Learnings and Takeaways from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference
I have just returned from four stimulating days at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara, California. While still descending from the mountaintop, I offer the first of a few posts highlighting observations and key learnings from the event.
While most of our work over the past couple of years has focused on helping companies get the most out of external social media activity between the company and the customer, there is equal if not greater value to drive technology enabled collaboration inside the organization with employees and business partners. This is the primary idea behind Enterprise 2.0.
One of the most compelling Keynote comments was that e2.0 is not about Facebook for the enterprise but it is about what we have learned from Facebook. We are all social beings who naturally connect with others, share information and express our opinions. Just as in our personal lives, social relationships at work create value and impact productivity. We heard many companies like Cisco, Dell, Booz Allen Hamilton and Salesforce.com describe how they were effectively leveraging this innate social capital (networks and connections) into the workplace to increase performance, efficiency and competitiveness.
There was much discussion about the word social. Since this was a global conference social meant many different things depending on who was speaking. Consequently, attempting to sell the CEO on social anything was not encouraged. So, how do you encourage buy- in? The key is to define the e2.0 business case by focusing on key performance indicators (KPIs) and not necessarily ROI which we all know can be fuzzy and difficult to grasp. If you can demonstrate how more efficient and effective information sharing can contribute to KPIs then you should have the C-Suite’s attention. Additionally, if executive management believes people are the crux of the organization then dial in on how these emerging tools can help employees increase collaboration and perform better.
One of the speakers, Oliver Marks, had a terrific slide on the difference between social networks and collaborative networks. According to Marks, Social nets focus on enabling interaction and conversation whereas collaborative nets focus on groups accessing and organizing data into actionable formats that enable decision-making, collaboration and reuse. Smart. Value can be derived by combining both.
In just about every organization huge volumes of data are generated daily. This information flows through the organization, out and over the edge. What companies need to prevent is information evaporation (a wonderful term). Just like with social media, this constant data flow is like a fire hose but, within many organizations today the flow is siphoned off into dozens if not hundreds or even thousands of separate, unrelated streams. The promise of e2.0 is to harness these streams, bring them together, provide useful filtering and context (data without context yields few insights) to help everyone do their jobs better.
Next time, we will talk a bit more about buy-in; not just from the executive suite but also from employees whose jobs and work style will be significantly affected by these changes.
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