E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Enterprise 2.0 Highlights – Towards Living Intelligence

I am not sure whether this blog post would eventually be classified as a highlight from the Enterprise 2.0 conference event in Boston or not, but certainly an annotation, or even an observation, on something that I thought was rather interesting and that struck me while I was participating from the various activities during the course of the entire week.

Last year, if you were able to follow up with plenty of the various conversations available all over the place, there were a number of different Enterprise 2.0 stars, i.e. businesses, organisations, etc. etc. that successfully deployed social software within the Enterprise and they decided to share their stories as case studies during the event. Quite a buzz, indeed! And certainly the path to follow, getting these folks to share their key learnings on how they have made it work for themselves.

So this year I was hoping to be able to hear about them once again; and see how one year later they were still going strong; how they may have moved into the next level of social software adoption; or how they may have helped (As well as influenced) some other businesses into following their steps; I was even hoping they would be there sharing their anecdotes and lessons learned on what worked and what didn’t during the course of that past year.

Alas, I didn’t see it. And this is what I found rather surprising; that the clear stars of the Enterprise 2.0 scene in 2008, one year later, we couldn’t see anything of them while at the event in Boston. That doesn’t happen every day. And I am sure that we would probably have an opportunity to find out from them what’s been going on so far. Well, believe it or not, I had that opportunity.

Towards the end of the event, through one of these serendipitous encounters one gets exposed to every now and then, I ended up waiting for a taxi at a long queue to then take me back to my hotel. And on that same waiting line I eventually bumped into Sean Dennehy, one of the folks who last year shared with his colleague Don Burke their story on perhaps one of the most successful Enterprise 2.0 case studies to date: their Intellipedia.

So we got talking and over the course of a few minutes I eventually got to find out how his organisation was not much different than the company I work for: the same excitement, they same movitation and inspiration to make an impact adopting social software by and large, the same obstacles, lessons learned, use cases, anecdotal evidence, success stories, etc. etc. Fascinating conversation. For sure!

The funny part was that, at the end of it, I just felt like I was getting an exclusive 1:1 private overview of what happened in that year timeframe. So what I thought was going to be something I would be missing big time, all of a sudden, I got it granted and certainly became one of the best conversations I had. Shorter than what I would have hoped for, but rather intense and with the right level of energy. Just wonderful! And all of that while waiting for a taxi!

Then my good friends Lee Bryant and Christoph joined us in the queue as they were heading to the airport (At least, Lee was, since he was on his way to Reboot #11 in Copenhagen, Denmark) and it all happened so suddenly that before they realised I put both Sean and Lee on the same taxi on their way to the airport, after a rather short introduction (Too funny, eh?)

When returning back home I pondered some more about that particular conversation I had with Sean and it soon became one of my highlights of the entire event for which serendipity did a great job, once again! And, funny enough, within the following few hours after arriving home, on my Twitter timeline there is this link to a wonderfully crafted, insightful and inspirational YouTube video, posted by Chris Rasmussen under the title Toward Living Intelligence that surely made my day.

Why? Because, in less than 5 minutes, it simply shows where such an amazing initiative as Intellipedia is heading. One year later. Fantastic! And if you don’t believe me here is the embedded video. Sit back, relax and enjoy it:

(So, there you have it; one of my key learnings from the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this year: sometimes the best conversations happen naturally, in the most unexpected venues, totally unprepared and under some incredibly circumstances that not even one-self can control, or even should attempt to. Long live serendipitous (knowledge) encounters! One of the main key reasons why conference events are still worth while attending to)

Tags: e2conf, Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Boston, Conference Events, Events, Conferences, Reality Check, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, Networking, Social Networks, Serendipity, Serendipitous Encounters, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Productivity, Enterprise 2.0 Stars, Stars, CIA, Intelligence, Intellipedia, Sean Dennehy, Don Burke, Case Studies, Business Cases, IBM, Lee Bryant, @Christoph, Headshift, Reboot 11, Reboot11, Copenhagen, Denmark, Chris Rasmussen, ckras, Living Intelligence, Be Bold

Enterprise 2.0 Conference Highlights – A Proposal for DIA

Before I move on into detailing the main highlights from Day 1 at the recently attended Enterprise 2.0 conference event in Boston, I thought I would spend a few minutes sharing a couple of thoughts on what has been, repeatedly, one of my long time pet peeves from every single event I have attended in the last couple of years or so and which, once again, re-surfaced this year at this event. Yes, indeed, I am talking about the incredibly poor quality of the wi-fi connection throughout the whole week, to the point where folks who weren’t even attending the conference in person noticed it big time as well.

Check out the very insightful blog post from Mary Abraham under the title "Tech Conferences Struggle With Technology" to give you an idea of the kind of frustration that permeated throughout the entire event. Once again, and this is not the first, nor the second time, that the wi-fi at a large technical conference venue as Enterprise 2.0 in Boston failed to deliver one more time. And why plenty of people claim that the hotel is probably the main guilty party for such poor experience, I still think the conference organisers should think twice before committing with a hotel on providing the best accessibility to the network for those of us who are going to be there.

There needs to be much better guarantees to prove that, once and for all, we can do it right. And it may not well be down to the hotel itself, but more the organisers of events themselves. Here is why. This time I have been one of the lucky ones. I have been connected for most of the time and I must confess that it was not because of the wi-fi provided at the conference, nor the hotel one (Like the lobby and such), nor my own roaming one (Which, as you would expect, is a no-no so far!), but a good friend of mine who, after last year’s frustrations, where I complained consistently about the poor performance, came to the rescue and kindly offered to lend me his own 3G connection through a portable device that was a treat throughout the whole week!

So if you see me this week sharing various blog posts on the highlights from Enterprise 2.0, it’s because I have been able to capture plenty of really good insights through my live tweeting at @elsuacon, as well as make other kinds of online annotations I could then use to draft the longer blog posts with those highlights. And all of that thanks to my good friend Doug Neal who surely saved me plenty of hassle and frustration by allowing me to borrow his connection while attending the various speaker sessions.

Very thoughtful and considerate, if you ask me, (Thanks ever so much, Doug! You know I owe you big time for this one!) taking into account that we have never met face to face and it was our first time meeting up "in the carbon" at the same event; yet, we have been following each other for a while now and I think last year’s annoyances were what had him well prepared to come to the rescue of this poor soul who just keeps asking for Decent Internet Access, as David Terrar blogged about a while ago, and time and time again he doesn’t see it happening.

I cannot imagine how annoyed I would have become if Doug wouldn’t have helped me stay connected throughout. It’s the second time I was kindly invited to the event as a media / blogger, and, as such, I always think about the compromise to give back; it’s my job; it’s fair; yet without the proper access to the right tools, it becomes increasingly more irritating than anything else. To the point where more and more I am starting to stop going to conferences, just because of this very same reason. We need to do better. We should do better. We should start demanding Decent Internet Access at these technical events, otherwise we may as well switch off and move elsewhere! And that’s just what I am about to do. If no DIA, no go. Sorry. Enterprise 2.0 in Boston has been the last time I’m going to put up with it.

Next time I am going to a technical conference I will wait for the first 15 minutes and if I cannot get connected right there, right then to start "reporting" on what’s happening, I will switch off all of my equipment and just passively go through the event: no live tweeting, no follow up blog posts, no highlights, no spreading the message around, no encouraging folks to make it to the next year, no further involvement from yours truly. As simple as that.

Perhaps conference organisers need to start getting more serious about what we expect from audiences attending these kinds of events, even more when some of them have got the "responsibility" of reporting and spreading the message around sharing our insights on what’s going on. And then deliver, of course. And big time!

So what could have been improved in such tech conference as Enterprise 2.0 for us attendees with regards to the wi-fi connectivity? Well, here are a few suggestions; provide multiple networks, not just access points, to the attendees (One for media / bloggers and another one for the rest. That load balancing, I am sure, would help out quite a bit!); also provide a network, or two, specifically implemented for the event itself, not just the hotel wi-fi connection, because we all know what hotels think about such commodities as wireless access to the Net. Non-existent! And pretty expensive, too!

Another good suggestion may well be to help educate your audience attending the event that it is ok to have one device connected to the network, not 5 or 10 of them! People should respect you can only have up to so many access points at a specific venue, so let’s all get connected, with one device, and enjoy a reliable and constant access to the Web from there onwards. It’s that simple.

And, finally, perhaps the one suggestion that I would hope folks out there organising conference events would be paying more attention to than what I have been saying so far in the above paragraphs: learn from others! I think it’s about time that conferences learn from one another and start providing true 2.0 experiences throughout the entire event for us attendees. And that includes access to the Internet as well!

Take, for example, the cases of Defrag or EventoBlog (Which, by the way, just announced Evento Blog 2009 in November, in Seville, for 1,500 people, with a specific and unique wi-fi installation of 100mbps download (Yes, that’s right! 100mbps download!) for all attendees to enjoy. On the first day open for pre-registrations, they maxed out in a matter of hours already! And that shows!). So two incredibly successful conference events that have raised the standards and ensure that the wi-fi works throughout the event. Year after year. No matter how many people attend.

Now, I have never been to Defrag just yet, perhaps sometime in the near future, but I have been to Evento Blog in Seville last year, and I must confess I was gladly surprised the connectivity throughout the event was outstanding! Only conference event that made it work from over 40 events I have attended in the last couple of years!

So if they have managed to make it work, why can’t others? I refuse to think that they are not committed to make their own conferences a real success; yet, time after time, they keep failing on the very same basic principles, i.e. not caring enough about your audience(s) or how you would want to engage with it to help them spread the message around for you. I refuse to think about that, but the truth is that here I am, writing this blog post on this pet peeve of mine that I managed to escape this year at Enterprise 2.0, by the wonderful Doug Neal who surely sensed, and witnessed, the level of frustration I went through last year and he wanted to help me avoid reaching that same level, or worse!, this year; so why can’t tech conferences come to our rescue? Once and for all…

What’s stopping you from providing the best experience out there when attending face to face events, like both Defrag and Evento Blog have proved over and over again? Isn’t it time for you all to catch up, learn from past experiences, learn what works and what doesn’t and start applying new solutions in your next gig? Well, I will be looking forward to it, because so far it’s not happening and I’d certainly object to becoming a passive attendee of such events. I might as well stay home doing some other productive work.

Thank you very much!

Tags: e2conf, Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Boston, Conference Events, Events, Conferences, Reality Check, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Productivity, Feedback, Technical Conferences, Mary Abraham, Conference Organisers, Wi-Fi, Wireless, Connectivity, Hotels, Networks, Doug Neal, DIA, Decent Internet Access, David Terrar, Lessons Learned, Audiences, Conferences 2.0, Audiences 2.0, Defrag, EventoBlog, Evento Blog, EventoBlog 2009, EBE09, EBE2009, Leverage Good Practices, Seville, Commitment, Involvement

Enterprise 2.0 Conference Highlights – The Pre-Event Workshops

After the initial round of blog posts, to kick things off, with the Enterprise 2.0 conference event highlights, it’s now time to move into detailing some of the various major key learnings throughout the event itself, based on the various sessions I attended over the course of four days that the event lasted. And to get things going I will be spending the next few minutes going through what I learned on the Pre-Event day, i.e. the one of the workshops, which I blogged about it over here a little while ago.

If you remember, I mentioned back then how I had the intention of attending the conference workshops from both Dion Hinchcliffe and Mike Gotta (In the morning and in the afternoon, respectively) and I am surely glad I did, because I got to learn a few things that surely marked a specific trend that got corroborated during the course of the entire conference.

But, before going into that, I would like to encourage you to have a look into the superb blog posts that my good friend Bill Ives put together sharing his thoughts on both sessions, because I eventually agree with most of his findings, as part of being my own as well. I guess following each other for a long while now in multiple places helps you build up an affinity for things we both are passionate about and Bill certainly captured a good number of the most interesting tidbits that I can relate to in the KM and Enterprise 2.0 space.

So, what were the workshops like, you may be wondering, right? Well, Dion’s Exploring the Tools and Techniques of Emergent Change was a massively packed presentation on the state of Enterprise 2.0 in the corporate world, where he combined a good number of slides with a special guest (David Stephenson, another good friend I, finally, had the real pleasure of meeting up in person, although too briefly, I am afraid, and perhaps one of the most knowledgeable people out there in the area of Democratisation of Data, very much worth while following up further up, for sure!), trying to give us all an idea of what’s eventually happening in this space in most companies.

Very very helpful and informative, although if you have been following his blog already, there isn’t probably much you will learn additionally, but one thing for sure that is if you would need a crash course on what’s happening in the corporate world on Enterprise 2.0 Dion’s workshop will be it. Not only do you get an exposure to some of the key concepts related to social computing, but at the same time he covers a wide range of social software tools from various vendors, places them into perspective and it becomes really helpful to figure out the kind of landscape we live in. Tremendously helpful seeing how busy it’s starting to be for everyone out there.

However, if there would be a single major highlight from Dion’s workshop I would have to say it would be the clear trend that we are moving past the social software tools focus itself that we have been having in previous years and we are now moving forward into the heart of the matter: Enterprise 2.0 adoption. Yes, indeed, one of the exciting highlights, not just from this workshop, but, from the entire conference itself, is that the focus at the moment seems to be around the area of social software adoption within the corporate world, something that those folks who know me for a while now would have to agree with me is a very exciting shift into the right focus with social computing and social software tools: don’t focus on them, focus on their wider adoption by your knowledge workers and let it down to them to figure it out by and for themselves.

That’s where the real challenge is, and although I know plenty of folks out there don’t buy into the argument that it’s all about a cultural shift, in my opinion, it eventually is. And very much so! For Enterprise 2.0 to succeed it’s all about changing people’s habits, about inspiring a culture of sharing, about provoking a change of how we conduct business so that it happens more out there in the open, publicly and transparent to everyone, which is basically what most social tools would empower us to do. And Dion’s slideware during the workshop certainly confirms that growing trend.

Which makes for an interesting segway into Mike Gotta’s workshop: Getting Started With Enterprise Social Networking, where he shared plenty of insights on the recent study he has conducted where he worked with 21 organisations, interviewed 65 people, got 45 hours of conversation, and looked at 1,700 data points (WOW!), following quite an interesting approach as well: "rather than guide the conversation with a lot of questions, he set a framework and let people talk and tell their stories". Like I said, Bill Ives’ blog post on the topic is an great read on this one, too!, to get an idea of what the session was like.

Like I was saying though, Mike’s workshop session was eventually down to sharing the insights from the study itself where there was a single key concept coming back over and over and over again: adoption. Indeed, over a good number of slides he got to describe, quite extensively, how most folks are embarking into the next wave of Enterprise 2.0, now that we have moved past the tools focus into that one of social software adoption itself.

And with that new challenge we go back again to what I have mentioned above already … that this is going to be a rather interesting time as more and more businesses start wondering whether they can embrace social software as part of that cultural shift I mentioned earlier on as well or whether they will not.

The chance is that if they remain open to the whole concept of helping knowledge workers to be more in control of their work flow and their interactions with their peers sharing their knowledge and collaborating across there is a great chance that it will happen. But, it is not going to be that easy; more of a bumpy road eventually with key concepts like ROI (Yeah, I know! Again! Grrr), Social Software Tools (Making the right choice with vendors), business processes alignment, transition into a culture of sharing (Perhaps for the sake of sharing itself) are some of those hurdles we will keep bumping into and Mike’s workshop certainly provides plenty of insights on how to address most of these.

I do hope that both slide decks from Dion and Mike will be made available online for everyone to download, because there is just so much stuff contained in each of them that it would probably take folks a few hours to digest all of the interesting and insightful content. I surely am glad I attended both sessions, because they certainly corroborated what I have been doing for the last six years (As an internal social computing evangelist), but more interestingly a good reflection of the huge amount of work there is still out there to be done by each and everyone of us.

And I surely hope you are ready for it. Because it’s not happening next year or the year afterwards. It’s right here. It’s right NOW! … Are you ready?

(Quick note that caught my by surprise a bit while attending the pre-event day … Whenever someone mentions to me the word workshop, and this may well be a language issue, since English is not my mother tongue, I always think about a single word: interactivity; yes, a dialogue, a conversation between the presenter and the audience, a healthy discussion on specific topic(s); sitting in a room for over three hours waiting for that interactivity to take place and eventually just being a one man show is not what I would call a workshop, so I hope the conference organisers change their wording next year to match better our expectations on what a workshop really is and let us decide how to engage further … Just sayin’)

Tags: e2conf, Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Boston, Conference Events, Events, Conferences, Reality Check, Workshops, Dion Hinchcliffe, Mike Gotta, Burton Group, Emergence, Change, Change Management, Study, Surveys, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, Productivity, ROI, Metrics, Return On Investment, Cultural Barriers, Barriers of Adoption, Vendors, Bill Ives, dhinchcliffe, mikeg514, Emergence, David Stephenson, davidstephenson, Democratisation of Data, Government, Government 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 Adoption, Adoption, Social Software Adoption, Culture, Cultural Shift, Culture Change, Managing Change, Feedback