e2.0 blog

This is something we and other Enterprise 2.0-enthusiasts have been going on and on about for a few years now – technology is not the matter, culture is. Oliver Marks at Collaboration 2.0makes the same point again, but from another angle, in his excellent blog post, “Understanding Enterprise 2.0 Tolerances & Scale”.

Coming back from two Enterprise 2.0 conferences, one in the US and one in Europe (that we also attended) he can see a quite obvious difference that has absolutely nothing to do with technology but greatly impacts the use of Enterprise 2.0-tools:

“The European Enterprise 2.0 scene is a Ginger Rodgers to the USA’s Fred Astaire: Europeans are doing everything the US is doing but backwards and in high heels, or rather also in multiple languages and cultures. Although English is the lingua franca of international business online, providing compelling reasons to persuade participation in European online collaboration can be culturally more challenging than in the English speaking US and UK.”

And though it might come as a surprise to Marks, this has been the case in Europe since the start of the Internet. We live in Sweden; how many web pages in Spain have I visited lately? Answer: none. I don’t read Spanish. Google Translate is not enough, obviously. I know that it exists and it works quite well – I still don’t visit Spanish sites. And this notion is of course even more obvious when it comes to Enterprise 2.0; I’m not only supposed to read what people in other cultures write – I’m also supposed to interact. This is the major threshold of today in Europe.

But these cultural differences are not the only ones. Marks also points out that the same terms and prerequisites apply regarding Enterprise 2.0, no matter if the business is a huge corporation or a small one-man firm:

“We’re at an interesting intersection in the collaboration world where projects both large and small tend to be discussed with the same terms. This can be very confusing to the lay person since it’s hard to know what sort of scale is being described.”

Both these cultural differences matter more than mere technology. And Oliver Marks points it out very clearly, I highly recommend reading his article.

This Tuesday, me and Rickard Hansson boarded the pitch black Incentivemobile for an 850 km journey to Frankfurt am Main and the Enterprise 2.0 Summit. We did not know really what to expect or what to find in the heart of Germany, but we did see some really interesting topics and speakers (and we had a good playlist for the journey, more on that below).

Today we, me and Gustav, attended the E20 Summit in Frankfurt and I will try to sum it up from my perspective.

As an event I must say it was quite OK arranged - wifi worked (most part of the day), the speakers time was limited to maximize the time for Q&A's and there was really no fiasco like a bad speaker, pure raw selling, and so on.

Today’s word was: Silo. I lost count on how many times that word was mentioned in the different presentations. Silo there, silo here - of-course it's a good description of the problem when groups in large organizations holding on knowledge and not sharing.

I think that Oliver Marks keynote was quite good - setting E2.0 in perspective, such as the workforce we are aiming at for the moment still has the industry revolution burnt into their corneas. This makes our work hard to prove the power in collaboration, making every co-worker count.

One quote I have to give Oliver is "IT is from Mars and Business from Venus". A good sum up on that IT commonly answers every question with "SharePoint" and Business simply picks up their credit card to subscribe on the service that best fits their requirements for the moment - flying under the radar.

My reflection on this is: If the business people keep on picking up their credit cards, the existing systems don’t work - simply put! This in return creates silos (today’s word) over and over again. So, deal with the problem - bury the hatchet and meet up on the same planet.

The best presentation during the day was performed by Lee Bryant @ Headshift. His message was how leadership is affected by implementing Enterprise 2.0 were everyone has an opinion valued equally.

The presentation was excellent because Lee gave a very good impression - he simply knew exactly what he was speaking about, and he was very constructive. He actually gave me the headline to this blog post:

"You don't NEED to change - it's a question of a competitive advantage" on the approach on why to implement Enterprise 2.0. You can't force anyone. They don't need to implement it, the company won’t collapse. But it's a competitive advantage - absolutely!

Let's wrap this up. This summit is interesting, it's packed with information and knowledge - but... and it's a big BUT. Where is the rock'n'roll? Enterprise 2.0 is as big a revolution as Web 2.0 - we are overthrowing the accepted dictatorship a hierarchically structured company actually is. I get the feeling that we act like the little brother standing in the shadows - excusing our existence. We're simply not cool enough.

This is not done with bullet lists in PowerPoint - this is done by strong characters. Drop the ties, put on your sneakers and lead the revolution. I'm all game!

Andrew McAfee is the father of the term Enterprise 2.0 and because of that we all have to listen to every word he says. No, I'm kidding - but obviously this guy still has a lot to tell us and among other things he said in connection to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference was how you embark on your Enterprise 2.0-travel the wrong way. Follow the six steps below and you are guaranteed to fail. Easy, eh?

• Declare war on the enterprise.
• Allow walled gardens to flourish – an interesting analogy to Napoleonic land division in Paris where smaller and smaller lots were created all divided with hedgerows – let’s not go there…
• Accentuate the negative – the risks aren’t quite as bad as people make out, don’t dwell on them [well, we've been saying that for years and years now...].
• Try to replace email.
• Fall in love with features - “what’s the simplest possible thing that could work”.
• Overuse the word “social” [hm...].

Read more at Enterprise 2.0 Blog.

I love this title – the new meeting the old. Social is “the new kid on the block” and the intranet is “the old stale guy”. Making them work together – side by side – is one of the missions in your Enterprise 2.0 strategy.

That might be true today, but not tomorrow. My belief has always been that you should marry the new with the old. That’s the only solution to the fact that you invested loads of money into your intranet (read: Sharepoint). It simply doesn’t work to tell your CIO to “scrap that, we are going to do the wiki & blog dance”. So my thesis is that the “social” will record the journey to the fact that is published on the “intranet” – there’s the marriage.

That was my thesis. Until I spoke to the CTO @ SBAB who simply said “why should we keep the old stale guy – he is… old and… stale”. Why should you keep something that takes you three weeks to publish content? Why keep something that prohibits collaboration?

With a successful E20 strategy the intranet becomes obsolete. Why? Because the users behaves like a herd, they will simply move over to “the new kid on the block” because it's much more easy and accessible.

The same herd behavior is seen on the net. A new and more easy to use service gets users to move.

So... are you going to lead the herd or be a solitary?