As an advisory board member I’m heavily involved with TechWeb’s US Enterprise 2.0 conference, which is launching an inaugural California edition next week (the other event is in Boston around June each year). With Sameer Patel I am running a track with a session occurring on each day of the conference around driving business value.
We’re starting with a three hour workshop which will follow a timeline from earliest planning of a collaboration environment which will take advantage of Enterprise 2.0 technologies, through presenting the rationale to the business after gathering requirements, and on through launch and beyond. This session will be based on personal experience in the trenches and will feature a presentation around the launch of a successful site and a vendor panel discussion on dealing with pre sale customer requirements.
There will be panel discussions on Collaboration at Scale, lowering customer service costs using social tools (fellow EA Ray Wang will join us for this discussion) and finally on Thursday.
All of these sessions are discussions around finding and extracting practical business value from strategies, tactics and associated technologies.
The following week I’ll be keynoting in Frankfurt Germany at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit and will be distilling the above into a talk around the same topics.
This is an important time for ‘Enterprise 2.0′ in terms of value propositions to business. Historically there has been a ‘movement’ with many theorists and futurists mapping out their idea of benefits and influence on structure of businesses. On a practical level many of the early innovations by smaller vendors are now being co-opted by the larger suite vendors, with SharePoint 2010, due out next year being a good example.
What hasn’t changed, and is consistent with all other areas of business, is identifying the ‘what’s in it for me?’ factor that attracts uptake and use. Homing in on specific business value is a challenge for a topic which often appears, along with the catch all ’social software’ or ’social media’, to be all things to all parts of business.
In the context of the Enterprise Advocates, who are focused on at-scale repeatable processes, Enterprise 2.0 can seem like an out of focus fad spattered on the windscreen of the 18 wheeler truck big enterprise vendors look like in comparison.
The reality though is that SAP’s senior management talked at length during the Phoenix TechEd event about the importance of the capture of tacit knowledge and unstructured data, and how this is a central plank of their plans going forward. It’s these ‘barely repeatable processes’, to quote Sigurd Rinde, or ‘exception handling’ to quote John Hagel that is at the heart of finding business value not just in Enterprise 2.0, but increasingly in all software.
Unstructured data is at the heart of the ‘performance fabric’, the cross woven interaction between business units, partners and customers, that will drive future business in the unified communications and collaboration ecospheres we are moving towards.
The previous paragraph sounds great but you can’t issue a purchase order against it and expect delivery of tangible results in a few months as a result of deploying it. That’s the focus of defining business value and realizing it, and is my core focus in tailoring specific solutions for clients.
How their existing seat licenses and infrastructure interact with this desired new flexibility and knowledge capture is the subject of most of my time, and is increasingly a key driver of competitive advantage in businesses and business units of all sizes.
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