Wrap Up of Enterprise 2.0

My brain is full after spending most of the week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. I ran into lots of great ideas and lots of interesting and smart people.

At last year's conference, it was like a light came down from the sky to show me what had been missing from my knowledge management practice. It transformed my approach to knowledge management and my life. I often start my presentations by saying they are about Enterprise 2.0 and Doug 2.0.

This year's conference was not about the transformation, but more about reaping the benefits of that transformation. I was asked to speak on a panel. I put together a panel for un-conference portion. I met people from around the world. I spent time with colleagues.

It was a great four days.

Meeting People:

The highlight of conference was the face-to-face meetings with people I have been communicating with since last year's conference. Web 2.0 is about being form these communities and communicate with people all around the world and with people in your backyard that you are just not able to see on a regular basis. I really enjoyed hanging out with Stephen Collins/Trib of AcidLabs and Luis Suarez of Elusa.net. I have been a big fan of those two for a while.

From my backyard, it was great to spend time with Jessica Lipnack, Jeff Stamps, Sharon Wilson, David Hobbie, Anne Stemlar, Andy McAfee, Jack Vinson, Patti Anklam and Dan Keldsen.

It was great to make some new friends: Bill Ives, Lee Bryant of Headshift, Matt Simpson of IBM and Chris McGrath of ThoughtFarmer.

I wish I was able to spend more time with Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting, Mark Masterson of CSC and Carl Frappaolo of AIIM.

A special thanks to Maggie Fox of Social Media Group for organizing and paying for dinner on Wednesday. She put on an impressive display of how to eat a lobster.

Keynotes Presentations:

If you have some time, there are videos available for the keynote speakers. These are the ones that I think are most worth watching:

• From the Bottom-Up: Building the 21st Century Intelligence Community
  Don Burke, Intellipedia Doyen, and Sean Dennehy, Intellipedia Evangelist, CIA
• Enterprise 2.0 - A State of the Industry Address
  Carl Frappaolo, Book Author and Vice President, Market Intelligence, AIIM; and Dan Keldsen, Director, Market Intelligence, AIIM
• Wachovia: The Business Imperative for Next-Gen Enterprises
  Pete Fields, Senior Vice President, eCommerce Division, Wachovia
  

My Session Notes:

I try to live blog from conference so I have my notes in one easy to access place. I hope they give some value to you as well.

• Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston - Kick Off
• Social Computing Platforms: IBM & Microsoft Part 1
• Social Computing Platforms: IBM & Microsoft Part 2
• Implementing Enterprise 2.0: Exploring the Tools and Techniques of Emergent Change
• Putting the Social into Social Media at Enterprise 2.0
• Connectedness: Changing What's Possible
• From the Bottom-Up: Building the 21st Century Intelligence Community
• Working in the Cloud: How Cloud Computing is Reshaping Enterprise Technology
• Enterprise 2.0 - A State of the Industry Address
• Elevating the Enterprise 2.0 Conversation
• Enterprise RSS: Connecting People, Information & Communities
• What Blogging Brings to Business
• Knowledge 2.0
• Power to the People: Driving Business Innovation through Communities
  
• Realizing Business Value through Social Networking within Wachovia
• Enterprise 2.0 In Action: Pfizer
• Real Enterprise 2.0 @ Sony Computer Entertainment's World Wide Studios
• Enterprise 2.0 Reality Check
• Making Wikis Ridiculously Successful: Real Lessons, Real Tips
• Top 10 Design Guidelines for Integrating Web 2.0 in Enterprise Apps
• Best Practices for Securing Enterprise Search
• Micro-blogging and Emergent Platforms
• Enterprise 2.0 Town Hall

Enterprise 2.0 Town Hall

Wrapping up the conference will be the first ever "Enterprise 2.0 Town Hall", a hosted discussion featuring you, the early adopters of the Enterprise 2.0 culture, the tools and the business practices. After a week of visionary talks and thought-provoking discussion we invite you to participate in this interactive session led by members of the Enterprise 2.0 advisory board.

• Moderator - Steve Wylie, GM, TechWeb
• Stowe Boyd - Front Man for The/Messengers
• Larry Cannell - Analyst - Collaboration and Content Strategies for Burton Group
• Jessica Lipnack - Co-founder and CEO for Netage
• Susan Scrupski - Chief of Applied Research for BSGAlliance.com

My Notes:

Jessica, as usual, had the audience introduce themselves.

Steve acknowledged that the wireless coverage was horrific. On the facility issue, it was too cold.

Lockheed martin got a big round applause on their session. Here is David Hobbie's coverage from his Caselines blog: Lockheed Martin & Enterprise 2.0.

There was more interest in the Twitter sessions than the enterprise community back channel on Meebo. The audience disliked the Meembo sessions being embedded in the webpages and made it difficult to monitor multiple back channels.

There was a lot of interest in videotaping or recording the sessions for later use.

The audience liked the unconference. They felt it filled in some holes in the conference. The open sessions were not well publicized or coordinated. A technical person wanted a forum to get really technical.

People liked the community site, but thought it was set up too late. There was too little time for people to set up a profile and connect. The community site just went up the week before the conference.

There was a lot of request to have fewer vendor based presentations.

People thought that the labels on the tracks and the grouping of the sessions did not make much sense.

Micro-blogging and Emergent Platforms

The social networking scene is moving fast with ever-changing tools and feature-rich services that provide users with increasing personalization and flexibility. Join provocative blogger, Dennis Howlett in this highly interactive session as he discusses new platform choices such as Twitter and Seesmic. Particular emphasis will be placed on the utility for these platforms and services in the Enterprise environment.

Speakers:

• Dennis Howlett, Industry Blogger
• Chris Brogan, Vice President, Strategy & Technology, CrossTechMedia
• Laura Fitton, Founder, Pistachio Consulting
• Loren Feldman, President, 1938 Media
• Rachel Happe, Research Manager, IDC

My Notes:

The dominant medium for this is Twitter.

The first question is why should we care?

Laura - A great way to bond weak ties.

Rachel - A version of social networking, but happens much quicker.

Loren - Sees no use for the enterprise. (mostly as a skeptical use of internal company communication)

Chris - Does not see twitter itself as the enterprise solution, but as something analogous.

Loren thinks that Twitter is just taking away productive time. Its a time waster.

Laura sees it as a quick and easy way to ping for experts.

Rachel sees that building relationships is important. Twitter is just another communications tool. Serendipity flows through the network.

Laura thinks twitter is no worse than reply all.

From the audience, are the concerns about twitter any different than concerns about IM.

Twitter is not about getting accountability in the messaging. It is a different tool.

Luis (http://twitter.com/elsua) thinks Twitter is a killer app for people who travel.

An audience member brought up the scenario of setting out a twitter for something that needs a quick response. The next step is to elevate. May be the wrong tool. Try the phone.

(There are lots of ways to waste time. Even if Twitter is time waster, at least you are wasting your time building your network. Instead of finding mines. Or finding the tiles of Mah jong.)

Loren thinks video and audio deliveries may be more useful than the 140 characters of Twitter. Of course one of the limitations on audio and video is the limited mobile bandwidth in the U.S. (It is also harder find. Google has not figured out how to index the content of audio and video files.)

"Twitter is not going to change the enterprise." Loren thinks it is just more layers of people not saying anything.

Establishing, building and strengthening relationships is key to the success of the enterprise. Can Twitter help?

Loren: The blog is more important than the micro-blog.

There are still no vendors for Twitter inside the firewall. They have no plans for a white label product for the enterprise. Some of the platforms are working on something.

During the presentation, Laura was displaying her Twitter flow on the screen using Summize. She also managed to crash Andy McAfee's blog by tweeting several links to his posts.

• Something New Under the Sun http://tinyurl.com/4nsha6
• Ties that Find http://tinyurl.com/yucbcv

Best Practices for Securing Enterprise Search

Overview: Although this session provides technical details it also offers a glimpse at the issues behind enterprise search for those less familiar with the subject. The challenge is to provide easy access to data and content employees need while still protecting sensitive information. Join us as we share best practices for delivering secure yet comprehensive results for leading search engines.

• Speaker - Mark Bennett, Vice President, New Idea Engineering, Inc.
• Speaker - Miles Kehoe, CEO, New Idea Engineering, Inc.

My Notes:

One of the common themes during the conference was the need to find the stuff you need. Of course the flip side is to make sure people do not find the stuff they should not be able to find.

You’ll be amazed what you can find on your own company’s network. Try searching for:

• confidential
• highly confidential
• salaries
• performance review
• Obscenities
• Racial and gender slurs

(The session had a little bit of a scare tactic. There are issues with exposing content inside the enterprise. Lots of companies have gotten complacent with security by obscurity. "I can't even find my own stuff inside the enterprise, how can someone else find my stuff?")

The Good: single sign on, LDAP directories to make security management easier

The Bad: Spidering for content means that the spider has to be a super-user that can see everything.

The Ugly: There are lots of whole in search technologies.

They focused on what is the right level of security. The macro level? The document level? The field level?

Early binding versus Late Binding.

With early binding the security is applied as the information comes into the system. Late binding applies the security after the search is made. FAST was doing some hybrid binding. Late binding is not as good. The security verification happens after the documents are retrieved.


Early Binding: IndexTime
1. I have document “http://corp.acme.com/sales/forcast.html”, what are the group IDs for it?

Early Binding: SearchTime
1. I have Session ID “14729834416”, which User is that for?
2. I have User “Jones”, which groups is he in?
3. Transform the list of Group IDs into a Native Query Filter


Late Binding:

• No work needed at Index time
• Would appear to be a simpler/better design
• Late Binding: SearchTime
• I have Session ID “14729834416”, can I access document “http://corp.acme.com/sales/forcast.html”, Yes or No?
• (repeat for every match)

The problem with early binding is latency. If you change someone's access after the last index, they will have access to documents that they should not have. The hybrid is good to deal with this issue.

Their take on vendors:

FAST Search & Transfer

• Supports Early and Late binding
• Can use BOTH together
• Hybrid approach “Best of both Worlds”
• Gets along very well with Microsoft Active Directory
• FAST SAM = Security Access Module
• Based on Windows technology
• Can still use your own application level logic if you prefer

Google Appliance

• Late‐Binding only
• “spin” is low latency –but actually a compromise...
• Could heavily load security infrastructure
• Does use some caching to lighten the load
• Caching decreases response time = good
• Caching increases latency (ACL changes)

Endeca

• Out of the box is Early Binding only
• Mitigated by low latency for document changes
• Provides accurate document counts by user
• General term is “Record Filters”
• Or can use “joins” to a fulltext ACL index
• RRN: Relational Record Navigation
• Late binding via custom code

Microsoft Sharepoint

• Late binding
• Microsoft calls it result trimming
  

Search Structures

Monolithic search
With a monolithic search, the index pulls everything across company boundaries. End users also run their search in the one same system. The spider has to have a super-logon to crawl all of the systems.

Federated search
Different search engines are in place. The federator queries each of the underlying systems. Th federator passes through the users logon to run the search. Each search system runs its own way and its own way. The big problem is applying relevancy to the results from the federated search. You also have to deal with varying search syntaxes in the various underlying systems.

Deferred Search
For highly secured information, you provide a link to the different silo where you would need to re-run the search in that locked down system.

(They went into even more technical stuff that went way over my head. )

A link to their slidedeck on the Enterprise 2.0 Community Site.

Top 10 Design Guidelines for Integrating Web 2.0 in Enterprise Apps

There are lots of vendors and tools now available to support Enterprise 2.0. But the complexity of enterprise applications, concerns about security, and the expectations of enterprise users (and their managers), dictate that collaborative and social networking tools need to be tailored for the enterprise environment. For example, typical enterprise users are acutely aware of the corporate hierarchy, and the UI should provide cues to inform and encourage them to collaborate with colleagues in a different department. Based on the findings of our own research, we will present ten design principles for integrating Web 2.0 technologies into enterprise applications.

• Dustin Beltramo, Architect, User Experience, Oracle Corporation
• Michal Kopec, Interaction Designer, Oracle

My Notes:

Colleagues conducted research activities with a total of 40 end-users and collected their thoughts and opinions about Web 2.0 features.

The typical enterprise 2.0 user:

• Uses a computer daily
• Uses the web daily
• Novice with Web 2.0 features
• May not have access to popular social networking sites from work
• Relies heavily on training
• Motivated by professionalism, not personal interest

Enterprise Context

• Performance-based evaluation
• Curiosity and exploration not necessarily rewarded
• Data security and privacy are emphasized
• Users fear errors, data loss
• Complex pages. - Page density is high and pages are often confusing, require training
• Each user is part of a business process - Maintain the status quo

The Enterprise 2.0 User Mindset

• Task-oriented - Wants to work efficiently
• Wants tools that don’t get in the way of their job
• Hesitant to veer from routine for fear of data loss
• No motivation for exploration, innovation
• Performs tasks according to training
• “I adapt to the system” vs. “The software adapts to me”

The Big “Ah Ha!”

• Demographics of Web 2.0 user are not generalizable to Enterprise 2.0.
• UI designs must cater to the unique characteristics and motivations of the enterprise user

The Guidelines:

1. Do No Harm. Minimize disruptions to existing workflow. Make sure you do not mess with time sensitive processes

2. Stay in the Zone. Embed tools in existing workflow, near business object. Put the subscription button near the content. Think about the supermarket checkout.

3. Location, Location, Location - Screen Real Estate is Precious (so is a user's attention span). Use progressive disclosure. Expose things in a secondary layer as they progress down the task.

4. Keep it Relevant. Provide access to relevant content, not just tools. Instead of just linking to relevant information, embed it on the page and expose when needed.

5. Two Sides of the Same Coin. Provide bi-directional navigation between mainline tasks and Web 2.0 spaces. If the space is in another location, make sure you can move back and forth easily. Expose whether there are comments. Do not make the user have to go to the other space to see if there are comments. If you are commenting, you should be able to see the content you are commenting on.

6. Climb the Corporate Ladder. Leverage existing corporate structures. Grouping information around the structure makes sense and associate content with groups. (People are more likely to value content from their team. The speakers may have been saying to reinforce the corporate hierarchy. I do not agree with that. I think associating content with a group is useful metadata, but you need to avoid the balkanization of information along artificial corporate hierarchy.)

7. Good Fences Make Good Neighbors. Encourage the creation and discovery of ad hoc groups. There are things and times that you cannot share information. If you give them a safe place to collaborate with a small group, they can build until they are ready to disclose. Lots of people are not comfortable being fully transparent. Ad hoc is very important so that it easy to create a relevant space.

8. Keep it Simple. People will use tools that are easy to adopt and enhance. (Training is just another barrier to adoption!)

9. Support Voyeurism. Make it easy for users to see what each other is doing, and to reach out and touch each other. Authorship adds value. Make it easy to discover expertise and information about each other. People are sensitive about personal information

10. Look for the Duct Tape. Look at things that are broken or things are not working. Look at abuses of the current system to help see what problems are there.

There was much discussion about user customization and personalization. Users should be able to structure and make the experience more useful for them. But you need to make easy to support and inevitable upgrades not messing with things and creating more duct tape.

There approach was recognizing that small groups with permeable walls. People are afraid of looking like idiots. Being part of a group helps learning. (I find that interactions among peers is more common and more open. Junior people share and talk with each other much more than with senior people. Partners in The Firm share with other partners more widely than with junior attorneys.)

Tags are more likely to be used to find your own stuff, and not the social nature of it. (Of course the value of tagging is to organize my information in a way that make sense to me. One of the most popular tags in Flickr is "me." That is useless to search on. Unless I am searching my subset of pictures. Then "me" is relevant to me.

Oracle is looking to the consumer web because that is where they see the innovation coming from.

Making Wikis Ridiculously Successful: Real Lessons, Real Tips

Overview: Useful lessons that work from companies like Pixar, Dow Jones, Vodafone, and Accenture. Listen to Sun Microsystems' story about their successful wikis.sun.com and blogs.sun.com. Get 12 tips for making your wiki work. Learn what value these companies created

Speakers:

• Jeffrey Walker, President of Atlassian
• Linda Skrocki, Sr. Engineering Program Manager, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

My Notes:

Accenture 123,000 employees with 54,000 wiki users
Deutsche Bank 270,000 employees (80,000 online) with 15,000 wiki users
IBM 387,000 employees with 100,000 wiki users

Vodaphone combines blogs and wikis. CEO blogs on the platform. Customized it to look really nice (visually) The CEO wanted to blog to e employees rather than sending out blast emails. Two weeks ago he resigned. He did it through a video blog with a message to a company.

The finance department wiki for Leapfrog gives new users a tour.

SAP's developers network sdn.sap.com has 800,000 registered users.

Deutsche Bank. The mascot is Marvin the Paranoid Android (from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.) Marvin actually has his own presence on the platform, including a CV. The awards are the annual Marvin awards. It is always the 42nd annual Marvin Awards. Since 42 is the answer according to the book

The sun community is a galaxy. Sun.com is in the middle, with planets revolving around it. Linda's perspective is from the external blogging community. Sun has lots of both internal and external blogs.

Linda's Nodes fro Success

1. Relax and trust your contributors. Give up control. Balance policy, risk tolerance, culture, benefits and trust. Be your self and share as much information about yourself and your job. Obviously do not share proprietary information. Anyone can set up a blog by themselves.

Have guidelines on public discourse. Use a conversational tonne. Just clarified that it is not just about blogging, but also sharing. Sun recently revised their policy to address anonymity, avatars appearance and community moderation. They provide blog themes for the employees. The CEO emphasized that they could pick their own theme.

Of the the over 100,000 blog posts, only 5 post had bad things. The sun bloggers monitor other blogs in the sun galaxy. So there is self-policing. The thought was to allow the more experienced people to post comments and respond to the posts.

2. Seed the site for Success.

• seed site with content
• engage power users to pilot
• pre-launch evangelism
• user tools, including instructional videos, FAQs getting started, etc.
• wiki for self support

Their wiki growth, after less than a year, and have had 50,000 edits to 7,000 pages.

3. Guide and Nurture self-sufficiency

Enable user to find answers and collect answers to questions.

What is the difference between a blog and a wiki. Collaboration and retention is more for a wiki. A blog is more of a flow and one person drafting. Blogs are more about discourse and debate.

The session turned to blogs (I thought this was a wiki session). An audience member recommended that you start with a wiki rather than a blog. There is less pressure to keep feeding the blog monster. Someone else recommended twitter before blogging.

How do you rate wikis? Why do you need to. You are not rating documents or other systems. If you have a rating system, then let people rate, set up a competition among employees to be the best.

Jeffrey has new employees create a new space and describe themselves. Make them editors from day one.

He showed an interesting task list as a widget in a wiki.

He showed a wiki with charting and reporting. A database view through a wiki is really powerful.
They encourage non-work use in the wiki. Getting using the wiki for whatever it is that they do.
Some concerns from audience about time wasting. Jeff says it is a management philosophy. If people are going to waste time, they can do it in many ways. They may as well waste it using the company tool and learning its features.

Permissions should be as open as you can. The default is no restrictions.

Duplication can be an issue. As wikis get bigger they need more gardening. As wikis it gets bigger it is harder to find things.

He pitched wikipatterns.com and Stewart Mader's book, Wikipatterns.

What about wiki gardener as a job description? Should companies have someone dedicated to gardening.

Sun has not incentive program overall. Some groups at sun include blogging as part of the review process.

Sharepoint question. Blogs and wikis are very rudimentary and the functionality blends together. (I just found out a major problem with the Sharepoint wiki. A blog rant will be coming as soon as I settle down from the E 2.0 conference.)

Enterprise 2.0 Reality Check

You have heard the vision of how Enterprise 2.0 is going to transform the way we work, the way we access and share information and the way we communicate and collaborate in the social enterprise. But how is this grand vision playing out in the real world? Led by Harvard Business School's Andrew McAfee (who coined the term), representatives from forward-thinking enterprises across diverse industries will discuss the true state of Enterprise 2.0 - what's working, what's not and what's next.

• Moderator - Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor, Harvard Business School
• Don Burke from the CIA
• Sean Dennehy from the CIA
• Pete Fields from Wachovia
• Ned Lerner from Sony Computer Entertainment
• Simon Revell of Pfizer

My Notes:

First question: why has E2.0 not taken over their organizations?

Simon: Some of population just gets it. Less than 10%. Enterprise 2.0 is foreign to the rest. People already have a lot of IT and this is in part just handing them more IT. Treat those who get it as embedded E2.0 consultants

Pete Fields from Wachovia: What is true in the consumer space does not mean that it translates inside the enterprise. You need to overcome the inertia. "In the flow; not above the flow"

Don Burke from the CIA: The tools reflect a fundamental change. Are we becoming more transparent in our lives and our jobs. Perhaps the incentives are not yet in place or understand for implementation. It will be a challenge moving from the early adopters to early majority, need to escape the adoption chasm. Middle management is hardest nut to crack.

Sean Dennehy from the CIA: Within workforce you have a range of people from those who grew up without computers (and are in power and dominate senior management) to the new workers who grew up always being connected.

Ned Lerner from Sony Computer Entertainment: It's okay that everyone is not contributing. You should expect that you will have more readers then contributors. (Bad mouthing lawyers.) Working with lawyers was not a collaborative process. Game developers have to collaborate to do their jobs.

Don Burke from the CIA: middle management is about making the trains run on time. Change is disruptive and makes it harder (in the short term) to make the trains run. The incentives are made based on the trains coming in on time, not necessarily that they are running better.

Pete Fields from Wachovia: They spend lots of money bringing in consultants because people are not telling their bosses and management the truth about the job and the problem with the workplace. These tools open that dialog. (Anne S. has crush on him; Me too.)

Simon: Just F*cking do it.

Pete Fields from Wachovia: Look for big problems. Be Audacious. Find champions. Have upward mentors

Ned Lerner from Sony Computer Entertainment: Find the best minds as champions. It is about people.

Don Burke from the CIA: give up control and your employees will do right. Avoid locked down spaces. Openness is good.

Sean Dennehy from the CIA: Keep it open do not have locked down team sites. Keep it open. Start with me first. You do it and be the example.

Andy: Trust your students. (i.e. trust your employees)

Sean Dennehy from the CIA: Look at your email. How much of that could be better handled in a blog or wiki.

Don Burke from the CIA: Comment on things you read in a blog at a regular meeting

Pete Fields from Wachovia: Getting feedback empowers the enterprise community. You can feedback and information from a broader audience.

Andy: You do not turn over decision-making to the collective intelligence tools and social media. But they are a great way to collect information and let people know that they had their say in the decision-making process. (It is even great to let people know that there is a decision-making process happening.)

Real Enterprise 2.0 @ Sony Computer Entertainment's World Wide Studios

This session offers a compelling review of the actual enterprise 2.0 systems used at Sony Computer Entertainment's World Wide Studios (SCE-WWS). The speaker will demonstrate SHIP, their collaboration portal at SCE-WWS and discuss the company's Enterprise 2.0 architecture. This informative talk explains the requirements for a real-world, large enterprise that drove their Enterprise 2.0 strategy, and discusses the history of the project and how the company has been organized around it. The speaker will focus on what criteria drove vendor selection and what the company did to make it work after selection.

Speaker - Ned Lerner, Director of Tools and Technology, Sony Computer Entertainment

My Notes:

Ned supports the game developers for Playstation.

After a length technical delay trying to get his speaker notes to work. Ned claims that this will be be a meat and potatoes presentation (as opposed to the uncooked rice from Oracle).

He went into screen shots.

Wikis are default game development documentation

Why did the build the platform? They needed a directory, a forum, a tracker, they need search. The document and email paradigm does not work. The tools need to be fully custom and lightly customized.

Enterprise security rules are a difficult obstacles. Projects vary from open to very secret.

Data ownership the require systems to have information in xml. They want to own their information and do what they want with it. He is frustrated with vendors who have closed APIs and proprietary ways of pushing out their information. They need to pull and push information across the information silos.

They do want a common visual style with a single sign-on and a single search interface.

Enterprise 2.0 In Action: Pfizer

This session will cover what Pfizer is doing with Enterprise 2.0 technologies. In particular we shall focus on the story of how this came about inside Pfizer and the eventual management buy in, incorporating the role played by our internal Discussion Group about the World Wide Web (DIGWWW) blog and the now famous "Meet Charlie" slide deck.

Speaker - Simon Revell, Manager of Enterprise 2.0 Technology Development, Pfizer Ltd

My Notes:

Simon started off with "eat your own dogfood." So his group started up their own portal. They used edgy graphics because they thought they were being cutting edge. They were looking toward ways to inspire new approaches to collaboration within the company. They wanted to influence the technology direction of the company.

Anyone can contribute. Those contributors can then be targeted as evangelists and you can find the believers in the organization.

First steps:

• Lots of nervousness "who gave you permission to do this"
• they used repeated reminders and urging to post

Pfizerpedia was started by some researchers at a different branch. Simon latched onto it. They were not concerned about the proliferation of different wiki platforms.

He went to the "Meet Charlie" slide presentation from Scott Gavin.

| View | Upload your own

And did his own derivation: "Meet Jessica"

| View | Upload your own

He found blogs to have a barrier to adoption peoples' perception of blogs is negative. So Simon rarely used the term.

Pfizerpedia looks like it is made on Mediawiki and re-skinned. They have 10,000+ articles.

Regulatory affairs division started using the platform. They use it to capture best practices. They want ideas fast and reactions fast. In Pfizerpedia, within 2 weeks they doubled the number of people that were providing reactions and feedback.

They have a pilot tagging platform open source and a second with Connectbeam.

Realizing Business Value through Social Networking within Wachovia

What is one of the biggest challenges faced by organizations that elect to deploy new or emergent capabilities? Justifying, with clarity and confidence, the expected benefits. Wachovia has rolled out an enterprise platform for social networking, including blogs, wikis and employee profiles. In this session, Pete Fields, eBusiness Director, speaks to the critical business objectives that these capabilities are expected to help accomplish.

Speaker - Pete Fields, Senior Vice President, eCommerce Division, Wachovia

My Notes:

Wachovia just rolled out a big Sharepoint deployment with extensive use of My Sites.

They treated it as one comprehensive integrated framework so employees can have collaborative and networking capabilities. the idea is to put the employee at the center of the information.

Pete came up with a list of business objectives and rationale for the deployment he bounced these around employees and other management

1. work more effectively across time and distance. As they expanded from Charlotte, the different time zones became apparent. They were look for better asynchronous communication. the group management were willing to transfer part of their travel budget to fund the initiative.

2. Better connect and engage employees. Company software teams and bowling teams were great. As companies grow it is harder to physically pull people to together. Virtual relationship can be just as robust and effective. Relationship are made by sharing information. You can do that across the network as you can face to face. He found that some of the HR people got behind it. IT did not get it as much.

3. Mitigate the impact of a maturing workforce. They are concerned about the loss of knowledge assets that are soon coming form the retiring of boomers. (Of course you can look at the increased mobility of the workforce. The 50s notion of joining a company and staying there for you entire work-life is gone. People are jumping from company to company at a much more rapid pace. You want them to leave some of that learning and knowledge behind.)

4. Engage the Gen Y worker. They are workers who are looking to better engaged with their company. They notice that they come in ready to engage in work and learn. That engagement drops dramatically when they are confronted with a hierarchical structure with silos of information. We should focus on the ability to remove friction in the workplace for finding what they need to do their job.

(Wachovia or least Pete gets the problems and sees the opportunity of the 2.0 movement.)

Sharepoint was pushed out to 100 workers in December up to 60,000 employees now. When pushed to retail banking and got many comments from workers at retail branches. He saw a lot of enthusiasm in the workforce and a lot of energy from these front-line employees.

(It sounds like Wachovia really gets it. Time to buy some stock in Wachovia.)

Other benefits:

• Position Wachovia as innovative and forward thinking
• Improve general employee engagement
• Reduce travel engagements
• Provide world class tools to compete in business
• Support key corporate initiatives

He sees the shift in focus from personal productivity to team productivity.

He was very open and honest with his presentation. So much better than the buzzword presentation from Oracle.

Power to the People: Driving Business Innovation through Communities

Enterprise 2.0 will revolutionize the way we get our jobs done. But, to do this requires an understanding of people, politics, and business practices. Oracle's contribution to Enterprise 2.0 is multi-faceted; Mark will describe how community-aware enterprise systems should evolve, how existing business processes can exploit natural collaboration, and offer some advice to ensure privacy and governance.

Speaker - Mark Woollen, Vice President, CRM Product Strategy, Oracle Corporation

My Notes:

Urgency, fragmentation and engagement are three key factors to the change.

Speed is a factor; there is a need to be connected.

Fragmentation is a result of the fracturing of ways to communicate within and outside the organization. Publication is not solely in the hands of traditional media

There is a need to engage your customers and employees in your brand. You also want to harness talent and ideas regardless of whether they originate in your organization. You especially need to harness knowledge within your organization.

Rigid top-down processes are not nimble enough. need to recognize that people do not live a process driven environment. The problem is that employees are organized hierarchically, but work happens through social networks irrespective of the hierarchy. Collaboration and hierarchy do match up well.

The thrust is to better connect the company with its customers, partners and suppliers to share intellectual capital and social capital to accelerate growth of the company.

"Talk does not cook rice" so he showed some examples Or at least he thought he was providing examples. He spiraled into a whole lot of buzzword speak rather than any meaningful thoughts or examples. In the end HE was not cooking any rice.

The buzzwords continued. The slides were pretty, but I ended up with un-cooked rice.

Knowledge 2.0

Overview: Knowledge Management (KM) was the business buzzword circa 1995. Today, some say KM is dead, others point to portals, innovation management, Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 as the manifestations of KM today. Join noted KM author, speaker and consultant Carl Frappaolo as he updates the definition of KM practices and technologies for the 21st century. Strategy and technology models first introduced in Carl's KM book in 2002 will serve as a framework for positioning and understanding the current state of the industry.

Speaker: Carl Frappaolo, Book Author and Vice President, Market Intelligence, AIIM

My Notes:

Carl wants to talk about the relationship of enterprise 2.0 to knowledge management. Is KM dead? The room was mostly full of knowledge management people and/or people with knowledge management in their title (including me).

"Enterprise 2.0 gave a jolt to knowledge management." Google searches for "knowledge management" are on the up-tick. (I noticed on the ACT KM listserv that the group is working on a thread about whether "KM Is Dead.")

What is knowledge management? Carl thinks the industry does not agree on a definition. He also thinks there are lots of different definitions of enterprise 2.0. Carl's definitions:

• Knowledge management is "Leveraging collective wisdom and experience to accelerate and experience to accelerate innovation and responsiveness." (The crowd was a bit rambunctious about defining knowledge management. I pointed out that IT and HR do not define what they are.)
  

Knowledge Management 2.0 is the alignment of business strategy, people, technology and process.

On process, we need the right process to disseminate, share and apply knowledge. Does the process help or hinder the capture of knowledge? We should not be asking people to do things outside of their normal process. Knowledge management needs to be "in the flow" not above the flow".

Technology is a key enabler. (Every organizational group has a technology piece. Where would HR be without a database of employees) Never start from the technology perspective. Tech tools can help fill in the gaps in the process, people.

According to the AIIM report:

• Enterprise 2.0 a system of web-based technologies that provide a rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise." Key words: system and web-based. The cloud is a plus to have info somewhere other than your own individual computer.

Market Evolution

Enterprise 2.0 is not a revolution. The introduction of the PC was revolution. Putting computing power on the desktop was a big change. Email was a revolution. Communication with the computer as the platform. E 2.0 is not as revolutionary as either of those.

Enterprise 2.0 tools have resuscitated knowledge management. They allow us to mash-up information, putting more information around information is key to knowledge management. Online collaboration moves the communication into a platform that is easier to leverage. Processes need to change to embrace Enterprise 2.0 and Knowledge Management. In the end the Enterprise 2.0 tools are just tools.

Technology and cultural worker models. You need to figure out where you are technologically and culturally. People in the organization may not be ready to be open and transparent in their jobs.

Carl has the spectrum of cultural from isolated to fully engaged

• islands of me
• one-way me
• team me
• proactive me
• two-way me
• islands of we
• extended we

An audience member brought up the issue of compensation structure to the sharing structure. Do I get rewarded for sharing? "Culture creeps slowly" Carl thinks you should target the highest level person in the organization who gets it.

An audience member pointed out a hole in strategy that HR was not included in the strategy. Her co-worker in HR jumped up in the back of her room.

The problem with KM 1.0 was that it was awkward and disjointed interfaces that were technology driven. There was a tremendous collision of academic treatment and reality. In some circles KM became a dirty word.

Email was 1.0. It did open people to sharing through the computer. But then the inbox became the content system. That leaves it disjointed and isolated. Enterprise 2.0 opens the communications platform.

IT does matter. KM is not about tech, but you cannot easily do it without IT.

Carl proposes four characterizations:

• Intermediation - broker those who know with those who need to know
• Externalization - capturing knowledge
• Internalization - personalize the information for me so I can find it
• Cognition - marriage of knowledge and process

Enterprise 2.0 is not web 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 may be KM, but web 2.0 is not Enterprise 2.0.

Carl also handed out copies of his book, including one to me.

UPDATE: A link to Carl's blog and his slidedeck:
http://www.takingaiim.com/2008/06/is-enterprise-2.html

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What Blogging Brings to Business

Blogs are powerful communication platforms that allow you to capture information you find interesting and to share it with an "audience" who can talk back to you. This panel of five business bloggers with a combined blogging lifetime of 19 years has generated business, communicated the concerns of its customers, experimented, and broken new ground through their blogs. Topics we'll cover include: Blogging as knowledge management, Blogging as a conversation, Blogging for "fame and fortune", Blogging as a platform for experimentation, and Blogging to reduce internal spam. Come join us to share your experiences and have the chance to speak at length with experienced bloggers.

• Moderator - Jessica Lipnack, CEO, NetAge
• Speaker - Bill Ives, Web 2.0 Consultant and Writer, Portals and KM
• Speaker - Cesar Brea, Partner, Force Five Partners
• Speaker - Doug Cornelius, Knowledge Management Attorney, Goodwin Procter LLP

My Notes:

I was on this panel, so I have limited notes, but will try to reconstruct some information. You should also checkout some other blog posts about this panel:

• Enterprise 2.0 Blog post by David Spark
• I will add any others in the comments. You should feel to also link to your blog posts in the comments.
  

As Jessica posted [Bloggers at Taste], the panel got together to discuss an agenda. We had a great conversation and thought it would translate well to the audience.

Our audience was very interactive. Maybe too interactive. It was hard to keep pulling the discussion back to the topic. The participants seemed to be looking at two different aspects: What external blogging can bring to business and what internal blogging can bring to business. My take is that internal blogs (at least in the classic sense) are just limiting their audience. But blogs are flexible tools that you can do lots of things with inside the enterprise.

The session started with an introduction by the panel about their blogs:

• Jessica Lipnack
  Endless Knots [http://netage.com/endlessknots]
  
  
• Bill Ives
  Portals and KM [http://billives.typepad.com/portals_and_km ]
  Fast Forward Blog
  Art and Photography Blog
  Ives Family History Blog
  Sharp Family in NC
  
  
• Cesar Brea
  http://octavianworld.org
  
  
• Patti Anklam
  Net Work http:/www.pattianklam.com/
  
  
• Doug Cornelius
  KM Space [http://kmspace.blogspot.com] - Blog on law firm knowledge management, enterprise 2.0 and legal technology
  Real Estate Space [http://realestatespace.blogspot.com] - Blog on commercial real estate finance.
  Internal Blog: Real KM
  

Then Jessica asked the bloggers in the audience to introduce themselves and their blog. I was not able to grab the whole list, but here are some:

• Zo Knows-www.zoknows.wordpress.com
  
• Zo Knows Tech-www.zoknowstech.wordpress.com
  
• Zo Knows Food-www.zoknowsfood.wordpress.com
  
• Zo Knows Gaming-www.zoknowsgaming.com
• Caselines by David Hobbie
• (Audience members feel free to add a link to your blog in the comments)

We moved onto why we blog and who we blog for. One common theme among the panel was blogging as a personal knowledge management tool. We all found the blog to be a great way to capture information in a way that is easy to categorize, where it is easy to find the content. As a personal knowledge management tool, I blog for me. These notes are for me to reuse. That you are reading is a by-product.

We spent some time off on a tangent about who should blog, who should be forced to blog and who should not blog. I spent a fair amount of this conversation time in the back-channel on the Enterprise 2.0 Community site for the Conference.

A blog is an excellent way to display expertise, whether the blog is internal or external. It is one thing to paint yourself as an expert. It is much more effective to prove your expertise through your writings and information you push out.

We ran out of time, but here are some other thoughts I wanted to get out:

Internally, the blog can act differently. Scott Niesen, Director of Marketing, Attensa brought this up nicely earlier today in the Enterprise RSS session when he said you should draw a distinction between what "need to respond" and "need to know." A blog is a communication tool. It is well suited to what you need to know. Email is better for information that has a need to respond. Take a look at you email flow and think about how much of this you need to react to. Most of it is just information you need to know. But by the information being pushed into email, my inbox is acting as my content management system. A blog or a collection of blogs makes a much better content management system. It is easier to search, easier to find content and easier to add content.

Enterprise RSS: Connecting People, Information & Communities

Delivering a communication channel that enables people to subscribe to the information they need, includes filtering and alerting mechanisms to notify people of important changes, and provides access points across multiple application contexts, is an incredibly powerful solution. Deployment of feed syndication platforms to manage proliferation of RSS feeds can improve worker productivity, drive business performance and aid in community-building efforts across people with common information interests. In this panel, senior strategists from leading enterprise RSS vendors and enterprise customers share their perspectives on market trends across different industries.

Speakers:

• Mike Gotta, Principal Analyst, Burton Group
• Brian Kellner, VP of Products, NewsGator
• Scott Niesen, Director of Marketing, Attensa

My Notes:

Brian started off with a background on NewsGator with its background in the consumer side, but is now moving into the enterprise RSS and, in particular, integrating with Sharepoint.

Scott gave a background on Attensa and, of course, their enterprise server. (One difference is that Attensa is only an enterprise product. They did not come from the consumer side like NewsGator.) He highlighted the attention stream feature of Attensa that prioritizes the RSS content and pushes your most popular/used/read feeds to the top of your attention stream.

Most of the audience is familiar with RSS and enterprise RSS. Most of the audience uses a browser-based reader; few were outlook plug-ins and a few were RSS reader clients.

Mike quizzed Brian and Scott as to why we need them and why the big vendors are not in the space.

Attensa wants to help companies embrace RSS as an company communications tools. He sees breaking company communication into "need to respond" and "need to know." Need to know items would be RSS and need to respond would be email. Also it is a better way to harness the good information outside the firewall with the flow inside the firewall.

Brian thinks the big vendors are just missing it. It is not a clear message or product for them to get their arms around it. There is also an important security element. Consumer-focused rss readers do not handle security well. The product also makes it easier to get new people up and running in the organization and into the flow. It is key to tie into LDAP to get people subscribed to the feeds the need and the feeds they should have.

Synchronize, security, download control and analytics are key features.

An audience member raised the issue of consuming the content. Should there be a predominant way to access your RSS feeds. Power users may want the more robust features of a full client, some people cannot be removed from outlook and some live by their blackberry. One of the great features of both the NewsGator and Attensa servers in the ability to synchronize the feed across the platforms. An item is marked read across the platform. Brian indicated that he routes his feeds through NewsGator clients in different ways. Some go to his Sharepoint reader, some to his client, some to his blackberry. (This seems to be different from the synch model of enterprise RSS.)

Patrick from Wallem a shipping company told his story about implementing enterprise RSS. (Like the FedEx presentation, information flow is very important to the physical

Simon from Pfizer told part of his story about implementing enterprise RSS. They are rolling out Sharepoint and see enterprise RSS as a way to improve the communication nature of Sharepoint. Simon says not to focus on email. Focus on the communications. RSS allows you to push external content and make people aware.

There is a concept of pushing a reading list of feeds as part of the on-boarding process. Attensa has a browse directory of feeds that users can shop among and pick their own in addition to the feeds pushed to them.

Patrick pointed out that enterprise RSS can create on the fly channels of communication to be able to push information out. This is particularly useful in the event of an emergency or unusual event.

Elevating the Enterprise 2.0 Conversation

The past five years have held tremendous innovation in enterprise software, an industry not known for its innovation relative to other areas of the technology sector. Enterprise 2.0 has challenged preconceptions and created innovative products. But of more interest, the use cases have evolved and practices are enabling new solutions that offer competitive advantage. Its time to elevate the conversation beyond features (wiki, blog, RSS, social networking, etc.), put aside the hype and talk about what problems the Enteprise 2.0 community is uniquely prepared to solve. In this keynote, Socialtext Chairman, President & Co-founder Ross Mayfield will share his insights from the past five years in business, and look to the next.

My Notes:

Ross noted that the personal productivity tools usually did come from the bottom up. People were looking for tools to help with personal productivity. The enterprise's internal network imposed new complexities and limitations on the personal tools.

Now in the 2.0 it is not the tools that are interesting. It is the social effects that are more important than the technology. The pre-formed structures are a barrier to work and a barrier to productivity.

Ross wants to move the conversation beyond the tools. Move beyond the features to the needs of the business. IT does not get the tools and they do not get the user needs. It is important to not just deploy the tools but focus on the use case.

Wikis have evolved from lightweight documentation tool, to a business user alternative to email, to a wiki-pedia inside, to a process-specific solution.

It cannot just be about knowledge sharing. It is about a business problem. The idea is to get "in the flow," instead of "above the flow." He quoted Michael Idinopulos. (There was some similarity to his presentation at LITLS: Where is Web 2.0 in the Enterprise?

The goal should not be to automate the business process to drive down costs. The goal should be to collaborate on exceptions to the business process. You should re-design the process with transparency and more participatory. You can involve people even if they are not part of their job description.

Ross moved onto a new product to work with structured data in an unstructured way. Spreadsheet were used to structure data and is the most common database. Today we play "email volleyball" with documents moving back and forth. This results in email overload, version control issues and high error rates. The idea is not to re-engineer the spreadsheet in a webpage. Ross showed the social spreadsheet. This is designed to be more robust than Google Spreadsheets. You can put a wiki page in a cell. You can get much more connectivity to information and people in the spreadsheet

It not about the cloud. It is about sharing information inside the firewall.

Enterprise 2.0 - A State of the Industry Address

Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen of AIIM Market Intelligence, provide highlights on the first in-depth Enterprise 2.0 market study, including the results of a survey completed by over 400 Enterprise 2.0 users and evaluators.

My Notes:

Carl and Dan went back and forth with a boomer versus millennial take on the view of the internet and Enterprise 2.0. With Carl as a Boomer in a suit and Dan as the millennial dressed "schlumpier."

AIIM published a Market IQ report on the state of Enterprise 2.0: Agile, Emergent and Integrated.

Age does not matter. There are very different opinions based on age. Culture does matter. It is the single most important success factor. Worry about their attitudes, not their age. Internal champions of enterprise 2.0 tend to be slightly more boomers than millennials.

One point is that organizations are not taking a strategic view of enterprise 2.0. A knowledge management organization is more likely to take a strategic approach.

A knowledge management company is more inclined to increase the rate of networking and increases the rate of adoption. They are more likely to have a more rapid rate of adoption.

Culture creeps cautiously. An organization moves slower than an individual.

Increased collaboration is one of the top goals most organization are trying to achieve with enterprise 2.0. Next on the list was "knowing what we know." (Lots of the goals of enterprise are common with the goal of knowledge management. Here come knowledge management 2.0 again.)

Working in the Cloud: How Cloud Computing is Reshaping Enterprise Technology

In this session, Google's Rishi Chandra will discuss ways cloud computing is influencing the Enterprise IT industry and what this means for businesses.

My Notes:

Rishi is responsible for Google Apps. No PowerPoint (Google slides instead.)

Enterprise computing in the cloud. Our data and computing power is hosted on the internet. It is accessible from a utility and is available anytime you can access the internet. (So I could not access it during the presentation because the WiFi would not stay up. The hotel was lacking router capacity.)

Innovation is Coming from the Consumer

Rishi sees the innovation coming from the consumer, not the enterprise. The consumer market is Darwinian. In the enterprise, the vendors and end users do not have a direct relationship. IT intercedes and picks the tool. In the consumer world, the end-user picks the tool directly. I can jump from Google to Yahoo at the click of a button.

"Simplicity wins." It is not designing for the lowest common denominator. It is making it easy to use and learn how to use. Otherwise the consumer will go somewhere else where it is easier.

The Design of Enterprise Tools Need To Change

In the enterprise, team work is more important than individual user tasks. You need to connect with disparate information and disparate people across the enterprise. Enterprise applications are built for the power user and loaded down with functionality.

You need tools that allow collaboration to capture and create information. You need access to the most current information (and not be hunting around for the latest version.) You need around the clock access to the information. You need to make it easy to publish the information.

Economics of IT

Scalability of information is a problem. (Of course Google is trying to index the entire internet) Ten hours of video are loaded to YouTube every minute. They get 7 million photos a day into Picasa.

Scale drives unit cost toward zero. For an enterprise, how do you drive your storage and computing costs down.

Barriers to Adoption are Falling Away

Connectivity is need for cloud computing. We are much more connection to the internet (The WiFi in the room is back up so the crowd is less rambunctious.)

The user interface is getting better and the browser is getting better.

Reliability is much better. Customers will not allow downtime. They will go elsewhere.

Offline access is still important. You need to deal with the lack of connectivity (On cue, I lost WiFi again.)

Security is important. You cannot get around the issue. The cloud computing vendors just need to prove themselves as secure as other enterprise tools. Laptops are stolen all the time; two million are stolen every year. We see news stories of lost data on laptops all the time. With the cloud, a stolen laptop is a non-issue. Who do you trust more: your company's IT security people or Google's security team?

Rishi showed an impressive list of clients using Google Apps for messaging and collaboration and for security and compliance. These are not static products. They had 40 upgrades to Google Docs last year.

He sees the innovation in the cloud, in the consumer space, but not in the enterprise. And there will be lots of competition.

From the Bottom-Up: Building the 21st Century Intelligence Community

Overview: The speakers will brief the technical and cultural changes underway at the CIA and across the Intelligence Community involving the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 tools including Intellipedia, blogs, and social tagging. These tools are being used to improve information sharing by moving information out of traditional channels and onto platforms.

Speakers:

• Don Burke, Intellipedia Doyen, CIA
• Sean Dennehy, Intellipedia Evangelist, CIA

My Notes:

Intellipedia is built on Media wiki (like wikipedia). It actually consists of three networks: (1) Sensitive, but non-secret, (2) Top Secret Network and (3) Secret. They have video system like Youtube (but for spies.) They have tagging, blogs. a document management system, RSS and photo gallery (like Flickr).

They pulled up Intellipedia from the non-classified site. They showed the Simple Sabotage Manual from the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA) with ways to infiltrate an organization. One question from the manual was whether a decision lies in your purview or with someone else. People are looking for someone else to say it is okay.

The intelligence community debate started with a paper from Dr. Calvin Andrus: The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community.

"Wikis do not work in theory only in practice."

The history feature of the wiki is great tool for the CIA. It can answer the question of what they knew and when.

Unlike wikipedia, they require a logon to edit content (you do not need to logon to see content.) This authorship gives credit to the author and helps build the community.

They do not want to be an encyclopedia. They do not have the "deletionists" of wikipedia.

They have conflicting reporting. They do not always have all the facts. They have bits and pieces that need to be assembled. The do not believe in the neutral point of view. They take the attributable point of view. It is important to associate content with authorship to show interest in the community.

They are still in the early adoption phase. There is a big cultural change. This is a group that is used to keeping information to themselves. These evangelists were told that their tool would "get people killed."

Their three core principles:

• Work at broadest audience possible - stop keeping everything in safes (sure some things need to stay in safes)
• Think topically, not organizationally
• Replace existing business processes - Blog instead of email. Open platform instead of channel. Do not treat it as a separate tasks. Replace the task.

They do not think it is an age thing. Their biggest contributor is 69 with over 40 years of service. Younger workers need to be told to use the tools this way to engage in this new process.

If you want to encourage the use of tools. Look in the mirror. You should use your tools. (I say eat what you cook.)

They no longer use powerpoint. They use intellepedia pages. (Not sure if this is CIA wide or just these two evangelists.)

Connectedness: Changing What's Possible

Networks have always been among the most powerful of market forces. From the earliest roads and shipping lanes to today’s hyper-connected world, companies that live on the innovative edge of networks have prospered. Providing next generation connectivity inside and out of your enterprise is now a critical success factor. Find out how FedEx is pushing the edge of both physical and digital connections globally.

Speaker: Robert B. (Rob) Carter, is Executive Vice President - FedEx Information Services & Chief Information Officer at FedEx Corporation.

My Notes:

Commerce has always been about networks. First was the distribution networks, the silk road, etc,. Next was the electricity distribution network. Then the telecommunication networks spread. Communication was moving faster than we could.

In 1994, FedEx.com has a simple blank to fill in a tracking number. It was one of the first transactional sites. You could interact and do things with the site.

Rob still sees an expansion of the network. There are still lots of people that are not on the internet.

FedEx started a way to quickly connect. He showed a fantastic graphic of the FedEx air traffic in and out of the Memphis airport.

Rob sees a mixing of the digital and physical networks. The widespread use of handheld scanners to track packages. The online tracking of packages is very important. Changing the supply chain so you know where your stuff is.

Digital connections arte important to connect. There is value creation in eBay. A fan at a yard sale can get a greater interest and a great sale place on eBay. Digital can add value.

FedEx is exposing services so that you do not need FedEx.com. ( It sounds like they are opening their API). They are expanding the FedEx Kinkos. THey are expanding the ability for mobile devices to connect and interact. They are deploying an application for Adobe AIR. They are pushing tracking information out to the desktop. They have a Facebook application. "Launch a Package". Although it is toy and not an interaction for packages.

Putting the Social into Social Media at Enterprise 2.0

One of the the great things about blogs, twitter, facebook and other social media is the ability to continue communicating with people even though you are not face-to-face.

One of the great things about conferences is the ability to communicate with people face-to-face who are usually spread around the country or the world.

I had to miss the second half of Dion Hinchcliffe's session on Implementing Enterprise 2.0: Exploring the Tools and Techniques of Emergent Change. (I had to do my usual pick up of The Son and The Daughter from school. The Wife is dealing with the kids on Tuesday and Wednesday so I can stay longer.)

While wandering down through the lobby I ran into table with Stephen Collins (@trib), Luis Suarez (@elsua), Mark Masterson (@mastermark), Emanuele (@absolutesubzero), Lee White (@leewhite), Chris McGrath (@thoughtfarmer), Matt Simpson (@MattSimpson) and others. I had a great conversation with them until I had to run to catch that 4:30 train home. I look forward to more of these over the next three days.

I have been following Stephen and Luis since I first stumbled into Enterprise 2.0. This is a unique opportunity to have so many people with whom I share interests here in my hometown.