I am half through the pre-Social-Era collection on essays on the “Future of Human Resource Management” by Losey/Meisinger/Ulrich and besides the re-definition of the HR discipline there is a strong tendence towards a more agile and rather on capabilities than structure built organization. One essay by Russ Roberts and Paul Hirsch on the “Evolution and Revolution in the Twenty-First Century: Revolutionary New Rules for Organzations and Managing Human Resources” stroke me specifically in regards to the relation with the E20 world.

The authors claim the need for the drive towards organizational effectiveness and performance. They define five value factors enterprises need to appoint on their future agenda:

• Enabling capable and courageous leadership
• Building a very strong and adaptive organizational culture
• Strengthening organizational productivity and performance
• Fostering creative innovations, products, and solutions
• Building exceptionally high customer loyalty

These five value factors match quite well with the E20/Social Business agenda. The only thing there is that the E20/Social Business movement is coming the other way around. It provides 1) the means (technology) to enable the change process on an effective and efficient scale (that HR/OD could not achieve with long term change projects before). And 2) the technology is even a driver for the change itself. In a recent German post on our N:Sight Research I have explained my views on the interdependent relation of E20 and OD.

Together with practice experts of our E20 Community we are just about to elaborate a checklist of OD task along the maturity cycle of an E20 project. We are trying to work out specific action implications on different maturity stages.

The following image shows the structure of our approach:

Enterprise 2.0 practioneers know that social software already inherits kinds of “gamified” mechanics by default. Relating to another recently published article of Nir Eyal about how to hook users and how to drive them crazy we can say that the key to social software are the social rewards from the “tribe”. The “social reward” grows exponentially with the growth of the network – as the quantity as well as the quality of the reward increases. So where is the magic or the “beef” of the “gamification” talk within the social enterprise?

Transfering the built-in features of most social technology to the “gamification” idea already provides a very solid foundation:

• Likes & Comments – represent the low level system of the social reward system
• Replies – provide a “reward of the self” in terms of “yes – I have been heard”
• Leader boards & recommendations of articles & documents – represent the high level of system of the social reward and underline the authority and status of the people behind it
• Topic-person-relations – provide a “reward of the hunt” (see the post of Nir Eval) as it make the search of relevant people and competencies more easy

Therefore for me social technology is by default “gamified”. “Gamification” is an underlying principle of a good “adoption” process. Providing some “merit badges” will even intensify the reward process and might get more people on the social bandwaggon. But adoption 2.0 experts would probably also state that if the E20 initiative is set up at the heart of solving business problems and these additional reward systems are not need because the business problem solving overweights any kind of “virtual” reward.

So I am really looking forward to anybody convincing me on the added values of even extended “gamified” features of social technologies!

The orientation on social business activities has reached a strategic importance

The overall conclusion of E20 SUMMIT for me is that the projects in this field are finally receiving the strategic importance and awareness that is needed. Both the more mature projects of the early leaders of the pack like BASF, Alcatel-Lucent, LdE as well as of the frog-leaping late adopters are being sponsored from the management support. And they are not at all technology-driven, but most of the times cultural-driven.

But while some management support is already given a lot of projects are still challenged to gather the sufficient momentum for having a substantial impact to the model of the enterprise. Furthermore in many cases an important “ingredient” to the transformative nature of these projects is also missing – as a lot of HR managers are still not or too less involved into those projects! For this second issue it is just a question of refocusing the discussions from the E20 adoption and project management level towards the design of the future model of the enterprise. Though planned differently the discussions at E20 SUMMIT also turned again around the first part of the equation – therefore we definitely have to focus on the second part (on the foundational pillars of the social enterprise) more strongly in next year’s conference.

Therefore wrapping up this year’s conference is mainly focused on the “keys to the E20 project excellence” which I will elaborate in the following. But also to some extent to the discussion of the foundational pillars that I will give an outlook to subsequently.

What are the keys to the E20 project excellence?

As planned the discussion on how to drive the excellence for the E20 project management was still the main part of the conference. The discussion always tends to be not very much distinctive between how to run the adoption and transformation process and how to design the future model after the transition as both parts are very much interdependent. But I think we have extracted some explicit ideas on the first issue at the conference.

Furthermore we have to conclude that there is not one modelized approach to the E20 project management as the adoption and transformation is also dependent on the starting situation. A medium-sized company with a strong leadership and less bureaucratic structures can start differently than a large multi-national and diversified corporation. Besides size and structure the industry and the cultural background are further distinguishing factors.

So this said – in the following discussion I leave out the cultural part. For me a more open and collaborative culture is part of the target dimensions of the E20 initiative as well as a situational factor from where the project is starting. The same is with the often as needed proclaimed “management support”. Yes – “management support” makes the project live easier and is needed at the point where the initiative should be expanded to an enterprise-wide approach or enters the transformative stage but it is –for me – not a factor of doing the E20 project management right.

Therefore discussing the keys to the E20 project excellence is to find some common grounds for all kinds of project that have to be considered. In the following I want to try and list some of the important discussion points from the E20 SUMMIT 2012. The action items are structured along the idea of a maturity / evolution process as discussed in our N:Sight E20 Practice group and practical applied and presented by Cordelia Krooß at the E20 SUMMIT. Within this concept the project starts off with pilot and ends with an implemented “organization 2.0”:

1. Start off with a strong focus of solving business problems
   A key to a successful project is to align to the objective of solving real business problems. Adopting to social changes for the purpose of doing “social” is not the way that leads to success. But solving small but meaningful business problems with social initiatives helps to bring people in line for the project and creates “better practice” stories.
2. Ignite small and meaningful initiatives
   To start the social game (internally as externally) what counts is not the large scale but the successfully fulfillment of the project promise. And this is more reliable achieved on a small scale – therefore the old call for “start small and move fast” is still valid. At E20 SUMMIT the discussions have extracted some more detailed aspects on this:
   1. Start in small but multiple parallel projects, move fast and support social learning between the groups
   2. Get the right people involved from the beginning; the right people are a mix of digital natives as well as process-focused and digital sceptics
   3. Provide social skill training to help people to leverage the positive network effects from social technology fast
   4. Focus on helping solving the business problem (it might not be solved on its own!)
3. Spread the story of the good practice and make it visible
   As the socially and collaboratively enhanced work differs from Tayloristic process-aligned and individualized way of working and as the effects of the new way of working is not directly measurable at the beginning storytelling is an effective way to extend the adoption in a later state of the adoption. The following advices has been brought up in the discussions at E20 SUMMIT:
   1. Convince with best practice stories and build up advocates and evangelists within the organization
   2. Build up mentorship relations between new projects and advanced projects (install a social learning approach)
   3. Play the “gardener” (cultivating the collaboratively collected ressources e.g. wiki pages, established folksonomies or not tagged but valuable content objects like status updates) and focus on content curation (making sense and sharing of the content that others are creating)
   4. Expand the social skill training also to people not directly involved into the E20 initatives
   5. Integrate work council along the evolution of the way of working
4. Drive actively the transformation process
   This is the action that cannot be done without the support or at least the acknowledge of the top management. As the adoption of social technology has taken place the advancement for the project go along with the transition of the concept of work and even further with the transformation of the concept of creating value. This step goes beyond the initial scope of most of the E20 projects (“solving some business problems with social enhancements”) the detailed action items are consequently turning around the design of the foundational pillars (see below!) for the future model of the enterprise:
   1. Get a strong sponsor from the management board to support the further steps
   2. Find allies within departments that are in charge for the organizational and cultural development
   3. Call for a steering committee and get support for the change management
   4. Do further storytelling and support the social learning process
5. Track project performance & effects
   Tracking the progress of the adoption and practice of collaborative way of working is a very challenging but also important task for the successful E20 project management. At E20 SUMMIT we started the discussion on the dimensions of social business analytics that I will elaborate in a further post soon.

What are the foundational pillars of the Social Enterprise?

Regarding the question on how to design the future model of the social enterprise the discussions at E20 SUMMIT have been only rudimentarily. In order to set a framework for the further discussion I like to mix in my following discourse the outcomes of the conferences with some extended ideas.

The future model of the enterprise – named here in relation to the enhancements of social technologies as social enterprise – must be seen as evolutionary step towards the process-aligned model. It is not a fallback to adhocracy and chaos but a step forward to a more agile and fluid design of the organization.

In the book “Future of Human Resource Management” by Losey/Meisinger/Ulrich I found a very nice description of the guiding principle to the fluid organization:

Define organization design as an action verb, not a noun – as what everyone does, not a place where they all do it. Minimize hierarchy; create a huge hierarchical vacuum to force leadership to emerge when and where it is needed. Instill a mental model of emergence, of employees constantly creating, pursuing, and abandoning ventures (products, services, business models) by organizing and reorganizing teams and temporary alliances (in evolving networks of firms). Resist all temptations to dray static organization charts.

This describes also very nicely what the E20 and Social Business movement is up to. So wrapping up the conference discussion in alignment with the ideas of the HR people I came to the following foundational pillars for the design of the next enterprise model that I also want to discuss in a further post soon:

• Culture of Openness & Collaboration
  A wide spread acceptance of the added value in sharing knowledge and intellectual property in order to gain and enhance the business value creation.
• Leadership 2.0
  Role of a forward looking, risk taking and opportunity driven “mover and shaker”
• Customer-Centricity & Customer Value-based Market Approaches
  A strong focus on the customer value & satisfaction within the market approach and interaction
• Installation of a Digital & Social Workplace
  Implementation of a work environment that provides a transparent view on the business activities and supports a collaborative work whenever and wherever it is needed.
• Fluid Organizational Design
  Establishment of a mental model of emergence with a strong technology driven backend that matches competencies with business process requirements.
• Socially extended Business Processes
  
  Structured business processes enhanced with a social layer on top for solving adhoc process issues (by finding answers in the collectively documented business process wisdom, by finding competencies to solve the issue or by working collaboratively together with others to solve the issue)

So – now I have put together my thoughts and drawbacks from the E20 SUMMIT and even have defined some more work for me to do. Now it’s up to you to join in the discussion and add or comment on my ideas.

Without having statistical data and only derived from subjective perceptions and interpretations of talks with German and French executives I like to state that E20 projects in France and in Germany are in many ways different. In the end they all follow the same vision of the socially enhanced and collaborative organization but the key drivers for the projects are as different as the challenges that go along with the adoption.

Starting off with Germany – I see the majority of E20 projects based on a strong objective in improving the knowledge sharing in the company. This might be more or less hierarchically organized – in terms of whether there are pre-defined sharing spaces (e.g. wiki spaces, discussion spaces in collaboration platforms or topic-related blogs) or adhoc knowledge space (e.g. tagging related spaces in social messaging platforms). But in anycase the key driver for introducing social software concepts to the enterprise is very often the urge to improve the information flow and the knowledge sharing. This might be explained by the more dezentralized structure of German organizations and the industry in general. Knowledge is seen already as a high-valuable asset that needs to be made accessible and transparent. The key challenges of E20 initiatives in Germany is to convince people of the value of knowledge sharing – as knowledge is also seen as a highly competitive asset of both people and companies. So the success of E20 in a German-based organization lies very much upon the transformation of mindset in regards to the higher value of a knowledge-sharing co-worker. The ROI discussion of these E20 projects are therefore based on the calculation of not sharing and the lost business opportunities of the enterprise.

In France I see quite a number of E20 projects being built around the social
networking idea – in order to enhance the organization by the layer of digital interconnection of its peers. The objective is to support adhoc collaboration and coordination along business processes. This is a very much different approach than the German on to me – the implementation of the network is at first in order to derive value from the indirect/network effects of being interconnected. This is also related to the strong notion of personal networking within the French economy – especially in the elite networks of bureaucrats and executives. But while those elite networks of the so-called “cadre” – graduates from private schools in c-level positions – are very much informal and closed, the social networking goes beyond this. And while this is a chance for the French economic system to overcome the education-based system (for more information on the cadre system you might want to study the works of Geert Hofstede), it is also the biggest challenge for the adoption. Because it’s clear – for the non-”cadre” (blue and white collar workers beneath the C-level) social networks are a big chance to overcome the beaucracy, but for the “cadre” it is a thread. And another point is the “weak” ROI of just social networking – because it is very much dependant on the added value of the increased transparency.

So these two short observations already show the importance of different adoption approaches by cultural background. At the E20 SUMMIT we want to explore this again in more depth with a session on adoption strategies as well as a roundtable with insights from different cultural background. Furthermore E20 SUMMIT will be the time Richard Collin and Nicolas Rolland will announce the results of their research on E20 in France – which will also be part of the sessions about the “models of transformation“.

So I am very much looking forward to this in depth discussion about this – but I am also keen about your opinion and feedback to this.

I have been blogging quite substantially about Lean Management lately and I have noticed a common purpose with Agile methodologies (which get me blogging 4 years ago) and Enterprise 2.0 (which has kept my blogging busy for the last 2 years) : they all address complexity and permanent change, the key characteristics of our business world. This is one of the key ideas of the great book by Yves Caseau Processus & Entrerprise 2.0 [FR].

Picture taken from: Star Wars Generation 1, Encyclopédié, Etoile Noire

They don’t fight it because it’s uncool (even though it deadly is) but because it does not work in the 21st century. We now have many evidences that this type of organisation is not appropriate in an economy where complexity and perpetual change are the rules (for french readers, refer to this awesome interview by french paleo-anthropologist Pascal Picq).

Peter Drucker has taught us that in the knowledge economy the main sources of wealth are knowledge and innovation. Gary Hamel and John Hagel both stressed how fostering employee passion is critical for organisations to thrive.

While Lean, Agile and Enterprise 2.0 lie on the Republican Side (Douglas McGregor‘s Theory Y), Taylorism lies on the Dark Side (Theory X). Let’s make it clear : such vertical and hierarchical organisations as the latter don’t scale in this horizontal and networked world.

Yet, it still prevails. The questions are how come and what can we do about it …

The Irony of knowledge economy

An irony in some product organizations is that the manufacturing engineers have revolutionized and adopted lean production, moving away from “economies of scale” toward flow and flexibility in small batches without waste. But these lessons—which fit well to New Product Development —remain unused by development management, who continue to apply practices found in older economies-of-scale manufacturing management. (Craig Larman, Bas Vodde – Lean Primer)

This irony basically applies to the whole knowledge economy. We use the latest technologies, we mention innovation in every other sentences and yet we lag behind manufacturing in terms of management innovation as they’ve successfully implemented Lean Management.

Gary Hamel presents the same problem in a far more direct way in The Future of Management :

Right now, your company has 21st-century Internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th-century management processes, all built atop 19th-century management principles.

Empire University

In his inspiring speak during Agile Tour in Bordeaux [FR], Laurent Bossavit (director of French Agile Institute) told us that when he integrates fresh graduates on a project from software engineering schools, the first thing he teaches them is to forget what they learn.

Interestingly enough, David Heinemeier Hansson makes a pretty similar statement regarding MBA’s in this great video of a talk he gave in Stanford : to succed in today’s world, you need to Unlearn Your MBA.

Something we find in the The Future of Management. Gary Hamel is on the same wavelength and provides examples of exceptional leaders (WL Gore,  John McKey, Larry Page …) who didn’t have management educational background and who innovated in management because they never were told what NOT to do during an MBA.

Reason #1 : Taylorism prevails because this is main management philosophy taught in university to tomorrow leaders.

Action #1 : As Laurent Bossavit rightly said : if we want alternative organisation approaches to thrive, we (evangelists, practictioners, etc …) need to create close relationships with universities (Technology and Business), and spread these philosophies amongst the students.

Behavioural Sciences

This defiance towards business school also is depicted in the famous article Management Myth article where the author argues that you don’t need MBA to be a good manager but a degree in philosophy.

The impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like “out-of-the-box thinking,” “win-win situation,” and “core competencies.

Complexity and Permanent Change probably are the main characteristics of today’s economy. In his talk at Lean IT Summit, Steve Bell drawn on Ben Zimmerman and Sholom Glouberman study on complicated and complex systems and insisted on the relative importance of Behavioural Sciences versus Technology to solve complex problems.

This echoes Jamie Pappas statement in Enterprise 2.0 Conference : “to thrive in social business requires more soft skills than hard skills”.

I’m not sure about MBA’s (we even have in France an Enterprise 2.0 Institute under the lead of Richard Collin). But for sure, these sciences are not taught in IT Universities as Laurent Bossavit noted.

Reason # 2 : Taylorism prevails because this need to tackle complexity with Behavioural Sciences is not taught in university to tomorrow leaders.

Action #2 : If we want people on organisations to understand the complexity we are in, to be able to assess how appropriate Lean/Agile/Enterprise 2.0 are to tackle it and how inappropriate Taylorism is, we need to add Cognitive and Behavioural sciences in their curriculum and trainings.

The Sith

(Disclosure : I’ve been a manager for the last 7 years).

During Lean IT Summit, many speakers mentioned the need of a fundamental management shift, from managers to teachers and enablers. Pierre Pezziardi, Daniel Jones, Michael Ballé, Yves Caseau : all mentioned this at some point in their speak.

This is another common point with Agile and Enterprise 2.0. Incidentally, this also is one of the main obstacle to adoption. We are humans, we like power and we are not so keen on getting out of our comfort zone.

So why would people  who have power and an enviable social status accept giving up on these assets and get into something new ? Why would they put themselves in a position where they need to learn new ways of getting things done ? Why would they spend their energy putting people in the best position to succeed, and losing all the credit they used to get from their team work ?

Besides, as Yves Caseau explains in his enlightening book [FR], learning requires humility. Managers enjoying their status are not really subject to humility. Not to mention that more often than not they were graduates in exclusive schools where, there again, humility is not one of the most important part of the curriculum.

Reason #3 : Managers are much keener on enjoying their power & status than giving it away to learn a new way of getting things done.

Action #3 : While evangelising, spend significant amount of time and energy on showing how important managers are in this new frame. A good model to base this on could be The middle-up-down model advocated by Nonaka and Takeushi (the godfathers of the Scrum Agile framework) in the Knowledge Creative Company essay :

“Middle Managers play a key role in the knowledge creation process. They synthetize the tacit knowledge of both front-line employees and senior executives, make it explicit, and incorporate it into new products and technologies”

Operational Benefits and credibility

This is another great takeaway from Laurent Bossavit’s talk : he admits that Agile Evangelists should do a much better job in bringing factual evidences of how well it works.

The Standish group has regularly presented Agile Methodologies as Software Projects success factor : this is a great starting point. Another opportunity Agile community could make the most of is the is the Agile PMI certification. This is a massive step towards business recognition of Agile methods capabilities. Yet the Agile community is mostly against the very idea of certification : this shows a bad understanding of corporate psyche : this really is adding needless obstacles on the path of adoption.

This is the exact problem Deloitte decided to address in their Social Software for business performance improvements for Enterprise 2.0 : showing results achieved by Social Software in terms of operational benefits.

In that respect, there is no doubt on how efficient Lean Management is as we have bucket loads of data proving how efficient this approach is.

Reason #4 : Taylorism prevails because Agile / Enterprise 2.0 don’t provide enough credibility and factual data regarding what  they’re bringing in terms of operational benefits.

Action #4 : Do not (only) rely on “rah rah” rhetoric to sell the case of Agile/Enterprise 2.0. Provide regular scientifically measured set of data proving the value of these methodologies as Lean has been doing ever since it appeared. Besides, encourage any institutional initiative that will improve credibility of these approaches as per corporate culture.

Anti-Taylorists of the world unite

During the researches I’ve been doing related to Lean, I’ve noticed some tensions between Lean and Agile communities. How sad. Michael Ball in a belligerent mood during Lean IT Summit, David P Joyce and Peter Middleton presenting Lean Kanban as a competitor to Agile methodologies, Jeff Sutherland drawing on Nonaka and Takeushi to minimize Lean influence and sing the superiority of Scrum.

I understand this can be identified as passion for the topic they’ve been working for. But eventually, this serves only one purpose : making Taylorism and bureaucracy as we know it feel secure and not really challenged in our organisation.

Reason #5 : Lean / Agile quarrels provide Legacy Management with ammunitions to discredit them both and to maintain the status quo.

Action #5 : If we really want to give Taylorism and last century forms of management a go, we should unite to try to bring Taylorism down rather than losing time and credibility in trivial skirmishes arguing what is the best approach to get things done. The thing we know for sure is that it’s not Taylorism : this is the black star to bring down.

• Defining quick wins for the project to show the social benefits.
  This relates to the call for pilot projects for social software initiative to provide a fast practice showcase on how social software leverages the network effects and the benefits that goes along with it.
• Finding a balanced way between technological introduced and directly invoked cultural changes.
  Enterprise 2.0 is not about technology, but technology is the enabler for the new open and transparent organisation. Therefore this is always the hen-and-egg-issue to be solved in somehow a balanced way.
• Keeping in mind that the low barrier of entry is key for the software adoption.
  The ease-of-use is what guarantees the quick adoption of the technology. Any non-intuitive implementation is hindering these effects.

In many ways the conference showed that we are in the middle of a big transformation process with the practical how-tos for guaranteeing or achieving the project excellence for Enterprise 2.0 initiatives far from being defined soundly. Exactly on this point we want to support with the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT. And as one single event cannot solely accomplish this task we have developed the idea of the “happening” for the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT with various pre-events in France and elsewhere to gather and pre-discuss ideas for the conference. In two weeks we are starting off with this idea at the first E20 Meetup in Paris in the NextLounge at Nextmodernity:

Under the headline “Ideas for the model of the social enterprise” we want to gather insights, ideas and opinions about the future models of the social enterprise. The key issues to be discussed at this evening are the following questions:

• Visions and opinions about the future organizational framework
• Overcoming the dissonance between targeted business activities and adhoc social actions
• Notion of  “management” in a social enterprise

Already some 20 people have already registered for free event. But as the NextLounge is limited to 40 people any interested participant should register fast. But this will not be the only event – we have already defined some more events for the month to come e.g. about “internal community and engagement management” on Nov 17th at the LECKO headquarters.

Each event has the task to gather basic ideas to one topic that will be discussed in depth on the E20 SUMMIT (see the session planning!). We are very much looking forward to this extension of the event and the outcomes of these gatherings.

This was also true for the evening at Harry’s New York Bar on Wednesday night last week where we met some very bright heads for our first E20 meetup. While exchanging ideas about the state of the E20 adoption I was able to gather some valuable insights that I am happy to share.

Defining the master plan for the E20 maturity cycle is the key to success!

Especially at the meetup the discussions circulated around the challenges of the maturity cycle of Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business. While starting a 2.0 initiative is nearly at no barrier of entries (in terms of technology, setting up & starting off, gaining momentum etc), the enterprise-wide usage of social tools as core parts of the business processes  is still challenging. Especially the driving forces for the project along the maturity cylce are still to be explored and explained more clearly.

Here are some non-literal quotes of this evening:

Sebastian Blanc from Yoolink stated that corporate leaders accept social software in parts for their organization, but they are not willing to change the organization – especially when it works in terms of sales and profits. Sebastian sees the need of a certain level of “pain” to be existent in order to have social concepts integrated into “in-the-flow” processes.

Jon Husband (who happend to be in town and joint us) stressed out the rethinking of the regulatory framework of HR in order to succeed in the long run with 2.0 initiatives. He summarized his point neatly in a post yesterday on the needed redesign of work requirements.

Anthony Poncier added to this that the long-term success of E20 projects implies new salary systems that reflect motivational incentives to enfoster engagement, collaboration and social work. Both – Anthony’s as well as Jon’s – assertions lead to the point that the organizational development and a framework for the new organizational constitution has to be strongly discussed at the conference.

Last but not least – Thierry de Baillon added on the last point that especially for France HR is in most parts still far away from these topics in order to make a real shift. He also pointed out the need for a new skill set for the staff to benefit from social concepts.

Defining the business values to support the business development

As Sebastian stated already at meetup a key question for corporate leaders to fully acknowledge social initiatives is to perceive the business value in terms of sales and profits. Any project focussed on only streamlining and advancing the productivity of the company will be faced with restraint adoption. This is also the point our partners emphasized in our meetings on Thursday – in regards to framing and focussing the conference schedule.

In our morning meeting on Thursday Richard Collin from NextModernity mentioned that in order to secure the success of the initiative the problem needs to be tackled head on – meaning the corporate leaders have to be convinced. And the management is easier to be convinced by a discussion about “new forms of value creation” than a discussion of a “collaborative workplace”. The former is the objective, the latter is the mission to be completed on its way.

Later on Arnaud Rayrole from USEO also accentuated the importance of the added value of sharing – in regards to the effects of the transparency to the business activity. Meaning – sales people can perform better when they know the best selling propositions and clues about convincing the customer. This goes also along with the demand for the new skill set mentioned earlier and the reflections on Dion Hinchcliffe‘s discussions of the “open work framework“.

Again last but not least – we have met Yves Darnige from IBM (Disclaimer: IBM is sponsoring the E20 SUMMIT!). He is in charge for the Lotus brand in Southern and Western Europe and therefore is heading the “Social Business” meme of IBM for this area. While he sees his company always being right when jumping on a trending topic he also acknoledges that “Social Business” is still at an early stage. Most of the projects within this field still fail to deliver the “Social Business” vision in its full notion with real business values. But as this is an evolutionary process with major changes nobody can expect a jumpstart. Yves clearly approved our conference approach of discussing practices from the specific angle of use cases – this supports a more differenciated discussion of the different business values social software adds to the enterprise. He suggested to focus on the definition of the social added value proposition of the term “Social Business” for the conference. If the E20 community cannot bring the discussion down to the practical insights, he sees a clear danger of “over-clocking” the term.

In the search for the Social Business Excellence

As already said at the beginning the discussions have been very helpful and helped me sharpen the focus of the conference setup. And as posted before with the February conference we are trying to evaluate the drivers for improving the business excellence by using social concepts within the company. In regards to the structure of the conference we are trying to deliver our own value proposition by differenciating the following topics:

1. Entry plenary session: Discussion of the key factors for the Social Business Maturity (with keynotes from Rawn Shah/IBM and a senior level corporate speaker (tbd))
2. Track 1: Discussion of the “project excellence” with sessions about the key challenges that drive the adoption and the transformation management of E20 initiatives
3. Track 2: Discussion of the “practice excellence” with sessions on different use case scenarios and corporate speakers giving insights to their project and the created business value
4. Track 3: Discussion of the “organizational excellence” with sessions on how to define the “Enterprise 2.0″ (meaning the concepts and constitutions) for the future enterprise model
5. Closing plenary session: Discussion of the key factors for defining the future work definitions (with keynotes from Dion Hinchcliffe and Richard Collin) as well as a discussion on the future roadmap of the social technology.

We think this provides a good state-of-the-art overview of where everybody stands in the projects at the moment and what open questions are existing to be answered.

I am looking very much forward to any comments and feedback on the conference focus.

But these assumptions imply that the cultural change will alter the participation behavior in a sustainable matter. And at this point I doubt the outcome – as I am strong believer in the 90-9-1 rule of Jacob Nielsen and see only a small portion of the total number of stakeholder will constantly show a strong participation. For any increase of this portion the steering comitee of the E20 project needs to incentify with some kind of effort.

If we have a look at different use cases this is more or less true for all approaches from wiki driven knowledge sharing & retention to networking based collaboration strengthening and open innovation approaches. Only projects that seem somehow being excluded from this stagnation are those based on social messaging approaches at the core of the project. So the question is why? In relation to our “Social Messaging” research I already tried to argue and set the meme about Social Messaging being the key driver for Enterprise 2.0, but I could never nail it down to a single idea.

In an early German post in June last year I tried to bring it down to the following two key characteristics:

1. E20 immanence – social messaging as the enterprise wide activity stream is showing a river of information about the processes and activities within the enterprise and therefore fullfils and represents the E20 promise of the open and transparent enterprise.
2. E20 enablement – with showing the activities within the enterprise social messaging also supports the change process because it makes the alteration transparent.

In our “Social Messaging” research Joachim and I focussed the reasoning of the significance of social messaging as the (1) centerpiece of the E20 initiative and (2) the clock of the E20 change process.

It was not before this weekend that I realized another very important key argument. In the follow-up to a German post about the facets of the “social object” I came along the significance for answering the question why social messaging could be the key driver for Enterprise 2.0 initiative – because it is the infrastructure or better platform for “social objects” to expand their power.

“Social objects” are information items that cause social interactions. (The concept was introduced first by Jurie Engestrom at reboot 2007.) The cause is key element of the “social” of “social objects”. “Social objects” are the elements or better node social networks are spinning around. It is seen as the glue or elexir of life of social networks.

“Social messaging systems” provide the infrastructure with low barriers of participation for users to share information about their activities that eventually expand to “social objects”. This means that “social messaging” per se not guarantees the power of “social objects” – but it enables it.

On the second step it creates the network the Enterprise 2.0 initiative is heading for.

Well – it is not me to realise this relation first because the admired JP Rangaswami already discussed this earlier this year in a series of posts:

• Social objects in the enterprise: some early thoughts
• Thinking more about social objects in the enterprise
• Social objects in the enterprise: Part 3

In a fourth post JP summarize quite well the significance of “social objects” and therefore indirectly the infrastructure enabling the creation and sharing of it:

It is through the sharing of social objects that communities form and grow.

The social objects have another critical use: they form rolling stones that gather the moss of metadata we all need. As we move from hierarchies of product and customer to networks of capabilities and relationships, the topology of the business and the firm changes. Vertical integration is replaced by an architecture best defined as high cohesion with loose coupling or, if you prefer, small pieces loosely joined, to quote David Weinberger.

Therefore the concept of “social objects” relates back to what I tried to frame as the E20 immanence from another angle. It inherits the DNA of the Enterprise 2.0 organization.

Looking forward to any feedback.

So now – with the new platform – we want to take up the efforts on integrating other views on the Enterprise 2.0 topic in this blog. We are very happy to have found some first interested contributors: Alexander Stocker and Cecil Dijoux are interested in taking part in this move! But we are also looking forward to more contributions. Feel free to contact me.

Therefore we had to take up action and move the whole conference to February – with already settled speakers, sponsors and first registrants for November. Therefore we want to announce now officially: The next Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT will be held on February 7 & 8 2012 – and we are very much looking forward to organize a path paving, first conference for 2012!

And in order to be more concrete than before – we already defined the main topic as well as sessions for this event:

We see the state of Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business adoption within the enterprises at a key stage. In quite a lot of European organizations E20 initiatives have mostly proved some business value to the organization – but often limited to only parts of the organization. The adoption to social tools and socially enhanced processes have not been realized Enterprise-wide. Project leaders are realizing that new competences like engagement and community management, new kinds of analytics and only an extension to more critical business processes will substantially secure and leverage the value of social processes. According to this perception of the situation we see the key challenges in “doing the things right” in regards to the Enterprise 2.0/Social Business project (meaning assuring the most effective actions to secure the project excellence), in still providing some parts of the management with appealing new case stories to argue with practice excellence and in identifying the future trends on extending the social idea towards the whole enterprise. These three building blocks (project excellence, practice excellence and future excellence) are the key ideas for the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT. To catch everyone’s attention we have defined the phrase “Defining and Building the Collaborative Workplace” as the guiding key theme for the conference. You can find the detailed session draft at http://www.e20summit.com/conference.html.

We are also happy to annouce the confirmed participation of first cases from Alcatel-Lucent, St. Gobain, Lyonnaise-des-Eaux as well as WWF. Also our advisory board with practioneers of SwissRe, Cegeka, Deutsche Bank and Danone will actively take part at the conference. Further we are in the final talks for our keynote speakers to be announced shortly.

As a peer conference we are looking forward to an intensive exchange already prior to the event (just comment on this post, on the schedule draft or on our Facebook page!). We have planned again some interactive roundtable discussions that are planned to be filled with “hot project issues”. We like to encourage everybody to help us identify and discuss these topics during the next months. To get things started we are just setting up a first E20 Meetup in Paris on Wed, Sept. 7, at 8pm in Harry’s Bar (see this Facebook event page).

So as everything is said about the E20 SUMMIT we are eager to read your comments about it – and only also have to announce the relaunch of our “Enterprise2Open” blog at this new location.