Review of Day One of Enterprise 2.0 conference – Sydney 3 December
A quick review of Day One of IIR’s Enterprise 2.0 conference. After my opening keynote, including my six lessons on Enterprise 2.0, Steve Hodgkinson of Ovum addressed the question, ‘Does Your Organisation Need Enterprise 2.0?’ One of the great examples he used is fixmystreet.com, which allows individuals to submit work orders to their local council to fix things. While this is just a website someone has set up, councils are actively responding to the requests. Or at least some are, and it’s easy to find which councils are and aren’t responding to their constituents’ complaints. Steve also presented a useful framework on the relevance of Enterprise 2.0 to organizations, as below, which comes from an interesting Ovum report on Enterprise 2.0.
Factors that influence the extent to which an organization will need, or value, enterprise 2.0
Nigel Watson of Microsoft described the history of blogging at Microsoft, from the early days through to the breadth of blogging across the enterprise that there is today. While I’m familiar with the history, it was good to hear it again. I didn’t realize that Microsoft doesn’t have an explicit blogging policy, and that Microsoft’s general employee policies are seen as sufficient. One of Microsoft’s interesting internal social media channels is Academy Mobile, which uses mobile delivery for its online learning content.
Ben Naftzger of Atlassian made a good case that wikis are the best thing ever to happen for organizations. This was well supported by the case presented by Cochlear on how they have been using Atlassian wikis across the organization. I’ll write up the case study in a separate blog post, as it’s well worthwhile.
Rosie Mullaly, head of corporate employee communication at Telstra, spoke about some of their initiatives. I have been sceptical about their nowwearetalking.com.au website, however it certainly seems that they’re genuine about publishing all comments, with Rosie going so far as to invite the audience to submit critical comments to the site and check that they are posted. I found it intriguing that while Telstra has 36,500 full-time equivalent employees, it has 48,000 employees and contractors receiving communications from Telstra, indicating a very real blurring of organizational boundaries.
Tom Worthington is I believe the only other presenter to have blogged about his presentation on Enterprise 2.0 Providing Solutions to Wider Business Needs. He mentioned how in his workshops for government employees on emerging technologies, they had a deep-seated fear of modifying entries on Wikipedia, and had to be gradually led to it.
Jennifer Wilson, head of innovation at NineMSN, covered social networking and generational change. While by her birthdate Jennifer doesn’t fit into the “Generation C” (creative, content, communication etc.) she described, her energy and level of engagement in the online world positions her squarely in that demographic. Very interestingly, Jennifer thinks that Facebook’s Beacon is the way of the future, and she loves it because she wants to know what her friends have been doing, buying, and are interested in. She mentioned FriendFeed, which aggregates friends’ online activity. Jennifer spouts plenty of fabulous statistics, including that 14% of people would answer their mobile phone during sex.
David Peterson, in the course of his excellent technical session, quoted Henry Story of Sun Microsystems: “The value of information increases exponentially with your ability to combine it with new information.” Yup, that’s absolutely what is driving the current shift in both the open web and inside the enterprise. David discussed how a Semantic web initiative of Science Commons, an offshoot of Creative Commons, has helped to reduce identifying medical targets from 3-5 days to 3-5 minutes.
In all, a good conference day, with some good insights and local perspectives. I was committed to an innovation workshop for a client on the second day of the event, so wasn’t able to attend. Stephen Collins has left a comment on James Dellow’s blog on what he heard about the conference.
As many people there commented, there was not a big turn-out at the event. One of the reasons was that a quite similar event – Online Social Networking and Business Collaboration – overlapped with the Enterprise 2.0 event, and the Enterprise 2.0 event was considerably more expensive.
Our Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum next 19 February will be quite a different style of event, taking more of an executive perspective, and being substantially more compact, with brief presentations, panel discussions, participant roundtables, and international keynotes by video, all within a half-day forum designed to accelerate the uptake of Enterprise 2.0 technologies and approaches. Our Forum will also be far less expensive than either of the conferences this week. I think the business model for expensive series-of-talking-heads-in-a-dark-room conference is rapidly – and thankfully – dying. This is not least because some organizers are now putting on great events at very accessible prices. That’s certainly what we’re trying to do.
