I’ll admit to only getting through half of Heinlein’s book before getting bored and moving on, but, always loved that title. Anyway, I had the good fortune of attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston Monday through Wednesday last week, these are my initial impressions and thoughts, in no real particular order.
1. For a great wrap up of the event, create a search column for yourself in twitter on hashtag #e2conf. Conversations are still going on.
2. Kudos to the event staff for organizing the event. While the up and over between the conference and the exhibition was kludgy (and I supposed adding a new hallway to the building exceeded budget); everything else was extremely well done. Great job. It’s a small thing, but I like the dual clips on the badges. It was nice to have your name ALWAYS FACING FORWARD (though the clink and chinking of the chains reminded me of walking the dog).
3. It was at once more and less serious than I thought it would be. On the one hand, lots of business attire. On the other hand, when the question of ROI arose in one session, a panelist said, “What’s the ROI of a bathroom.” More on this later.
4. I had the good fortune to meet and interview Eugene Lee of SocialText, Ben Kiker of Jive, Brian Kellner of NewsGator, Craig Hepburn of Nokia, and Bob Maguire of Merck.
5. 10ish years ago, all of the ECM products started to look exactly like Microsoft Office. No frame of reference, but a LOT of the tools I saw (albeit briefly) look a LOT like Facebook.
6. First question I heard at the conference (the IBM in the Cloud product demo, er, presentation) was on records and ediscovery. While many of the vendors and speakers seem to soft-pedal this issue, it’s huge.
7. Ron Miller has a good write up about the entry of the big vendors like Cisco and IBM into the enterprise 2.0 space. http://www.fiercecontentmanagement.com/story/attack-huge-enterprise-2-0-vendors/2010-06-17
8. I wish I had spent a bit of time checking out what Cisco was doing. On the to-do list now.
9. Part of the event, and the event itself, reminded me of the ECM industry 10 or so years ago. Lots of buzz. Excitement. Parties. A booze cruise. A feeling that the tools and changes to managing information were going to make a difference. Ten years on and the ECM industry often feels like a cranky old man, though one with a lot left to do. Parts of the event floor reminded me of the AIIM show:
a. There was a Fujitsu Scansnap in the Oxygen Cloud booth. Many think capture/scanning is boring. We’ve been there and done that. Dunno. To me, this reflected the continuing importance and presence of paper and the need to get it under control. Just because you can buy a scanner for 2 dollars or so at Best Buy doesn’t mean that scanning is easy.
b. Speaking of Oxygen Cloud. The service hasn’t launched yet, but it looks to me of basic document management. Xythos Software has been doing this for years. SpringCM. Digitech. Box.net. Wasn’t much new. Kofax had the same idea 5 or so years ago with a horrendously overpriced SOA connector to enable distributed capture.
c. Thoughtfarmer focuses on building effective intranets for companies. Again, not a new concept, but one that might finally come together and be effective with the new tools and maturity around the Web now.
d. Ektron piggy-backed on top of the conference, not exhibiting, but holding a launch event at a nearby Morton’s (very nice, by the way). Ektron has been in the ECM space for years (they won an AIIM E-DOC Magazine Best of Show Award for WCM 4 or 5 years ago). In demo mode, they look like they’ve done a good job of “socializing” their software and combining a solid Web CM product with activity streams, profiles, etc.
10. Successful E2.0 will be built on solid ECM concepts. Once you get past the microblogging and presence-type technology, a lot of Enterprise 2.0 looks to me like collaboration around documents. The documents might be small, but that’s what they are. They’re going to need to be managed as business records. They’re going to have to live in a repository somewhere.
11. There is a dark side to E2.0. It’s harder to detect nuance and connect over Skype than sitting in a coffee shop with someone and enjoying conversation, the breeze, and the smell of coffee. Also, the constant back and forth of paying attention to short bursts on Twitter/IM/Email, etc. is not good for productivity. It can give the illusion of productivity by being “busy.” Research from many time management books I’ve read point that it takes 15 minutes to reengage with a task once you’re distracted. One of the speakers (my notes are awful here); noted that research for the most productive employees shows that they focus intensely for hours (morning or afternoon) and then spend time frittering (twittering?) and splitting their attention among email, phone, etc. I live this myself. I realized that I can’t take notes by typing. (Not a surprise, writing my notes with pen on paper makes it stick in my head better.) Nor can I tweet and track a conference presentation. Starting to worry that I have an 8-track mind in a streaming video world.
12. Had a conversation with Rob Howard, CEO of Telligent. He echoed a few of the trends that I saw too:
a. We need to define metrics that we want to measure as part of a strategy. As is too often the case in ECM, “Often go to technology with going with strategy.” This was mentioned a number of times in keynotes, sessions, tweet stream as well. For customer support, time to answer is a key metric.
b. While it’s shifting, there was still a lot of talk about what and why the conference was for. Rob mentioned that buyer’s are starting to ask business questions and value and how they’re going to make the argument to use these tools.
13. Back to ROI. I’m a firm believer in the value of Enterprise 2.0. I think that we are seeing the beginnings of a shift in the fundamental way we will work in the future. That said, if I see another “What’s the ROI of the bathroom?” Or “email, oxygen, chairs, or chamberpots;” I’m going to scream. Yes, I get it. Some bosses are too dull to see the brilliance of Enterprise 2.0. Fine. Hey, they’re still bosses. We might want to start thinking about providing real examples of success rather than a cool cocktail party line. And the stories are out there. The email example is the one that bugs me the most. On the one hand, email did often come in through the back door. And it did make us all more productive. On the other hand, it came in through the back door. Unmanaged. We’ve all seen the discovery stories in the news. And we’re thinking that bringing in Enterprise 2.0-type tools through the back door for work is going to end better why?
14. We are all still feeling our way towards some version of Enterprise 2.0, which will most likely be unique for each organization. It’s going to be a very interesting ride.
What do you think?