frogpond

Upcoming part 1: Web2Expo Berlin

Im Vorfeld der Web 2.0 Expo Europe in Berlin werden viele verschiedene Interviews mit den Protagonisten der Konferenz geführt. Speziell auf der Web 2.0 Expo in New York hat Ulrike zuletzt ein Interview mit Jen Pahlka vom Co-Konferenzorganisator Techweb geführt. U.a. wurde diskutiert, warum es dieses Jahr wieder nach Berlin geht.

Video ist courtesy of Johannes (mit dem ich mich interessanterweise beim BarCamp Stuttgart darüber unterhalten habe), und der zusammen mit den anderen Bloggern der Berlinblase die Expo wieder unter die Lupe nehmen wird. Einig waren wir uns jedenfalls, dass O’Reilly und Techweb ernsthaft und glaubwürdig an diesen neuen Anlauf gehen und wir daher mit einer guten Grundstimmung an die Sache gehen sollten. Er schreibt:

Insgesamt kommt klar das Gefühl rüber, dass die Kritikpunkte vom letzten Jahr mehr als deutlich gehört wurde und man alles dran gesetzt hat, es dieses Jahr besser zu machen.

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Ein weiteres Video hat Andrea bereits vor ein paar Tagen gepostet- ein Interview mit zwei der drei Initiatorinnen des Expo Bloggerprogramms, in dem die Motivation für O’Reilly und Techweb für diese Initiative deutlich wird. Ich spare mir mein Disclosure, das habe ich bereits transparent gemacht.

Um nun die Masse an Vorträgen, Workshops, Keynotes etc. zu organisieren bietet es sich zum einen an ein persönliches Programm zusammenzustellen, zudem sollte man das konferenzeigene Social Network (auf Basis von Crowdvine) nutzen. Anders als letztes Jahr ist es dieses Mal rechtzeitig am Start. Und um sich in der Vielzahl der Besucher zu finden bietet es sich einfach an – neben der Benutzung der üblichen Verdächtigen wie Twitter und Co. – dieses spezialisierte Social Network zu benutzen. Auch wenn ich ja ungern dutzende von Freunde, Bekannten und Kollegen von Hand dazufüge, ist es zumindest eine gute Eigenschaft von Crowdvine, dass die Beziehungen in friend, fan und “want to meet” differenziert werden können.

Nun ja, wer nun noch Lust auf eine intensive Berlin Web Week verspürt kann sich mit meinem Promo-Code immerhin 35% Nachlass verschaffen. Bei der Registrierung also den Code webeu08gr17 eingeben …

Pre-Conference interview: dbWiki – building a Web 2.0 corporate knowledge base

There’s another pre-conference interview (”Fallbeispiel: dbWiki – Umsetzung eines unternehmensinternen Lexikons mit Web 2.0 Technologie“) at the Enterprise 2.0 Forum site. Again it’s german language only, so here’s a short english language summary and brief analysis of the key points discussed.

This time Joachim Niemeier spoke with Dr. Matthias Büger, Vice President, Group Technology and Operations and Jamil Ouaj, GTO Communications of Deutsche Bank AG.

Topics of the conversation included:

the understanding of Enterprise 2.0 at Deutsche Bank, i.e. the focus of E 2.0 efforts – these include supporting collaboration between employees, and enhancing the social capital inside the company and in relation to partners and customers.
perceived benefits of Enterprise 2.0 – basically, leveraging and effectively using knowledge in social networks and communities. They pointed out that contributors can build up authority and expand their personal network in the bank, strengthening the employer (well, rather community of colleagues)-employee relationship. Well, I think that rationale is a little bit awkward. While I certainly can see the point I guess that for employees it’s important that their professional networks aren’t confined by the narrow limits of one organization (they’re no life-timers, are they?). And I am seeing more and more “natural optimizers of personal professional value” – these people value and master relationships no matter what company the other nodes are in, companies need to loosen up their borders anyway and they’re doing it in other places too (see bullet point #1 above)
Organizational barriers of Enterprise 2.0 (namely a lack of willingness, motivation and preparedness, like e.g. overly bureaucratic structures) and how to deal with them. Yes, it’s about fitting an ambitious concept into a context that’s not ready. Their basic advice is sound – fitting Enterprise 2.0 initiatives into the overall strategic setting. I found it more interesting that he called for a more rigorous project management than usual, but that’s probably due to the nature of the beast. Banks they put so much attention on risk management, governance and diligence that it seems hard to approach things differently. See, while I hold project management dear, I also like the light-weight aspects of Enterprise 2.0 and the swiftness it brings. Hence I would rather argue for the creativity and agility of “planned and controlled experimentation” than the security of coordination meetings, processes and all (“Abstimmungsrunden und Teilprozessen”).
finally, their wishes for the upcoming conference. This is something I fully join in: “let’s discuss this space, but leave the hype behind”

Changing organisations via Enterprise 2.0 – pre-conference interview – Festo

There’s a third pre-conference interview (“Fallbeispiel: Enterprise2.0@Festo – Biographie eines Projektes“) at the Enterprise 2.0 Forum site. Like its predecessors (see more here and there) it’s german language only. So – again – it’s probably a good idea to do a short english language summary and analysis of the key points discussed.

This time Joachim Niemeier spoke with Arne Schümann of Festo didactic (Festo as a whole is best described as a family-owned global player – and, full disclosure – I know this company a little bit. One reason is that it’s main branch is located only about some 15 km from my home, another one being that some friends of mine are current and past Festo employees).

To me the main “learning” from the interview is that changing organisations via Enterprise 2.0 is both hard and (potentially) extremely rewarding (yes, also in terms of ROI). Now onto the topics of the conversation:

Festo had a headstart with their Enterprise 2.0 project as they already had experiences with (personal) knowledge management, life-long (e-)learning, collaboration …
Enterprise 2.0 is not about technologies, it’s about perceptions, attitudes and “modes of work” – well, yes, some paradigms (and principles and methods too) stay – but there’s a need to adapt some of those, i.e. give them the place and importance they deserve …
Hierarchy is an ever-present issue in implementation, seen vs. the evolving trends that supplant formal and stiff hierarchy with heterarchies (and/or meritocracies, sociocracies, …). Now I am really looking forward to the actual talk by Mr. Schümann, I want to know more about how Festo dealt with this. BTW, I really I liked the mentioned term “guided autonomy”, sounds a lot like a “roman law” of Enterprise 2.0-aware design of organizational structure. We’ll see, I sure don’t hope it ends along the lines of “Regulierte Selbstorganisation”, i.e. overregulated and face-value self-organization that’s OK only when dealing with “blue sky” situations …
Organizational proponents and supporters of Enterprise 2.0 – seems to be an integrated effort of various stakeholders. Interestingly, at Festo the distributed local branches had more interest than the headquarter. Yes, good point – these scattered outfits will profit the most from improved communication and collaboration.
Factors that are speeding up change, Mr. Schümann is rightfully calling for an optimal balance of bottom-up-grass-roots and top-down-supported implementation.
„Don’t talk about it, prove it“ – start with actual (pilot) implementations to demonstrate the benefits. Well, yes, that’s what I am saying … so small wonder that his rant “most Enterprise 2.0 consultants are way too theoretical” doesn’t really bother me – I’m a proven Geek Enterprise 2.0 consultant (TM), but I’ve blogged about the E2.0 consulting value proposition here and here before
And finally, the need for effective change management in the context of Enterprise 2.0 – well yes, said that before too – here (“One word as a focal point for change – Collaboration“) and here (“Cultural change and developing collaboration capabilities“)

Enterprise 2.0 implications and digital natives

Cool, Björn did an extensive wrap-up of the interview Joachim Niemeier did with Prof. Dr. Michael Koch of the Universität der Bundeswehr, Munich (here’s the german language full text of the interview, here’s the corresponding post by Michael Koch).

Let me add my two cents to the discussion, interpreting and expanding on one point I found especially interesting: His observation that just because students and young people are avid users of social networking applications, this has (at least for the time being) no direct business implications.

From my perspective today the students know a lot of tools and services as StudiVZ or Facebook; but IMO it is not clear to many students how these tools can be used effectively within organisations; therefore I believe that the students nowadays are not any further then the enterprises; but this generation will add some more pressure towards the enterprises in order to use social software tools – though they will not enrich the enterprise with some kind of application expertise.

Well, corresponds with my own experiences with students, derived e.g. from supporting a slew of university courses and related events with innovative e-learning and social media tools. Despite the successes we’ve had I hold that only some of todays students are “real digital natives (TM)”. Granted, most are accustomed to all kinds of services, and they use the internet as normal part of their daily lifes. But that doesn’t mean that

they know how to leverage these experiences for business purposes,
nor are they “naturally” active and creative web-people, and so I doubt that they all will (again oh so naturally) turn out to be active, creative and efficient participants in (business-oriented) Enterprise 2.0 intranets, social networks etc.

And so, while the pressure on companies to alter organizational cultures, processes and routines is surely mounting by Enterprise 2.0, it’s not alone young people entering the workforce that are causing this. Let’s keep this: age and gender are really bad indicators for “digital nativeness”, easy as they seem to be.

One might even argue that it’s rather people like Frank – well-educated, -networked and experienced knowledge workers – that are raising the pressure. Perhaps it’s the retirement of the baby boomers that should get most companies to think about Enterprise 2.0 – i.e. how to retain the considerable tacit knowledge and social capital these people have, how to enhance and retain their productivity (they’re going to work for another 30 years, don’t they?) and how to ensure that these knowledgeable people stay with us when other companies offer so much more flexibility, openness, transparency – i.e. have become Enterprises 2.0?

What do you think? I am not sure if this is a worthwhile discussion to have – and I sure am not interested in a long discussion about definitions and the like – but for understanding target groups for Enterprise 2.0 initiatives this might be interesting?

Enterprise 2.0 at Adidas – pre-conference interview

Here’s a short summary of the pre-conference interview (alas, german language) Joachim Niemeier did with Christian Kuhna, Head of Internal Communications of the adidas Group

The interview dealt with

usage areas of Enterprise 2.0 at Adidas
Adidas current intranet situation, and the aims and goals they are pursuing
who is engaged as an inner-company proponent of Enterprise 2.0
Mr.Kuhna’s expectations for the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Forum
and more

Interesting stuff in there, some notes:

Mr. Kuhna’s professional background is in communication, he also has some experience in leveraging intranets and internal communities in M&A situations, i.e. the Daimler-Chrysler. Interestingly, he’s sometimes reminded by the “Enterprise 2.0 hot topics of today” of all the things that were envisioned before.
Adidas is aiming for a global intranet portal, which integrates a round of Web 2.0 ideas and technologies. Up to now they’re having a variety of heterogenuous intranets, which makes it hard for employees to find information, etc. Starting from this situation Adidas decided for a fresh start – and they’ve come far by now – during the next months the scattered solutions will be replaced by the new integrated intranet.
Adidas’ employees already have some experience with social networks and platforms (Xing, Facebook etc.) and the intranet team leveraged these competencies. He stressed the importance of easy participation, helping adoption off the ground. Yes, getting a voice on the intranet is getting easier and it’s no longer a monopoly of IT departments – we need to allow for easy, free-form, adaptive and emergent design of interaction and participation means. Now, we can be sure that this will also add considerable complexity …
How to explain the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 to senior executives? Mr. Kuhna recommends to start with demonstrating the changed nature of (internet based) communication and the emergence of communities. Sounds like a good idea – senior executive support is vital, complementing grass-roots adoption.
How will Enterprise 2.0 change organizations? Mr. Kuhna sees most of the changes as rather evolutionary, even when the actual speed of change is impressive. Yet I am not sure if I support this all the way, I guess it depends on how we define “most of the changes” – to me, some current changes in the context of 2.0 are going deep (well, whole industries are disrupted, but for Adidas it may yet be another thing)
One last thing that’s worth noting – one of Mr.Kuhna’s wishes for the future of Enterprise 2.0 at Adidas concerns „Budget“. Nothing new on that front obviously – awareness and understanding is nice, but budgets get the thing rolling …

More on Enterprise 2.0 …

I am still catching up on my backlog, some findings of late:

Sören Stamer of Coremedia did an interview with Don Tapscott during the Dresden Zukunftsforum. Nice, in the background there’s the relaxed chilly music of the PuroBeach club (mp3, via Ulrike Reinhard). I was there too and I can tell you that it was a superb evening, chilling on the Elbe beaches. Don is a very thoughtful guy and I enjoyed our very own little chat, clutching at Caipirinhas. BTW, here’s a (german language) article on Tapscott and Wikinomics in the FAZ, nothing new but spreading the word is never a bad thing.

„Wir stehen an einem historischen Wendepunkt der Geschäftswelt, an der Schwelle zu dramatischen Veränderungen der Organisation, Innovation und Wertschöpfung. Offene, vernetzte Unternehmen setzen auf Kollaboration als neue Grundlage der Wettbewerbsfähigkeit“

Next thing is an upcoming interview with David Weinberger that is put together by WE magazine. Next Sunday, June 15, 5 -6 pm (MEZ) David will give a short introduction to his book Everything is Miscellaneous and then the Q&A will be open to everybody who joins the virtual interview club here.

Weinberger’s work focuses on how the Internet is changing human relationships, communication, and society.

The discussion will be led by Steffen Bueffel, Ulrike Reinhard and (yes, guess who?) Sören Stamer. Reminds me again that I owe him a review of “Enterprise 2.0 – The Art of Letting Go” …

To warm up to this event check out some more multimedia content, like Dions Enterprise 2.0 TV Show here or this nice video by BEA:

Stumbled upon – innovative organization and organizations …

Klaus Eck interviews CoreMedia’s Sören Stamer (german language) on what is his definition of Enterprise 2.0, and how it gets “on the road” at CoreMedia, i.e. agility, organizational culture and more:

Als vereinfachende Formel könnte man sagen: Enterprise 2.0 = Web 2.0 in the Enterprise + Privacy + Relevance

Sören himself has an interesting post here, pointing towards Toward High-Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware by Douglas Engelbart:

[who] makes a strong case for Enterprise 2.0 long before this term was coined. Especially his framework for improving the improvement process is eye-opening. Inventing hypertext to share information easily was definitely a great C activity. And I guess the same is true for Wikis, Blogs and Micro-Blogs.

When he describes the interdependencies between the human system and the tool system, Douglas Engelbart captures the whole challenge of transforming a conventional Enterprise into an Enterprise 2.0. Without changing our paradigms, organizations, procedures, language and attitudes we won’t see the benefits of new tools.

We’re not alone in this, Vineet Nayar, CEO of India-based information technology services HCL Technologies explains why he believes that in the future, democratic companies will outperform the command-and-control dictatorships that have persisted since the industrial revolution, his learnings include:

– Let go of command and control. In business, as in nations, dictatorship is out. Democracy is in.
– Business leaders must be open to criticism, just as elected officials are.
– Customers don’t come first, employees do, because employees are the product that your customers are buying.
– Democracy and feedback allow employees and managers to gravitate toward their strengths.