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

Enterprise 2.0 Conference – What to Expect – The Pre-Event

Continuing further with that series of blog posts I mentioned yesterday I would be sharing during the course of this week on the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 event taking place in Boston next week, here is the first of a couple of entries where I will be covering briefly the actual agenda of the event and, perhaps much more interestingly, what you may expect from each of the sessions per day. And, in this case, I will also be blogging about each of the sessions I will be attending myself based on those expectations.

So, instead of putting together a massively long post, I’m just about to start a bunch of shorter ones, detailing what my current planning for the event would be like starting with next week Monday, the pre-event day itself, if you allow me to call it like that, and that way you can see what is driving my interests at the moment (Specially in the areas of Social Computing, Knowledge Sharing, Learning, Collaboration, Communities and, of course, Enterprise 2.0), as well as providing some insights on what you may expect, just like me, from the event of events! Thus let’s get the ball rolling!

Implementing Enterprise 2.0: Exploring the Tools and Techniques of Emergent Change #e2conf1 (With Dion Hinchcliffe)

The pre-event day is always the one about workshops; perhaps one of the most interactive days and, as such, I am sure this year is not going to be any different. And this specific one is the one I plan to attend during the course of the morning. As usual, it will be hosted by my good friend, the always insightful and resourceful, Dion Hinchcliffe, who will be sharing with us "an in-depth overview of the state of Enterprise 2.0 from grassroots, emergent collaboration to large-scale social media strategy".

He usually does this session every year before the event really gets started and, to be honest, for those folks who may not have been exposed to Enterprise 2.0 just yet, or for those folks who would want to know what else is happening out there, it’s one of those workshops not to be missed! If not, check out the section on "You Will Learn" listed at the main agenda. Always plenty of new stuff to learn about, whether you are a primer into, or well versed in, social computing, you know it’ll be worth the time!

Reality 2.0: Getting Started With Enterprise Social Networking #e2conf4 (With Mike Gotta)

And this will be the second workshop of the day that I plan to attend, the one in the afternoon, and one that I have been looking forward to diving in plenty more, and for a while now, since Mike has already blogged about what he will be touching base on under "Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Social Networking Workshop" and it surely sounds like one workshop not to miss out on either!

I know, and have followed, Mike for several years now and I consider him to be part of the pool of some of most eloquent and amazingly talented industry analysts in the Enterprise 2.0 scene. And surely finding out plenty more about the recent study the Burton Group conducted around Social Networking will be the key highlight from the workshop itself. I am sure. Specially, if you read further on the section on "You Will Learn" that I am reproducing below:

• "What are the critical issues confronting social networking project teams, and how organizations are responding to those challenges and opportunities
• How project teams are dealing with the business case for enterprise social networking, including concerns over ROI and metrics
• What cultural issues do social networking projects tend to surface, and how did organizations in the study address legal, HR, compliance and security considerations
• What difficulties project teams will likely encounter as they try to convince employees to adopt social networking platforms (e.g., profiles), and what adoption tactics were used to jumpstart participation (e.g., expertise location, communities).
• How interviewees felt their IT organizations were handling with the topic of social networking, along with high-level impressions from participants regarding their experiences with different tools (e.g., IBM Lotus Connections, Jive Software, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server)"

Doesn’t it want to make you be there like today? It certainly does it for me! And that’s the reason why I am really looking forward to his workshop, as well as that one from Dion. I bet it’s going to be quite an amazing couple of workshops! And to top things further, at the end of the day, I will be participating in the first, of several, TweetUps! Yay! But that will be the topic for another blog post on the various networking activities I will be participating in and hanging out at… Like I said … There is just *so* much going on this year!

For now, though this is what I plan to do during Monday 22nd 2009, at the Enterprise 2.0 pre-event in Boston. But how about you? What will you be up to?

Tags: e2conf, Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Boston, Agenda, Conference Events, Events, Conferences, Reality Check, Workshops, Dion Hinchcliffe, Mike Gotta, Burton Group, Emergence, Change, Change Management, Study, Surveys, Twitter, TweetUp, TweetUp Events, 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, IBM Lotus Connections, Jive Software, SharePoint, Vendors

IBM Drives Enterprise Adoption of Social Networks with New Enterprise Adaptability Practice

And it looks like I may be continuing with some more blogging on IBM and its adoption of social software within the corporate environment, because a couple of days ago Jack Vinson pointed me to another superb article where one of my fellow IBM colleagues, and good friend, Scott Smith, describes the kind of disruption that social computing is causing to the enterprise world! Check out the article over at IBM Drives Enterprise Adoption of Social Networks with New Enterprise Adaptability Practice!

I know it is a rather lengthy blog post over at The Global Human Capital Journal, so I am going to keep things short and perhaps just point you folks to some of the most interesting quotes from the entire entry so that you can get a glimpse of what you will find in there, plus some more additional commentary from my side.

Oh, another good thing from the article that you should not miss is the description of a couple of technologies that IBM has been putting together and which, in my own personal experience, have become essential in my escaping and fighting work related e-mail. Yes, I am talking about SmallBlue, a.k.a. IBM Atlas and IBM’s Lotus Sametime family products. Very helpful tools not only capable of enhancing your real-time collaboration experience, but also with great potential to help you find the experts right when you need them and when they can collaborate and share their knowledge with you. Amazing stuff that, as I get to uncover the tools suite I am currently using to escape e-mail, you will be able to find out some more on it in upcoming blog posts.

So here is one of the various different quotes that I thought would be worth while mentioning over here:

"As organizations have already gone global (and become more complex), they want to drive innovation, and innovation comes down to people and collaboration. They have to connect those people and make the world small. They need to find the right people at the right time"

Indeed! Scott is right on the money with that statement and for those folks who may have been reading this blog for a little while now, this particular may resonate as very similar what some of the various topics I have been discussing over all along on the kind of impact social computing is having behind the corporate firewall. Amongst many other things it is helping business realise they have got an incredibly amount of great talent with various knowledge workers that in the past was just plainly hidden and not available. Now, all of a sudden, that focus that used to be on tools and processes is slowly, but steadily, leaving its place to a focus on people, i.e. the knowledge workers, as the main drivers of the different interactions and knowledge sharing activities. Something that in the past wasn’t having the same kind of impact as it is having nowadays, something that may well be *the* main success factor for those companies that would want to thrive in the current Knowledge Economy of the 21st century.

From there onwards you would get to read some more on how some of those various social networking technologies have been helping out different businesses address, and perhaps fix, one of the main issues that knowledge sharing and social computing have been having all along: finding experts, right when you need them!, to start sharing their knowledge and collaborating with other knowledge workers.

As the article continues to dive into the impact of these emerging technologies behind the corporate firewall, there was one particular quote that I thought was very relevant as well for the overall discussion and it is this one:

"People who don’t trust each other will not collaborate because collaboration is about sharing and collective risk taking. Innovation is a practical approach to channeling creativity, and the most efficient innovation entails cross-boundary collaboration. You’re stalking surprise and taking risks and making mistakes. That won’t happen if the enterprise culture doesn’t prize trust and discontinuous risk-taking"

I am not sure how many times I have been saying this already, but that trust is one of the main key success factors from any social networking tool available out there. People hang out in these social software tools on a regular basis, because they want to improve very much their social capital skills so that they can help improve their trust levels with others, specially in the corporate world, to such extent that they would be much more participative and engaging when they know someone they can trust, than when they don’t know a specific person they would need to collaborate with.

And that is one of the reasons why social software is key to any business, because if there is one thing that social software is good at is helping knowledge workers work through building those trust skills by sharing knowledge snippets that could be work related or not, but still provide value that would be helpful to others. Yes, that is right, interactions through communities making use of social software is going to bring many many benefits, but perhaps the most significant is the huge push on improving your own social capital skills, something that all along most corporations have been missing, as they thought it was not that important in the recent past. Well, think again, not only is it important, but crucial to any business to boost such set of skills to help bring knowledge sharing and collaboration into the next level.

And from there onwards you will be heading towards the end of the article where you would be able to find this other interesting gem which I think summarises pretty well why business cannot longer afford ignoring social computing, both inside and outside of the corporate firewall, and how if they don’t pay attention and react to it soon, they would probably be the businesses of the 21st century that would be struggling the most to the point where they may no longer exist in the medium / long term:

"Web 2.0 is the age of collaboration; people pay more attention when companies solicit and act on their input. Brand value will be increasingly driven by how well the brand inspires and participates in customer relationships and experience. Too many companies still see themselves as producers and customers as consumers. Of course, this is literally true, but the value of the underlying good continues to drop, and Web 2.0 enables people to create value via scalable digital relationships"

Thus still think that Enterprise 2.0 hasn’t got its place within the corporate world? Not sure what you would think, but something tells me it has, and a lovely spot, too, I must admit!

Tags: IBM, Jack Vinson, Scott Smith, Human Capital Management, Enterprise Adoption, Technology Adoption, Global Human Capital Journal, SmallBlue, IBM Atlas, Atlas, Lotus Sametime, Sametime, Social Network Analysis, SNA, Social Software, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Media, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Communities, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Management, KM, Innovation, Expertise Location, Trust, Social Capital, Skills, Knowledge Economy

IBM Lotus Enterprise 2.0 Workshop Outline – Madrid – March 2008

As you may have read already, today I am in Madrid, staying over here for a couple of days while tomorrow I get busy participating in a workshop titled IBM Lotus Enterprise 2.0 where I will be providing a presentation on Social Computing @ IBM (A very similar one to the one I provided just recently at the Lotusphere Comes To You events in both Zürich and Geneva, respectively) and then I will be providing a series of demos on some of the most popular IBM social software tools. To give you an idea of what I will be demoing here is the listing of tools I will be covering during the course of the entire morning:

- Lotus Connections (With all of its various components: Blogs -with our very own BlogCentral, Dogear -Social Bookmarking tool, Profiles, Communities and Activities and showing some of the new features put together for v2)

- Beehive, Fringe, Atlas -a.k.a. SmallBlue and one other tool I will probably be talking some more about over the course of the next few months around the area of expertise location.

- Lotus Quickr, Media Library and Cattail, all of them as team / community collaborative spaces with both open, public and private access, where knowledge workers can have a public or protected environment to help them share their knowledge and experiences.

- Lotus Sametime and Sametime 8 Advanced (With all of the various different social networking related plugins available that extend the traditional concept of Instant Messaging into new levels)

- Wiki Central & Bluepedia (Where I will show how IBM has been working already for a good number of months on our very own version of Wikipedia: Bluepedia)

Of course, there will be a few other tools that I will be mentioning, like the Lotus Greenhouse or Lotus "Bluehouse", along with Lotus Notes 8, where I will be mentioning all of its integration capabilities and how, now more than ever, you can certainly state that it is just so much more than e-mail client!! (i.e. You got to love all of those widgets coming through!!), but in general those are the guidelines I am planning to go through.

Yes, indeed, a whole morning through packed with plenty of excitement as I would be able to talk, discuss and demo how each of those tools have been disrupting the way knowledge workers share their knowledge and collaborate inside IBM and beyond. It should be plenty of good fun, for sure, since I will be having plenty of time to cover each and everyone of the various tools I mentioned above.

As I get to wrap up this blog post, I am also going through the final finishing touches of the whole show, where everything seems to be working just fine, at least, at this point of time. We shall see how things go tomorrow when everything should be up and running, ready to go! Let’s hope that technology and a good Internet connection would not fail me … Fingers crossed.

And not to worry, I am not sure I would be able to share most of the stuff I will be doing tomorrow, but I am certainly planning to continue talking plenty more about each of those various IBM social software tools and surely after I prune the presentation deck I will also be sharing it over at Slideshare. Thus stay tuned because there is plenty more to come!!

Let’s get ready for the show now!

Tags: IBM, Lotus, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Computing, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Communities, Learning, Workshops, Madrid, Lotusphere, Lotusphere2008, LCTY2008, Zurich, Geneva, Lotus Connections, Connections, Blogs, Blog Central, Dogear, Social Bookmarking, Profiles, Communities, Actvities, Beehive, Fringe, Atlas, SmallBlue, Lotus Quickr, Quickr, Media Library, Cattail, Lotus Sametime, Sametime, Wiki Central, Bluepedia, Wikis, Lotus Greenhouse, Lotus Bluehouse, Lotus Notes 8, Notes 8, Widgets, Slideshare