The Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT is a one-day conference at the CeBIT 2008 about how corporations have to change their informational and organisational structures to be more innovative and competitive for their markets. Keynotes and best-practice talks cover the potentials corporation can realize using weblogs, wikis, social networks and other "socially" enhanced enterprise solutions.
The idea of the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT is rather than theorizing about the potentials web 2.0 and social software are offering towards the corporations, the SUMMIT is presenting best-practices and practioneers with first experiences in stepping forward in the use of these new types of tools and techniques. The Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT will help participants in gaining new ideas and inspiration for their projects as well as learning about the real-life opportunities and challenges.
By a stroke of luck the stars fell into place and I was able to attend the CeBit as well as the Enterprise 2.0 Summit and my short answer on whether it was worth it or not: YES! The first day of the event was when I was there, they still have more going on but the first day for me was key for multiple reasons. There were people there I wanted to connect to as well as others I wanted to hear about their story down the Enterprise 2.0 path of winding roads.
For those who could not attend allow me a moment to "pimp" my own little side project, @eventtrack where you can follow the conversations, links and photos of the event.
There have been several great blogs already on this so I won't bore you my specific thoughts (many you can find viewing @eventtrack.) The biggest take away I can share is this: next year their will be a Enterprise 2.0 Summit at CeBit and this year in September there will be a one day German event on the same topic - take the time!
Now on to the good and bad, as a developer the food at the event of course is an important aspect, this was my lunch.
Notice the steam I was outside to eat this. OK no really it was my lunch but it was not that supplied by the KongressMedia folks they did a great job there unfortunately I had a couple of other meetings while there and I grabbed a bite at one of the snack bars between the buildings. Two of those meetings I'll blog about later.
So back to the real content here...
As more and more people begin to realize the benefits of the entire Web 2.0 concepts and ideas they begin to look for ways to bring those ideas to their jobs - it made their personal lives fuller, easier and more enjoyable on the web so why can't it help in the work place as well?
Credit to the slide goes to Dion Hinchcliffe, fellow Irregular and someone I finally had a chance to meet during the event.
The slide represents the problem of bringing the Web 2.0 thinking to the Enterprise, Enterprise 2.0 has not caught up to the thinking of those already embracing Web 2.0. How can it with so much already in place? There are simply so many hurdles to overcome and the technology and services are simply moving to rapidly for the age old "best practice" of the Enterprise to come into play.
In a way the problem reminds of Acupuncture, this I think is what Enterprise needs to be able to embrace the concepts of Web 2.0 and utilize the best aspects to give the information worker and edge, and advantage to push further ahead successfully. Have I lost you yet?
OK, right now I am undergoing acupuncture treatment for a collapsed disc in my back, it happened a year ago and I've still got pain so I figured I give something different a shot, it can't hurt right? In a lot of ways that's how people get involved with the new web today. Upload and share my photos - why not try it and save sending everyone emails all the time. So I go to my doctor and he gives me a extensive list of questions to answer, these are for him to determine the proper treatment for me in regards to where the needles go. My first thought was "it's a back problem, should be specific enough?", I expect he got this question quite often as he immediately began to explain why he needed to know all these various and seemingly disconnected issues.
Each problem a person might have does have specific points that need to be addressed, however as each person is different there will be additional items that need to come into play n order to ensure proper success for the specific problem at hand. So I ended up with 3 needles in my back to address the specific problem, along with 2 in my hand, 1 in my leg and 1 in each foot. He told me another patient with a similar case might only get the 3 in the back and the 1 on the leg but they might also get one n the arm. The reason is, and I looked this up to ensure I understood correctly (it was in German)
The acupuncturist decides which points to treat by observing and questioning the patient in order to make a diagnosis according to the tradition which he or she utilizes. In TCM, there are four diagnostic methods: inspection, auscultation and olfaction, inquiring, and palpation(Wikipedia)
It's all about bringing things into Harmony, it's still quite controversial today but many cases do show strong relationships between this form of treatment and the biomedical diagnoses. So if I haven't lost you yet give it a thought I might still lose you but I think if you consider this to the Enterprise environment you'll see many correlations. During the Summit I heard for the second time that you could consider "cave paintings" as one of the first forms of social media. Consider that to be the "traditional medicine" then consider the existing Enterprise environment as the "biomedical" one.
Enterprise today is overloaded with many one way communications, not so many "cave paintings" yet the new web, the area around Web 2.0 is filled with them from things like Jumpcut.com where you can actually remix and reproduce derivative works of other people's uploaded video to the various wiki platforms where you can with a simple click of a button can go in and edit, change and enhance what others before you have done. Very much like a cave painting I can go in now and draw where the herd is going based on what I've experienced or show that the last earthquake wiped out half of the forest or that there is a new lake now. The whole group can take advantage of that and learn from it. Now fast forward a really long time and you find your self in the the time when the King writes a decree on a piece of paper and sends it out to be read. Well once you've seen it you probably won't see it again BUT you are required to abide by it and like one of those corporate memo's you probably didn't bother to read it anyway.
So if we think about some of the main "issues" we have in the Enterprise it's often about open, rapid development and deployment, communication and accepting feedback from customers. We then take a look at the mass of Web 2.0 tools out there and most likely we signal out blogs and wikis simply because they seem to be the most popular right now. Often times I hear "just start blogging", what the conversations are supposed to flow automatically? This is where the idea behind acupuncture comes into play. Once I've determined my goal and chosen the "root" tools to use now it's time to to observe and question. It's time for you to sit back and determine the nature of the those you want to blog, what are their strong suits? Their weak ones? What style of blog? Should the blog but just a text one or should you employ rich media as well? Who should blog?
By asking these questions and looking closely at the whole one can determine the best and most appropriate path through the massiveness that is Web 2.0 and what it offers today. Blogging to Blog or using a wiki to say "we use a wiki" is like sticking a needle in my big toe - it might do something and it might not but it doesn't mean it's acupuncture! Tuesday we saw that first hand from many of those in attendance as they talked about their own experiences with the topic, at SAP we have our experiences as well but those are for another time.
Watch the Enterprise 2.0 website as they recorded the whole thing so I hope to see it online soon.
Disclaimer: My attendance at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit was covered, additional travel and expenses were not
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