frogpond

WikiWednesday, IntranetForum, BarCamps und mehr

Nachdem meine Wochenendplanung steht, hier nun ein erster Überblick über die danach geplanten Veranstaltungen:

Am 5. Dezember ist bereits der dritte Stuttgarter WikiWednesday. Ich freue mich besonders auf den Vortrag von Dr. Christoph Giess (Avono AG) zum Enterprise Wiki Confluence. Das passt auch gut zum anderen Schwerpunktthema, einer “Marktübersicht” von Wiki-Engines, insbesondere aus dem Open Source Umfeld. Hier ergeben sich mit Sicherheit interessante Diskussionen und Anregungen.

Am 7. Dezember findet dann in Zürich das Intranet 2.0 FORUM statt.

Im Mittelpunkt steht der praktische Einsatz von Web 2.0-Ideen und -Konzepten innerhalb von Unternehmen:

[…] In der Diskussion um die Potentiale von „Hype-Themen“ wie Intranet 2.0 kommen die entscheidenden Erfolgsfaktoren oft zu kurz. Hier setzt das Intranet 2.0 FORUM an. Es zeigt erforderliche Grundlagen und innovative Beispiele aus der Praxis zu folgenden Fragen: Wie ist eine erfolgsversprechende Herangehensweise an Intranet 2.0? Welche Rolle spielen Unternehmenskultur, Hierarchien und Mitarbeiter? Wie kann das Unternehmen vom freien Wissenfluss profitieren? Welche technologischen Potentiale können ohne komplette Neugestaltung der Intranet-Plattformen erschlossen werden? Wie verändert Social Media bestehende Strukturen und Hierarchien? Wie wird die Intranet Governance beeinflusst? Welche Erfahrungen haben andere Unternehmen bereits gemacht?

Wird sicherlich interessant, ich freue mich auf die Vorträge und auf die Gespräche mit den anderen Teilnehmern.

Für die längerfristige Planung sind dann noch diese zwei Veranstaltungen interessant, an denen ich beteiligt sein werde: Zum einen die Enterprise 2.0 Open während der CeBIT:

The Enterprise 2.0 OPEN is a Barcamp-alike event at the upcoming CeBIT 2008. We encourage everybody who is interesting in the topic of Enterprise 2.0 – by means of a more grassrooted organizational approach for enterprise information and process management – to participate in this event.

Zum anderen wird ein Enterprise(Bar-)Camp (April 2008?) geplant, für das gerade die ersten Ideen gesammelt werden.

BarCamp Berlin: Social Networks and Enterprise 2.0

At the BarCamp Berlin me and Frank Hamm had an extremely interesting (and well received) double session on Enterprise 2.0. As we asked the participants what bothers them most, the discussion circled a lot around issues of adoption, change management et al.

Yet I managed to discuss some of the slides I prepared, focussing on the significance of social networks for knowledge workers. This is no easy play for Enterprise 2.0 implementation – and I ask myself how far social networking can make inroads into the enterprise. Not only is it seen with suspicious eyes by security-anxious corporate IT teams, it’s also an approach that HR most probably won’t follow: While we know that supporting (informal) networks is key for knowledge workers, and that they want to access a wide diversity of networks, the HR people fear that interesting employees may get snatched away by competitors if made accessible via social networks. While this is a somewhat distorted view of reality (hey, let’s block access to Facebook, but nah, we can’t take away the phone …) it surely puts obstacles in the way of corporate adoption.

Killing the Org Chart and Enterprise 2.0 Reality Check @ Web 2.0 Expo

Some notes (with added thoughts and remarks from me) on Sören Stamers and Nicole Duffts session at Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, Sören starts:

Self-organization moves the world (emergence, natural enterprise, complex systems theory, …)

But hierarchy controls the enterprise – why?

Hierarchies are vastly successful (military, church, mafia, …), but
– they kill creativity (which thrives on the edge, see Stowe Boyd)
– they kill agility
and
– they kill motivation (people don’t like to be told what to do, at least the people we want to have in our organizations)

So what’s the situation?
1. Rising complexity
2. Accelerating dynamics (and yes, not only in this web 2.0 world, think of accelerating product lifecycles)
3. Stronger Values (networks tend to create a sense of value, they evolve into higher levels of understanding, again here’s the emergence of patterns)

Three years ago CoreMedia was sensing the need for new approaches, to let go, to get the best of their (capable) people. Here’s how they approached this, they let go the old understanding of departments and rigid organizational structure:

– Get rid of departments, work in projects (so it gets easier to include external people into the work processes

– Transparency doesn’t hurt (open board/management meetings, this creates trust)

– Using Open Space meetings as an organizational method

– Collective awareness beats processes (big changes get easy when you have a global, shared understanding)

– Tools, yes, tools are important (they change the behaviour of people, again see Stowe Boyd) and yes, those web 2.0 tools are a really good afterburner. Sören cites Twitter as an example, but also showed us screenshots of the internal CoreMedia blogging platform), CoreMedia seems to be an interesting company to work for or to do projects with …

Next up is Nicole Dufft of Berlecon Research (Berlin, Germany) speaking about Reality Check: Enterprise 2.0 in Germany

– recently had a study among CEOs et al.
– focussed on knowledge-intensive industries

Some findings:

– a quarter of decision makers in KM-intensive industries do not know what Web 2.0 is
– of those who know, only a smart part know what to do about it
– 90% sees there’s a change going on, that requirements have increased (they sense that things are shifting
– less than half see they are good supported by their ITC team (surprise …)

All in all, web 2.0 ideas haven’t arrived yet. Those who should don’t use the tools, while there’s some scattered use now and then, there’s pretty little use on a company scale.

And really important: People asked do not recognise the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 (yet, these will only be really visible when these tools get used in an integrated, enterprise scale way)

Some Learnings
– Integrated E 2.0 solutions will have to replace insular tools
– Enterprise 2.0 will change the way we companies collaborate, exchange knowledge and ideas
– We as consultants must work hard to explain the benefits, to show them the usage etc.

Closing there was a round of statements and questions from the audience, all things that are bothering them:

– projects not working as wished
– we’re working in small teams, but they seem to don’t work well together
– we’re suffering from bad motivation among our employees – they seem to be too content
– we sense that we could be more innovative, but don’t know how to proceed
– we are a big organization, how can we kill the hierarchy (Sören says that one way may be a meritocracy, someone from the audience: make flat project teams, you need to network and build these small teams, this is a good idea even for big enterprises)
– listening is sometimes the bottle-neck, it is easy to make them write blogposts, but it’s hard to listen and act upon the things read (Sören offers a good idea: support the formation of weak ties in the organization, e.g. by having rounds of bilateral talks in the organization, whereby you create conversations and change the organization in the course of talking)

This was a good session, I enjoyed the audience participation and the presenters way of going on about this, Frank and Oliver did some liveblogging too, so I will link to their posts shortly.

Web 2.0 Expo Workshop: Dion Hinchcliffe on Rewriting the rules of the web

Dion Hinchcliffe was giving a high-energy workshop today at Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. Frank did his best in taking notes here and here, this was no easy task as Dion (which btw is a really amiably guy, met him yesterday at the Berlin geek dinner …) is a fast speaker, and he gave us a rough ride through web 2.0, warts ‘n all. In fact, Dion said that his talk is the condensed version of the material he’s using at the Web 2.0 university, i.e. his executive web 2.0 bootcamps (The Future of Online Business – Bootcamps).

He explained a wide range of stuff related to web 2.0, including technological backgrounds, agility, basic rules and characteristics, economic rules like Metcalfe’s law, success factors and ways to progress in this new competitive landscape.

Here are the essential 7 rules and observations that define this space:
– web as platform
– data as the ‘intel inside’
– end of software release cycle (but please, let us all replace the worn out beta by something along the lines of agility, adaptivity etc.)
– lightweight software and business models (see here my notes on Scott Hirschs Be like the Internet session this morning)
– software and many (increasingly portable and ubiquitiously connected) devices
– rich user experience (Ajax, RIA)
– collective intelligence

And the design patterns that rule:
– long tail
– users add value
– network effects by default (Metcalfe, Reed)
– some rights reserved
– perpetual beta (agility and adaptivity, please)
– cooperate, don’t control
– architecture of participation

Enterprise 2.0 wasn’t a real topic in itself, yet Dion handled a lot of stuff that is extremely important in the Enterprise: Usability, motivation, ease of use, and yes, network effects, especially the ways to enhance adoption. If you want more information on this part of the talk, get in touch.

In relation to wikis, Dion shared a lot of stories and experiences and explained the rationale behind their use, for more info get in touch as well. I need to get into Tim O’Reilly’s keynote early on …

Update: Oliver liveblogged from the session as well (german).

The state of Enterprise 2.0

Dion Hinchcliffe analyzes the state of Enterprise 2.0, collects some of his learnings and introduces a new visualization:

Enterprise 2.0 is going to happen in your organization with you or without you.

Effective Enterprise 2.0 seems to involve more than just blogs and wikis.

Enterprise 2.0 is more a state of mind than a product you can purchase.

Most businesses still need to educate their workers on the techniques and best practices of Enterprise 2.0 and social media.

The benefits of Enterprise 2.0 can be dramatic, but only builds steadily over time.

Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t seem to put older IT systems out of business.

Your organization will begin to change in new ways because of Enterprise 2.0. Be ready.

and

Nothing extraordinary in here, yet these are nice heuristics to play and design implementation efforts by. While these heuristics don’t make our lifes easier – changing “state of minds” is harder than experimenting with nifty tools – they can surely help in planning our adoption strategy and organizational change management efforts:

[…] to get the full benefits of the Web 2.0 era, we must begin adapting our organizations and their information and IT resources (with suitable enterprise context) to this network-oriented model […]

Web 2.0 is gaining traction in the corporate world …

is this really reality? Now, I’ve been collecting and compiling some serious stuff on Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 adoption lately, some of them are worth pointing out … especially given a discussion I’ve had lately and that was revitalized today.

There’s this HBS Case on How Wikipedia Works (or Doesn’t) and the related discussion (“Wikipedia in Pinstripes”), that handles a lot of the adoption challenges social software has in the enterprise:

[…] Wiki is another experiment in how to generate more collaboration inside companies, but I’ve seen mixed results. It can be as simple as “We’re having an office party, please sign up on a wiki page, and tell us what you’re going to bring,” to “We’re going to run this project, bring in all your knowledge assets together, and then we can self-organize.”

What Wikipedia has shown is that self-selection is critical. Peer review is critical. So there is a challenge for firms that are used to managing employees and allocating the resources in a very top-down kind of way. Now we have a technology that enables self-selection, transparency, openness—how does a manager or management deal with the technology? Do they implement it in a way that’s true to the spirit, or is it top-down? And, again, there are some very successful examples and some not so successful examples.