Here is a fantastic resources for those who couldn’t attend the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum (or those who did and want to share the ideas with their colleagues).

Mark Jones of MIS magazine’s The Scoop podcast series recorded three of the case studies presented at the event, and has created a 30 minute podcast of excerpts from the case studies presented by Victor Rodrigues of Cochlear, David Backley of Westpac, and Nathan Wallace of Janssen-Cilag. (See the event speaker bios for details.)

Click here to go to The Scoop podcast on “Australian Enterprise 2.0 lessons revealed”.

All three case studies are extremely interesting, with some very honest sharing of each organization’s current activities, lessons learned, and vision moving forward. These kinds of case studies should prove an inspiration to other companies that are implementing Enterprise 2.0 or considering doing so.

I’ve just got home after the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum. Far too much happened (and I’m far too tired…) to reflect in depth on it all right now, but I thought I’d offer a few initial reflections, and links to some of those who have been blogging, twittering, video blogging and more during the conference.

In short, it went great. I was extremely pleased with how everything went, and all the anecdotal feedback so far has been excellent. It’s always a relief when the technology works as planned, and our Skype video links to Euan Semple, who’s currently visiting Germany, and Andrew McAfee, who was at a conference in Orlando, Florida, worked extremely well. Even with the video images blown up to a large projection screen, many people commented on how good the quality was (including Alex Manchester writing “the connection robustness was impressive”).

Rather than trying to do a summary now, it’s best to point to the many event attendees who were live-blogging the event. Every attendee at the event has been given a login to the Forum blog, so we can discuss and share thoughts and perspectives.

At the opening of the conference I asked for a show of hands of bloggers and Twitterers, and got a response of what seemed to be close to half for blogs, and perhaps a quarter for Twitter, which is pretty exceptional for an executive audience.

On the Forum blog at www.futureexploration.net/e2ef/blog/, there have been around 20 posts since this morning, and we can expect plenty more over coming days – having a look at the discussion on the blog will give a pretty good feel for what was discussed.

Some particularly noteworthy posts below:

Image from Mick Liubinskas on Flickr

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After a flurry of last-minute registrations, the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum, which is on tomorrow, is now chocka-block, with no more space available in the room. This keeps us at a 100% record for our events selling out (i.e. our Future of Media Summits and Web 2.0 in Australia ).

Given that other events on related topics are struggling or even being cancelled, this seems to show that people appreciate the difference between A. a participatory executive-level event; and B. a formulaic sequence-of-talking-heads-in-a-dark-room type of event that most event organizers seem to think still works.

It also shows that the topic of Enterprise 2.0 is considered to be of pressing relevance today, which supports my (and others’) contention that 2008 will be the year of Enterprise 2.0.

A very good article in Voice and Data magazine titled Enterprise 2.0 will bring radical change in organisations covers some of the truly important issues on the topic, going beyond narrow views of the technologies to how these new approaches will change organisations. It quotes Steve Hodgkinson of Ovum extensively, including some of these nuggets:

Steve Hodgkinson, Ovum research director, sees Enterprise 2.0 as a genuine opportunity for technology to act as a catalyst for changes in organisational culture.

“Enterprise 2.0 is emerging as the most practical way of sharing and managing knowledge in a range of contexts, from team collaboration to customer self-service forums. This leads to the ability to bring about cultural change with the personal power of informal networks such as wikis, blogs, profiles and forums.”

“The root of its culture change power, however, is its ability to unleash the personal power of informal networks,” said Hodgkinson.

…

Key ideas within this new system include:

* The need for a flat organisation, rather than an organisational hierarchy

* Folksonomy rather than taxonomy

* User-driven technology rather than IT department control

* Short time-to-market cycles; to continue and increase flow

* Global teams of people, rather than locating the whole organisation in one building

* Emergent information systems, rather than dictated and structured information systems

* The opening of propriety standards

Hodgkinson said: “These informal networks provide organisational peripheral vision and cut through the day-to-day nonsense, enabling more sensitive situational awareness, breakthrough thinking and access to the subtle levers of organisational change.”

“The changes are designed to increase ability, flexibility, distribution, openness and simplicity within the organisation.”

I strongly agree that these are the key issues at stake. There are lots of other great ideas to uncover in the article.

Steve spoke immediately after my keynote at the IIR Enterprise 2.0 conference last December – I wrote about some of his ideas in a summary of the event. Steve will be attending the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum this week.