Keynote: The Potential of Enterprise 2.0 – Six Lessons for Success

I will be doing the opening keynote at tomorrow’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Sydney. The slides are below for reference purposes for those who attended. As always, note that the slides are not very meaningful without the accompanying speech, explanations, and case studies.

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While the slides are similar to the presentation I did at KMWorld in Silicon Valley a few weeks ago, the overall positioning and messages are quite different.

This is best reflected in the closing “Six Lessons for Enterprise 2.0” I will offer in tomorrow’s keynote, summarized below:

1. Make governance an enabler. The reason why most large organizations are slow to adopt Enterprise 2.0 tools is that senior executives are uncertain about the implications, and as a result cautious or worse. Governance needs to be in place to allay those fears, without stifling the emergent, participative nature of how the new tools create value for organizations.

2. Start from business applications, not tools. Far too often people want to implement blogs, wikis, tagging, or other tools. This is completely the wrong way around. The starting point has to be a specific business application, such as project management, product development, sales support or any number of functions that relate directly to business value.

3. Make work easier. None of the rhetoric or practice around Enterprise 2.0 makes any sense unless it makes the everyday work of employees easier, more effective, and more productive. If that is the principle around how all initiatives happen, things will necessarily be on the right track.

4. Build strategies at the architecture level. As described in more detail in my Successful Enterprise 2.0 and social media speech, a core issue is gathering inputs such that they contribute to valuable emergent outcomes. Any enterprise strategy has to be at this level, not at the level of implementing tools.

5. Allow users to experiment. This principle is often overlooked, yet Enterprise 2.0 is founded on end-users being able to adapt the tools, processes, and working to something that suits them. Everything must be changeable by users so the end result of how tools are used is unpredictable.

6. Create pilots that yield useful lessons. Understanding that no organization has got Enterprise 2.0 “right” yet, and that every organization is different, the task becomes one of trying things, seeing what works and what doesn’t, and evolving systems so that they create value. Designing projects to learn useful lessons and acting on these lessons is at the heart of this.

More on all of these points soon…