What I learned (and didn’t) at Enterprise 2.0 this week

This week, I attended techweb’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. I was also on a panel yesterday (“Unlocking the Potential for Enterprise Mashups #e2conf25) afternoon with Oren Michels (@OrenMichels) from Mashery, Aaron Roe Fulkerson (@roebot) from Mindtouch, and hosted by David Berlind (@dberlind) from techweb. But I’ll get to that a little bit later on.

Here’s the thing.. What constitutes Enterprise 2.0? Well, if I organize all of the sessions into categories to try and find the answer, I come up with:

Social Collaboration	27 sessions	71.05%
ROI	4	10.53%
Security	2	5.26%
Cloud Computing	2	5.26%
Monitoring/Analytics	2	5.26%
Mashups	1	2.63%

I couldn’t attend every session in person, and there were some last minute changes, but I think I captured the general flow of the conference fairly well. There was a ton of discussion about social networks, collaborative networks,
community building, et cetera. All of these sessions were focused on connecting people: Connecting internal teams, businesses with their customers, empowering individuals, and so on.

I learned a lot about different approaches for bringing people together (I was humming Kum ba yah by Tuesday night). And I will bring a lot of the lessons learned to my “day job” – as an architect for a firm with more than 300,000 employees.

But what I didn’t hear a lot of mention about was how you actually enable a dynamic, living community to actually get work done. The ROI question came up over and over, and most of the time the responses were wishy washy. “People used to say ‘What’s the ROI of email’ – and now we can’t live without it. They said the same thing about the telephone”. “It’s hard to measure the ROI when you can’t anticipate the new opportunities that will emerge”. “ROI is Enterprise 1.0 thinking”.

The question came up again and again because people are hungry for a way to justify the expense/effort to their management (current economic conditions notwithstanding). And this dovetails nicely into our mashup panel.
First, our panel was the only one that specifically addressed speeding the Solutions Delivery cycle. You can deploy the biggest, shiniest watercolor in the world, but ultimately a business exists for one reason: to make money. Sometimes that means creating new products or services, sometimes it means cost-avoidance. We told real stories that could easily be extended to many firms (which is important, because as Dion Hinchcliffe notes, corporate cultures are unique)
For example:

• Consider a workflow that requires a user to visit several disconnected systems to gather the information that they need. Now, imagine a mashup is put in place to automate this process. Measure the time to complete the task beforehand and after, multiply it by an average hourly rate and voila! - a number to show management.
  
• Or suppose you have a system that tracks customer issues, bugs, etc. You probably also have a value for how long a trouble ticket is open. If you build mashup tools to make it easier to solve a problem, you can track the how it affects the resolution time for a problem. In the simplest case, you again have the "employee time saved value". But there are less easily measurable metrics like customer satisfaction and company reputation.

<< Quick plug: I have some useful Case Studies in Mashup Patterns that may give you other ideas >>

Connecting people is an important part of Enterprise 2.0. But is it 71% of the work? I don’t think so. Do people spend 70+% of their day collaborating? Sure, it depends a bit on the industry. I attended a session hosted by IDEO, a design
firm, and it’s clear that collaboration is a crucial part of the creative process. Speaking for myself and my work environment, I can say that once people sit down at their desks and get down to business, they depend more on the
applications that IT either builds or buys for them than speaking with one another. Anything I can do to accelerate the delivery curve of new solutions – and to make existing ones work faster and smarter is where the real value proposition is.

Andrew McAfee’s definition of Enterprise 2.0 stresses the personal aspects of collaboration. But let’s not limit ourselves to thinking people collaborate only inside online communities or via services like Twitter. People implicitly collaborate via the common applications that they all use. And applications collaborate with one another, too, without people!
Recognizing these synergies and optimizing the common challenges that we handle (individually) is to me the most important part of Enterprise 2.0. It’s a task mashups are more than ready to handle, and I'm grateful David had the prescience to establish our panel to address it. I hope future iterations of Enterprise 2.0 get down to business (figuratively and literally) and spend more time exploring this issue.