I am part of two panels, if they get approved. If either of them interest you, go ahead and vote for them. You need to register on the voting site (not register for the conference) to vote.

Social Media Policies: Practical Advice From The Trenches

This will be similar to the panel I was on at the San Francisco Enterprise 2.0 event: Social Media: Policy Formation & Risk Management. Mike Gotta will repeat hie performance in moderating the panel.

What Enterprise 2.0 Can Learn from Knowledge Management

This panel will look to the lessons of knowledge management and how they can be applied to enterprise 2.0. The panel also features Jack Vinson, Carl Frappaolo and Patti Anklam.

With 466 submissions there are lots to choose from. Here are some others to think about.

• Continuous Compliance enabled through Collaboration
• Open Meets Closed: Social Software and Regulatory Compliance Collide
• Enterprise 2.0 Lock Down in a Highly Regulated Environment
• Case Study: Adapting and Adopting Enterprise 2.0 in a Law Firm Environment
• Mike Gotta has listed out his several presentations on his blog: Enterprise 2.0 Conference: Session Proposals
• Claire Flanagan’s proposals
• Marcia Conner’s proposals
• Bill Ives’ Using Chaos Theory Principals to Overcome Information Overload within the Enterprise and on the Web.
• Networks and Leadership with Patti Anklam and Jessica Lipnack
• Social Media and Personal Net Work with Patti Anklam
• Moving beyond email — Barriers to knowledge management

You get a new tool to help manage your processes and everything starts working better. Is everything actually working better? Or is the data just being manipulated to look better?

As is often the case, the pointy-haired boss can show us the problem.

Often the compliance officer is like the pointy-haired boss. Everyone is on their best behavior when you are around. But what’s happening when you aren’t looking?

Its a matter of perception.

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, Andrew McAfee handed out a few copies of this new book: Enterprise 2.0. I was one of the recipients of a shiny new copy with his autograph on the cover page.

If you have heard of Enterprise 2.0, they you have heard of McAfee. He coined the term in his 2006 paper in the MIT Sloan Management Review: Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration.

You will enjoy the book. It pulls together all of the bits and pieces that he has said about Enterprise 2.0. Because even if you are familiar with McAfee and Enterprise 2.0, you have not had it all put together nicely in one place. I learned some great new things and was able to see some old things in a new perspective. This is the first book that puts it all into one place.

If you are not familiar with Enterprise 2.0, then you should definitely read this book.

We are at at the tipping point for a new way to communicate. Email was revolutionary when it came out. We could communicate using the internet. It was cheap and easy.

Now we are able to communicate using webpages. This a very different way to communicate than the pure back-and-forth of email and the letters that preceded email. The shift is from channel communications to platform communications, moving from inherently private communication to inherently public communication.

One of the challenges is that the innovation and lessons are coming from the public space into the enterprise. In the past, the innovation in communication technology came from inside the enterprise out to the public space. It used to be hard to establish an email account. You needed big servers and IT support from a company or university. Now you can establish a new email account in seconds from Google using gmail.

With these 2.0 tools we are seeing a reverse in the flow of technology. The internet has gotten much more efficient at finding information than the tools inside our enterprise. Is it easier to find information on the internet using Google or to find information in your corporate intranet?

Those of you who are familiar with McAfee or his blog will find some familiar passages.

• There is a discussion of his SLATES perspective on the elements of Enterprise 2.0: Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions, and Signals.
• The story of Wikipedia
• The power of weak ties and the expansion of the Dunbar’s number
• The evolution from the channel communication to platform communication
• The success of Intellipedia among the intelligence community

McAfee also delves into compliance aspects of enterprise 2.0. In a discussion with the CIO of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, JP Rangaswami, they discuss how the platform communications of enterprise 2.0 makes compliance easier. Our current mainstream communication tools of email and IM are inherently private. Being private, they are harder to monitor. It’s also harder to spot misinformation, negligent information and bad acts. The more open platform communication of enterprise 2.0 allow more people to be on the lookout for bad patterns, misinformation and compliance issues.

The book takes you through the next big steps of adoption and outlines factors for success, overcoming the knee-jerk reaction to be private, counter fears of abuse, and overcoming the 9X effect for adoption.

The book is worth the purchase price and the time to read it, regardless of whether you are an enterprise 2.0 veteran or a newbie.

In the interest of disclosure, Andy not only gave me a copy of his book, but also autographed it. I’m easily swayed to write about something when it is given to me. He also supplied me with copious amounts of alcohol at parties after the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco and the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. (Another surefire way to get my attention.) I also earn a fee from Amazon if you buy the book through the links in this article. You can judge for yourself if I am easily swayed to say nice things about the book.

References:

• ThoughtFarmer Featured in McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 Book
• Review for Andrew McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 book by Gil Yehuda

Do criticism and praise work to affect performance?

Leonard Mlodinow briefly addressed this topic in The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. He explores the studies of Daniel Kahneman who was lecturing the Israeli air force flight instructors on behavior modification. Kahneman was trying to make the point that rewarding positive behavior works, but punishing mistakes does not.

One of the students called him out. He had praised people warmly for beautifully executed maneuvers and the next time they do worse. He screamed at people for badly executed maneuvers and they improve the next time. The other flight instructors agreed. But Kahneman’s research demonstrated that rewards worked better than punishment.

So what was going on?

Regression toward the mean. In a random series of events, an extraordinary event is most likely to followed by an ordinary one. Due purely to chance, it’s hard to have two extraordinary events in a row.

The fighter pilots have a certain level of ability. An extraordinarily good performance is most likely to be followed by an ordinary performance. So the praise would seem to fail to maintain the extraordinarily good performance. Similarly, an extremely bad performance is most likely to be followed by an ordinary performance, which in this case would be better than the bad performance. So the screaming criticism would seem to cause an improvement in performance.

So it appears that the criticism does some good and the praise does no good. What is really happening is a misconception of uncertainty and probabilities. The connection between actions and results is not as direct as we might think.

In compliance, we eschew lots of data. It’s good to step back every now and then to think about the implications of the data and the underlying assumptions.

This is a big step up. Instead of being a  mere wiki, the platform now offers different ways to collaborate, but still captures the information in the platform. I assume that is one of the reasons they changed their name from PB Wiki to PB Works.

PB Wiki was the first wiki I ever used. A group used it to plan an international meeting of law firm knowledge management leaders. Now I regularly use the PB Works tools as part of GeekDad information management process.

While I was at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, I spent a few minutes with a bunch of people from PB Works: Jim Groff, the CEO;  Chris Yeh, Vice President, Marketing ; Glen Hoffman, Sales Engineer; Greg lelli, Legal Sales Specialist; and Kristine Molnar, Community Evangelist.

One of the drawbacks of a wiki was the check-in/check-out process. Only one person could edit a wiki page at a time. Google Docs (and to a lesser extent Google Wave) showed us that you can have multiple people editing at the same time and speed up the collaboration process even more.

The PB Works team gave me a demo of the new tools and it was pretty cool. If you are editing a page and realize that you need input of other team members, you can summon them to the page using IM Collaboration, start a Live Editing session, and use Voice Collaboration to initiate an instant conference call. You can do this all in a fraction of the time it would take to set up a web conference, the call line, and communicate the details to everyone.

Since PBworks hosts the  information, you can be up and running in a few minutes.

I’m attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I’m sharing my notes from this session. At the outset, organizations are often eager and excited about the benefits they anticipate from cultivating adoption and use of social and collaborative tools. But talk to those same organizations six months or one year after they’ve started, and you’ll hear a different story. Some organizations have experienced measurable success, others are struggling with a range of adoption and use issues, but all will tell you to watch out for several factors they didn’t anticipate.

• Stewart Mader, Founder and Senior Consultant, Future Changes
• Thomas Vander Wal, Principal & Senior Consultant, InfoCloud Solutions (speaking, just briefly, from a remote, undisclosed location.)

The issue of lack of capacity is re-thinking how you use the space. He used some urban design analogies, including community adoption and reliability. (Stewart’s wife is a landscape architect.)

Stewart advocates focusing on solving small day-to-day issues instead of trying to change the enterprise. Changing the enterprise is scary to most people. Mass collaboration is not the right way to go. (Wikipedia is a bad model for Enterprise 2.0.) Smaller groups of people who trust each other works better for collaboration.

Collective, community, collaborative, sharing listening and holding onto are each different activities. Different Enterprise 2.0 tools are better at some of these activities and not so good at others.

When focusing on the group, you need to know what type of interaction they need.

Never underestimate how busy people are and how easily they may dismiss a new tool.

Another myth is the 1-9-90 rule (1% create most of the content, 9% do some, and 90% are passive.). Its true for the internet, but not true inside the enterprise. (I also found this to be true. There is much more contribution when focused on a group.) Tools focused at the enterprise as whole, as opposed to working groups, will have fewer contributors. The tools will not have a hockey stick adoption curve that you see on the web. You will see steps of adoption inside the enterprise. You may see spikes of activity, especially after a presentation their use. But that use is merely exploratory.

Rules are for impatient people. See what works and adapt to the use. A pilot is the stepping stone to demonstrate utility and value. Case studies are nice, but internal use stories are much better. Adoption happens at the lunch table. Hearing it helped solve a problem for a person they know is the best sale tool.

Enterprise 2.0 tools are like swiss army knives. They do lots of things. You need to find the best uses. Give people permission and encouragement to find the best uses.

A wholesale replacement can often been seen as being out in left field. People do not like big changes. People have an easier time adopting tools that ease an obvious pain point. You need to fix a problem. The problem is a need. Focus on day-to-day problems.

Tools are the foundation. You need them. But you need to know how to use them.

Stewart ended with his analogy to dog “messaging.” See more: What Can Location-based Social Networks Learn From Dogs? Stewart seems to learn a lot about messaging from his dog.

I’m attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I’m sharing my notes from this session. The 2.0 Adoption Council presents the market’s first in-depth research on a representative sample of early adopters in large organizations. This session will cut to the chase on issues that have plagued pundits and vendors alike.

• Carl Frappaolo, Co-founder and Principal, Information Architected, Inc.
• Dan Keldsen, Co-founder and Principal, Information Architected, Inc.

Dan and Carl conducted a survey of large companies that have been adopting Enterprise 2.0 tools. The companies all had over 10,000 employees. None have deployed to 100% of employees. But of course many, many companies do not even have email deployed to 100% of their employees. Most shop floor employees do not have email.

Resistance is real. Most of the resistance comes from users. In the survey 49% encountered IT resistance and 64% experienced management resistance, but 72% experienced resistance from users. Of those 38% overcame IT resistance, 40% overcame and only 32% overcame user resistance. So the user resistance was the strongest and harder to overcome.

Looking at management issues, the biggest issue is measuring ROI: 69% experienced issues with ROI, but only 12% overcame it.

The biggest issues with IT was the immaturity of the technology. 54% experienced resistance from IT, but only 17% overcame this resistance.

Lessons learned:

• Enterprise 2.0 isn’t free
• Driving adoption isn’t magic, it requires
  • resources
  • time
  • focus
  • money

The ROI is there. It’s just hard to measure.

I’m attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I’m sharing my notes from this session.

• e2 Moderator – Irwin Lazar, Vice President, Communications Research, Nemertes Research
• Christian Finn, Director of SharePoint Product Management, Microsoft
• Mike Gotta, Principal Analyst, Burton Group
• Rob Koplowitz, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

SharePoint is a platform. The move from the 2003 version to the 2007 solidified the treatment as a platform. It is also getting better integrated with the rest of the Microsoft development framework.

SharePoint does require a big overall strategy. It’s not a lightweight deployment. But the deployment of lots of grass-roots deployments of Enterprise 2.0 tools causes lots of governance, privacy and control issues. SharePoint helped manage those issues. But the 2007 was flawed and caused its own sets of problems.

SharePoint 2010 requires top-level decisions and policies before the grass-roots content creation can begin. It’s tough to start small. Maybe the cloud version/SaaS model is better. It’s more agile.

Christian, after sitting quietly, pointed out that software is both a platform and an application. People to be able to use it right out of the box. He admits that SharePoint will not move as fast, but that means the platform is more stable. They are open as a platform, welcoming third-party add-ons to bring additional functionality.

The panelists agreed that SharePoint did a great job of focusing on things like records management. But SharePoint, with its 3 to 4 year development cycle, will always be behind the market. Christian points out that 3 years it the typical adoption cycle for software.

I’m attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I’m sharing my notes from this session. Clara Shih,founder and CEO of Hearsay Labs, which develops web applications to track brand engagement and accelerate sales on Facebook and Twitter. She is also the author of The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff.

Facebook is CRM, its the way to manage your contacts and stay in touch. She makes the argument that email is dead.

(I think this is a losing argument. You will lose just about everyone if you make this statement. So what if college students are not using email. They are not working inside a business organization.)

Companies are investing more time and money on social media as part of their marketing strategy.

She put forth that Facebook is the template for online identity. It has become socially acceptable to share photos, interests and demographic information. You can get to know people more quickly.  Now you also have the layering in the real-time identity.

The transaction costs of communication are being reduced. Email was cheaper than phone calls. Facebook and Twitter allow you to reach an even broader audience even cheaper. Especially, keeping in touch with weak ties.

She showed the tool she made called Faceconnector (originally called FaceForce) that pulled Facebook information into Salesforce. Essentially enhancing that CRM system.

I’m attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I’m sharing my notes from this session.

• e2 Moderator – David Berlind, Chief Content Officer, TechWeb
• Jamie Pappas, Manager, Social Media Strategy, EMC
• Bryce Williams, Social Media Consultant, Eli Lilly
• Megan Murray, Community Manager/Project Coordinator, Booz Allen Hamilton
• Claire Flanagan, Senior Manager, KM and Enterprise Social Collaboration, CSC
• Bruce Galinsky, Director IT, Metlife
• Greg Lowe, Social Media Architect/Program Manager, Alcatel-Lucent

David started off by point out that this session was set up as a response to Dennis Howlett’s Enterprise 2.0 What a Crock. (Although he didn’t mention Dennis by name, merely saying a ZDnet blogger.) The panelists are part of the Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Council.

Workplace Transformation.

The first topic the panel addressed was workplace transformation. Greg pointed out that Alcatel wants to break down organizational silos so that people doing similar things can find each other. He points out that in big organizations have a hard time finding internal expertise.

Claire pointed out that the tools are enabling devices.She points out that the tools are not an incremental change, but a quantum leap. She comes from knowledge management where the concept was to push information into a new silo. These new tools allow knowledge capture as part of the workflow.

Bruce agreed. The tools make sharing easier.  Bruce emphasized the need for speed and innovation in the marketplace. Enterprise 2.0 tools help.

Business Process

Claire points out that the 9-to-5 office has been eroding. People are collaborating around the world, so face to face collaboration is not feasible.

Intellectual Property/Privacy/Governance

You need to focus on the governance and compliance issues. There was some discussion of the benefit of open governance, allowing organization groups to get input from other groups in creating policies.

Companies need to start stop not trusting their employees. The biggest threat is from within. But you need to educate employees. Malicious people will find ways around the lock-down. Email is no more secure than Enterprise 2.0 tools.

Religious Wars (Technology and Generational Bias)

The importance is tools that are easy and intuitive to use. Some companies prefer open source, some prefer Microsoft and others IBM. People want the tools to communicate better to remove information silos.

Bottom-Line Business Benefits

The elusive quest for ROI on technology tools. The panelists agree that this is the biggest challenge. It is hard to show the direct benefits of collaboration. One panelists took the time saved approach to measurement. The tools allowed a project to be done faster. Another did a comparison of the time and money comparison between reply-all emails and a wiki. (Of course, this is soft dollars.)

Then the audience joined in.

One question was how you value the better decision-making that can come from use of Enterprise 2.0 tools. A panelist gave the example of how the company sent an open question on how to save money. They got lots of good feedback and money-saving ideas. The tools allow management to get better feedback and an ability to tap into the conversations happening in the organization.

Claire pointed out the need to find a tool that is “addictive.” Employees will vote with their feet and use what works best for them. Tools need to be easy to use and intuitive. And of course, useful.

My Take

Enterprise 2.0 is still looking for pays to justify itself. People that have used the tools (at least the good tools) do find them addictive. The problem is comparing the tools to email when it comes to ROI. The ROI for email was easy. Email was obviously cheaper and faster than mail or overnight delivery of documents. It was also cheaper than a phone call. The ROI for Enterprise 2.0 tools is much more elusive.

I think Enterprise 2.0 should look to some of the arguments for knowledge management. Sure, knowledge management largely died because the tools and approach were flawed. I find the Enterprise 2.0 approach to be the better approach to knowledge management. You are capturing the intellectual capital of your enterprise as part of their workflow.