Expectations for the Enterprise 2.0 Summit #e20s

I'm really looking forward to the Enterprise 2.0 Summit! Are you coming? If so, I hope to meet you there!

Recently the organizers shared a pie chart of the participants per country. To my surprise hardly any people from The Netherlands are coming! I was wondering why hardly any Dutch people attend this conference. Last year I was there with one other Dutch guy. I know of many people in Holland who are interested in Enterprise 2.0 and social business. So that can't be a reason. Is the conference not well-known? I don't think that's the reason either. The location can't be a problem either. So, what is? Let me if you have any thoughts on this. My goal is to get more people in Holland interested in the summit and hopefully many more fellow Dutchies will be at next year's Summit. And for this reason I won't just be blogging in English but also in Dutch about my conference learnings.

What are my expectations for this year's Summit?

1. Last year we had a great breakout session about the integration business processes and (internal) social networks. At that time using external and internal social tools was mostly something extra, next to the formal tools in the organization (email, ERP & PLM tools). In our group we debated how important it is to relate and integrate the social tools with the formal business processes (and accompanying tools). I'm curious if we will see examples of companies actively doing this. Or is social still isolated in most organizations?
2. In the previous year there was lots of discussion about the 'return on investment' of internal social tools and social business in general. The business cases have popped up. One of the great things about (internal) social media is that it is also challenging us to not only talk about results in terms of money and analytics, but also in the form of stories. I wonder which types of value the speakers will show and in which way they will validate the effort they put into enterprise 2.0 initiatives.
3. Lots of data has been created on internal and external social media. Last year's final presentation was about the promise of Big Data. Are companies using the data to improve they way they run it? How are they capitalizing on internal and external big data?
4. Mobile has been a huge topic in the previous year. Are organizations combining enterprise 2.0 and mobile and capitalizing on this trend?
5. And, related to mobile, I'm curious if companies are also working on location-based social networks (inside and outside the organization). What are the implications of local in the new enterprise?

Keep in touch to see if these expectations will be met! I'll be live blogging the Summit just like last year. Tweets can be followed at #e20s. And you can find this year's program here.

Are you coming to the Enterprise 2.0 Summit? What are your expectations for the conference?

PS. Contact me for a discount for the Summit!

Enterprise 2.0 Research

There's not too much fundamental research on Enterprise 2.0. Deloitte recently published interesting research done on enterprise 2.0 implementations and their return-on-investment. In the EU research has also done as well. Study is being done for the European Commission and it was carried out by Tech4i2, IDC and Headshift. What was the goal of the study?

Goals of the study

• To provide a clear definition of Enterprise 2.0 is, describe the market and the positioning of EU industry, also in comparison with US and Asia;

• To analyze the take-up of Enterprise 2.0, the organizational requirements, and the role on the transition to a knowledge based low-carbon economy;

• To collect evidence on its macro-economic impact, as a market opportunity for the European Software industry and as a productivity tool for European business;

• To identify and analyse both the direct and contextual challenges, including the need for Next Generation Access and the legal barriers;

• To analyse and propose possible policy actions to overcome the challenges and grasp the opportunities.

The first part of their study has been published (a while ago). I didn't read the whole (lengthy!) report, but read parts of it. There's lots of interesting stuff in there.

Part of the research was about defining the difference between traditional enterprise software and the new social software. The research says the "openness by default" approach is the real new part.

They also write about the size of the e2.0 market, comparing the US with the EU. The market is considerably bigger in the US. And Europe is 2/3 years behind the US market. Europe is ahead of Asia though.

In Europe, the e2.0 deployments are much slower, through pilot initiatives, compared to the US.

Privacy is a key issue when rolling out e2.0 solutions. As is lack of understanding and cultural resistance by employees and management.

Some time ago I blogged about social media and cultural. In short I said: social media deployment can change culture, culture change doesn't always have to precede social media deployment. This study gives interesting results in this context. It proves that my statement was correct. It says:

Prerequisites to a successful adoption of E20 solutions is the existence of a collaborative and collegiate culture, where innovation is rewarded. It is difficult to reap the rewards from investment if the culture is not there and there is no top management endorsement. However, there is also evidence that the adoption of E20 tools generate cultural change by encouraging  collaboration and reducing silos effect: for example, the Intellipedia case showed how wiki were able to foster a more open and collaborative approach by the US intelligence agencies  (McAfee, 2009).

The research also stressed the value of e2.0 tools in organizations is not always easy to measure. This does not imply that there's no value in using them.

To close off the insights from the report, it also underlines the importance of understanding community dynamics and network effects that guarantee the success of e2.0 initiatives. Students and employees should be trained in these aspects of modern work.

The report closes by saying "next steps" will revolve around "the definition of policy options with regard to E20, based on the findings here presented." These results have also been published (and are open to revision and discussion).

Social software for business performance - Deloitte Report

Deloitte recently published an interesting report about their research on Social Business. It's titled: "Social software for business. The missing link in social software: Measurable business performance improvements". Some colleagues and I were interviewed for this report (when I worked for Oce) - see table on page 8. One of the reasons I wanted to participate was because this research was focused on truly measuring the impact of social software in organizations. We'd been rolling out social tools and using them widely. Also, we measure or tried to measure the value of these tools for business. We focused on two types of value. Value based on hard (analytics, increased productivity) and soft metrics (stories showing the value of these tools). We combined both because we knew that one can easily shoot holes in the 'hard' numbers. For instance you can wonder if the productivity increase is really due to use of social tools or did other factors (like organizational and cultural change) actually account for the increase?

Andy McAfee also relates to these issues when discussing this report. We need proof that social tools do improve business. Although many companies have been using these tools successfully, we are still learning what good these tools should and can bring. Measuring in terms of adoption is not enough, as the report says.

This reports points to several companies that focused less on adoption. They focused on operational pain points and tried to solve them with social tools. And these cases show that social tools did help here and did provide measurable and sustainable ("organize for the long haul", as McAfee says in this book Enteprise 2.0) performance increase. I think this relates well to what we've been discussing at the last Enterprise 2.0 Summit and my blogpost about this topic.

Alcoa and OSIsoft are the two cases. And I think Deloitte did a great job in showing they actually made long-term performance improvements. For instance by using a microblogging tool to decrease the issue resolution time.

With McAfee I'm greatful for this report. I hope many more will follow giving examples of others areas with dramatic improvement using social tools.

I wonder how you measure success in your social tool deployment. Please share your experiences in the comments section.