The Melcrum Blog: Exploring the future of Enterprise 2.0

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

I spent most of today at the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum, run by The Future Exploration Network. While it's all still fresh in the memory, here's a quick report.

Run from 8.30am-2pm the event took place at breakneck pace, and covered a massive amount on the topic of social media and Web 2.0 in the workplace.

There was much talk of knowledge and knowledge workers, easing employee frustrations, helping individuals to do their jobs more easily, differentiating to attract and retain the best talent and increasing employee engagement (yes, all of this in just 5.5 hours).

Via Skype video conferencing we heard from Euan Semple (currently in Germany) and Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee (currently at the Fast conference in Orlando), together with Australian case studies from Westpac, Cochlear, Janssen-Cilag and CapGemini and a fair few more. (Note to self, the video tie-ins worked seriously well.)

Some takeaways from the conference include:

Participation: As with Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 is all about participation and the people - not technology. I'd go further and say it's the sophistication of modern technology (software) that enables it to be all about the people.

Some of the participation levels for social tools (in the featured case studies) ranged from 10% at Westpac to practically 100% at Janssen Cilag, the latter having entirely replaced their static html intranet with a Confluence-based wiki. Janssen Cilag also had a very interesting and new application called "Jitter" â an enterprise version of Twitter. Needless to say I'm keen to find out more on that one.

Generational differences have been drastically overblown: Yes, there are some aspects of Gen Y and the Millennials that make them more naturally open to collaborative communication, Web 2.0 etc.. But, there's still plenty of people in the top end of Gen Y and throughout Gen X and the BabyBoomers who use and love the benefits brought Web/Enterprise 2.0 tools. Whether they see them as "Web/Enterprise 2.0" is irrelevant.

It's also easy to forget that Gen X workers will still be in the workplace for the next 30 years or more (depending what the expected retirement age is in 30 years...). To cut through generations and say that this group like certain tools and this group don't (and will never adapt) is.... stupid.

On this point, Peter Evans-Greenwood at CapGemini made a good point: "Let's see how the Gen Ys feel when the Millennials come through, and the Millennials feel 10 years after that," and so on and so forth...

Prediction markets: A standout point for me also came in the excellent video presentation by Andrew McAfee and hit on the topic of "Prediction Markets".

I'm still thinking about this idea so won't comment too much. Suffice to say, it appears to be along the lines of the wisdom of crowds being far more accurate in predicting outcomes of specific events than corporate thinktank or prediction models â be it election results, product success or similar. "All of us are smarter than any of us" type thinking, but it goes a lot deeper than that. Apparently, Google is the leader on enterprise experience of Prediction Markets, but other companies are experimenting too.

Appealing to business: How can you make enterprise 2.0 tools appealing to business leaders? Simply appeal to their business senses. "These tools can help productivity" (but be prepared for the retort). "These tools can ease the flow of information," (most boards should go for that, no?). Or, how about, "These tools will save us money by helping to create an organisation where employees are less stressed. Why? Because they can do their jobs more easily because the systems are in place to communicate more easily, meaning they won't leave for a competitor who already understands this."

Within these points there may well be the basis for some hard measurement on the benefits of these tools.

Social media at a social media-esque conference: Another aspect that was very interesting was the interactivitivity and social media being used at the conference itself. Not only were there the two video calls via Skype, but many people were live blogging to their own blogs and the event blog (Trevor Cook was doing both), various groups were using Twitter, some were uploading photos to Flickr, and one person was even streaming the conference via ~~Qik~~ Tangler & Ustream and uploading videos to Seesmic.

On one hand I feel there's an element here of just playing with toys â the "isn't this cool" school. On the other hand it was great to have so much discussion and opinion fielded as the conference unfolded - yet without having to whisper to the person you inadvertently ended up sitting next to. As points were made and ideas presented, I was chatting about them with people I knew who were in other parts of the conference room, and some in other parts of the world who were simply paying attention to the event. There's no doubting the potential for these applications in the workplace. As was a recurring theme of the event, it just depends where and what to use, and who will want to use them.

Overall it was an excellent event and I've got 10 pages of notes so could go on for a while, but that's probably enough for the moment. The conference could have been drawn out for longer too. But, as organiser Ross Dawson said afterwards, that's simply not the way he likes to run events.

[Future Exploration Network]