A Holistic Approach to Enabling the Collaborative Enterprise #e20s

Lee Bryant closed the Enterprise 2.0 Summit with a talk about Social Business.

Where's Enterprise 2.0 headed next? It's in the direction of providing real business value.

Enterprise 2.0 has been adopted at least a bit by most organizations. There's a nice spread of use cases, showed by research supported by Headshift.

Lee sees Enterprise 2.0 as a Trojan mice for organizational change. Small but impressive changes to the organization.

Enterprise 2.0 is still in the early phase, patchy and tool-centric (like the KM wave was in the beginning).

We're looking for quantifiable business improvements, like:

• lower operational costs
• networked productivity
• business agility
• effective management (move away from information hostages: businesses run by writing and moving report up and down the ladder)
• customer centricity (Listen! But many companies lack a structure to socialize what you're learned by listening)

Where is business practice going wrong?

1. people, outdated view of motivation, behavior. Do we trust them. Trust is cheaper than control. We still have no real understanding of viral behavior inside organizations.
2. process, an expensive way to orchestrate activity
3. technology, a critique of the IT function. Businesses are spending lots of time on very basic stuff, like ERP/CRM. Light-weight processes with tools so employees can get things done. We used to believe that huge automation would lead to huge productivity improvements, which it did not.

What have we learned that can help here?

• human behavior, spread of influence in networks
• aggregation, flow, network effects, force multipliers
• open, collaborative working contexts
• designing for emergence and evolution

Moving beyond e2.0 adoption:

• social business program
• platform thinking for underlying capabilities (shows a really interesting picture of how this platform adds up technically)
• this will lead to an app store for every enterprise
• use cases and local, situated software
• e.g. better coping tools for information overload

Now he moves over to sharing open data to change behavior. Now the processes to send data up and down the organization is not real-time and not open. If it would be, every employee could change their behavior in increments.

Another future trends is social experience design: energizing networks. Lots of measuring and monitoring and changing on the fly. This could give you loads of information about the amount of engagement there is.

Finally, there are new opportunities for leadership. Leadership is not obsolete, but it will change. Or E2.0 helps business leaders to reach out. Intimacy at scale.

This can create meaningful change in organizations. It's not a full-frontal battle, or it shouldn't be. But it should weave in with the existing networks and structures. From biology we know we only need 5% to create flock!

Great end to the Enterprise 2.0 Summit!

Enterprise 2.0 and Business Processes #e20s

Some notes from the open space about Enterprise 2.0 and business processes:

If you don't impact the business process with Enterprise 2.0 you won't unlock value.

If you introduce a new tool, you can't make them use it. Tools should fit in their daily routine. If not, users will easily reject it.

There were differences about using force to get people to adopt Enterprise 2.0 tooling. Most said, Don't use force, make it voluntary. But it does depend on the type of e2.0 project. For instance, an example was given about social project management. In this case you agree to do project management in this way. But with communities using (a bit of) force is restrictive.

Helping people use e2.0 tools and integrating them in their work processes requires patience and lots of training. Sometimes you even have to start by explaining what a webbrowser is. Focus on the e2.0 concepts not on the tools. Most people understand the concepts better than the tools... Enterprise 2.0 projects almost always start as push, not pull. Start by solving daily problems. Because most people don't ask for e2.0 concepts and tools.

Context is a key word in this area. Linking people (expertise), information, processes and tools. Formal processes, information need context to understand them.

We also see a role for e2.0 in the definition of new formal processes and improve them continuously. Basically most of us are unconsciously looking for improvements to business processes.

Social tools and formal business tools are not or hardly integrated. (At least we don't have examples... We do see vendors moving into that space, like SAP.) People are not middleware. Extra tools are see as a barrier for knowledge workers. E.g. they live in their email. Every extra tool for sharing, storing, etc is seen as a hassle.

Also see Emanuelle Quintarelli's notes here.

Challenges of the Organizational Setup of the Enterprise 2.0 #e20s

JP Rangaswami couldn't make it... Too bad. So his talk has been turned into a discussion between Frank La Pinta, prof. Joachim Niemeier, Jamil Ouaj and Christian Wuerdemann.

Don't have much to blog about this discussion. Not that it wasn't interesting for sure. One important thing to pass on is that the European companies in the panel have not changed their organizational structure based on their e2.0 implementations. The middle management does not have a new role, according to the panel.

There was lots of discussion in the audience about this topic via Twitter.