Enterprise 2.0 - A Conference, Conversations and a lot of Common Sense

This week the Enterprise 2.0 Conference made it's debut in San Francisco (it has been an annual event in Boston). I was only able to attend one of the days but got my fill of colleagues who work in the space that i have not seen for a while, vendors (expo hall had many new and 'old-timers') and got to attend some interesting sessions.

One of the things i love about Twitter is the value that it brings at conferences- both when you are physically there as well as when you are 'listening' in remotely. Commonly called the 'Back-Channel' attendees tweet their thoughts, location, what speakers are saying etc. The Enterprise 2.0 site has a handy 'Back Channel' page or a quick Twitter search on the #e2conf hashtag will let you read through some of the conversations occurring in the back-channel as well the 'reporting' that was done during sessions and post event. The days i was not there, i was tracking the conversation that way. Today i also spent some time reviewing various 'wrap-up' posts including:

• Oliver Marks - The Enterprise 2.0 Value Propositions Agenda -
• Andrew McAfee's Top Enterprise 2.0 No-No's - CMS Wire
• Tony Bryne- Enterprise 2.0 Conference wrap up
• Nenshad Bardoliwalla - Is Enterprise 2.0 a Savior or a Charlatan? How Strategy-Driven Execution can pave the path to proving legitimate business value (great post need to digest a bit more myself)
  

My own thoughts align with some of the criticism and frustration that can be heard about E2.0 that it is early, how do you define, what are the business values, etc. Do you have to give it a special name- or it is just for marketing purposes. Spending some time with the vendors in the expo hall- the business proposition is primarily productivity benefits, increasing sales, capturing knowledge- nothing new in the Enterprise software space but the key is that the user (enterprise user in the role of the consumer) is driving. Adoption is still a huge issue and although the 'wikification' method of enterprise penetration (Mary puts a wiki server under her desk, at 10 dollars for 10 users that grows to enterprise) has proven to be successful for some of these smaller vendors and it is still early on but the big platform vendors are quickly catching up.

From the start, the labeling of Enterprise 2.0 has been debated and for instance the panel titled "Is Enterprise 2.0 A Crock?" that featured internal evangelists from EMC, Eli Lilly, CSC Booz Allen, MetLife and Alcatel-Lucent was supposed to prove that it isn't- although it was good to hear these big name companies on a stage advocating and proving some benefits- i didn't manage to hear anything new and specific. That is why i enjoyed sessions like the one that Susan Bouchard from Cisco did on Enterprise Mashups Deliver Business Value: Cisco's Story (disclaimer Cisco has been a client of mine for a while).

Susan recently co-authored a book titled Enterprise Web 2.0 Fundamentals and the years that i have know her as been an advocate of adopting new technologies for Cisco- primarily sales teams. Susan's presentation had specific use cases on leveraging mashups (a technology that is included in the E2.0 'stack'). She also mentioned some of the work that my team has been doing around executive dashboards to deliver contextual data that incorporates mashup principles (Cisco is currently not a client of that solution).

Susan also made note of a recent publication by Cisco titled the Economics of the Cisco Collaboration Story: Case Studies of Web 2.0 Collaboration Initiatives where over $650 million in savings is sited based on their use of Web2.0 collaboration capabilities (this number includes things like reducing travel and the use of some of their own product lines (e.g. Webex)). Susan posted her slide deck on Slideshare (E2.0 presentations are locked down for attendees only-boooo) so here it is :
Always good to be surrounded by like minded individuals and although i am sure i missed meeting many many many more because i was only on site for a day- i certainly enjoyed it and all the while making the brain juices flow which sometimes is hard to do when you are in front of a computer and talking to Enterprise clients about existing solutions (cause that is what they are ready for)- when the mind wants to explore and build the next thing!


Image|Flickr| Alex Dunne