The Workplace Blog

I’m on a Social Computing panel at the upcoming Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Chaired by Shel Israel of Naked Conversations fame, the other participants include Gina Bianchini from Ning, Anil Dash from Six Apart, John McCrea from Plaxo and Adam Nash from LinkedIn. All participants receive a free iPhone which they are supposed to use for exchanging information during the conference.

I’ll tell you how that experiment turns out once I’m back. If you’re attending the conference, join us at 1:30pm on Thursday, September 6th, 2007. It should be fun!

Don’t miss the Enterprise 2.0 conference that’s taking place in Boston this week. It’s a new conference covering the impact of web 2.0 on the enterprise and has a strong speaker line up. Yesterday at the conference I heard Andrew McAfee walk through a scorecard of how enterprise 2.0 is doing and a presentation by an IBM executive. Andrew and Tom Davenport battled it out the night before in a debate about the importance of enterprise 2.0. You can catch that online.

I was struck by the lack of case studies and it made me wonder whether enterprise 2.0 is a lot younger than we’d like to believe. In fact, the IBM executive who was highlighting what IBM is doing in the space actually used a shopping cart example in his demo!

Avenue A | Razorfish is a sponsor of the conference and our very own Amy Vickers will be speaking at it on Thursday. Don’t miss her talk!

It was John Chambers turn to take up the Web 2.0 mantra when he spoke at Network + Interop recently. He used Web 2.0 and collaboration interchangeably to emphasize how he viewed this reality. Chambers emphasized that web 2.0 is introducing a new era of productivity - one that can increase the productivity of organizations by upto 5%!

In discussing Cisco products, Chambers emphasized that video is the killer application among the collaboration tools - much more than other tools such as IP telephony and electronic whiteboards. He also highlighted the Cisco Unified Communications solutions which leverage web 2.0 philosophies. And when talking about web 2.0 he specifically drew attention to social networking as changing decision making processes within organizations. Now that’s something interesting.

Chambers emphasized that social networks are changing businesses making them less hierarchical and more network oriented. I wonder if he had recently read a chapter or two from Consequences of Information, as that book devotes a few sections to the changing nature of organizations and how they are moving from being bounded and hierarchical systems to network oriented ones.

For more on the presentation read Dan Farber’s take as he was there listening.

If you’re looking for a conference to attend this spring, try FASTforward ‘07. They look at new approaches impacting the way businesses compete, learn, build communities and socialize. You can expect to find a lot of talk about Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 at the conference.

Even if you don’t attend the conference, take a look at their blog. Here are a couple of posts that I found interesting:

Taking the Pulse of 2.0 Enterprise Adoption: This discusses how companies are using web 2.0 behind the firewall.

What’s at the edges?: This is similar to my post about “Leave room for the Red Light Zones” and discusses finding innovation at the edges. You’ll find it interesting reading.

“Why can’t we build this on Sharepoint?”: This answers the question that my colleagues and I have been asked at practically every conference that we speak at.

Strategic sensemaking and Enterprise 2.0 technologies: This post discusses how sensemaking will drive the adoption of enterprise technologies and helps you think about promoting them.

This may not be web 2.0 or intranet specific but it is worth drawing attention to. Steve Jobs recently gave a speech at Macworld and nearly simultaneously Bill Gates and Michael Dell spoke at the Consumer Electronics Show. These speeches were striking contrasts in style and substance.

Maybe enough for us to understand why Apple gets so much attention even though it is so much smaller than Microsoft and Dell. Look at the tag clouds from the speeches to see what words were used. This might help the next time you need to make a speech or give a presentation. The tag clouds highlight the importance of using the right words when making the case for something. Words that excite people rather than tired jargon that bore. Click to see the actual tag clouds.
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For those of you that missed the Web 2.0 conference held earlier this month, you can access the archives at IT Conversations. And if you’re still wondering what the definition of Web 2.0 is, O’Reilly has another definition which is summarized in a $800 article. Personally, I’m just fine sticking to his earlier definition which is available for free here.

I will be speaking on intranet maturity cycles at the CM Forum Conference (cmf2006) on November 8th in Aarhus, Denmark. If you are in the area consider attending it. Ted Nelson and Nicholas Carr are among the lead speakers. My talk description is also available.

I was fortunate to be able to do some taxonomy work for the Verizon intranet a few years ago. I also helped prototype their first “information workplace.” These were massive projects with several different consulting firms involved at different stages which means that no one firm and certainly no one individual could take much credit alone.

So I was pleasantly surprised to see that Toby Ward over at the Intranet blog was organizing an Intranet Insider World Tour: Verizon, Digital Workplace webinar. To learn more about the information workplaces read Forrester’s take on it. And to see how you can participate in the webinar visit Toby’s site. Please note, the webinar is not free.

SXSW is trying to decide panel programming for its 2007 event. And in true web 2.0 style, it is asking potential participants to help them choose the panelists. You view the speaker proposals, choose your top ten, order them as you see fit and then just enter your contact information. I wonder how many votes will be cast in total and whether SXSW will be willing to share the actual vote counts.

While you’re playing around with it, take a look at the “The New Business of Collectivism” speaker proposal by Amy Vickers. She’s a part of the Avenue A | Razorfish Enterprise Solutions practice and yes, this is a not so subtle plug for her!

Toby Ward is hosting an intranet webinar next week discussing what it takes to build and maintain a winning intranet. For him, the most important pieces are engagement, governance, planning, measurement and content. Learn about the seminar at Ragan Commu nications and if you do participate tell us what you think.