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It’s been a thought provoking two days at the Office 2.0 Conference. Some sessions have been more interesting than others but overall the conference was a great success. Here are a few personal takeaways.Pictured to the left is a slide from Knowledge Worker 2.0 talk. Yes, that pesky employee who can’t really be held accountable for much but still provides value. Is that you?
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1. Lots of Office 2.0 startups
There are more Office 2.0 companies than the market can accept. Some will survive, some will die and some will get bought. I wonder which will be still around at next year’s conference. For your reference, Office 2.0 startups are generally web 2.0 companies that provide a hosted solution to improve collaboration and productivity. They often leverage social media concepts. Think of them as the smaller equivalents of Google Apps & Salesforce.com.
2. Our professional and personal lives have really started to merge
There has been a lot of talk about consumer innovations coming into the enterprise. A related trend is how our professional and personal lives are merging. It is getting harder to separate the two. There are some who disagree but they are increasingly in the minority. This is best exemplified by the fact that on Facebook many of us have personal and professional connections. We’re entering an era of increased openness, which unfortunately compromises our privacy. If you’re a skeptic, pick up the latest issue of BusinessWeek and read the article on Facebook.
3. Online communities are hot once more
I used to be a member of the Well in the mid 1990s and watched the rise of Tripod and Geocities with fascination. Now communities are getting a lot of attention once more. And its not just the social networking sites but also closed professional communities for customers, business partners and employees. While this trend is gathering the most steam in the technology sector (no surprise there), companies in other industries are getting interested too. The question that no one is willing to answer is how large are these communities and how many repeat active users do they have.
4. Everybody is a knowledge worker now
This is another subject that has been discussed in the past and is a hot topic again. The point is that we’re all knowledge workers depending on information to make better decisions. We’re also communicators having to communicate a lot more than in the past. What does this mean for the enterprise? While having the right information is critical, separating the important information from the junk is getting more challenging. It’s a skill set we’re all trying to develop. Office 2.0 tools are supposed to help. Let me know if they actually do.
5. Culture and management matter more than ever
Ironically, while a lot of the speakers talked about social media and the emergence of bottom up knowledge management, they also emphasized the importance of management support. The truth is to do anything in an organization you need management support. You also need to have a culture that supports the collaboration. What is that culture and how can you change your own organization’s culture? Those are hard questions that I hope will be discussed next year too. For now, I believe the best solution is to be a part of management!
6. Office 2.0 apps do best in the small and medium business segments
There was not one but two elephants in the room at the Office 2.0 conference. The first was Facebook. It was noticeably absent from the Social Computing panel which had representatives from Plaxo, LinkedIn, Ning and Six Apart. But the second elephant was Microsoft. Many of these Office 2.0 applications replace a Microsoft application. They compete with Microsoft for attention. And frankly speaking, they lose because Microsoft is the incumbent software that everybody is familiar with. It is only in the small and medium segments where Microsoft is too expensive that they succeed.
7. We’re still not paying enough attention to the users
It is fairly obvious that most companies that sell in the enterprise space focus on selling to the CIOs and their IT departments. Less attention is paid to actual end users unfortunately. The reality is that it is the end users that will make a product succeed or fail. These users already have more applications than they want on their machines. Better make sure your application is compelling if you want them to adopt it. In fact, it should be 9X as compelling as what they’re already using.
8. We’re all busy reading each other’s blogs
This has resulted in all of us having more similar opinions than we may realize. Which means that conferences are becoming less about the exchange of ideas and more about networking and product demos. Not a bad thing, but nevertheless different to the conferences of the past. Along those lines, conferences have become sites for the promotion of products and consultancy services. Ideas we save for private strategy sessions only. There are exceptions but it feels like this more and more. Having said that, I really enjoyed Office 2.0 and plan to return next year.
Here are some interesting blog posts about the conference from bloggers who attended- Dan Farber, Jeremiah Owyang, Tris Hussey, Shel Israel, Maggie Fox, Susan Scrupski and Joshua Greenbaum.
