Coups de coeur dans les nuages

As an Ambassador of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris on February 7-8,2012, I am scooping (reading-selecting-sharing) lot of posts about the so called "social business" or "Enterprise 2.0". 

Most of these readings are exhorting "management 1.0" to become more "2.0 oriented", which consists mainly to move from hierarchy management to network management. You take a department in a company, you engage people in this department to work with new social technology, arguing that sharing knowledge is pushing productivity and work done! Companies are still working with the same processes for one century and they just add technologies or separated platforms of networking. Is this changing the way enterprise are profitable? Is this "social business"? 

Social business is about re-thinking the processes in all parts of the enterprise on a bottom-up conversation base. As a wiki expert I am frustrated to see companies relegating wiki as a management project tool. What if a wiki will manage the finance department or the human ressources or the customers relationships. This is not a fantasy, it is just possible and desirable. Why? 

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• More Hurdles in the Shift from Documents to Wikis (vaughanmerlyn.com)

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• Collaborative Consumption: How it will disrupt "traditional" Business Models (customerthink.com)

• Meeting points like Twitter or Facebook catch more attention than TV programms 
• Social media connect people locally ensuring new meetings in vivo and amazing community feeling 
• Personal issue are solved by real person directly connected through Twitter or Facebook or Linkedin or Quora (asynchronous reply is better than no reply at all)
• If you go for shopping, you trust more recommandations from your buddies' internet community than the shops or brands reviews. 
• You can follow the conversation or let it but you know where to find conversations. 
• The spiral of silence is brocken. Everybody can add his word, his pictures, his videos "silently" or "loudly" hoping to find his soul mate in a little comment or re-tweet coming from nowhere. For a human being a little comment is a BIG reward. 

35 years working with personal computer and what has be done to rethink the way we live with this appendice of our brain?

How have you arranged your table to keep your hands, your shoulders, your back, your neck, your eyes (I will not add your legs but think about them too) in a relax, confortable position during all day long?

This is my husband's new solution. He is really happy with his "flat desktop", so I share it with you. Please tell me YOUR home made solution!

Back from Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt (Germany),  Thanks to Bjorn Negelmann and Cathrin Gill for this opportunity.

1. The format of the summit was a real good surprise: 10 minutes pitch followed by discussions, open-space workshop, networking space during the day and after dinner of day one. Great opportunity to meet and discuss with companies' evangelist and consultants. I was happy enough to talk with @sagenet (Jenny), @elsua (Luis), @frogpond (Martin), @aponcier (Antony), Joachim Linder from http://komblog.de, Wendelin Auer from http://www.kkundk.de/, Felix Schröder and his CEO from http://justsofwareag.com, Juliet from Bausch, @JeanYves, @andgenth, Juliette Girard from Renault, Richard Collin, Rolf Schmidt-Holz...All embracing persons, very enthusiatics about the summit and the subject, Enterprise 2.0, but very realistic too. Companies with a long lasting internal communication are even working hard to turn upside down their habits. They are still looking for transversal, fluent, agile conversations all over the company (nobody talked about connecting companies communities with customers or providers).

2. As an entrepreneur I know that business is just about customers. Processes inside the company are aimed to deliver the product or service customers are waiting for. According to cases studied during the summit, big companies (Renault, BASF, T-System, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale, IBM, Bayer) are experimenting social platforms, community buildings behind their "firewall". 

starting from the inside (internal initiatives aimed at employees) to gain proficiency in order to move to the outside (externally connecting and engaging in communities with customers and other partners) seems to be the norm. (source:http://artlifework.wordpress.com/) 

What these companies are fearing? Is the "firewall" protecting them 100% from critics, leaking, legal issues? Where are their best allied: inside the company or outside? They are doing a great job, their products are fantastic, so they can meet the "public" with confidence, nothing to hide. Do they know that the most creative and profitable industry sector, fashion, is NOT protected with copyright. (see: http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.... ). Remember what Rolf Schmidt-Holz pointed out opening the summit, about people inside companies : "...You find out that you have fantastic people, mostly not at level one....Excellent people need to be treated excellently and it means giving them space, freedom". He was speaking by hart, from his experience on the ground.

3. One workshop was dedicated to "Network analysis". Information, knowledge, pull/push information, network design, bottom-up, ...companies as Lee Bryant showed up are delighted with designing processes aimed to put limits to employees' responsabilities. 

But what if the network is a rhizome, each employee a knot (maybe a crux) and the flow between two knots completely free? Forget about tree and graph, listen the noise, see what "knots" are growing, what piece of information become re-used and is integrated as a knowledge...[1]

Enterprise 2.0 phenomenon like many others current movements (open gouvernement, open foodies, commons...) are disruptive in essence. Are we on the verge to embrace "The perfect society" as described by Socrates?: 

"...The perfect society relies on laborers, slaves and tradesmen. The guardian class is to protect the city. The question is put to Socrates, "Who will guard the guardians?" or, "Who will protect us against the protectors?" Plato's answer to this is that they will guard themselves against themselves. We must tell the guardians a "noble lie". The noble lie will assure them that they are better than those they serve and it is therefore their responsibility to guard and protect those lesser than themselves. We will instill in them a distaste for power or privilege; they will rule because they believe it right, not because they desire it." (source:http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3F)

[1] A simple wiki is able to give all these informations: 
- listen the noise with "Recent Changes", "watchlist", "New Pages" delivered by email or RSS
- see what knots are growing with Users tracking on each collaborative article
- see what information becomes a knowledge thanks to "search" or "semantic tools"
You can also plug-in all "apps" (like IPhone apps) to test whatever type of collaboration or integration (ex: mobile inputs, twitter or facebook integration). This is agile, versatile and low cost.

* great post which sum-up the Summit with quotes:
http://artlifework.wordpress.com/2010/10/28/lessons-learned-at-the-enterprise-2-0-summit/