Tag: Jessica Lipnack

Enterprise 2.0 Keynotes on Tuesday

evening in the clouds panel

After Monday night’s Evening in the Cloud (That is me in the middle of the picture during the Evening in the Cloud), Tuesday turned to social media and collaboration in the keynote presentations on the big stage.

It was a mixed bag of presentations. There were glimpses of how organizations can use enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0 tools to further the goals of the organization. What was missing, was the compelling case for adopting the tools and devoting the resources to that adoption. There were a few points from the compliance perspective that popped up in the presentations. I thought I would share some of my thoughts and notes from these presentations.

my.barackobama.com: The Secrets of Obama’s New Media Juggernaut

Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Chief Technology Officer & Founding Partner, Blue State Digital started off talking about some of the success of the presidential campaign:

  • 1 billion emails to 13 million addresses
  • Over 1 million text message subscribers
  • 200,000 offline events planned through the website
  • 145 YouTube viewing hours
  • Of the $770 million raised, 65% came through the website

Although this presentation was interesting I was hard-pressed to see how the lessons learned from the presidential campaign could be applied to the use of these tools inside an enterprise. (Although the bleeding heart liberal in me enjoyed seeing the great success story.)

He did emphasize the need for measurement, which is dear to the hearts of compliance professionals. They measured everything, tested their assumptions and redesigned the visuals and tools based on the data.

Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom: How Online Social Networking Will Transform Your Life, Work and World

I don’t have much that’s nice to say about this presentation. So I won’t.

Hello from Booz Allen Hamilton

Booz Allen won the Innovation Award from the Open Enterprise 2009. Walton Smith gave his insights on their enterprise 2.0 platform. It looked great! (In the interest of disclosure, Booz Allen is a large tenant in my employer’s portfolio.)

Walton started with the business case. They need ways to better capture the tacit and explicit knowledge in the organization. There is a tremendous need to identify expertise and allow people to find that expertise. They are looking to add thousands of employees over the next few years and need to get those employees up and running quickly. On a typical day, over half of their people are working at client sites. Outlook was their de facto collaboration tool.

They deployed Hello, their enterprise 2.0 tool, to address these concerns. It sounds like a success. Over 40% of the firm has added content. Another 1% to 2% of new users are adding content each week. The technology is mash of technologies, many of which are open source platforms.

Given the short time allotted, we were not able to see much detail about the operations of Hello. From what I saw, it was just what I thought a large professional services firm needed. Walton’s description matched up with the vision I had for the redesign of Goodwin Procter’s iNet (before I left).

Walton did address some of the compliance concerns. In responding to a question about posting inappropriate content, Walton had this great statement: “I can’t prevent you from being stupid, but now I can see how stupid you are.” As to EU data privacy, they had lots of discussions with legal on what people could post about themselves. Legal wanted to exclude all non-US from Hello. They came to a compromise, but I am not sure what it was. For departed employees, they keep the content and the profile. They merely add a banner that the person has left the company. They want to preserve the intellectual capital footprint.

Enterprise 2.0 Reality Check – What’s Working, What’s Not, What’s Next

Matthew Fraser was back to moderate a panel of Christian Finn, Director of SharePoint Product Management, Microsoft, Nate Nash, Senior Manager, BearingPoint, Neil Callahan, Executive Vice President, mktg, and Ross Mayfield, President, Chairman and Co-founder, Socialtext. There was lots of talk of whether enterprise 2.0 was an evolution or revolution. One commenter in the crowd said the panel was an I’m a Mac, I’m a PC ad. There was a fair amount of discussion about the ROI for enterprise. Some panelists and audience members were dismissive of needing a monetary ROI. They likened it to email. Nobody asks for the ROI on email.

I don’t agree with these thoughts. When email was first adopted in the enterprise there was an ROI calculation. It was cheaper and faster to send an email, than to send a message through the post office. There is a reason we get so much spam. It is cheap and easy. Businesses may no longer calculate the ROI, but they did as part of the adoption process. Event though now it is just an assumption that you have email in the business. There was a compelling reason to adopt.

Meeting People

Web 2.0 is not about sitting in your basement. It is about meeting people. Besides the presentations it was able to run into and chat with a bunch of great people. I had a great lunch with David Hobbie of Goodwin Procter and Rachel Happe of The Community Roundtable in the fake Irish restaurant.

It was great to spend some time talking with Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen of Information Architected. Unfortunately, I missed the session but I was able to chat with Jessica Lipnak and Jeff Stamps of NetAge. Alex Howard of Digiphile and SearchCompliance.com was there covering the conference and having great conversations. I apparently got Mark Masterson fired up about compliance because we chatted about it for a while.

I also had some short chats with Luis Suarez of IBM, Joe Wehr of DBMI, and Ming Kwan formerly of nGenera and now at Nokia.

Michael Idinopulos of SocialText gave me a great tour of the latest release of their product. Their new marketing strategy is to offer SocialText free for less than 50 users. Chris McGrath and I talked about Thought Farmer. I kind of beat him up over records management and wikis. Cheryl McKinnon gave me a great presentation on some compelling OpenText products.

I will back on Wednesday for a few sessions and will try to distribute any insights.

What Blogging Brings to Business

This post is republished from my original post on KM Space on June 10, 2008: What Blogging Brings to Business.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston 2008

Blogs are powerful communication platforms that allow you to capture information you find interesting and to share it with an “audience” who can talk back to you. This panel of five business bloggers with a combined blogging lifetime of 19 years has generated business, communicated the concerns of its customers, experimented, and broken new ground through their blogs. Topics we’ll cover include: Blogging as knowledge management, Blogging as a conversation, Blogging for “fame and fortune”, Blogging as a platform for experimentation, and Blogging to reduce internal spam. Come join us to share your experiences and have the chance to speak at length with experienced bloggers.

  • Moderator – Jessica Lipnack, CEO, NetAge
  • Speaker – Bill Ives, Web 2.0 Consultant and Writer, Portals and KM
  • Speaker – Cesar Brea, Partner, Force Five Partners
  • Speaker – Doug Cornelius, Knowledge Management Attorney, Goodwin Procter LLP

My Notes:

I was on this panel, so I have limited notes, but will try to reconstruct some information. You should also checkout some other blog posts about this panel:

  • Enterprise 2.0 Blog post by David Spark
  • I will add any others in the comments. You should feel to also link to your blog posts in the comments.

As Jessica posted [Bloggers at Taste], the panel got together to discuss an agenda. We had a great conversation and thought it would translate well to the audience.

Our audience was very interactive. Maybe too interactive. It was hard to keep pulling the discussion back to the topic. The participants seemed to be looking at two different aspects: What external blogging can bring to business and what internal blogging can bring to business. My take is that internal blogs (at least in the classic sense) are just limiting their audience. But blogs are flexible tools that you can do lots of things with inside the enterprise.

The session started with an introduction by the panel about their blogs:

Then Jessica asked the bloggers in the audience to introduce themselves and their blog. I was not able to grab the whole list, but here are some:

We moved onto why we blog and who we blog for. One common theme among the panel was blogging as a personal knowledge management tool. We all found the blog to be a great way to capture information in a way that is easy to categorize, where it is easy to find the content. As a personal knowledge management tool, I blog for me. These notes are for me to reuse. That you are reading is a by-product.

We spent some time off on a tangent about who should blog, who should be forced to blog and who should not blog. I spent a fair amount of this conversation time in the back-channel on the Enterprise 2.0 Community site for the Conference.

A blog is an excellent way to display expertise, whether the blog is internal or external. It is one thing to paint yourself as an expert. It is much more effective to prove your expertise through your writings and information you push out.

We ran out of time, but here are some other thoughts I wanted to get out:

Internally, the blog can act differently. Scott Niesen, Director of Marketing, Attensa brought this up nicely earlier today in the Enterprise RSS session when he said you should draw a distinction between what “need to respond” and “need to know.” A blog is a communication tool. It is well suited to what you need to know. Email is better for information that has a need to respond. Take a look at you email flow and think about how much of this you need to react to. Most of it is just information you need to know. But by the information being pushed into email, my inbox is acting as my content management system. A blog or a collection of blogs makes a much better content management system. It is easier to search, easier to find content and easier to add content.

Other commentary and notes from the panel: