Bigger, busier and more “social” than ever, the Enterprise 2.0 Conference San Francisco is abuzz with conversation on how to participate in the market’s riches.
Lots of new products/services have been announced here, and the sessions have been packed– some standing room only or attendees taking seats on the floor.
Andrew McAfee, the father of e20, launched his book here. You can see him in this photo (bottom left) signing books issued by the publisher.
We have approximately a dozen members here from The 2.0 Adoption Council. As always, it’s great to participate virtually, but the face to face meetings and memory-making events are irreplaceable.
We were extremely proud to announce our “Internal Evangelist of the Year 2009” yesterday. The winner of this year’s award is Claire Flanagan, Senior Manager KM and Enterprise Social Software Strategy, CSC. Claire received accolades from her executive leadership, as well as Jive software whose platform CSC is building out to its nearly 100K employees. The final nominees for this award also included Megan Murray, Booz Allen Hamilton and Greg Lowe, Alcatel-Lucent.
Today, Council members will participate in a morning keynote session addressing the highly charged question, “Is Enterprise 2.0 a Crock?” And once again, Ross Mayfield and I will be facilitating a few unconference sessions this afternoon starting at 3:15pm. If you have a burning issue you want to address with peers, this is your opportunity to share informally with conference attendees and get some personalized answers.
The 2.0 Adoption Council has begun work on a new initiative – an Adoption Index that will measure the adoption of 2.0 technologies within large enterprises. We’ll be announcing the results of our member survey at the Enterprise 2.0 conference next week, and we want to get all the friends and fans (and Twitter lists) involved. The bigger the crowd– the smarter we all are. We’d like to engage the entire community in predicting E2.0 adoption trends We’re partnering with Crowdcast to launch a prediction market that will tie in to our next survey, which will be conducted in June 2010.
As an Enterprise 2.0 fan, you’ll have the opportunity to make bets about what you think will happen with hot topics such as “What percent of budgets will be allocated to ongoing community management?” and “What percent of organizations will report using mash-ups inside the firewall?” You’ll also be able to see what others think. We’ll be giving out prizes for the most accurate bets, so if you’re ready to put your (virtual) money where your mouth is, you can request an exclusive invitation to participate here.
Why get involved? This prediction market, the first of its kind, will allow us to harness the wisdom of a broad group of experts – (that’s you!) – to develop forecasts of Enterprise 2.0 trends. This will be an excellent complement to our 2.0 Adoption Council state-of-the-market survey, which will provide regular snapshots of the current state of adoption. Not only will you know the current state of adoption, but you’ll also have insight into where things are heading.
The market will officially launch next Wednesday, November 4 at 3:00 pm, right after the 2.0 Adoption Council research presentation, “Straight from the Horses’ Mouth” by Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen at 2:40, when the results of the first Adoption Council survey will be announced. Request an invitation today here.
You know that feeling when you have to take a random trip to the mall and when you get there, the entire mall and every retail establishment has been magically transformed for the holiday shopping season? Wow. It’s not even close to Thanksgiving, you think… But sure enough, you find yourself a little excited, a little sentimental, a little anxious about the fact that the holidays are upon us. It’s an emotional, a psychological reaction that launches a number of triggers that will ultimately lead to the consumer behavior the retailers are banking on.
That’s how I felt the first day at SAP Tech Ed, SAP’s annual education extravaganza. I had never been to an SAP Tech Ed before, and wasn’t sure what to expect. In the first twenty minutes after I arrived at the newly renovated, cavernous Phoenix Convention Center, I started hearing the words collaboration, transparency, and social. And it wasn’t from the blogger’s corner, I was hearing these words from SAP executives and customers. The event was suddenly, surprisingly relevant to me in a way that I did not anticipate, nor that I was prepared for. It was magical.
And similar to my experience visiting the mall and being greeted by a re-themed holiday shopping bonanza, the event launched a numbers of triggers for me. The first trigger was excitement. SAP gets it! I beamed to myself. For so long, it appeared SAP corporate was just not interested in the Enterprise 2.0 agenda. As recently as last SAPPHIRE (April), SAP’s massive annual customer and partner event, I was grousing about the fact that 2.0 was all but completely absent on the agenda or the trade show floor.
The second trigger was anxiety. At the same time as SAP TechEd, Oracle was holding its famed Oracle OpenWorld. Keeping a CPA eye on the tweet stream, it occurred to me that Oracle was “getting it” too. As I write this, Microsoft is amassing its fan-adulating entourage in Las Vegas where it will announce the long-awaited SharePoint 2010 which has been predicted to be the e20 startup killer. And, lastly IBM got this a long time ago which completes the MISO (Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Oracle) four horsemen of the 2.0 apocalypse. The combined market strength of the enterprise vendors to persuade and advance their particular offering signals an unmistakable step change in the heretofore teensy Enterprise 2.0 sector evolution. The big boys are moving in with their big marketing budgets and massive sales organizations. Not to be discounted either is Google whom unless you’ve been trapped floating above the earth in a homemade helium balloon, or hiding in an attic closet, you know has recently launched Google Wave: its impressive collaborative, real-time sharing platform. The other one I suppose I shouldn’t leave out is Cisco who’ve been re-tooling their go-to-market messaging around a fluid collaboration theme for months now.
Why does this tacit endorsement of e20 by the large enterprise vendors prompt my anxiety? Because I’m concerned they’ll dominate the discussion; maybe suppress innovation, dilute the passion that has historically fueled interest in e20. It’s hard to predict what the effects of mainstream promotion will be for e20, but one thing is for sure, e20 is about to bust out of the echo-chamber.
I started this post on the plane ride home from SAP’s TechEd (USA) two weeks ago now. Yesterday I was pre-briefed on Jive’s new announcements coming with its SBS 4.0 platform. Whatever real anxiety I felt about the big boys moving into the space has now been dissipated.
It takes a startup like Jive to inject innovation, creativity, passion, and excitement to this sector. Jive is releasing a ground-breaking set of features that will set a new high bar for excellence in the category. I’m certain the tech bloggers will cover the announcements in depth, but in brief, Jive is announcing an iPhone app (plus an email-driven enriched BlackBerry experience), very slick MS Office integration, and a bridging capability that will unite internal and external communities. All this in addition to the series of announcements Jive made previously that include social media monitoring and a SharePoint connector.
What’s significant about the Jive announcements is the company’s commitment to releasing timely, innovative new capabilities in response to customer feedback and requests. I’m here at JiveWorld, the company’s first customer event. From the energy circulating in the crowd here, it’s obvious to me Jive is customer-driven and loyalty from Jive’s customers handily delivers repeat revenue as well as product improvements.
Jive’s ability to manage the books, pay careful attention to its user base, invest in educating its partners and employees, rationally identify its target market, as well as manage its growth effectively squarely positions the company uniquely from other startup competitors in the space. Further, it accentuates the advantage startups have over the large enterprise vendors where releases are timed in years, not months.
So, as the e20 market twists and turns to accommodate innovation, advancement, and welcome step changes in attitude and strategic direction, one thing is guaranteed—all of this progress benefits customers. Customers have a hard enough time getting this job done, so thank goodness, vendors like Jive are making it easy to accelerate adoption and experimentation with 2.0 tools and philosophies.
Bjoern Negelmann has been conducting a series of TinyChats with leading voices on Enterprise 2.0 in preparation for the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt, Nov. 10 – 12. I hope you’ll join me this Friday: 9:30am ET for a conversation on trends in 2.0 adoption.
I think the process is fairly simple. At 9:30am ET, just go here.
Novell hired me to do a short webinar explaining the chronology of Enterprise 2.0 and some of the key challenges in embracing it. I created this presentation which has a visual I am continuing to refine that explains e20 relative to the social memes. I created this presentation before the meme wars began this week. Enterprise 2.0 still works to define the business of enterprise transformation for the folks who are currently committing talent and investment to transforming large organizations.
In my experience the word “social” has always presented problems in the enterprise. Management exposed to the philosophies of 2.0 thinking, aren’t keen to encourage socializing in the enterprise, but are very willing to improve working. I saw a similar post by Chris Yeh on this theme. Also, we had a good chat internally in the Council about the meme wars, and members expressed their frustration in a wholesale change to the labeling of the sector. It will cause practical disruption and well as introduce confusion at a time when many in the organization were just starting to “get it.”
Many readers of this blog will be receiving an invite to our 2.0 Adoption Community that is still scheduled to launch tomorrow. I hope we can continue this discussion there with an eye toward improving the experience for the most valuable players in this conversation: the customers who are valiantly trying to get this done.
