Yesterday I had the great pleasure of presenting at a great day of learning on The Future of Enterprise Computing at University of Virginia. The seminar was put together by Professor Ryan Nelson, the director of the Center for the Management of Information Technology (CMIT) in UVA’s McIntire School of Commerce. Ryan pulled together a great panel of speakers:
- Andrew McAfee, Harvard Business School, the person who coined the term “Enterprise 2.0″
- Paul Daugherty, Accenture’s Chief Technology Architect
- Jeff Kelly (yours truly) representing Web 2.0 University(tm)
- Lewis Shepherd, CTO at Microsoft’s Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments
The audience consisted of about 70 graduate students in UVa’s MS MIT program and about 30 members of UVa’s Center for the Management of Information Technology. We were fortunate to be one of the first groups to present in the newly remodeled, state-of-the-art facilities in Rouss-Robertson Halls. I’ll give a brief recounting of each presentation, but I’m hoping that soon I will be able to edit this post to add links to videos of the presentations (3/17 update: it turns out the videos can’t be released - sorry about that).
Andrew McAfee led off with a great 60-minute summary of Enterprise 2.0 and it’s implication for enterprise technologists. I’ll briefly mention two points he made that I thought were intriguing. The first was his discussion of the underlying trends of E2.0 which included “lack of up-front structure” and “mechanisms to let structure emerge”. Those two trends align with the “freeform” and “emergence” concepts that Dion Hinchcliffe added in his FLATNESSES checklist - which is an extension of Andrew’s original SLATES checklist. We discussed it briefly over lunch, and the E2.0 trends that Andrew is encountering are congruent with what we have been seeing. The other interesting idea Andrew introduced centered around the value of weak ties in a social network. He mentioned Mark Granovetter’s The Strength of Weak Ties from 35 years ago and the Web as platform for social network is reproving how accurate Marks isights continue to be. He postulated - and I agree - that the people with whom we have weak social ties may be more valuable than the people with whom we have strong ties. That idea supports the research I have been doing about the importance of diverse and inclusive groups as the greatest driver of innovation.
Paul Daugherty was the second presenter and he provided very rich insight on the future of technology and what it means for the enterprise. Accenture has surpassed IBM as the world’s largest systems integrator, so Paul certainly has a keen perspective from which to predict future trends. His presentation was full of rich insight. While there was too much great content to review here, I will share his list of the eight power shift trends that will impact enterprise technology:
- Cloud Computing & SaaS
- Systems Integration - Regular & Light
- Enterprise Intelligence at Scale
- Continuous Access to People and Content
- Social Computing
- Explosion of User-Generated Content
- Gradual Industrialization of Software Development
- Green Computing
Jeff Kelly - I designed my talk to give the audience of technologists insight into the requests they might see coming from the business line. I based it on the platforms and strategies that resonate the most with the audiences we have at our Web 2.0 University ™ learning events. I provided a very brief summary of our two most popular learning events and then the topics that resonate the most with the business leaders who attend. You can see that list on slides 13 and 18 in the presentation deck linked here:
Lewis Shepherd gave a great capstone presentation that illustrated the practical application of the ideals and theories covered earlier in the day. His perspective was that of someone who came to DC from Silicon Valley after 9/11 to help devise ways for the US intelligence community to better gather, share and collaborate on various intelligence sources. So, much of his presentation focused on implementing Enterprise 2.0 platforms in a ultra-secure environment. His insights were excellent and provide great fodder for countering security-veiled resistance to E2.0. (It gives us the ability to say, “well I’m sure the information sharing your employees will do does require the most robust security available - let me tell you how the US intelligence community uses to wikis to share top-secret information…”). Lewis walked us through the evolution and success of Intellipedia as well as covering some other federal E2.0 projects. He also pointed out that my alma mater, EPA, is doing some great Web 2.0 work at epa.wik.is. I encourage you to read the EPA Web 2.0 Whitepaper - grand kudos to Brand Niemann and everyone else who is finally getting EPA to the level of public data exchange the Myles Morse and I (and many others) were hoping for 14 years ago when we worked on Enviro$en$e.
The day wrapped up with a panel moderated by Stefano Grazioli where Lewis, Paul, and I (Andrew had an early flight) fielded questions. The entire day was a great learning opportunity and I look forward to delving deeper into the wealth of information that was presented.
Thanks much to Brian Weston for posting pictures from the event!
The first leg is technology and it has been the primary topic of E2.0 discussion. The innovative platforms and tools of Web 2.0 are being carried into the enterprise. Wikis, blogs, social networks, prediction markets, open APIs and mashups empowered people on the Web and now people want that same power at work (for more info, 
The second leg is processes. Though usually emergent phenomena, E2.0 solutions needs to establish standard process and procedures in order to be successful. Employees must understand how each of the E2.0 tools works, how it interacts with other tools, and how they are expected to use it. E2.0 tools should be easy to use by definition, but employees will still need to be educated on “how” “why” and “what”. The “how” is an understanding of the tools’ function and features: “How do I use this to be more successful at work?” The “why” is about understanding the benefits to themselves and the larger organization: “Why is it worthwhile for me to use the tool?” The “what” is about understanding what the tool should be (and should not be) used for: “What would I use this tool to do?”
The third leg is culture. For E2.0 to succeed the organization must value collaboration and knowledge sharing. This is often the most challenging of the three legs. If your organization does not already have a culture that values collaboration and information sharing, it may be impossible for your E2.0 implementation to be successful. But cultures can be changed. Before we consier changing a culture, let’s be sure we agree on what a culture is. For our purposes, I will define culture as: “The behaviors and values characteristic of a particular group.” Within a culture, we have “mores” and “taboos” (and many other things we won’t go into). Again for our purposes, I will define mores as: “Accepted traditional customs and behaviors of a particular group” and taboos as: “Behaviors proscribed by a group as improper or unacceptable.”
So there you have the three legged stool of Enterprise 2.0 (or any type of collaboration/knowledge sharing system). Successful E2.0 implementations assure that all three legs of the stool are strong and balanced. They also recognize that a change in any one of the legs may require changes in the other two to keep the stool balanced. To close with a blatant plug, I encourage you to join us at a delivery of the 
So the blogosphere is agog with today’s 
Welcome to the safer parts of my mind! Here I invite you to converse on thoughts of life & learning in the 21st century. (