Cathexis

Enterprise 2.0 2009 - Pivot Moment

This year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference shows a marked evolution from two years ago.  

Andrew McAfee had written his important paper on the topic “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” in April 2006.  The E2.0 conference of 2007 was talking theory with precious few real life examples to discuss, and so the event was technology and vendor heavy.

Good news.   This year the story is that there are stories - real life examples of companies and organizations implementing the technologies, and engaging their workers, constituents and partners.   From aerospace to the military, education to manufacturers, it’s now clear that there’s experience in what works.     

The U.S. Army uses uses it’s Milspace to support a community of 30,000.   company commanders who use their online collaboration platform to quickly turn to fellow commanders for ideas and knowledge.   Status updates are focused on learning as an “What are you learning today.”    Milspace makes full use of multi-media with video Leadercasts and Gaming features for learning.   For the U.S. Army this kind of collaboration speeds time to competence in a rapidly changing environment.

For the Department of Education in Minnesota, online collaboration connects teachers with the business community in their state to match up teacher needs in STEM education with community members who can offer resources of talent and donations. 

Karen Klinzing, Asst. Commissioner of the Department of Education in Minnesota indicates that STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) is vital to the economic well-being in their state.   It is estimated that Minnesota will have an increased of 20-33% in scientific and technical occupations in ten years, but there is a trend, so the DOE are looking for creative ways to help augment the teaching of these skills in the public schools.

The Minnesota DOE launched an online community getSTEM-MN.com in February of this year to match teacher needs in STEM education with potential donors in the business community in Minnesota.   A teacher can request expertise, donations and other support allowing business community members to align their capabilities easily with teacher and school needs.   

The getSTEM brand has already taken off.   Ms. Klinzing mentioned that within 24 hours of the launch of the site, she was contacted by three other states to launch similar efforts.   In the coming months, the getSTEM project will launch in several other states taking the same approach.

Booz Allen Hamilton, winner of the Innovator of the Year Award at this year's conference, their online community for employees hello.bah.com not only keeps current employees connected, but is now the vital component in on-boarding new employees.   According to Walton Smith, of BAH, with 5,000 new employees expected to be hired this year, hello.bah.com is now a vital element of on-boarding and orienting new employees.

Boston Bound - Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2009

It’s summer and time to head for Boston for the annual Enterprise 2.0 Conference. I'm looking forward to catching up with colleagues and getting a perspective of what's evolving.

When I attended in 2007, Andrew McAfee called for real life stories about engagements and implementations.   Enterprise 2.0 had been defined but not fully realized.

It’s exciting, then, to see that there are panels and speakers that represent even more engagements as well as the technology advancements at this year’s Enterprise 2.0.

I’m looking forward to panels like Community and Social Network Sites: Think Adoption, Not Deployment, with a panel that includes Genetech, Sabre Holdings, and Harvard University

The Enterprise in Action track has a a real diversity of companies and organizations talking about their own experiences.  

One panel of particular interest in this vein is Real World Customer Edition: Stories About Social Computing Deployments.    In my own work, I’ve been looking at how social computing can help education system leaders engage in education innovation.   Karen Klinzing, Assistant Commissioner for Education for Minnesota is one of the speakers on this panel discussing how social computing tools are being used to promote STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math).     

I’m going to ask some of these panelists not only how they create collaborative work environments internal to their enterprises, but how they use these mechanisms to engage with partners and customers and other key stakeholders.   Hopefully, we’ll see a fuller story developing along these lines.

Enterprise 2.0: The Conference, is a place to hear about innovation in solutions and technology, but it’s also a place to hear perspectives as organizations implement the technologies and foster the process of organizational change.   From Volvo, to Lockheed Martin, Harvard University, Genetech, and the U.S. Army, this year’s conference looks to be showcasing the practical roadmaps as well as the vision.

Collaboration: Why It Needs to Be a Real Business Practice

U.S. business executives often talk about the need to embrace "collaboration," as a means to being more competitive and innovative,  with collaboration viewed as an accelerator to both characteristics in the global marketplace.

But why?   Well, we should probably follow the money.

In the past 25 to 30 years, the aggregate value of stock market has steadily and pronouncedly shifted to an asset base of "intangibles." Ultimately that means the value resides with the talent and skills of the knowledge worker and their capacity to engage in knowledge creation and value with colleagues, partners and customers.   And that knowledge and value creation is the result of what is termed "tacit interactions." 

In an Accenture report published in 2004, Future Value: The $7 Trillion Challenge, notes that those intangible assets have "supplanted tangible assets as the key value drivers in the economy."    

That transition in asset characteristic is shown in the Accenture graphic from Jurgen H. Daum's 2002 book, "Intangible Assets and Value Creation."

Despite any impact of the 2008 downturn on specific numbers, this trend remains the nature of asset value and value creation in the 21st century.

While advancements in communications and Web 2.0 collaboration technology and tools are major enablers of collaboration practice, and there's lots of discussion about those technologies, what's often missing is the concomitant discussion about the actual, disciplined practice of collaboration.  

One of the best articles on the practice of collaboration is a Harvard Business Review article entitled Collaboration Rules by Philip Evans and Bob Wolf.  And while the article was published a few years ago, it recommendations often remain the exception rather than the rule in organizations today.

Here are Evans and Wolf's Collaboration Rules, highlighted in a mind map.

Technology underpins many aspects of this model, but just as importantly, the Evans and Wolf "rules" speak to culture, behavior and practice.   I'll be talking about each one of these areas in upcoming posts.