The business productivity track of the breakouts started with a panel on the social enterprise, and how search is changing the way that people work, featuring Kevin Dana of Accenture and Amit Bansal of Cisco.
The moderator, Nancy Lai of Microsoft, asked them both the same set of questions rather than fostering a real conversation, and the link to search was a bit tenuous at times: sometimes she just seemed to replace the words “social media” with “social search” or “search-based Web 2.0”. The panelists just blithely ignored that, and discussed the adoption of social media within their enterprises.
Interestingly, there was a bit from Amit Bansal about users not knowing when to use which tool – blogs, wikis, etc. – which means that there are multiple information silos being created within their enterprise social media spaces: the perfect application for search, although that didn’t come up.
Something that I noticed at last year’s FASTforward is that this is more than just a user conference: it’s also a social media conference. I don’t know how a search company’s user conference ends up like that, but it makes it interesting. What has changed since last year is that it seems that they’re required to inject the word “search” into everything in order to reinforce the overall message of the conference.
This was a great discussion of social media adoption in the enterprise, including user expectations, return on investment and a number of other very relevant topics for anyone considering bringing in these types of tools to their company. Nothing to do with search, but that ultimately didn’t really matter. Maybe Microsoft just needs to admit that not everything has to be exactly on the product message, and that providing discussions like this add to the overall value of the conference.