post here when I hear about it

Here are my slides for my opening presentation at Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum tomorrow. As usual, these are intended for attendees at the event, and won’t mean that much for people who aren’t there for the presentation itself.

I will write up some of the new material I cover in the presentation in subsequent posts, particularly on the governance framework. More details on some of the other content, including the lessons for Enterprise 2.0, can be found from other presentations I’ve done on The Potential of Enterprise 2.0, which was my opening keynote at the IIR Enterprise 2.0 in December, and on Successful Enterprise 2.0 and Social Media at KMWorld in Silicon Valley in November.

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