Enterprise 2.0 Conference Highlights – Day Two
Posted on Aug 5, 2009 | Categories: Collaboration, Communities, Conference Events, Enterprise2.0, Innovation, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Tools, Learning, Social Enterprise, Travelling | 1 Comment
And we continue further with one of the last blog posts I will be putting together as part of the Enterprise 2.0 conference event highlights. Yes, indeed, I am almost done with this series of blog entries sharing with you folks what I learned throughout the event that took place in Boston a few weeks back. This time around this article will be dedicated to some of the key learnings I went through during Day Two of the conference.
As you would remember, not long ago I shared a blog post on what to expect from Day Two itself and, by the looks of it, it promised to be a pretty intense and fully packed up day. And it surely was! So with the same format I did for the conference highlights for Day One, here you have got my main key highlights of what I learn that day. It may turn out to be a rather long blog post, so you may go and grab a cup of coffee, just in case …
Applying the Social Dimension to the Lockheed Martin Mission
with Andy McAfee (As facilitator) and Christopher Keohane and Shawn Dahlen; probably one of the best sessions from Day Two; at least, one where I learned plenty more from one of the Enterprise 2.0 stars from last year; looks like Lockheed Martin are doing just fine; starting small, building from there and currently having 65 open communities, with a nice blend of digital natives and digital nomads participating rather heavily (With a 40 year old blogging star included!); all provoked thanks to both a bottom up grassroots effort as well as top down leadership one diving into the conversations as well as providing full support to those initial grassroots efforts.
The interesting thing from the entire session that Andy kept moving along at a fast, but rather intense and engaging pace, was when both Christopher and Shawn commented on something that didn’t permeate much through the live tweeting taking place, but that I thought was rather fascinating. And that was how apparently at Lockheed Martin personal, non-work related, knowledge / information exchanges are not encouraged by the communities themselves; in fact, they self-regulate them out of the work environment.
Whoah!!! Yes, that’s what I thought myself about it! Back then I made this comment over at @elsuacon: "Am I the only one who’s concerned LM doesn’t understand the power of social capital to strengthen ties & build trust?" and a few weeks later I am still standing by that statement!
Social capital skills are essential in any corporate environment, more than anything else because, whether people like it or not, when knowledge workers go to work they bring their whole selves, both the business person and the private-personal one (With their thoughts about their families, their kids, their pets, their house, their car, etc. etc.); so actually filtering out when you go to work yourself as an individual is not only counterproductive, but also will slow down your business, because right there you are not helping employees to build further up on their trust levels by those social capital exchanges at a much faster pace. You are eventually slowing down your business without knowing it.
I am not saying that you would not be trusting your colleagues, that will still be happening, of course, but that trust-building will be taking place at a much slower pace, yet with a huge impact on the company. We need those social bonds, we are social beings, after all, and we need to connect further on in multiple levels with our colleagues and if you start capping those social non work related interactions you may not be getting the most out of not only the social tools people will keep using, but of the people themselves. A knowledge based enterprise will not thrive without social capital and those social, informal and trivial interactions. They are, always have been & will be, the glue, the key to a very successful corporate environment.
The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise
With Irwin Lazar (Moderating the panel) and Al Literati, Dan York, David Marshak, Fernando Egea, Marcia Conner, Mike Gotta and Tim Young as speakers; just as I thought, far too many people wanting to talk for such a short session, but overall lots of great insights indicating, once again, something I have been saying for years and which makes me feel content that vendors are coming around to terms with it: it’s never been about the tools, but how people make use of them to reach out to other fellow knowledge workers to collaborate and share knowledge with a purpose, i.e. a specific context. And social messaging is a clear example of that premise. Just as much as all of the other options available out there.
Another interesting take from this session came about when Mike Gotta mentioned how most of these social messaging options still lack in the fields of security, compliance and data leakage (Amongst several other risk management assessment factors).
Yes, it’s probably one of these areas where tools need to be fully compliant with such regulations, but it is also important to realise how both education and facilitation play a key role in empowering the knowledge workforce to work smarter (More productive) with less effort; to trust them ("How many companies out there are hiring untrustworthy people?" -great quote from Marcia) to do their jobs, to self-govern themselves, because, after all, and unless a business says so, you are eventually hiring professionals who should behave like professionals.
So eventually, and thank goodness, the current corporate environment is starting to shift towards more people centric organisations, encouraging plenty of people practices and use cases and eventually starting thinking more of a participatory culture, letting the employee be the ambassador! (Great thoughts, once again, from both Marcia and Mike! Funny enough … what I have been doing over the last couple of years and what I have been advocating for all along throughout all of my years involved with social software evangelism. (Yeah, you can imagine the kind of healthy ego boost I got right after the panel was finished, eh? hehe)
Does Social Media and Marketing Matter?
With Peter Kim, as the moderator of the panel, and with Ben Foster, Greg Matthews and Morgan Johnston as the speakers; unfortunately, due to a couple of other commitments I had to skip this session, but when talking to people throughout the day about it, it seems as if it was a really good one! And I can surely vouch for that, because later on that evening I had the great pleasure of having dinner with both Ben and Greg, amongst several other folks, and the conversations were some of the best I had throughout the entire week.
On what topics? Mainly on social software adoption, since both Ben and Greg seem to be doing very similar stuff to what yours truly does on a daily basis and it was great to see how each and every business seems to be facing the very same challenges and obstacles, regardless whether you are in I.T. or not; examples like cultural barriers, using community building programs as major drivers of social software adoption, variety of choices and what to stick around with, etc. etc. seem to be far too close. And I suspect we all learned a few tricks from there onwards. I know I surely did! (Perhaps another blog post in the making over here … hehe)
Initially, I had put together a blog post with the rest of the remaining sessions, but then realised that would have made this entry far too long than what it is already. So I am going to split it in two articles and finish this one off as Part I, to then continue with Part II shortly afterwards. So, like some folks out there would say … to be continued …
Tags: e2conf, Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Boston, Agenda, Conference Events, Events, Conferences, Reality Check, Twitter, 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, Peter Kim, Lockheed Martin, Andy McAfee, Christopher Keohane, Shawn Dahlen, Unified Communications and Collaboration, Enterprise Messaging, Al Literati, David Marshak, Fernando Egea, Marcia Conner, Mike Gotta, Tim Young, Irwin Lazar, Enterprise Microsharing, Social Capital, Trust, Social Capital Skills, Tacit Knowledge, Interactions, @elsuacon, Social Messaging, People Centric Organisations, People Practices, Use Cases, Participatory Culture, Ben Foster, Greg Matthews, Morgan Johnston, Marketing, Marketing 2.0, Serendipity
Enterprise 2.0 Conference Highlights – IBM Blogger Q&A
Posted on Aug 4, 2009 | Categories: Collaboration, Communities, Conference Events, Enterprise2.0, IBM, Innovation, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Tools, Learning, Personal KM, Social Enterprise, Travelling | 1 Comment
On my latest blog post on the Enterprise 2.0 Conference event highlights for Day One, I mentioned how I would be putting together a specific entry to detail plenty more one specific item on my agenda for the day that I was really looking forward to, since last year I missed it. Yes, I am talking about the IBM Blogger Q&A meeting that took place with both Irene Greif and Bob Picciano, amongst several other folks (Like Suzanne Minassian or Casey Dugan – and a few others).
The reason why I thought about sharing some further insights from this event is not necessarily to detail what went on all along throughout the whole time, but certainly share with you folks a few hints of what happened during that time that I am sure would be worth while sharing over here. And very shortly you will see why…
To start with, there were a few other very well respected Enterprise 2.0 bloggers in the room along with myself (Like Mike Krigsman and Sameer Patel, for instance); and it surely was interesting from an insider point of view to check out the flow of the conversations and the agenda that was set up. First, an informal conversation (The Q&A part) with both Irene and Bob, to then continue with some demo time of several IBM technologies from the Enterprise Social Software space (Like IBM Lotus Connections v2.5, Olympus, Sametime 3D and Beehive’s Honeybees).
As you can imagine, I am well familiar with each of the various different demos provided throughout that time, since I have been exposed quite a bit to each and everyone of them. Perhaps, at a later time I will detail some more about them. So to me the main key area of interest though was actually the conversations going on with both Irene and Bob around the topic of social software and how they themselves make use of it extensively on a daily basis to reach out to their immediate teams and communities they hang out with.
At this point in time, I am sure there is very very little I would probably need to add about Irene Greif and the amazing piece of work she has been doing with The IBM Center for Social Software in Cambridge, MA, amongst plenty of other various different activities in the area of Research and Social Computing. Always an inspiration to listen to some of the stuff she and the rest of her team are working on in this area that most of us can’t even think of it just yet as we speak. Some fascinating stuff going on in that area of researching the next wave of Social Computing interactions with a business purpose. I tell you.
And then we had Bob Picciano, General Manager from Lotus Software and WebSphere Portal, talking to a bunch of us on what his experiences have been like so far making use of social software tools for work. How he keeps using extensively LotusLive to reach out to customers and business partners; how he is using IBM Lotus Connections v2.5 (Mainly the Profiles micro-sharing component) inside IBM to reach out not only to his immediate teams, but also to help change the center of gravity so that it speeds up the process of reaching out to executives; how through using these social tools the traditional hierarchies and organisations become a lot more blurred and therefore much more dynamic getting the job done through networks and communities; and so on and so forth.
I could keep going on for a while detailing what we discussed during that Blogger Q&A session, but I think I will just summarise it with a comment from Bob himself to a question I asked while in there. Now, I know Bob for a while; we are connected through our various internal networks and share with one another plenty of stuff through that micro-sharing component from Lotus Connections v2.5. He keeps sharing nuggets to some of the stuff he is exposed to on a daily basis. But he keeps jumping into people’s Boards offering to help with his insights, his experience and further advice on how to tackle complex problems. He has managed to make it contagious as well for the rest of his executive team to dive into Enterprise Social Software. So I just couldn’t help but ask him "How does it feel making use of these social tools while at work, for an already pretty busy executive like yourself?"
Boy, his answer couldn’t have been much more revealing and provocative, as well as inspiring, as I could have expected it: liberating! Liberating to let command-and-control go! WOW! Who would have thought about that kind of answer, right? Indeed, that’s when it hit rather close home with my own efforts on social software evangelism; that the main clear benefits are not down just to the common knowledge workers, like you and me, but even high level executives, and whoever else in the management chain (That included middle management as well!) can benefit from it by letting some of that hierarchical structure become a bit more blurred and help facilitate and lead the work to be done through interactions amongst networks and communities that share a common affinity; whichever that may well be (A product, a customer, a business partner; in short, a common passion!); versus the traditional I command, you executive mentality.
Obviously, the results have been incredibly fascinating; even for myself, because more and more I am starting to notice how plenty of executives are already starting to make use of these social software tools. And that can only be a good thing. Yes, I know most companies advocate for a grassroots bottom up approach with regards to social software adoption; however, we should not ignore the power of sponsorship and leadership we can get from management, including executives!, to make use of these social tools with a business purpose! It’s all part of a balance that some times can be hard to strike. A balance between a healthy grassroots bottom up effort and the leadership, by example!, of executives who regardless of how busy their schedules may well be, they always make time to contribute back to their social networks and communities, because, after all, they are realising how much hidden potential and talent is out there inside each and every single business and there is probably nothing better than an executive leading the way unleashing that hidden power!
Yes, indeed, we need more Bob Piccianos in the corporate world! And the sooner, the better! For all of us.
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