Bjoern Negelmann (Conference Chair for Kongress Media) offered me this interview I publish below while he is preparing the next Enterprise2.0 Summit planned in Frankfurt (Germany) October 26.-28.,2010. I was invited by Kongress Media to be one of their Ambassadors and I accepted right away as entrepreneur, “noosphere” enthusiast and wiki evangelist. I will add short comments to Bjoern’s responses (I’m afraid I would have be a very bad ambassador 😉 )
Briefly – openness supports a more holistic understanding of the enterprise to internal and external stakeholders. With everybody microblogging about their work efforts internally, documenting and sharing the results of their project efforts in wikis and interconnecting with different peers in the internal and external realm – the value generation of the enterprise becomes more transparent for those who are allowed to view it. If there are any potentials of improvement anybody can get involved and give his or her input and suggestions. This allows not planned and executed solution finding and generation beyond political and organizational boundaries. So again – openness leads to speeding up time-to-market and improve the flexibility and agility the enterprise acts on the market!
Yes – indeed I think the most differentiating point of the E2.0 SUMMIT in Frankfurt is the number of corporate representatives on the speaker’s list. The E20 SUMMIT is not the conference about the E20 visions – not at all. It’s about the practical insights of the first movers and the solutions towards the challenges of E20 projects. These two aspects are forming the two tracks of our two day conference. Then again each track is divided into different sessions with short talks and a lot of discussions. Additionally there are three keynote sessions on strategic questions as e.g. “what are the characteristics of the manager 2.0?” and an open space workshop where the participants are getting involved to talk and discuss their detailed questions. Optional the E20 SUMMIT provides two pre-conference workshops about “social messaging” and the “social networking culture”.
Well – yes – the E20 idea is more widely spread. There are good practices from first movers – mainly with E20 initiatives focussing on some specific use scenaries as “improving the general information flow by micro-blogging” or “making the corporate knowledge more transparent by documenting projects into wikis”. With this the discussions about the challenges of E20 projects become more specific – we are not anymore discussing about the challenges of “adoption” but about the challenges of “rewarding systems”, “community management” and new “leadership models”.
Q5 About speakers, what is from your point of view, the main differences between European and US speakers?(what about Asia speakers)?
That’s a great question. Honestly said we haven’t had any Asian speaker and always only a few US speakers as we are mainly focussing the practical insights of the intra-European context. But comparing the Europeans and the Americans it would say the main difference is in the “point of view” of the subject. Though it might not be representative as we always invited only US speakers for overview talks but in discussions with them and other US experts in the E20 field I would say they stick very much towards the high-level E20 discussion. They tend to argue very much on the big cultural changes and less on the specific, hands-on details. Especially the German corporates they want to know the specific details of how to set up the community management or the leadership model first – before turning the “big” wheel of the changement of the corporate cultural. At the end for a successful project you need both – but the approaches are different.
2 Comments
Add Yours →Isabel – thank you for the questions.In addition to your comment above – I have one more remark: While "scarcity" of information might not the problem anymore, the vice-versa "abundance" will take the part – as it needs efficient techniques to "filter" and comprehend the new complexity of information. So – the problem of power still might not be solved but changed – from the power of access to the power of processing. For this new problem the collective intelligence can be a solution – but then you need the skills to handle the collective intelligence.Regards. Bjoern
Oui, c'est vrai Bjoern.<div>From the enterprise point of view the focus will be on skills to handle "conversations", symetrical flows of information. Waiting for practical experiences outcomes during the E20 Summit to give us a "beta-model" of a business driven by conversations.<br> <br></div>