Column 2

First after lunch is a panel that includes Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps from NetAge, who I saw present this morning, plus Sujatha Bodapati of ProdexNet (an IT services company with a large Indian offshore development lab) and Carole Boudinet of Volvo IT (which doesn’t make cars, but provides IT services such as SAP customization within the global group of Volvo companies), discussing more on the people side of Enterprise 2.0.

Stamps started out with a case study about Shell wherein they put the technology in place for collaboration, then had to develop new ways of working together in order to develop the internal networking skills. Boudinet continued on with information on how they developed a collaborative environment and culture at Volvo with global virtual teams, once the technology was in place to support such collaboration.

Volvo, as customers of NetAge (ah, the focus of this panel becomes clearer…) developed 10 keys to virtual team collaboration:

1. Be organized
2. Plan ahead
3. Show respect
4. Be clear
5. Seek confirmation
6. Dare to ask
7. Give response
8. Seek understanding
9. Address problems
10. Resolve conflicts

They developed a virtual team guide and exercises on getting started with virtual teams, and developed an iterative rollout process including assessment, coaching and exercises, then moving on to implementation of the tools and rules. They’ve developed a network of “culture ambassadors” who promote the Volvo culture and help people to adopt the culture.

An audience member asked how this helps Volvo do its job better, and it turns out that they can now gather ideas for their various manufacturing processes from participants around the world throughout their organization. This has helped them to save money by tapping into knowledge that already existed within their company.

Sujatha Bodapati then talked about collaboration challenges in their organization, with major operations in both the US and India, resulting in internal issues of culture, geography and time zones. They use email for customer and HR interaction, when a document trail is required; message boards and wikis for individual projects and technical details; online chat for quick clarifications and real-time collaboration; and web conferencing and desktop sharing for formal meetings, brainstorming and prototyping sessions, debugging, and technical support. I found this last bit to be a particularly good layout of how to use multiple communication channels depending on the type of communication required: very similar to the presentation that I heard from Craig Roth at a recent conference. ProdexNet uses a number of different processes for virtual team collaboration, including regularly-scheduled meetings and informal phone conversations, and encourages smaller team sizes of 5-7 people.

Besides talking about ProdexNet’s internal collaboration, Bodapati also talked about how they’re building a product for NetAge, and how during the entire 19-month project there has been no face-to-face communication between them: in fact, she just met Lipnack and Stamps yesterday for the first time. She sees excellent written communication skills as a key to this type of collaboration, since Stamps apparently wrote an incredibly clear set of product specifications ProdexNet to work from. They used BaseCamp for technical team collaboration, and online chat for development and debugging details. Since I often work with clients remotely, I agree that this can be done as long as there are clear communications, no resistance to using the technology required for collaboration, and a corporate culture that is open to virtual team collaboration. I have worked with many clients where we execute projects flawlessly without ever meeting face-to-face; on the flip side, I’ve had local clients who I met with several times per week but who couldn’t get past their own corporate politics and power games to allow collaboration to occur.

She stated that the bottom line to a successful virtual teams is the human interaction and attitude: willingness to take the time to communicate clearly, to have flexible work hours for time zone overlap, to travel when necessary for face-to-face interaction, and to use the right tools at the right time. An audience member asked how you “enforce willingness”, which I found pretty funny.

Lipnack finished up the session with a case study from an unnamed global financial services company, and how they developed collaboration across their global teams. They married sociology best practices with enterprise wiki technology, driven by the HR department — how’s that for three concepts that don’t often end up in the same sentence? The final result, based on before and after surveys, was a pretty impressive 34% increase in virtual collaboration.

We finished the morning with a keynote/general session by Dennis Moore of SAP, who gets points for making us laugh within the first 30 seconds. We still seem to be covering a lot of the basics of Enterprise 2.0; maybe that’s to be expected given the newness of the meme, although I would expect that most of the people here probably have a bit of knowledge about Enterprise 2.0 — they’re at an Enterprise 2.0 conference, after all.

He also discussed how the boundaries between work and home are starting to dissolve, in part because we’re bringing our expectations from our souped-up home-based computers and networks into the more restrictive corporate IT environment. Not satisfied with what IT can provide, business units are buying externally-hosted services via a software-as-a-service model, and building their own portals using RSS feeds.

As I’ve mentioned here before, he talked about how SAP has exposed much of their product functionality as web services so that those services can be consumed by other applications — whether a structured BPM application, an enterprise mashup or a portal — to provide visibility into the data and functionality of SAP. This makes SAP a vital and essential part of the ongoing environment rather than being relegated to the dreaded “legacy” category.

He demonstrated (finally! A live demo!) a nice “smart workspace”, essentially a portal environment with all of the SAP service-enabled functionality available for dropping into any of the containers in the environment. He actually poked fun at how SAP or one of their partners might take months/years to create a custom application that you could now create yourself in their smart workspace.

Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps of NetAge shifted gears away from technology by talking about the personal side of networks and organizations: their company focuses on organization change, particularly that required to make organizations more transparent. Although it’s not identical to the presentation that they’ve delivered here today, there is a presentation linked from their home page, Collaborating in the Networked Organization, that has a a bit of the same content and is interesting on its own.

Networks can be public or private, and can be for purely social or business purposes. From an organization standpoint, networking within teams requires new principles, behaviours and tools, establishing the four common principles of purpose, nodes, time and links. Adherence to these priniciples provides consistency when working in online spaces, essential if online networking is going to work in a corporate environment.

They finished up with a poem written for them by Robert Muller, former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, called Decide to Network.

As an aside, Lipnack and Stamps work completely collaboratively on stage, effortless passing the conversational ball back and forth.

The first session after the morning break is Marthin De Beer of Cisco’s Emerging Markets Technology group, speaking about how video and other Web 2.0 technologies are changing the enterprise. Like many of the speakers that preceded him, a lot of his material is pretty introductory, like explaining how social networking is being used, and what a mashup is. He talks a bit about the social phenomenon of the blending of social and business personas and functions, which I find to be an interesting topic: many young people start out using goofy pseudonyms on the first social networks that they use, but gradually move to having a public persona that includes both personal and business aspects of their life.

Unsurprisingly, he sees user content creation as transforming the very nature of content creation, and is being driven by consumer/home access to products and technologies including highspeed internet access, high-resolution video capture and peer-to-peer sharing. Whether it’s a consumer, business or service provider doing the content creation, it’s like to include some combination of social networking, collaboration and entertainment.

Yikes, more video clips with technical problems, although this one was really just a few-second clip. Ironically, the audio was clipped off at the end, removing the word “all” from the tagline “video shows it all”.

Well, I guess we have to allow him a bit of video, since the main focus of his talk is getting around discussing the role of video in the future of the web in terms of user-created content, but also for tele-presence and surveillance. He sees a place for consumer, prosumer and professional video content; given that almost 100 people have viewed the 9-second YouTube video showing my boyfriend making a Riedel wineglass chime by tapping it against his forehead, I truly believe that there’s room for all types of content out there.

Cisco is in the tele-presence business, and De Beer sees tele-presence as a powerful tool for collaboration, especially when it can be embedded in some of the lower-level networking layers for performance and scalability. Now that we’ve all mastered online collaboration in a text-based manner, video is the next step up.

The second keynote was by Andrew McAfee, the Harvard professor who originally coined the term “Enterprise 2.0” only a year ago, speaking on the state of that particular meme. He started off discussing awareness of the meme, which has really taken off in the past year. It involves the use of social software within enterprises, network effects that occur when you can gather contributions from anyone in the organization, and freeform authoring.

He touched on how categorization has moved from strict, professionally-created taxonomies to folksonomies, and the benefits that can result; for example, how the wild, wild west of the unorganized internet has become more categorized and structured over the past years, allowing it to be with library-like precision as required.

He touched briefly on the technology behind Enterprise 2.0, but didn’t have any particular insights in that area: enterprise needs, ease of use, yeah yeah.

He moved on to a discussion on communicating the results of Enterprise 2.0; he thinks that we’re doing a pretty mediocre job of this right now, with people tending to fall back on referring to the same Enterprise 2.0 success stories to try and convince executives to put up the cash to bring this into their organization. He claims that there’s not enough case studies or benchmarks, which is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: it’s hard to get people to buy without the case studies, but you’re not going to have any successes to develop into case studies if someone doesn’t just take the leap and get started. This, of course, is not unique to Enterprise 2.0: the same happens with any new technology, particularly disruptive technology like Enterprise 2.0 that might threaten both IT and business executives.

McAfee wants to help create a repository of Enterprise 2.0 successes stories (from which he will undoubtedly write a best-selling book 🙂 ), and challenged some vendors to step up and create some sort of wiki-like environment in order to house this.

He finished up by admitting how his own opinions of the value of social networks and the wisdom of the crowds has changed 180 degrees in the past year, from thinking that people who interact mostly online are a bit pathetic, and that the IQ of a crowd is around that of the dumbest person in it, to believing in the power of online social networking, blogging and the like, and recognizing that the collective wisdom of a crowd can be, with the right technology and environment, greater than that of the smartest person in the group.

David Weinberger, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, was the first keynote speaker today with a session on Rattling [Business’] Foundations. He’s an incredibly energetic speaker and had a very funny set of mostly photographic slides to illustrate his points using visual analogies. As his pitch and volume escalate through the presentation, however, I’m a bit happy that he’s only up there for 30 minutes — he’s pretty intense.

He starts out with the statement that the solution to the information overload is more information, by which he means metadata. He showed an absolutely hilarious slide of weird music CD classifications (Kansas-based Emo; techno-punk wedding music) to illustrate the problems with hierarchical categorization of physical stuff; then moves on to how when things go digital, you’re no longer required to keep things in just one category. A digital photo, through the wonders of sites like Flickr, can be categorized with any number of tags. Now, the consumers of data own the organization of that data rather than the owners of the data — a pretty revolutionary thought for the old schoolers — and can postpone the organization of that data until the point where they need to consume it. Part of the reason for this is that if you don’t, then the data consumers will just go elsewhere, and you can’t possibly guess what all consumers are going to want to do with your data.

His focus is really on capturing the wisdom of the crowds, but mainly for creating metadata (tags/categorization) rather than for creating the main content itself.

I missed the Zoho harbour cruise last night (they weren’t so bold as to call it a Boston Tea-point-oh Party), but I’m headed across the harbour for the Enterprise 2.0 conference now, so expect coverage of the sessions starting this morning (wifi willing).