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The term “best practice” has always bothered me because it has always had the aura of stale and static processes. Once you find the “best” way of doing things everything else will follow – adoption, productivity improvements, happy employees, ROI, etc.. We need a dynamic NEXT PRACTICE concept!

Last year I wrote about the 2009 Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston:
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Paula Thornton had an interesting post today – in reference to the conference – about “reinventing silos” that I find thought provoking. I have been in the trenches implementing solutions that would only succeed if company culture somehow could change/evolve/adapt. Paula is quoting Ben Foster from Allstate for saying “Enterprises and practitioners are often guilty of using Social Media as a cure chasing a disease.” I agree and will post about the role of organizational silos in my next post – stay tuned.

My own bottom line about the Boston conference is that there is a long way to go before Enterprise 2.0 “grows up” to be “WEB 2.0 for the enterprise” (or “Facebook and Twitter inside the firewall”). Integration with existing legacy systems, including general access control, logging of information exchanges in the context of a project or process combined with an upfront approach to industry specific compliance issues, FRCP and eDiscovery was rarely discussed during the sessions.

I also came away with the sense that a major driving force behind Enterprise 2.0 is a desire to get people to collaborate by other means than email. In essence that Enterprise 2.0 becomes a central repository for the exchange of messages and documents for a team of knowledge workers that need to collaborate in an easy and transparent way towards a common goal – sounds simple enough BUT it is not!

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Old habits and deep-seated corporate culture will be difficult to change without the chief change agents being senior management backed by a concerted effort to communicate to employees why this will benefit the overall organization and not threaten the individual. Knowledge is often perceived as power/job security and a difficult thing to share without getting something in return.
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For the 2010 Enterprise 2.0 conference taking place today and tomorrow I have so far noticed what could be a paradigm shift towards viewing Enterprise 2.0 as an integral part of the enterprise toolset and not just a separate component and that I think is very encouraging.

I hope that next year the key topic of discussion will be INTEGRATION!

How Enterprise 2.0 will be integrated with the entire toolset knowledge workers use to get their work done.

Here is some of what I observed:

• Structured vs. unstructured – ERP, CRM, ECM are existing structured systems that will exist for a long time; Enterprise 2.0 is unstructured and fill the void to connect, communicate and collaborate.
• Control vs. policing – in the context of information flow and access. Well, this depends on organizational culture and possibly regulatory demands. There is no correct answer and the pendulum might swing back and forth with time for the same organization. Great quote from @jobsworth keynote: "Enterprises need to start learning how to design for the loss of control."
• Social tools are augmentation to processes, not replacement -- Aid the art of process execution, not as much the design. I picked this quote out of the twitter stream that included “Silos gone”, “no more mono culture”, “collaboration within context”, etc.. Well, project/process groups (silos?) will probably always exists but in the context of interconnected communities and not closed autonomous entities – those days are gone.
• Enabler vs. guardian – As the walls of organizational silos break down (thanks in part to Enterprise 2.0) this will move the pendulum towards the enabled organization. The result of your work will become more and more transparent.
• Paradox of innovation is that good management will try to stop it - they are trained to minimize risks. Decisions are one of the least digitized aspects of Enterprise 2.0 – great quote from Dan Keldsen and I agree totally.

In order for Enterprise 2.0 to not become a cure chasing a disease we should focus on what problems we are trying to solve and adoption will be a lot simpler (not easy, but simpler).

The future is already here – just unevenly distributed!