February 2009 Archives

This morning an email from a client mentioned the GFC. Earlier this week another client was talking about the GEC (which has the advantage that you can pronounce it, while GFC has to be spelled out).

When this morning I Twittered about how we have a new acronym that doesn’t need to be explained, I got some interesting responses. @ITSinsider in America said that she had heard it before from someone else in Australia. An Australian initially thought I meant Geelong Football Club, so googled it to find out.

Which gives very interesting results…

If you Google “GFC” in Australia the #3 result is a newspaper story Tough week ends in talk of ‘GFC’, dated from October last year, with four of the top 10 results referring to the planet’s economic woes, including three newspaper headlines.

If you Google “GFC” in the US, aside from a #5 entry from Wikipedia which includes various acronyms including the contemporary one, the first entry which refers to GFC in this way is at #45.

So are Australians particularly acronym-crazy? Are we in the vanguard of what will be a global trend to summarize the state of the world as GFC?

Of course the very best thing about GFC is that it is an easy explanation for everything, in three easy letters. It was all getting very complicated for a while. Now it’s simple again – yay!

A quick review of of media coverage and commentary on the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum yesterday. Let me know if there's anything missing here.

Computerworld: Social networking in business: plan less for less pain
Coverage of the social networking panel at the Enterprise 2.0 Forum

ITNews: Westpac reality check on Web 2.0
Review of comments on Westpac's technology initiatives

National Business Review: Westpac pulls plug on virtual reality training
Comments on Westpac's use of Second Life and online initiatives

The Metaverse Journal: Enterprise 2.0 and virtual worlds and a free discussion paper download
Discussion of the Forum and insights and content from the virtual worlds in the enterprise workshop

Social Media and Cultural Communication: Here at Enterprise 2.0
Notes on the day from Angelina Russo

Brad Howarth: Live from Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum 2009
More from Enterprise 2.0 Executive Foum 2009
Reporting on the morning sessions at the event.

Innotecture: Playing Nice: Developing Guidelines and Policies for Social Software Use
Detailed content from the event workshop run by Matt Moore

mab397: A summary of points tweeted from Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum

Des Walsh: Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum Cover it Live
Complete event coverage including Twitter feeds and Des's commentary
[UPDATE - ADDITIONAL COVERAGE]

Kate Carruthers 1: Key enablers for Enterprise 2.0
Thoughts from the Forum on five key issues for organizations implementing Enterprise 2.0.

Kate Carruthers 2: 5 Key issues for Enteprise 2.0
List of top 10 enablers for Enterprise 2.0 based on content and conversations at the Forum

Des Walsh: Perfect Setting for Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum
Review of the Forum including announcement of forthcoming interviews with presenters.

If you want to get more details on the event and responses, definitely check out the complete Twitter stream for #e2ef, which was for a period yesterday the most active topic on Twitter globally.

Tomorrow morning I am delivering a keynote at the National Growth Summit, looking at how fast-growing companies can tap technology trends to build growth and opportunities.

The presentation is below (usual caveats - this is not intended as a stand-alone presentation but to accompany my speech). I'll write more about this soon, but now I must get to bed - it was a long (though fun!) day at Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum today.

Back from a fabulous day at Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum. I don't have time for a full debrief now as I have to finish preparing for my keynote at theNational Growth Summit tomorrow.

Certainly a highlight of today was the Twitter activity at the conference, with by some measures the event reaching #1 on Twitter activity globally, and with other services reporting us as #2 trending Twitter topic.

Certainly the best single place to explore the distilled insights from the day is the Twitter stream for #e2ef, with over 1000 tweets, mainly of what participants found most useful and valuable from the speakers and interactive sessions.

More reflections and reporting from the day, including a distillation of some of Twitter stream, coming soon.

Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum is on tomorrow in Sydney (my regular readers might be glad that I’ll be a little more diverse in my blogging activity after that :-) ). Everything has come together extremely well, both on the fantastic content and speakers, and in getting extremely good attendance, showing that Enterprise 2.0 is squarely on the agenda for corporate Australia even in challenging economic times.

For those attending (and those who can't make it who would like to pick up crumbs from the rich smorsgabord of insights on the day...)

Twitter hashtag for the event is #e2ef.

The event twitter stream is here - already under way with a lot more activity starting 21 hours from now.

The event blog is at www.futureexploration.net/e2ef/blog/

Anyone attending can get a login to post. We expect as usual to get significant activity on the blog on the day and after the event.

There have already been quite a few blog posts in the lead up to the Forum, as below. Expect a lot more great discussion during and after the event!

Des Walsh 1: Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum With Coveritlive
Des Walsh 2: Ross Dawson’s Stimulus Package: Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum 09
Gavin Heaton: Implementing Web Technologies to Transform Organisations
Technation Australia: Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum
Mick Liubinskas: Put the Oh in Enterprise 2.0
James Dellow: Don't forget the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum
The Metaverse Journal: Growth predicted in virtual events for enterprise
Kate Carruthers: one more sleep until Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum

To complement our one-day Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum in Sydney on 24 February, Future Exploration Network and Optus Business are running an Enterprise 2. 0 Executive Briefing over lunch in Melbourne on 5 March. The Melbourne event is certainly no substitute for the in-depth content, workshops, and insights that will be available for the full day event in Sydney, which is essential for anyone who is serious about implementing Enterprise 2.0.

It will provide a snapshot of the latest in Enterprise 2.0 in Australia and globally, and assist executives to understand the key issues and how Australian organizations are creating value using web and mobile technologies. See the full agenda and speakers. As usual with our events, it will be a pleasant lunch, this time at Zinc in Federation Square.

A highlight of the event will be a CIO panel, including Andrew Mills, who last year took the post of Chief Information Officer for the South Australian government, and Chris Yates, Chief Information Officer of Tennis Australia, which has been doing some fascinating things with mobility.

Since our events in Australia are usually in Sydney, it's great to have this opportunity to take our latest content and insights to Melbourne as well.

I hope to see you there!

For many, many years I have felt that the vast majority of conferences were very poorly run, continuing to apply ancient, didactic approaches. That’s one of the reasons that a few years ago I started running events, organizing the Future of Media Summit, which annually links Sydney and San Francisco, the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum (the second annual event is on next week), Web 2.0 in Australia etc. Earlier events including what was at the time the extremely innovative Living Networks Forum in New York in 2003, using social networking technologies embedded in the event. Even though the events industry is vastly oversupplied, the majority of them are crap, so there’s ample scope for something better, as the consistent success of our events has demonstrated.

Certainly the last few years have seen the beginning of a transformation in how events are run, with in the US, Europe, and Australia (less so in Asia so far) many novel and highly interactive formats. However there is still a massive opportunity to create immense value with face-to-face events, and we’re currently looking to spin off our events business into a new company that will grow aggressively. News on that soon.

I am unusual in that a large part of my work is as a keynote speaker, speaking primarily on the future of business (including sometimes the future of events), usually within a traditional conference format. However at the same time I endeavor to create (or help my clients to implement) participatory formats that transcend the talking head syndrome.

Now the issue is getting mainstream media attention. News.com.au has released an article titled: Networking trend: the ‘unconference’, which examines the plethora of interactive events that are arising, such as unconferences, Lightning Talks, Ignite, and Pecha Kucha, and drawing on an extensive interview with me on where the space is heading.

The entire article is well worth a read. Below are excerpts of the direct quotes from me in the article.

The Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum is coming together extremely well. It is fantastic to see that while other sectors of the economy are struggling, organizations recognize that they must engage with the critical issue of transforming how they work using web and mobile technologies.

We have confirmed a number of fantastic speakers at the event over the last while. A quick update on some of the speakers you will be missing out on if you don’t come :-)

David Backley, General Manager – Applications Development, Westpac.
David is the senior IT executive with the longest tenure at Westpac, having driven many of the initiatives over the last years to create an over-arching technology architecture that supports business, and introducing many new technologies and approaches to create value. David’s keynote on Creating Business Value from Emerging Technologies will be a highlight of the forum, and provide vital insights from arguably the leading practitioner in Australia.

My brother Graham Dawson’s iPhone app OzWeather finally hit the #1 spot for paid apps in Australia in late January. After a couple of weeks at #1 it has been knocked off by Wobble Bikini Fun. However the fad apps quickly come and go – while they can generate a fair bit of revenue in a short period, their sales are rarely sustained, while the consistent sales of OzWeather over 3 months are starting to become significant.

Graham has regularly released full financial details – his latest blog post Apponomics Part 3 gives an analysis of his latest sales and what he thinks is driving them. The chart of his sales is below.

What this amounts to is revenue of A$35,000 (US$22,500) over three months, with current sales generating revenue of approximately A$500 per day. While this does not compare to the $600,000 in one month that the #1 app globally has just made, it is still tidy revenue for a solo developer who now has time (after extensive development and refinements on the OzWeather app) to work on other things, including one of his next ventures, iTrafficApp.

One of the best things about the iPhone app store is that is providing a ready monetization mechanism for developers with good ideas. Certainly not all will get rich, or even make much at all, given there are now 20,000 apps on the store, but if you have the right idea(s) well executed, it can make you a living or more. A new economy is being created.

Recently I have been immersing myself in the Enterprise 2.0 space, organizing the second annual Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum which is on in two weeks now, writing the Implementing Enterprise 2.0 Report which will be launched at the same time (slightly afterwards for the international market), and helping a variety of large organizations to drive their Enterprise 2.0 initiatives forward.

It’s a long time since I came up with my definition for Enterprise 2.0 as below. While I generally dislike jargon and the liberal addition of “2.0” to words, I find the term Enterprise 2.0 highly meaningful because it is, in addition to tapping the value of Web 2.0 in a specific context, literally about creating the next version of the organization.

What that stayed with me more than anything else from Andrew McAfee’s speech at our inaugural Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum last year, is one of his key conclusions: “Enterprise 2.0 will make companies less similar” (or as I always remembered it, ‘Enterprise 2.0 makes companies more different’).

In the lead-up to the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum, a podcast interview with me has just been launched on Stan Relihan’s Connections Show, which is one of the top rated business podcasts in the world.

Next up on the show after me is Vint Cerf, the ‘father of the internet’, so that will definitely be worth looking out for. Stan Relihan is one of the top 50 most connected people in the world on LinkedIn.

You can access the podcast directly on the Connections Show.

Or you can download the mp3 file here.

Stan now also has a blog on The Australian website titled Wires and Lights in a Box where the podcast is also accessible, and which includes many more of Stan’s insights and perspectives.

A brief overview of what we covered in the podcast:

We are very excited to have JP Rangaswami doing the keynote at Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum (by video from UK).

For those who haven’t come across JP’s work – you should have!

For the inaugural Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum last year, our international keynotes were Andrew McAfee, the Harvard Business School professor who coined the term Enterprise 2.0, and Euan Semple, who had taken the BBC on the Enterprise 2.0 journey. For this year my absolute number one choice for keynote was JP, who is an extraordinary combination of a true visionary and a pragmatic senior executive.

When I thought about all the other people in the world I could invite to speak, almost none were those who are making Enterprise 2.0 happen in organizations. There is still, unfortunately, more talk than action in this space, though there is also the reality that many of the best Enterprise 2.0 leaders and initiatives inside organizations are not visible to the world at large.

Andrew McAfee’s article Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration (currently free pdf download!) in MIT Sloan Management Review Spring 2006 was the first appearance of the term Enterprise 2.0. The article essentially catalogues what JP Rangaswami was doing in his then role of Global CIO at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, and does not mention any other companies innovating internally using web tools. The twin Harvard Business School case studies on Wikis at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein and Blogs at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein published in January 2006 provided many with early insights into the practical business application of these tools from an organization leading the way in their use.

A new perspective on Enterprise 2.0 adoption has just occurred to me, stemming from a conversation with audience members at my KM Forum presentation the other day, and while writing the Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report, which is being created to be out in time for the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum.
[UPDATE:] Implementing Enterprise 2.0 is now out with 4 free chapters available for download.

In Diffusion of Innovations, Everett Rogers describes the now well-known curve of user adoption.

Attribution: Creative Commons Attribution 2.5

In the case of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 technologies, they become more useful the more people use them.

For example, social bookmarking or tagging is of limited value if adopted by just a handful of people, but can be extremely valuable in making information search more effective, if used by the majority of people in an organization.

This changes the shape of the adoption curve. Once there are sufficient users, the value increases, accelerating uptake. This is arguably the case with any system where there are network effects, however the mechanisms of Web 2.0 accelerate this increase in value.

This does not fundamentally transform the nature of user adoption initiatives in organizations, but it does change some of the dynamics and effective strategies.

For Enterprise 2.0 technologies far more than for other technologies, the real focus and the battle needs to be on moving from the early adopter group to the point of 'critical mass', where sufficient usage of the technologies is rapidly accelerating their value to users, and uptake is far more rapid.

Anyone who has attended our conferences knows that we create highly interactive and participatory events. One of the features we always run is ‘participant roundtables’ in which all attendees select topics of particular interest and share perspectives with their peers, who at our events are usually senior, highly experienced people.

At Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum on 24 February we are planning a new feature in addition to the participant roundtables, that I think will be one of the most valuable aspects of the event for attendees.

In what we are billing ‘mini-workshops’, we have gathered the absolute cream of the experts and consultants in the Enterprise 2.0 space in Australia, who will each run a series of 20 minute small-group workshops. The workshop leaders will share their expertise in interactive sessions that will give deep practical insights and take-aways to the participants. Participants will be able to select four workshops to attend in the session after lunch. This intense participatory format will be a fantastic complement to the rest of the content on the day. See here for our complete list of speakers.

The people running the workshops are truly the best people in the field in Australia (and beyond!). They have immense experience and deep insights to share; we are very fortunate to have them involved. The workshop leaders (who you can see are very much online participants!) are:

Kate Carruthers, Director, Digital Media Group
Kate is one of the top people in the field, with a deep enterprise technology background, and has worked at senior levels in some of Australia’s largest organizations to help them implement leading edge technologies.
Bio
Blog: http://katecarruthers.com/blog/
Twitter: @kcarruthers

I've just got back from presenting at NSW KM Forum on Implementing Enterprise 2.0 in the Real World, where I was spreading word on our Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum.

Below are my slides, which contain some preview material from our Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report, which will be released at the end of the month.

I used the slides to discuss what actually happens in organizations in implementing Enterprise 2.0, using examples of situations I've seen of successful and unsuccessful implementations, and creating a conversation with the audience (who had many great stories and perspectives to offer).

Things begin by someone in the organization recognizing that there is potential value in applying web technologies.

However soon barriers emerge, which are different in each organization. These need to be understood and addressed in order to facilitate useful organizational change.

The path of implementation is different for each company, however in most large organizations some key elements need to be in place, such as addressing governance issues and directing energies where they will reap the greatest rewards and set the stage for further initiatives.

Ultimately organizations need to become comfortable with experimentation, iterating in finding how to build a more responsive, effective organization.

The Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum is coming up very soon now!

Click on the image below for our latest flyer on the Enterprise 2.0 event, giving full details on why this will be the premier Enterprise 2.0 event in Australia this year.

As you can see from the speakers pictured above, who represent just some of the leading experts speaking at the event, pretty much all the people who matter in this space in Australia will be there to share their expertise.

I’ll post soon in more detail about the points below. For now a quick summary of some of the features that will make attending the event to be indispensable for anyone who is involved in assessing or implementing web or mobile technologies in the enterprise:

* International keynote by video from JP Rangaswami, the visionary who instigated the first major implementation globally of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, as featured in the landmark Harvard Business School case study and the Andrew McAfee MIT Sloan article that introduced the term Enterprise 2.0.