Launch of Implementing Enterprise 2.0 Framework

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A centrepiece of our recently launched Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report is an Implementing Enterprise 2.0 Framework. Click on the image below to download the Implementing Enterprise 2.0 Framework pdf, which includes references to the relevant chapters for each of the action steps. Some of the chapters referred to are available for download from the Implementing Enterprise 2.0 downloads page.

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The central aspect of the framework is that it is iterative. Where you begin on the cycle depends on your organization. Some will begin in the upper left domain of Understanding Drivers, by understanding the drivers. Others will start in the lower right domain of Supporting Initiatives by identifying and supporting existing initiatives that people have begun of their own initiative.

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mX newspaper: Blogs to conquer the office – prepare for the workplace of the future

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mX_030309.jpgLast week mX newspaper in Melbourne (the city’s largest free newspaper with readership of over 300,000) had a little story on Blogs to conquer the office based on an interview with me. The article was originally intended to cover the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Executive Briefing which was run last Thursday in Melbourne, though the final article just covered some of the forthcoming shifts in the workplace (slightly mangled in the journalistic process).

Hopefully these kinds of messages will eventually filter through this kind of mass audience to help accelerate these trends. Full text of the article below, or click on the image for a scan of the article.

Blogs to conquer the office

Blogs, wikis and social networks are the future of the Australian workplace.

Organisations which block employee access will be punished for their lack of vision within five years.

And email, which transformed workplaces late last century, will be a thing of the past.

Futurist Ross Dawson, chairman of Future Exploration Network, said companies embracing Web 2.0 – interactive internet use and web-based applications – would result in unrecognisable workplaces within five years.

Graduates and tech-savvy workers were bringing blogs, virtual worlds and social networks into the workplace, which improved communication, efficiency and productivity, Dawson said.

“I am not saying that if you use blogs you will be more successful, but those organisations that try to avoid any use of Web 2.0 in their organisations are going to find it far more difficult to attract talented people and to be competitive,” Dawson said.

At the expense of email, blogs and wikis are becoming popular methods of project management.

“If you use a blog or a wiki, (anyone) can update the most recent info and, at a glance, can see what has been done most recently by who and be updated using RSS (web feed Really Simple Syndication),” he said.

Why GFC explains everything (to Australians)

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This morning an email from a client mentioned the GFC. Earlier this week another client was talking about the GEC (which has the advantage that you can pronounce it, while GFC has to be spelled out).

When this morning I Twittered about how we have a new acronym that doesn’t need to be explained, I got some interesting responses. @ITSinsider in America said that she had heard it before from someone else in Australia. An Australian initially thought I meant Geelong Football Club, so googled it to find out.

Which gives very interesting results…

If you Google “GFC” in Australia the #3 result is a newspaper story Tough week ends in talk of ‘GFC’, dated from October last year, with four of the top 10 results referring to the planet’s economic woes, including three newspaper headlines.

If you Google “GFC” in the US, aside from a #5 entry from Wikipedia which includes various acronyms including the contemporary one, the first entry which refers to GFC in this way is at #45.

So are Australians particularly acronym-crazy? Are we in the vanguard of what will be a global trend to summarize the state of the world as GFC?

Of course the very best thing about GFC is that it is an easy explanation for everything, in three easy letters. It was all getting very complicated for a while. Now it’s simple again – yay!

Melbourne: Enterprise 2.0 Executive Briefing on 5 March on transforming organizations with web and mobile technologies

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To complement our one-day Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum in Sydney on 24 February, Future Exploration Network and Optus Business are running an Enterprise 2. 0 Executive Briefing over lunch in Melbourne on 5 March. The Melbourne event is certainly no substitute for the in-depth content, workshops, and insights that will be available for the full day event in Sydney, which is essential for anyone who is serious about implementing Enterprise 2.0.

It will provide a snapshot of the latest in Enterprise 2.0 in Australia and globally, and assist executives to understand the key issues and how Australian organizations are creating value using web and mobile technologies. See the full agenda and speakers. As usual with our events, it will be a pleasant lunch, this time at Zinc in Federation Square.

A highlight of the event will be a CIO panel, including Andrew Mills, who last year took the post of Chief Information Officer for the South Australian government, and Chris Yates, Chief Information Officer of Tennis Australia, which has been doing some fascinating things with mobility.

Since our events in Australia are usually in Sydney, it’s great to have this opportunity to take our latest content and insights to Melbourne as well.

I hope to see you there!

Why traditional conferences are dying and how unconferences and audience participation are the future of events

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For many, many years I have felt that the vast majority of conferences were very poorly run, continuing to apply ancient, didactic approaches. That’s one of the reasons that a few years ago I started running events, organizing the Future of Media Summit, which annually links Sydney and San Francisco, the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum (the second annual event is on next week), Web 2.0 in Australia etc. Earlier events including what was at the time the extremely innovative Living Networks Forum in New York in 2003, using social networking technologies embedded in the event. Even though the events industry is vastly oversupplied, the majority of them are crap, so there’s ample scope for something better, as the consistent success of our events has demonstrated.

Certainly the last few years have seen the beginning of a transformation in how events are run, with in the US, Europe, and Australia (less so in Asia so far) many novel and highly interactive formats. However there is still a massive opportunity to create immense value with face-to-face events, and we’re currently looking to spin off our events business into a new company that will grow aggressively. News on that soon.

I am unusual in that a large part of my work is as a keynote speaker, speaking primarily on the future of business (including sometimes the future of events), usually within a traditional conference format. However at the same time I endeavor to create (or help my clients to implement) participatory formats that transcend the talking head syndrome.

Now the issue is getting mainstream media attention. News.com.au has released an article titled: Networking trend: the ‘unconference’, which examines the plethora of interactive events that are arising, such as unconferences, Lightning Talks, Ignite, and Pecha Kucha, and drawing on an extensive interview with me on where the space is heading.

The entire article is well worth a read. Below are excerpts of the direct quotes from me in the article.

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Enterprise 2.0: Competitive differentiation occurs at the intersection of technology and culture

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Recently I have been immersing myself in the Enterprise 2.0 space, organizing the second annual Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum which is on in two weeks now, writing the Implementing Enterprise 2.0 Report which will be launched at the same time (slightly afterwards for the international market), and helping a variety of large organizations to drive their Enterprise 2.0 initiatives forward.

It’s a long time since I came up with my definition for Enterprise 2.0 as below. While I generally dislike jargon and the liberal addition of “2.0” to words, I find the term Enterprise 2.0 highly meaningful because it is, in addition to tapping the value of Web 2.0 in a specific context, literally about creating the next version of the organization.

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What that stayed with me more than anything else from Andrew McAfee’s speech at our inaugural Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum last year, is one of his key conclusions: “Enterprise 2.0 will make companies less similar” (or as I always remembered it, ‘Enterprise 2.0 makes companies more different’).

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Presentation on Implementing Enterprise 2.0 in the Real World

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I’ve just got back from presenting at NSW KM Forum on Implementing Enterprise 2.0 in the Real World, where I was spreading word on our Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum.

Below are my slides, which contain some preview material from our Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report, which will be released at the end of the month.

I used the slides to discuss what actually happens in organizations in implementing Enterprise 2.0, using examples of situations I’ve seen of successful and unsuccessful implementations, and creating a conversation with the audience (who had many great stories and perspectives to offer).

Things begin by someone in the organization recognizing that there is potential value in applying web technologies.

However soon barriers emerge, which are different in each organization. These need to be understood and addressed in order to facilitate useful organizational change.

The path of implementation is different for each company, however in most large organizations some key elements need to be in place, such as addressing governance issues and directing energies where they will reap the greatest rewards and set the stage for further initiatives.

Ultimately organizations need to become comfortable with experimentation, iterating in finding how to build a more responsive, effective organization.

Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum coming soon! New speakers and latest updates

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The Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum is coming up very soon now!

Click on the image below for our latest flyer on the Enterprise 2.0 event, giving full details on why this will be the premier Enterprise 2.0 event in Australia this year.

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As you can see from the speakers pictured above, who represent just some of the leading experts speaking at the event, pretty much all the people who matter in this space in Australia will be there to share their expertise.

I’ll post soon in more detail about the points below. For now a quick summary of some of the features that will make attending the event to be indispensable for anyone who is involved in assessing or implementing web or mobile technologies in the enterprise:

* International keynote by video from JP Rangaswami, the visionary who instigated the first major implementation globally of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, as featured in the landmark Harvard Business School case study and the Andrew McAfee MIT Sloan article that introduced the term Enterprise 2.0.

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Updated keynote speaker video – excerpts from speeches on the future of business

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We are in the process of revamping my keynote speaking videos. While we were intending to do this anyway, a recent trigger to bring this forward was Brightcove closing down its non-professional site. We had initially used Brightcove for my videos because of the quality, however despite YouTube’s lower quality it is more visible.

You’ll see that the quality of some of the video excerpts is rather poor. We are continuing to gather footage as I do more keynotes, and we’ll gradually bring in new material so that the video reflects my current work. In fact we have a fair few video excerpts in store that we will integrate into the next version of this video.

We will also continue to release excerpts from individual keynotes. We recently posted me doing a keynote on The Future of the Network Economy for Sun Microsystems, and there are a number of other keynote videos we’ll launch soon.

All of this content is available on my RossDawson.com website, which covers my keynote speaking and strategy leader work. The keynote videos page on the site page covers the videos we have up – more coming soon!

This keynote speaker video includes:

* Excerpts from half a dozen keynotes

* Brief excerpts from TV interviews

* Global keynote locations

Timewarp discovered: What daily life will be like in the year 2049

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Have you ever wondered what life will be like in the year 2049?

Amazingly I seem to have stumbled across a timewarp. The blog p40y is being written every day in the year 2049, and each blog post appears daily 40 years earlier. Since the blog began on New Years Day 2049 (and 2009 via the timewarp) some fantastic insights into the future 40 years from now.

Here are a few excerpts that give a flavor for what we can expect at the end of this half-century.

Claytronics

Today I sat in a meeting with some people and some Claytronic replicas of other people that were unable (couldn’t be bothered?) to make the meeting in person. Now I know this is a new technology but it’s total rubbish. In theory you just pmail or gfax over some instructions to a giant programmable lump of clay sitting in one of the spare chairs and it automatically morphs into a life size 3-D, walking, talking replica of the real person.

However, it didn’t. In this instance the millions of tiny microprocessors didn’t seem to be communicating with each other correctly – or the electrostatic forces weren’t working because someone left an AiPhone™ on – and what we got instead was a giant brown talking turd. “Different day, same old talking shit” as one wit observed.

This is particularly interesting. Kil’n People by David Brin, one of my favorite science fiction books, describes a world in which people create animated clay replicas of themselves. I have also blogged about a Japanese professor who has created a doppelganger of himself – though not in clay…

DNA Hacking

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