Pretzel Logic – Enterprise 2.0

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.

Yet again, thanks to Eric Norlin, a bunch of us get the opportunity to escape to Denver next month to talk about what’s next in social software. At the Defrag conference next month on November 11th and 12th.

I’m going to spare you a diatribe about 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.

I’m going to be facilitating a discussion on ‘Communication Metaphors’ with Tim Young, Alexander Moore, Michael Cerda, and Matt Brezina.

Hope to see you there!