Managing organisational cultural change is a well known challenge and was a common theme from the Boston conference case studies. Without the support of the management and employees Enterprise 2.0 technology projects can fail disastrously. Euen Semple , an independent business advisor on social computing with grounded experience of cultural change, recently posted a list on why he thinks most companies will fail at Enterprise 2.0. The CIA  (USA Central Intelligence Agency) case study at the conference strongly highlighted how they overcame these challenges.

Tony Byrne  felt that the CIA "shared many good nuggets about overcoming institutional and cultural resistance" and describes in detail the CIA's historical culture of collaboration. Don Burke from the CIA said at the conference "implementing social software is more of a cultural challenge than a technical one" and recommended "to start small and simple" to "get people who are uncomfortable with the tools to quickly make and edit and publish". Starting small and simple was echoed by the Lockheed Martin case with Lockheed's Shawn Dahlen saying "Think big, start small, move fast." and their Enterprise 2.0 project tagline "Express, Discover, Connect". C.G Lynch  from CIO magazine has a more detailed account of the CIA cultural challenges.  

Steve Wylie and his team at TechWeb must have put a great deal of time in convincing six global Enterprise firm's into presenting at the Boston Enterprise 2.0 conference in June 2008, however it proved to be worth the effort. Various news and blogger reports on five of these cases are summarised below: CIA (USA Central Intelligence Agency); Lockheed Martin (Defence Technology); Pfizer (Phamaciucals); Sony (Computer Entertainment) and Wachovia (Banking).  

These real world and tangible cases of Enterprise's adopting Enterprise 2.0 presented by enthusiastic internal project evangelist caught the focus of many conference attendees. This interest and excitement continued post the event with the CIA and Lockheed receiving much of the attention.

Lockheed Martin 

The Lockheed Martin presentation on the last day created a lot of excitement because of the extent Lockheed had developed and adopted a rich internal social network application with 4000 users and the potential to go to 150,000.  Alex Howard of Whatis?com in his report said "this unlikely candidate for early adoption of enterprise 2.0 technologies was one of the unexpected hits of the conference" and blogger Jen Robinson said the "session was terrific" on his post. The presentation is well summaried by C.G. Lynch of CIO and blogger David Hobbie and includes implementation and justification advice from Lockheed.  

Large enterprise vendors, pure-play start ups, or open-source? This was the question driving a lot of debate in Boston last week at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. With capable offerings from all three camps how should a company decide which path to take?

The answer isn't easy and in some cases the right choice might be a combination, or even  all three.

Enterprise Vendors go head-to-head

Day one started off with a head-to-head between IBM (Lotus Connections) and Microsoft (SharePoint). Suzanne Minassian stepped up first to present a comprehensive and polished demo of Lotus Connections. She covered a lot of ground, ticking all of the right Enterprise 2.0 boxes showing people profiles, wiki integration, tagging, bookmarking, search and more, all within a seamless and clean user interface. Meanwhile, Microsoft's Lawrence Liu struggled to win over the crowd with his PowerPoint slides and clunky SharePoint examples. Comments, analysis and opinion flooded in. Susan Scrupski found Microsoft's demo "uninspiring" but felt that IBM "clearly 'got it" she also noted IBM had "a terrific UI, more 2.0 features than I could even keep up".

An in depth analysis can be found at CIO.com where C.G. Lynch concludes that "SharePoint needs work with its social computing features" and conducts a follow-up interview with Rob Curry, Microsoft's director of SharePoint. David Hobbie has also reported on the session providing a detailed summary.

The Techweb Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 is over and the dust has settled. E20Portal.com has put together a roundup of news, opinions and blog posts about event.

We will be posting four articles based on the conference, look out for them coming soon:
 

• Three Enterprise 2.0 Alternatives
• Real World Enterprise 2.0 Case Studies
• Culture Implications when introducing Enterprise 2.0
• Preparation for Enterprise Mash-ups

Visit the Enterprise 2.0 Conference website for more details on the event, including presentation materials and post-conference news.