The Enterprise 2.0 Breakfast comes to Melbourne

"more organizations that are sleeping through the social media revolution will jump on the bandwagon. 2010 will be the year of the social intranet."
"Within organisations, we should start to talk about the “enterprise experience”. What experience do we want to provide to staff in their working lives? What systems should they be using, and how? How do they interact with the information and tools they need to do their jobs?"
BT has an intranet. It’s called the BT Intranet. It’s what it does that has created the reputation it now has rather than what it is called.
It’s what an intranet does that it important – not what it is called.
I feel you should go further than you have. In BT we use internet tools as well as intranet tools including Facebook, Twitter and RSS feeds of internal and external news for business purposeshttp://markmorrell.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/i-now-receive-only-the-information-i-need/.
I also feel work and personal lives are blurring in being separate distinctive things we do and we are doing more of these using intranet/internet tools.
As this evolves intranets could well become a redundant term and something far more embracing takes hold.
This will because of what people are doing rather than calling an intranet by another name.
"most interesting information is socially situated, socially constructed, or otherwise impossible to tear from its human roots and package into transferrable units of "knowledge". This has major implications for the viability of certain kinds of information systems, educational programs, and the evolution of an "information society". Yet, most information workers and information products appear to be oblivious to these implications."
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I usually dodge questions about specific vendors and their offerings, and instead answer how I'd look at any particular deployment of collaboration software to see if it met my definition of Enterprise 2.0.
I find this pretty easy to do. I check to see if the environment meets three criteria: Is it freeform? How frictionless is contribution? And is it emergent?
It worth considering Andew McAfee's criteria for Enterprise 2.0 software - particularly as we get excited about the potential for Sharepoint 2010 for example. However, we actually need to apply this criteria twice. Once to determine if the software's architecture is able to support an Enterprise 2.0 use case, the second to determine if the organisation will actually deploy it in a way that allows those capabilities to be utilised.
Hat tip to Martin Koser.
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Dates – January 28th, February 4th, February 11th, February 18th at 12:00 p.m. ET
January 28th: Webinar #1: Social Computing Adoption in the Enterprise “the Before” – learn how to best develop the business case, gain buy-in, select technology and establish the team February 4th: Webinar #2: Social Computing Adoption in the Enterprise “the After” –gather best practices on implementation, policy formation, training, and community management February 11th: Webinar #3: EMC Enterprise 2.0 Case Study February 18th: Webinar #4: Raytheon Enterprise 2.0 Case Study
Unfortunately 12pm E(S)T is something like 4am in the morning here on Australia's east coast, however they will be posting the deck from each Webinar on slideshare.
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Thanks to everyone who joined us for our Enterprise 2.0 meet up this morning, here in Sydney. One of the main themes in the conversation this morning was discussing our own experiences of the different organisational factors - such as internal politics, perceptions of productivity in the workplace, information security concerns and generational change - that get in the way of effectively introducing enterprise social computing.
Unfortunately, due a sporting injury, Alex wasn't was able to make it this time but hopefully he'll be recovered for our next meet up. If you couldn't make today either but would like to be invited to future meet ups, please get in touch with your twitter or email details so I can 'ping' you when we schedule our next event.Comments [2]
If you work at a medium-to-large company, you probably spend more time on your company's intranet site than on its external customer Website. Employees share content there that's too sensitive and secret for outsiders to see.
But the internal/external wall is breaking down, as companies need to share more and more content with freelancers, external sales reps, business partners, and so many other people who can't get inside the firewall but still need internal information.
Fortunately, today's Web technology allows you to solve these dilemmas, and might even save you some money you're spending on your intranet site.
I don't have time to blog much about this particular point right now - I'm just saving this for future reference. However, I do think we are long overdue revisiting the meaning and differences between the related concepts of intranets, extranets and even the Web more generally so we can understand how certain long held assumptions might be hindering us.
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The technology annual report
We wrote an article about this a few months ago in the form of a memo from the CTO to the CEO, laying out the concept of an annual report for technology. Click here. Since we published this, we have received valuable responses from technology leaders. The concept seems to resonate. One head of IT strategy in a leading electric utility said he was keen to implement this concept in his own. “This makes perfect sense," he said. "Just like the annual report for the enterprise communicates with investors and seeks to build enthusiasm in this community, we in IT need to build enthusiasm among all those involved in providing funding for IT. Establishing and sharing an IT balance sheet covering both tangible and intangible assets will raise awareness in our executive committee and provide a much better platform for the dialog around technology enablement.”
You mean you weren't doing this already? Scary.
No wonder senior IT execs and even intranet managers have trouble selling the value of new concepts like Enterprise 2.0 - they aren't even promoting internally the benefits of what they do now... (to busy benchmarking themselves perhaps?)
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If your intranet can be printed off and distributed as a booklet to staff every 6 months then you're not making the most of it.
I'm slightly disappointed that this sort of thing is still happening today, but I'm not surprised. However, this is what happens when you treat the intranet as an electronic book.
Meanwhile, over on the ReadWriteWeb Enterprise blog they are getting excited about Forrester getting excited about collaboration. However this is all part of the same story - the only difference is that sometimes we talk about 'intranets', other times 'collaboration' and occasionally 'information management' or 'document management'.
I'd like to start a Campaign for Real Intranets - like CAMRA, but without the beer. Any takers? We could have badges and everything. Alternatively, if you prefer the status quo, perhaps a Campaign for Dead Intranets instead? IMHO Better a dead intranet, than dead trees.
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You might think from recent posts that I don’t believe in measurement, particularly when it comes to measuring enterprise social computing projects. In fact, I do believe in measurement but also believe that measurement should be treated in a (organisationally-speaking) political context.
I’ve also noticed a quantum-like quality to cause-and-effect in organisational measurement - the helicopter view reported to the board often appears to bare little resemblance to the experience of staff on the ground. I don’t actually think there is anything quantum about the enterprise - its just that ‘organisations’ are complex systems. This simply makes it difficult to measure in absolute hard numbers anything that impacts on that system, unless you are prepared to invest in longitudinal and solidly scientific research methods.
The worst examples of this are systems that promise employee self-service but simply shift the transaction burden from a cost centre (where it is measurable) to the individual (where it is not measurable).
For example, if you are trying to justify the value of an intranet then time saved should be a great metric. However, it depends on how you value employee time and the actual impact on the organisation of time wasted searching for information. In many cases, this waste is invisible - people just end up working harder to make up for deficient systems.
So, if measurement is important what should we measure?
Wrong question. More on this another time.
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