People, Internet and Enterprise Business, all without mentioning Google.

Last Wednesday I had the fortune to attend a world class conference on social behavior and technology applied to medium and large sized businesses. Not in San Francisco. Not in Boston, where I worked for 4 years. Not in Milan, even. In Varese. Right, Varese, once known more for shoe production. The conference, the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0, was held at L’Università dell’Insubria as part of their 10^th anniversary celebration.

As a search marketing consultant, I was very interested in how the social web is being applied to business environments. The very intertwined nature of the web means that no web marketing project should be seen in isolation. <rant>Thanks to the kind folks at Trenitalia, who canceled my train from Tuscany at the last minute, I almost didn’t make it. Not that you’d find any news about this on their website.</rant>

The comprehensive Forum website thoughtfully includes a definition of Enterprise 2.0. Wikipedia aficionados can also consult the term “Enterprise Social Software”. I found the Wikpedia description

Enterprise 2.0 is … used to describe social and networked changes to enterprise, which often includes social software (but is not limited to it, nor to either social collaboration or software); and Enterprise Web 2.0 sometimes describes the introduction and implementation of Web 2.0 technologies within the enterprise including those rich internet applications, providing software as a service, and using the web as a general platform.

to accurately encompass the breadth of day’s presentations and discussions.

Don’t take my word for it.

We each see the world through the prism of our experiences, expectations and biases. My comments on a few of the presentations will reflect this. I encourage you to check out the speakers’ websites, and where available, their slide sets. You’ll find this information at the end of this article; I’ll update incomplete information as possible.

Norman Lewis began to stimulate us with a discussion of technology views across generations. In essence we see technology invented before our formative years as an unquestioned part of our every day experience. We don’t often think about life before the car. Yet a baby boomer will have a different relationship with the internet or a cell phone compared to a teenager (a “digital native”) from whom these are just enabling tools, taken for granted, to facilitate socialization. Especially interesting was his note on how the more fear is being used to control our lives and mores, the younger generation is forced to live and socialize virtually from the confines of their bedrooms.

Emanuele Quintarelli made Italy proud with a well articulated presentation on the drivers for deploying technology – people, their interactions, and of course, business imperatives. Technology is just the solution which enables it all to happen. It would be too easy to say there was nothing new here, yet often IT projects fail because a business is sold on a particular IT solution without first having evaluated what real business problems or opportunities are to be addressed. The classic scenario of putting the cart before the horse. People, and the necessary change management, are over looked, and guess what, the project dies.

With so many first class professionals present, it is hard to say that there was a “best” presentation. That said, I admit a soft spot for David Terrar. The reason is simple. In discussing the real world issue of deploying technology to solve a business need, David highlighted not only what worked well, but what could have been done differently or was overlooked. By doing so, he established credibility. I so wish this type of transparency and humility were seen more often in Italy. David also discussed social media metrics and the dearth of benchmarking data. For those looking for more information on social media measurement, Jeremiah Owyang, cited by David, has contributed frequently to Eric Peterson’s Web Analytics discussion group on Yahoo!.

Laurence Lock Lee, in excellent form despite having just arriving from Australia, introduced us to Social Network Analysis (SNA), theory and application. At the risk of vastly oversimplifying his work, I understood this to be an approach of compiling data on social interaction and hierarchies (who do you refer to when you need advice on …), data which is then graphed to visually enable insights not otherwise obvious in the data. Traditionally data came from questionnaire sampling. The proliferation of social applications is providing data mining opportunitie which can provide data in real time. From a search marketing vantage point, Google’s Social Graph project immediately came to mind. Google has mapped people relationships, mostly based on XFN and FOAF markup. Markup that one commonly finds in WordPress blogrolls, for example. I have a simple program in perl should anyone what to kick Google’s tires.

Several of the morning’s speakers cited Stewart Mader and his wiki patterns. I guess I need to investigate this area a bit more as I really wasn’t ready for a tool centric presentation at this point. Especially since a naive person might have gotten the idea that this was THE solution to the collaboration problem. While it was a clunky application in its heyday, Lotus Notes did a lot to facilitate enterprise information collaboration. Much like what Google is trying to do with it’s Google Office Suite, a.k.a. Google Docs. I also didn’t buy into Stewart’s continual affirmation more or less to the effect that not sharing data is dumb. This struck me a bit like a sales pitch. You don’t have to have worked in a Knowledge Management project to know well why people don’t share information in big companies. Their jobs and promotions depend on them hording knowledge. They have no incentive to mentor. They have no incentive to transfer their knowledge to an outsourcer in India. Or to put it another way, tell me their behavior and I’ll tell you their metrics.

Thomas Vander Wal spoke about how we each interpret information differently, and thus use different meaningful language to describe the same information. This is why Marketing Managers need companies like mine to verify search keyword lists! In the web 1.0 world we spoke of formal structured taxonomies. In the web 2.0 jargon, Thomas has introduced the word Folksonomy to specify user defined keywords or tags. Many years ago I spent a lot of time with the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus as part of what would now be called an Enterprise Search project for a museum in California. One of the debates was whether a rigid, structured taxonomy was a benefit or a limitation. At the time, the alternative seemed to be free text search over disparate unstructured information. Thomas’ presentation led me to think about another scenario – what if data consumers could have freely tagged documents?

Luis Suarez gets my favorite free thinker award. He was audacious enough not just to question our modern addiction to email but to actually give it up. As the only living boy in Italy without a cell phone, I think the world needs more people like Luis. I do hope however that he’s not getting more microwave radiation exposure in lieu of e-mail

Emanuela Spreafico and Ran Shribman both presented technical solutions their respective companies have brought to market. I personally prefer softer sells.

International Forum on Enterprise 2.0, 2009?

Organizing an event is a lot of hard work – work which goes unappreciated if all goes well but attracts criticism like a lightening rod when something goes wrong. I’m not sure if Emanuele Quintarelli and the Insubria University are willing to consider organizing a future event, but I hope they do. And with the exception of the product pitches, I hope the formula is similar to this year’s. Since it is easy to make suggestions (I don’t have to do the actual work), I’d like to see an additional big name sponsor who could foot the bill for 2 coffee breaks and an informal buffet lunch. Networking both with new and existing contacts is an essential part of a successful conference. Unfortunately this is not really possible when people disperse to various bars and restaurants. As for the technical solutions, I’d love to see someone provide an independent overview of what’s available and how these solutions compare.

Again, a tip of the hat to Emanuele Quintarelli and the Insubria University for pulling off this conference.

Enterprise 2.0 blogged live

Guess who was twitting what from those fancy Macs on the stage?

International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 Speakers and Presentations

Update 30 June 2008: This article on Luis Suarez (I.B.M), I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip, published in yesterday’s New York Times, is worth a read.

Questo post è disponibile anche in italiano come International Forum on Enterprise 2.0, Università dell’Insubria, Varese 25 giugno 2008.

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