It’s time for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference – Boston, June 22-25

The Enterprise 2.0 conference is coming to Boston in just a few weeks.

Over the past few weeks, it’s been good to see a whole host of topics emerge, ranging from customer facing social media and marketing, to nuts and bolts, behind the firewall plumbing. What’s striking about this years schedule is that a plethora of practitioners from larger companies are in attendance, sharing real world stories about deployed social computing initiatives.

My primary focus (and by extension, the topic of this blog) is on answering the “why” and “how” questions that business managers care about when associating an Enterprise 2.0 design with accelerating a given business activity.. With that in mind, here are 4 sessions that focus on making it happen.

Web 2.0 and Selling: Whether it’s on 3rd party networks such as Twitter or Friendfeed, or a customer community, we need to go beyond Brand Awareness and Engagement and start generating leads. I addressed this in detail recently in a Q&A.  This session at the conference promises to address social selling – “a process to build trust, generate interest and eventually close the deal.” Speakers include George Dearing (Telligent), Mark Woolen (Oracle), Romi Mahajan (Ascentium), Timothy Jones (Buzzient) and Umberto Miletti (Inside View).

Enterprise 2.0 – What’s Working, What’s Not, What’s next: This session brings together a panel of vendors and customers that have deployed social computing technologies in the organization. Speakers include R. Todd. Stephens (AT&T), Nate Nash (Bearing Point), Christian Finn (Microsoft SharePoint), Matthew Fraser (INSEAD).

Transition Strategies for E 2.0 Adoption: Switching costs are one of the most neglected topics when changing work processes and underlying technology. The ROI and break even analysis focuses on the numbers without accounting for risk associated from shifting people and platforms, that jeopardize any well thought plan. Lee Bryant of Headshift leads this discussion by offering strategies to transition to newer work models.

Reality 2.0: Enterprise Social Networks (A Field Research Study): Burton Group Analyst Mike Gotta talks adoption, risk mitigation and identifying the business case. All based on a study of 60 people from 21 large enterprises. This should be particularly interesting to the majority of readers of this blog who come from larger enterprises.

There’s plenty more but these formal sessions jumped out at first blush.

Finally, there’s the Open Enterprise 2009 research findings by Stowe Boyd and Oliver Marks. Described as “The project examines the adoption, application and impact of Web 2.0 techniques, tools, and architectures in the enterprise and is based on an open research model involving crowd sourcing of several major areas of focus.”

Will the conference answer important business considerations such as activity focused benefits, execution planning requirements, risks, tolerance, etc? Well, the right folks on the practitioner side are attending but frankly, I don’t know. But you can join me in bringing it up to get a discussion going, so we get to the bottom of this.

On a personal note, I’ve only been back to Boston once since I left in 1999 and so I’m thrilled to be going back to my hood.  I’m also planning on participating in a class at Babson (my alma mater), thanks to professor, Bala Iyer.

Here’s a 30% discount code for the conference.

See you in Beantown!

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Posted On: June 3, 2009

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• Event Reviews

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Written By: Sameer Patel

SVP, Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP