Pretzel Logic – Enterprise 2.0

Ive always said that this wall between customer interaction and service, and internal collaboration is largely artificial. Though if you’ve read this blog before, you know I’m  the last one to suggest we rush to blindly institute social across the organization and barf on all things process. That simply doesn’t reflect the reality and problem sets that we seen on the ground in our consulting work with larger organizations. That said, there’s a mature, performance centric discussion that needs to happen where organizations can understand the relevancy of this shift in the customers access to information (regardless of whether they actively partake in social network activity) to your business,  and evaluate how your internal processes are wired to deal with changing  competitive dynamics in your business. Surgical and decisive. Not spray and pray.

Comments welcome, as always.

The Keynote video here:

Next week the GigaOM network hosts yet another addition of its clandestine famous Bunker Sessions. This event brings together a select group of industry thought leaders to discuss the business ramifications of a given emerging technology topic. The setting resembles a town hall format, inviting everyone to participate and share experiences. This time around the topic is ‘Future of Work: Crowd sourcing, Cloud Computing and Mobility.

I have the privilege of participating and moderating parts of the half day event. One of my sessions covers how advancements in web connectivity is mediating work and labor access. The second focuses on effects of SaaS and connectivity, particularly in the context of the application layer.

Here is a description of the event from the Bunker Sessions website:

How many times have you worked from a coffee shop or from home? Ten years ago that would have been unimaginable, technically and culturally. The easy access to broadband, mobile computing and cloud based software services is impacting the way we think about building companies. It affects the way we employ people, the meaning of talent and how employees will think about employers. The aim of this session will be to lay a groundwork for debate about the changes coming up.

Every employer institutes some element of a work life balance program as a strategic talent retention weapon or morale booster. Whilst these programs will always have a place as HR charts strategy, we’re at the start of a shift in employee expectations around mobility, workspaces and collaborative tools and technologies. This shift will trigger a change from what’s been considered point programs, to price of entry organizational capabilities that attract and energize the best talent.

Depending on your industry, some of this is happening now whilst some of it is still conceptual. But these new modes of work have business benefits as well – they’re not just a reactionary HR strategy to Gen Y expectations. Regardless of the catalyst, these changes will have an impact on operational design, HR and of course, IT.

The event is sponsored by Accenture and Orange. Speakers and panelists include:

• Fabio Rosati, CEO of Elance
• John Hagel, Chairman, Center for the Edge and Author of “The Power of Pull”
• Vinnie Mirchandani, CEO of Deal Architect Inc. and Author of “The New Polymath”
• Lukas Biewald, CEO of CrowdFlower
• Aaron Levie, CEO of Box.net
• Tim Young, CEO of Socialcast
• Evy Wilkins – Curator of HR & Tech SF and COO of DoYouBuzz
• Mary Hamilton – Global Lead, Workforce Technologies, Accenture Technology Labs

A few-first-come-first-serve (free) tickets are also available and I encourage you to request a pass. Email bunker@gigaom.com to make it happen.

More information on the event in this post on the GigaOM blog. See you there!

The flagship Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, Massachusetts ended last week. I’m going to pen two posts to cover my thoughts on the achievements and challenges in the Enterprise 2.0 sector based on observations at the conference. This post covers the big (positive) shifts and the conference itself.

A quick disclaimer first: I’m on the advisory board of the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

The conference attracted a gaggle of practitioners, leading enterprise analysts and bloggers, and vendors who opined about latest techniques in collaborative approaches and technologies to improve engagement and relationships between employees, partners and customers.

(Image: JP Rangaswami / Credit: Alex Dunne)

For my part, along with colleague Oliver Marks, I co-chair the strategy and execution planning track which , like our work, is focused on identifying where collaborative approaches can accelerate workplace and process performance and on how to plan, sell, design and execute programs.

Every year the conference pushes management and engagement boundaries by introducing newer concepts, often in the face of lava-like progress on the ground. In its 4th year, my sense is that we can definitively see a tiny white light at the end of the tunnel with respect to the ultimate stamp of legitimacy – the eventual emergence of a capital and operational budget line item to build and support 21st century collaborative enterprises.

Thanks to the work of some very dedicated practitioners (there’s scores more), there’s no  doubt that the Enterprise 2.0 case studies of tomorrow are now being written. It’s a long road but these will eventually showcase more agile and fluid collaborative approaches that leverage existing process and collaborative systems and initiatives which will surface the best minds across the enterprise ecosystem to solve tough business challenges and enable effective competition.

A few large themes, and in particular order……

The Tide’s About to Rise

Tools won’t drive but they will enable. The entry of established vendors and a maturation of pure play positioning signals a decisive shift from feel-good to problem solving and growth focus.

• First, the traditional pillars of the Enterprise Software business attended and showed off their Enterprise 2.0 wares, en masse. We had platform offerings and extensions from the likes of SAP (Streamwork and Elements), Cisco (Quad), Microsoft (SharePoint 2010) and Novell (Pulse) and IBM (Lotus Connections).
• Second, proven vertical specialists such as Saba Software (Saba Live) and Success Factors (Cubetree) talked about collaborative offerings weaved into traditional talent management and workplace performance constructs.
• Third, the case for connected threads between employees, partners and customers gets stronger. Vendors such as Jive Software, Telligent and BlueKiwi offer strong platforms for customers ready to tackle multi-pronged solutions, whole hog.
• Fourth, a few horizontal platform providers woke up to the fact that they need to shove a foot into the door that leads to the process side of the house if they want to be taken seriously. Beyond experimental or tactical applications of collaborative constructs that are often void of purpose, they are moving from carpet bombing Enterprise 2.0 to launching surgical strikes. PBworks for instance announced strong collaborative wrappers to traditional CRM processes. CrowdCast latched on its predictive smarts to a known problem at every enterprise – how to turn today’s often dormant, “for the executive-brass-only” business intelligence capabilities into for-the-masses decision facilitation that helps any employee estimate the consequences of their decisions before they take action. And Socialtext introduced a beta release of what looked to be a social middleware layer that adds engagement to process.
• Fifth, those that are unapologetic about their approach to doing one thing and one thing only – simpler and better than anyone else, stuck to their story. Providers such as Socialcast and ThougtFarmer. The former continues to proudly call itself a light weight activity stream that adds much needed engagement to large, complex environments. The latter continues to innovate to gives you a far better intranet that replaces your asynchronous portal design, circa 1991.

Content, engagement and process – all in context. From a vendor offering perspective, that’s a first and must be celebrated.

Closely tied to this is another trend. Seasoned enterprise sales and marketing executives are being successfully lured to Enterprise 2.0 vendors. I spent a lot of time with them and one thing is clear: They are not adopting the party line. Rather they are channeling the passion and energy of cause driven entrepreneurs towards practical value propositions that customers will possibly care about. 

The reason I’ve led with vendor innovation here is that historically speaking, there’s a significant, practical take away from the entry of established players. The ramifications of platform and vertical process specialists betting on collaborative enterprises, means this: We’re about to see hundreds of millions of marketing dollars put to work to drive awareness and education around Enterprise 2.0, Social, Collaborative (or your jargon of fancy) forms of engagement in the workplace. Add to that, the network effect about to ensue when new and existing ecosystems around these vendors (Strategy Consultants, SI’s, ISVs, Resellers) start to articulate solutions to business problems for their customers based on these innovations.

This rising tide will lift all boats and likely cement a stable foothold for Enterprise 2.0 in the application stack (a big caveat to this that I will cover in a subsequent post). The technology may come from your process vendor, or from a pure play. Regardless the programmatic spend to realize business value will need its own budget.

None of this means that customers will be guaranteed performance acceleration or that smaller vendors will achieve instant stardom. This level of exposure may well highlight some of the rudderless propositions afforded around the altruistic value of E 2.0 that seasoned customer executives will instantly balk at. Dennis Howlett covers this with great insight on his ZDNet blog. And I’ve written before about the risk of the E2.0 marketplace facing the same fate as portal vendors. That continues to be a genuine possibility.

But one thing is certain: the Enterprise 2.0 message will now have far, far deeper tentacles into mahogany row. That’s good for big platform players as well as their pure play counterparts that don’t have the budgets to educate as many buyers as they would like to, on the value and promise of Enterprise 2.0. Many large buyers don’t allow single source deals and so, RFPs will often have to cast a wider net and as a consequence, expose pure play innovation in the marketplace

Distributed Customer Stories Beyond the Obvious

Most of the case studies to date have been skewed towards either Hi-Tech or Professional Services (consultants, agencies, etc) organizations. What’s unsettling about this to me is that neither are strong sample sets to extrapolate a credible assessment of wide scale acceptance across other industry sectors. I’m not in any way suggesting that it’s been easy going for orgs in hi-tech or services, but relatively speaking, hi-tech is traditionally an early adopter of technology enabled innovation and so its natural that a lot of Silicon Valley-esque organizations have jumped in first. In the case of Professional Services, knowledge and expertise is itself the end product. And so making the case that finding better ways to surface and reuse knowledge can more directly improve margins, if done correctly. Two very strong drivers to give E2.0 a shot. Again, some of these are my customers, and at others, I personally know internal champions who are banging their heads against the wall with adoption and cultural issues.

All that said, relatively speaking, what we’ve been missing all along are strong, tangible case studies from other sectors that are not early adopters or don’t naturally see a direct link to the bottom line. Many of these are extremely successful organizations in their markets but from a collaboration standpoint, some are still evaluating SharePoint 2007.  But that’s begun to change. We see it in our work and we finally saw a respectable number of case studies and customer stories from companies in other sections. Examples are YUM! Brands (restaurants), Harvard Business Review (publishing), NASA (government), Thomson Reuters (financial media), Vanguard (financial services) and Abbot Labs (life sciences) that made great presentations on their strategic uptake on open, collaborative constructs to drive performance.

Articulating the Business Case

A seemingly less critical point but one that I think is extremely important. This time around, customers were far more articulate when describing the inefficiency or limitations of existing processes and transactive designs before jumping into the promise of collaborative constructs. Enterprise 2.0 is often labeled as a solution looking for a problem and for good reason. In two customer panels that I moderated on Customer Networks and HR and Workplace performance, practitioners stated succinct, large scale business inefficiencies and competitive and market economics factors that have compelled their organizations to consider new ways of conducting business. These practitioners have been rooted in a structured process laden world over the last decade or two and spoke with authority when it comes to articulating what’s wrong first before gushing at what can be so right with Enterprise 2.0.

Where some organizations/departments have the luxury of being led by the likes of John Chambers (Cisco), Lem Lasher (CSC) and Brad Smith (Intuit) who naturally consider collaborative enterprises to be a necessarily utility to compete effectively and often without ROI prerequisites, most look for far stronger, tangible business case justifications from the get go. I’ve seen my customers in both camps, but there’s more customers who look for a strong articulation of what’s wrong with how things are done today and a seasoned justification to try a new approach. And we saw this maturity of critical business justification at least to the extent that an executive can’t afford to not listen to cause and effect arguments. That’s a huge step forward. 

The Definitive Watering Hole for the 21st Century Enterprise

The point that often gets lost in the midst of constructive criticism is that we have a strong physical platform with the Enterprise 2.0 conference to compliment digital and often disconnected conversations on Twitter and the blogs to help each other. As important, the conference offers a vehicle for attendees to share suggestions and for organizers to respond with solutions the next time around. There’s always a yearning from attendees to see more case studies, to see less vendors and consultants on stage and I think that’s legitimate.

Honestly, I don’t personally have a categorical objection to vendors presenting on the keynote stage. The reality is that vendors are no different from the rest of us in one particular aspect: They also share a passion and vision for a better way to conduct business and are putting their money where their mouth is, every day. Unfortunately one too many vendor keynote speakers launched demos where they should have taken the allocated 20 minutes to share industry vision and big market and customer problems that need tackling. It’s implied that their offerings address these challenges. What we largely got was 1.0 marketing to a 2.0 crowd. A big opportunity was lost to level with the rest of the community by offering new pathways to value and by inspiring the collective. These were in sharp contrast to keynotes from the likes of JP Rangaswami, Professor Andrew McAfee, Vinnie Mirchandani and others.

But we also saw more senior executives and mangers from the buy side present or join panels, this time around. I evaluated last year’s event by looking at the degree of practitioner focus and gave it a thumbs up. This year, the conference offered an all day Adoption track chaired by the able Susan Scrupski that gave practitioners significant leeway to design their own day long workshop, panels and sessions. So the conference built on last years practitioner centric efforts.

The conference is now in the early stages of catering to the entire Enterprise 2.0 life cycle: Credibly articulating the business case for layering in a collaborative backbone to enrichen process, understanding the tools, applications and platforms, getting adoption and tactical planning right, and holistically looking at interaction between customers and employees. With the help of a strong cadre of instructors and track chairs including Mike Gotta, Irwin Lazar, Tony Byrne, Oliver Marks, Susan Scrupski, Rachel Happe , Dion Hinchcliffe, Alistair Croll and Larry Cannell.

Whilst still consultant/analyst heavy, the conference is also become a clearing house for not only customer success stories but about the journey, as was made evident by over 30 customer stories presented on the keynote stage, in panels as well as in session talks.  Kudos to TechWeb and in particular the management, sales, marketing and operational teams for their flawless organization of the event itself.

Some Must Read Posts on the Event

There’s a lot of blog posts and media coverage offering up excellent opinion on the conference and state of Enterprise 2.0 from the likes of Oliver Marks, Thomas Vander Wal, Bertrand Duperrin and Nigel Fenwick.  I’m still digesting and will expand on these in my next post. But if your looking for the best blow by blow coverage, that comes from V Mary Abraham, Bill Ives and Patti Anklam. (please comment if I missed anyone and I’ll update)

What Comes Next:

It wasn’t all peachy. In a subsequent post, I’ll try and cover some of the following items that I suggest we deal with, pronto.

• We’re still lacking adequate operational metrics alignment to be taken more seriously.
• Addressing cultural nuances is certainly an important success factor. But we’re hiding behind cultural arguments as the universal culprit, far more than we rightfully should.
• The millennial discussion is mostly without substantial evidence and downright asinine.
• There’s a giant disconnect between today’s customer expectations and the ability of employees to fulfill these expectations. I covered this in my keynote at the International Forum in Milan week before last, and Ill try to add insights from others, based on my discussions.
• Unnecessary complexity added to design frameworks and to toolsets which, will only overwhelm potential customers.

On a personal note, this is the one event in the year that I look forward to most. And it did not disappoint. I chatted with lots of old pals into the wee hours of the morning, and had the good fortune to meet people who visit this blog and to thank them for taking the time to read and engage. Some in the community use this platform to genuinely bond once a year and to graciously share experiences, lessons learned and to celebrate the work of everyone involved. And you can’t put a price on that.

Next month I travel to Milan to speak at the 3rd International Forum on Enterprise 2.0.  A premier event on next generation enterprises and the processes and technologies that will power them, this event attracts business and technology executives across Europe and respected thinkers, advisors and practitioners that play a role driving business performance at leading organizations.

There’s some excellent content on tap at this event. The agenda is packed with purpose driven sessions around Marketing, HR and Innovation showcasing real world, practical experiences on applying new, more current techniques to performance.

Keynote

The conference has a great line up of keynotes and speakers including Andrew Gilboy – Oracle and Emanuele Scotti – Open Knowledge, Hutch Carpenter – Spigit and Verna Allee of Value Networks.

I will be keynoting the conference on the implications of the social customer on today’s organizational design and infrastructure. As important, the need for collaborative enterprise design to engage customers, partners and employees, to cater to this new customer dynamic.  I hope to help frame the discussion for executives as they prepare to respond to these changes in customer dynamics.

Workshop

In addition, I’ll do a workshop on the first day that provides a primer on the process from Idea to Launch. This 4 hour workshop will include instructional content, do’s and don’ts, pitfalls to avoid, and how to align the promise of open, collaborative constructs with discrete performance goals. One particular area where we will go deep is the pitch – in addition to instructional content, we’ll moderate a panel of vendor CEOs that pitch the most skeptical customers on a daily basis on how newer collaborative approaches can move the needle. We’re thrilled to have leaders at Telligent, Broadvision and Blue Kiwi join the panel. A special thank you to them for giving back to the larger Enterprise 2.0 community by sharing insights and practical knowledge. Finally, we will also involve practitioners that will tell their story on how they launched Enterprise 2.0 initiatives at their organizations.

More about the conference

The conference has three primary themes as stated on the website:

• Inside the organization: Intranet 2.0, Community Management, Human Resources 2.0, Social Learning, Organizational Network Analysis, IT Governance

• Outside the organizations: Social CRM, Sales Communities, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Monitoring

• Innovation: Idea and Innovation Management, Crowdsourcing and Idea generation, Prediction markets

An excerpt from an interview conducted by ComputerWorld (translated from Italian) with Emanuele Quintarelli, one of the organizers of the event:

Among the more than 40 actions to point out the contribution of Hutch Carpenter on 3C innovation to Sameer Patel on the use of collaborative approaches to improve business performance and ultimately the joint submission by Mark Tamis and Esteban Kolsky on how to compete by building a business client-centered. In addition to experts and also indicate that twelve managers of major Italian companies will go up on stage to confront so candid and transparent about the real risks and opportunities of the introduction of similar approaches in business.

More on the conference, the esteemed list of speakers, and agenda here. 

Hope to see you there!

I read, with great interest, an interview with Jeff Clavier of SoftTechVC in Network World. Jeff’s had notable successes in the consumer world (Mint, MyBlogLog, and Userplane). I’ve never interacted with Jeff (other than recommending a Dim Sum Restaurant on Twitter) but I’ve always had respect for him – unlike many others, he’s adequately self deprecating when it comes to his passing on an opportunity to invest in LinkedIn. : -)

On the topic of Enterprise Software, Jeff says:

Most of SoftTech’s investments have so far been in the consumer space. “Innovation is slower on the enterprise side,” Clavier claims, and “beset by security issues.” “It’s a mature market with only a few acquirers; sales are more difficult and investors have little leverage when there are so few buyers. Low cost, consumer applications that leverage the Web offer capital efficiencies not matched on the enterprise side – and they are fun to work with.”

I’ve had conversations with scores of CEOs of traditional and Enterprise 2.0 companies on this topic. I’m still sticking with my analysis of over a year ago about Commoditization that’s partly due to a lack of focus on process and context, too much reliance on nebulous measures such as productivity and little alignment with tasks at hand. That’s played out with CubeTree’s purchase for $20 million. Anemic by Enterprise standards.

But leverage is coming. I’ve been reading a galley copy of The New Polymath by Vinnie Mirchandani, due out later this summer, and its clear how enterprise application infrastructure, based on customer expectations is ripe for a re-haul. It’s not just about the cloud and its also not just about SaaS vs On Premise business apps. Simpler, better, faster-to-update ways of GTD in context, and in a way that connects people, are about to hit. And that opens up organic as well as M&A opportunities on the technology supply side.

There’s quite a few opportunities’ that are large enough to have significant impact, but I’m going to touch on a few areas I see when talking to end customers, discounted by the pace of innovation, to date.

• Decision Facilitation: Yes, in-person meetings and email are time consuming, expensive and often un productive. The answer is not to simply move those to digital interactions powered by Enterprise 2.0. That’s a first step. But that can also mean moving the same unproductive discussions to a digital platform and arguably more of them since its less time consuming. We still need to wrap a decision facilitation layer around it to drive better results. OpenAPIs, activity streams, data and document access all in context is where its at.
• Exception Handling: Somewhere between your Enterprise 2.0 platform and your structured employee, partner and supplier processes, lies a wide open gap. It’s a myth that we can get by with process laden technology since it solves 70%, 80& 90% of repeatable process tasks. The other 10%, 20%, 30% is where things can go horribly wrong and cost millions. Weaving in a social fabric to deal with those exceptions to standard process outcomes is barely tapped today.
• CRM 2.0 (or socialCRM) is DOA with Enterprise 1.0. You can have the most sophisticated customer community but remember, prospects and customers are looking to bypass marketing and talk to experts deep inside your org and partner ecosystem. You cant have a vibrant and successful community if you’re rely on a 1990s style latency riddled, portal/intranet/extranet inside the firm. Even a “facebook for the enterprise” that cant methodically wrap around real time customer interaction demands is but a first step.
• Performance: I joined a panel on SugarCRM’s SugarCon event last month with Esteban Kolsky, Jeremiah Owyang and Diogo Rebelo where we discussed who owns Social  Data in the enterprise. Traditional BI tools extract results from structured data systems. New performance applications will blend social and analytical data to improve discrete business performance outcomes  – HR and Talent, Spend Management, Communication Performance. Etc. Ultimately moving from “here’s the report” to “here’s what to do about the data”.

Each of these can spawn vastly different value propositions for end customers.

Jeff’s spot on when he talks about simple consumer constructs starting to influence how Enterprise users interact with people and data. And all of the opportunities, above, will expect this as a price of entry. The big consideration though for large mature enterprises will be to avoid siloed efforts and the need to form a central collaborative back bone that’s still flexible enough to show concrete improvement around specific business tasks (sales, marketing, innovation, etc). Last month, Oliver Marks and I  presented at Interop on Performance Acceleration via Enterprise 2.0 and this was further validated by a very mature audience of technology managers and executives.

I’m expecting to have a lot of interesting conversations on this topic over the next few weeks. Tomorrow I head to SAP SAPPHIRE, then to the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 in Milan where I’ll be talking about 21st Century Enterprises and the Role of Social, and finally at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston where were going to be focusing on business value of E2.0.

I’ll update this post after I’ve processed what I learn.

As some of you heard (many thanks for the notes), I’ve joined the Defrag Conference Advisory Board.

For those of you who are not familiar with the conference, Defrag is a yearly event in Denver that’s focused on emerging tools and trends in technology and its’ impact on business.

The conference is organized by Phil Becker, Brad Feld and Eric Norlin and counts Roger Ehrenberg, Paul Kedrosky, Jerry Michalski and Chris Shipley as advisors.

Here’s how I described the conference in a recent post:

———————————————————————-

The Five Fragments That Make Up Defrag:

I’m going to spare you a diatribe on why its a great event and distill it down to five reasons, (or fragments) that make me go back and why this an awesome event for the enterprise folks out there:

• Its about debating solutions to big big business and economic value challenges that will consume us all over the next 12-24 months. That applies to the buy-side as well as the sell side.
• Its about the ramifications of eventual large scale adoption of a lot of what a serious IT executive will deem to be well, “cutesy” ideas today (e.g. Real Time Enterprise).
• A cut to the chase discussion on which consumer trends we see and use today might one day be enterprise worthy. Remember when people laughed at the concept of ‘Facebook for the Enterprise’? Yep, that probably came up at Defrag two events ago.
• Little talk-to-the-crowd panels. Everyone is deemed to be intelligent and has an equal voice. You’ll spend more time talking to the person sitting next to you than you will listening to someone on stage. Guaranteed.
• Its frightfully practical stuff. No fluff. All actionable thinking that makes you look at work differently when you leave. And makes you want to come right back the next year.

————————————————————————–

A little about the conference in the words of Eric Norlin, the organizer:

Defrag is the first conference focused solely on the tools and technologies that are leveraging the "social" aspect of software to accelerate the "aha" moment. Defrag is not a version number. Rather it’s a gathering place for the growing community of implementers, users, builders and thinkers that are working on the next wave of software innovation.

Thanks to Eric for reaching out. Looking forward to a great event!

P.S If you’re a fan of Sons of Anarchy on FX, you’ll get what that T-Shirt is all about -)

“If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse."  – Henry Ford.

Somewhere there’s got to be a similar line from Steve Jobs as well.  And both have successfully belted out product after product that changed the automotive, mobile and media business, forever. All without involving the customer in a meaningful way.

So why are customer and employee led innovation programs all the rage at organizations today? Idea Management Platforms such as Bright Idea, Spigit and others are selling like hotcakes. And  Enterprise 2.0 platforms such as Jive Software and Newsgator single out this one purpose driven component and offer it as well.

Chevrons doing it, SAP’s doing it, Intuit’s doing it and lots and lots of others. And they are all involving customers, partners and employees to help them find and refine the next big idea or ways to streamline operations within organizations as a way to reduce cost and mitigate risk. And they’re saving or making millions doing so.

Come find out what the hoopla is all about at the Innovation Meetup in Mountain View this Tuesday, the 23rd of March at 6:30 pm. I’m moderating an awesome panel with Susie Wee, CTO of Client Cloud Services at HP, Tad Milbourn of Intuit and Marco ten Vaanholt, VP of SAP’s Community Network.

At Sovos, were also working on some high profile innovation programs with clients right now so it should be a lively discussion. We’re going to discuss the drivers, challenges and as important execution and follow through of successful innovation programs. Collecting ideas is one thing. Doing something about it is another. We’ll find out how the experts do it.

The event is hosted by Tatyana Kanzavelli whose now legendary in Silicon Valley for producing intimate, high quality events.

More about the event from the Meet Up website:

Innovation has been dubbed as one of the more promising purpose-driven applications of social and collaborative technology in the enterprises. Whether as a way to encourage customers or internal employees, Innovation Programs in enterprises have unlocked critical ideas at well known enterprises that has ultimately led to the conception of new product ideas, significant cost savings internally and finally, operational efficiency. Sameer Patel, founding partner at the Sovos Group will moderate a session to highlight the opportunity and challenges that organizations face as they seek to unlock critical insight coming from customers, partners and employees.

Learn more about the panelists and the event and register on the Meet Up site here. It’s $20 online and $30 at the door. Food and wine included.

Hope to see you there.

Sovos will be presenting on Accelerating Performance via Social and Enterprise 2.0 technology at a webinar hosted by Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) this week, Thursday.

Oliver Marks and I will both be on deck engaging with the audience on how to approach social computing in the context of organizational, customer and partner performance.

Here’s an excerpt:

This session aims to demystify Enterprise 2.0 benefits and to focus on pragmatic strategy by providing real world experience on viable tactics for budgeting, definining your value proposition and measuring your desired results.
Fresh from their presentation at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, Oliver Marks & Sameer Patel of the Sovos Group aim to help you unlock the value of these rapidly maturing and increasingly important social constructs to meet your specific business needs. And we’ll address how they can significantly augment the value you get from your current technology investments with greater employee and partner performance.

If you’d like to attend, here’s a promo code that gets you a discount: PRMSOVOS. You can register here. Hope to see you there.

Earlier this month I did a presentation with my Sovos colleague, Oliver Marks, at the Enterprise 2.0 virtual conference. The focus of our keynote was to  frame the discussion around social and collaborative concepts in the context of business value and performance. We coverd critical issues that are on the minds of executives at large enterprises that are grappling with the tanglble value of social computing in the context of the enterprise.

The slide deck is pasted below.

Oliver Marks and I are co-chairing the Enterprise 2.0 Strategy and Execution Planning Track at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco next week. Details on each session can be found here. The premise of this track is two-fold:

- help folks understand the conceiving, selling and planning phases of a transformation to social constructs in the context of enterprise performance.

- learn how to make the business case for using social constructs to improve specific line of business performance. For the San Francisco Event, we will focus on: Purpose Driven Collaboration and how to plan for Scale, Customer Support and Product Innovation.

Here’s a line up of our sessions.

Monday – Selling the Case for Accelerating Business Performance with Enterprise Collaboration and 2.0 Technologies #e2conf-3

~60% instructional led by Oliver and me. We will walk you through the process of getting the raw ingredients together, framing the discussion for executives, the pitch and finally the execution plan.

To add other credible voices to the conversation we have 2 panels built into the session. First, to help you be prepared for just about any question that can be thrown at you by the most skeptical executive, we’ve asked a few folks from the vendor community to join us and give us a taste of what they hear every day, out in the market. We’re thrilled to have the following folks join us:

Chris McGrath, ThoughtFarmer

Scott Schnaars, Socialtext

Tom Kuegler, PBWORKS

To help you with planning a successful launch, Bevin Hernandez from Penn State University will show us how they generated buzz and got folks jazzed about the launch of their collaborative intranet.

Tuesday: Collaboration at Scale

Alan Cohen, Vice President, Enterprise, Cisco Systems

Jon Pyke, Chief Strategy Officer, Cordys

Wednesday: Lowering Customer Support Costs via Social Tools

Lois Townsend, Director, Social Media Strategy and Operations, Hewlett Packard

R Wang, Partner, Altimeter Group

Steve Woods, Eloqua, CTO

Todd Shimizu, Director Communities, Juniper Networks

Treb Ryan, CEO, Opsource

Thursday: Launching winning products in the marketplace. How Social Software Improves your odds

Bill Truettner, Implementation Consultant, Imaginatik (Note: Bill will talk about his experiences in his previous role as an Innovation Manager for Hewlett Packard)

Jack Anderson, Innovation Specialist, Chevron

Patrick Asher, Innovation Leader, AT&T

This track is all about where the rubber meets the road. Our goal is to begin to move to discussion from tools and tactics, to accelerating performance via social computing constructs and software. Every one of these sessions focuses on practical approaches to social transformation in the enterprise. In turn, the esteemed group of folks that have been kind enough to join us have either (as executives themselves) led the charge to moving to social computing platforms to accelerate performance them selves, or as managers, have made convincing arguments to executives on the opportunity that social computing presents in the context of discrete business process.

We look forward to seeing you next week.