Business Two Zero

Two weeks ago I did the opening keynote session at KongressMedia’s latest Enterprise 2.0 Forum in Germany. They are running a sequence of events on the topic, with good, practical case studies, reaching a high quality audience. This last session had contributions from ABB, Deutsche Lufthansa, Bayer Business Services , T-Systems Multimedia Solutions, Frauenhofer Institute and Vodafone. Sadly it was all in German, except for my pitch, so I ended the day with a headache from concentrating, but not understanding enough - my ‘O’ Level German was too long ago!

My own session was all about building better web communities using our project at The Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales as a case study. I need to acknowledge the input on the presentation from Dennis Howlett of AccMan and ZDnet fame, and Philip Woodgate, Business Systems Partner at Goodman Jones. Both have been involved as consultants on the project, and both helped with the ideas for the session. There’s a certain symmetry involved in this team, as Dennis was the key person to get me involved in blogging back in 2005, and then, in turn, I was probably the main trigger to talk Philip in to blogging when he started.

Because I was presenting on the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, it seemed only fitting I should open with him. I used the Dawkins quote:

“The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is, in principle, capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.”

We’ve been communicating, collaborating and forming social networks since the stone age. We do this “organized complexity” because it is effective, we do it because it works.

Our own findings on community building are in line with Francois Gossieux’s excellent Tribalization of Business study from last year, and our best practices match with those in Jeremiah Owyang’s report. We’ve distilled our ideas and findings in to a methodology for successful implementation of web communities that we call SWITCH. That’s an acronym that stands for:

Start with the end in mind
What’s in it for me?
Intuitive and simple
Technology supporting not leading
Community management
Help and support

The first two are absolutely vital. I see too many social media projects that are technology led, with no clear business purpose defined. Then if you haven’t put yourselves in to the shoes of your target audience, and make sure there are a good reasons why they should turn up, consume and contribute, your community will fail. As you are building your community, the important things to focus on are the number of visitors, the number of active users, and how often people post and comment - the conversations. The measures that the old style, traditional online marketeers focus on like page views and time on the site just aren’t relevant. Number of comments is a much better guide to the influence of the post author than merely page views. The key measure that we watch to gauge the success of a community is the comment to post ratio. If it is at least 2 to 1 comments to posts or better, then the community is doing well and heading towards being self sustaining. However, for any community, the top two areas of difficulty are generally attracting new members and community management. Most people underestimate, often quite dramatically, the effort involved to start and keep the community going. Francois’ survey corroborates this when they found the two biggest obstacles to making communities work were getting people to engage, and the time involved for proper community management.

Here are the slides - feel free to download and use them under the terms defined there.

Technorati tags: social media, enterprise 2.0, ICAEW, Francois Gossieaux, Jeremiah Owyang, WordFrame, Dennis Howlett, Philip Woodgate, web 2.0, Charles Darwin

In part 1 of this enterprise 2.0 explanation I gave an overview of the topic and talked through some of the very few concrete examples and case studies that are out there.  Tomorrow I’ll post part 3 to  expand the definition of the topic and pick up on some of the predictions for 2009.  This post looks at how enterprise 2.0 tools can help and facilitate a change in management approach inside organizations, and some more real examples.  Take a look at how some technology companies are taking their own medicine.  Just as I was writing part 1 last week, a post by my friend Jon Husband tipped me off to a video of John Chambers, CEO of Cisco at MIT Sloane School of Management we had both missed back last October.   I’ve been interested in John and Cisco since reading Geoffrey Moore’s explanation of how one of my favourite books, Dealing With Darwin, came about.  A request by Chambers to do a kind of company biography morphed in to an excellent management book on how companies innovate through every phase of their evolution, with Cisco as a recurrent case study.   John’s lecture, and the subsequent Q&A lasts for 67 minutes, but it’s well worth spending the time.

You might expect John to mention Cisco telepresence a few times and the value of visual connections to help you “see the pupils dilate”, but he does present the argument for enterprise 2.0 tools in a company like his to:

• Drive productivity
• Help you get flexibility, speed and scale
• Increase revenue per employee
• Increase profit per employee
• Free up employees to help you move in other markets.

There is a good sequence from around 28 minutes to 35 where he talks about their use of discussion forums, Cisco-vision (which is their internal “YouTube”), the network effect and Metcalfe’s law increasing the usefulness of their internal networks, which he says are growing at over 400% a year.  He explains how this has helped him and his senior team pursue 26 top priority projects this year, compared to the 2 he could manage last year.  Another important comment is when he talks about combining these new web technologies with a discipline and a process as opposed to doing things in an unstructured way - that’s a key message in our implementation methodology too.  He also gives an insight in to the way management style needs to change with hierarchical organization structures being turned on their heads, and a move to a flatter, more network-centric approach with communities of interest.  He goes on to say:

 ”A lot of the management schools around the world still develop managers the way I was developed, and that’s command and control, and that’s not the future.”

He explained how they had used blog tools for idea management, with a competition for employees and customers for new product ideas, which resulted in 1200 entries from 104 countries.  Later on he has some great words in response to some of the questions.  He talks about how mobile is important, and how all devices will need to play.  However the one thing that he believes has to change is ease of use.  When you talk to a mobile service provider about adoption of a new function he says:

“One word one click 90% of their customers will pick it up.  2 words 2 clicks and 50% will pick it up.  5 words or 5 clicks and only 10% will pick it up - people don’t use”
 
“Making it easy to use is the key challenge”

He also explained how difficult it was for him to change approach himself.  He had to have patience and  move outside his comfort zone.  He uses video blogging for all his internal messaging, and staff use a Facebook style profile to describe the capability of every employee in the company.  He explains that wikis have been around in Cisco “forever”, with their use up 7 fold in the last 7 quarters.  Blogging doubled in 7 months, and he pointed out:

“None of this has been pushed top down.  People are doing this entirely  voluntary.  People do this purely because they get the leverage out of it.” 

He also talked a little about his background and business philosophy.  He spends 50-60% of his time with customers, listening to customers, and believes that’s how you stay on top.  He learned that lesson from his time at IBM and Wang.  He talked about IBM’s problems when they forgot about listening to their customers, and how Wang got to the top and then lost their way and crashed and burned.  He says that at Cisco, everything they’re doing is around social networking.  He participates in 30 different communities of interest , and believes that social networking concepts are how business will be done.

Another company to watch taking their own medicine is the one John (and I) used to work for - IBM.  Lotusphere is happening in Florida as we speak, and a few days ago Luis Saurez blogged about “Web 2.0 Goes to Work for Business“.  I’m looking forward to more from Luis during 2009, but he highlights the following links to find out what IBM are doing:

• Web 2.0 Goes to Work for Business
• The Web 2.0 Goes to Work blog
• Web 2.0 Goes to Work for Business on YouTube

So I recommend you invest 67 minutes to listen to John Chambers, and watch for good stories coming out of Lotusphere this week.  In Part 3 I hope to be able to link to a piece by one of my friends with some hard evidence on the unofficial adoption of social media inside companies bigger than 1000 employees.  The numbers may surprise you, and give an indication of the level of real grass roots adoption that is happening already. 

Technorati tags: social media, enterprise 2.0, Cisco, John Chambers, IBM, Lotusphere, Luis Saurez, web 2.0, MIT

You may know that I’m a big fan and advocate of Twitter and the microsharing concept.  Because I follow what’s said about the product, this morning I spotted that over on Nerd World, a Time/CNN blog, Lev Grossman can’t believe Twitter is winning:

“Why is this still going on? When will market forces and/or cosmic justice weed this useless attention-suck out of the technological gene pool? That’s what recessions are for. “

Lev just hasn’t been shown the value yet and so he’s completely missed the point.  There are plenty of people, particularly in business, who just don’t get it yet.  Similar negative commentary has been given in the past about blogging, or even the telephone when you go back to its early use in business.  The real people to listen to are the innovators and leaders - I’ll give you two examples.  On Twitter I follow @jobsworth - that’s JP Rangaswami of the Confused of Calcutta blog, and one of the most respected CIOs in the UK.  A few days before Christmas (8:39 AM Dec 21st, 2008) he tweeted:

” a newspaper. a bulletin board. a club. an “adda”. a telephone network. Twitter.”

Now I have to admit that I didn’t understand the term Adda, so I had to go check Wikipedia and find that:

“An adda is a form of intellectual exchange among members of the same socio-economic strata”

In a later twitter exchange he explained adda is the key reason he blogs.  So now I see that JP has produced a concise definition, in less than 80 characters, of exactly what Twitter is in terms of the value it can bring you.  For me the combination of club and adda is the most powerful aspect.  Over the last year I’ve had one very particular, personal example of how much my community can help me, as well as dozens and dozens of cool ideas and products that I could follow up on.  Here’s the other expert - Laura Fitton blogged the same concept almost exactly a year ago explaining “Twitter is my Village” and how it can shift from being “idiotic to amazing“.

The other amazing thing is the “other” potential value of Twitter.  Last November various people picked up on Kara Swisher reporting the meeting between top execs at both Facebook and Twitter.  Apparently, negotiations foundered over disagreements on valuation of the share exchange proposed - but the sums involved were reportedly around $500,000,000.  That’s not bad for a company with no revenues, and no published or proposed monetization plan.  Half a billion dollars sounds like quite a return for the founders and investors.   

And all of the above is exactly why Twitter style, microsharing functionality is now part of the product roadmap for WordFrame, and why quite a number of enterprise 2.0 products will be doing the same thing during 2009. 

Technorati tags: Twitter, microsharing, micro-blogging, JP Rangaswami, Laura Fitton, Facebook, WordFrame

Last week some dialogue started between the Enterprise Irregulars on Enterprise 2.0.  Susan Scrupski set a challenge for 2009 to get one of our number, Vinnie Mirchandani,  on to Twitter.  Vinnie is an Enterprise traditionalist who is sceptical about some of the claims of Enterprise 2.0 vendors and what he calls their “egotistical positioning”  of this stuff as some form of Enterprise solution replacement.  That triggered some great interplay and ideas about the topic, ERP and Barely Repeatable Processes - more on that in part 2.  I think E2.0 is significant, both in terms of the value the applications can bring to the enterprise, but also in the management change, even revolution, it can help foster.  All this E2.0 talk reminded me that back just over a month ago Manoj Ranaweera asked me up to his North West StartUp 2.0 event in Manchester to present my take on an introduction to the topic.  I’d forgotten to do a write up, so here are the slides themselves, followed by an explanation of the talk:

I often use Karl Fisch’s Shift Happens presentation to set the scene.  Karl’s a teacher at Arapahoe High School, Littleton, Colorado, but his presentation has gone viral and been seen by millions around the world.  It’s a fantastic explanation of the amazing period of history we live in, combining the rate of change of technology, some staggering statistics, the power of web 2.0, Thomas Friedman’s Flat World, and the rise of China and India shifting the balance of power of the global economy.  The presentation itself is a living example of what can be done on the web today, when you see how the pitch has been picked up, polished, represented and synthesized in so many different versions.  Just Google Shift Happens and see. 
  
I reference the Universal McCann Wave3 survey to highlight the Internet penetration around the World, as well as introducing the various strands of social media as a concept.  We now live in a time where user generated content is exploding as never before - 4,000,000 articles and rising on Wikipedia and 100,000,000 videos on YouTube, with 65,000 being added every day.  If you question whether social media is significant, you only have to look at the numbers:

• 184m Bloggers
• 73% of active online users have read a blog
• 45% have started a blog
• 57% have joined a social network
• 55% have uploaded photos
• 83% have watched video clips
• 39% subscribe to an RSS feed

Last year’s Interactive Advertising Board Status Report highlight’s the shift from broadcast advertising to word of mouth and recommendations.  They say:

“if you’re not on a social networking site, you’re not on the Internet”

Anyone in business has to get their head around the shift from old style marketing based on advertising, to the new style approach of fads and fashions, permission marketing, communities, and consumer power.  My recommendation to customers and colleagues who haven’t yet “got it”, is to go and buy Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae.  That book neatly summarizes all of the ground covered in his previous books and gives a great explanation of New Marketing, the current trends and how you need to change your thinking to deal with them.  I also recommend going back to The Cluetrain Manifesto.  Written by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger back in 1999, but every one of the 95 theses are just as fresh and valid today in dealing with the connected marketplace - remember:

“Markets are conversations.”

Back in May 2006, Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor at Harvard Business School (and an Enterprise Irregular) defined E2.0 as follows:

“Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.”

During Q1 of 2008 Carl Frappaolo and  Dan Keldsen produced their Market IQ report on Enterprise 2.0 for AIIM.  One of the things they tried to do was get consensus on an updated definition:

“A system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise”

They produced an 80 page report with over 70 charts giving a good flavour of how important the enterprise 2.0 topic is to the businesses surveyed.  44% of respondents indicated that it is either imperative or significant.  They also confirmed something I believe very strongly, which is that for this technology age doesn’t matter as much as you think.  Just as many “Baby Boomers” as  “Generation Y” or “Millenials” are the internal champion for e2.0 in their business.  I always tell people that it isn’t a generational thing - we have a world of people in enterprise social media who either “get it”, or they don’t. 

I go on to explain that there are all sorts of practical applications of enterprise 2.0 technologies, each with measurable return on investment, from idea generation to customers service, or from amplifying word of mouth to project collaboration.  One issue we have at the moment, as enterprise 2.0 evangelists, is that there aren’t enough good stories with hard facts yet.  My presentation goes through some of the better ones available to date.  Here in the UK the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales are using WordFrame to provide an online network, which will eventually connect all 130,000 of their members.  This is the online version of the regional groups, special interest groups and faculties that already hold physical meetups.  One, award winning, part of the community called IT Counts is providing IT advice between members for accountants in business and in practice.  SocialMediaToday are using the same technology to provide moderated online business communities for social media bloggers and marketers, or for  leaders of growth stage businesses, or for people interested in how energy choices, technology and markets are shaping the quest for a secure and sustainable future. 

Last year at the Boston Enterprise 2.0 show, one of the best presentations was by Shawn Dahlen and Chris Keohane of Lockheed Martin.  They explained the history and progress of their in-house developed Unity system that is spreading inside the organization.  They started with a small pilot costing $8,000 which worked, and led to the next step which cost $50,000, and then they have steadily grown the team to 40 full time developers building and maintaining the infrastructure.  Their system is based on the Microsoft SharePoint tool kit, as well as Google Search Appliance and Newsgator.  They provide personal space for the individual, team spaces, blogging, wikis, document management, discussion forums, bookmarking and activity reporting.  Although they aren’t the originators of the phrase, their key message for anyone deploying enterprise 2.0 solutions was:

“think big, start small, move fast”

The “stand out” example at last September’s Office 2.0 show in San Francisco was Pete Fields explaining the Enterprise 2.0 Business Strategy at Wachovia (it’s well worth watching the video).  Of course this was just before the worst news of the credit crunch, and then subsequent changes at the bank.  However, at that stage Pete was explaining how they went through almost 18 months of business case and business justification.  Their solution is based on Microsoft SharePoint Server and a collection of tools they have built.  It covers a portal, search, wikis, blogs, enriched profiles and presence.  They have 15,000 active team sites.  They provide more than 6000 web conferences a month, and they have been tracking travel costs to show a saving of $214 per web meeting - hard dollar savings.  They see staff use 100,000 IM sessions daily, and last August saw 46,000 visits to their various company blogs.  Back in September when I spoke to Pete after the session, he told me had a technical team of about 55 people developing, integrating and supporting the tools. 

Another great example is the SAP Developer Network.  For me this is one of the best enterprise examples of recent years.  For a corporation the like and size of SAP to be prepared to open themselves up to their whole developer community in such a transparent manner is a huge step.  This is one of the key messages that we present for enterprise 2.0 - that your company must “be prepared to lose control” in this way.  Their community has grown to over 1.4 million, with 1000 people joining each day.  Back at the last TechEd conference they reported there were 4 million posts and 1 million questions on the forums.  The quality and business value are more important though.  Zia Yusuf, the executive vice president for the platform ecosystem,  told me what he believes is the key benefit.   Before SDN existed it might take anywhere from 12 to 18 months for the company to take a new product or feature to market.  Now with SDN they can get some functions to market inside 3 months - a huge advantage with both cost benefits and revenue generating potential.

I went through some other examples, highlighting that there are a number of approaches that work, and that implementation can be top down, as well as bottom up.  You can use commercially available enterprise 2.0 platforms, low cost “best of breed” tools, or bespoke development.  However, although technology is important, the social factors and your approach to implementing enterprise 2.0 inside your company is much more important to the success of the project.

Ric Roberts, one of the guys I met up there, was kind enough to blog about the event, and I notice that Cynapse put the slides on their blog and their Intranet - thanks guys!
Technorati tags: Enterprise+Irregulars, enterprise+2.0, SAP, Lockheed Martin, Wachovia, AIIM, shift happens, ICAEW, IT Counts

Two weeks ago I posted about a very “web 1.0″ style PDF twitter guide. I actually think this concept of microblogging short messages, somewhere between IM and email as a means of team communication and collaboration is going to become increasingly important in business.  Just like with particular email services like Hotmail, although Twitter might be the best known example at the moment, there will be many services to choose from, and many software providers including the concept in their collaboration platforms.

Laura Fitton runs Pistachio Consulting, a company that specialises in advising companies on this new trend. On her website she says:

“‘Microblogging’ is the industry standard term for applications like Twitter, Plurk, Pownce, Jaiku, but many see it as inaccurate and too ‘inside baseball.’ We prefer ‘microsharing’ which reflects the nature a little more accurately, and isn’t as off-putting to ‘non web2.0′”

I definitely agree enterprise microsharing is a better description. She’s just completed a comparison of 20 (yes 20!) tools and services. You can download the comparison as a PDF, or read it on the Srcribd document sharing service (which in itself is well worth going to have a look at as well):

Enterprise Micro Sharing Tools Comparison 11032008

Some of the tools mentioned in this report could be helping your team collaborate better for little or no cost, except the time involved to sign people up, and learn how to best use them. You should definitely investigate microsharing, and if you need any help or advice - just ask here.

Just as I was writing this I noticed a new service called Tweetworks that apparently started less than 3 weeks ago out of Boston.  This could add useful public and private group functionality to Twitter - I’ll be checking it out in the coming weeks. 

For some time we’ve planned to hook CreativeCoffee Club up with a University in London, as well as wanting to get away fro the Height’s Bar at the St. Georges. The Heights Bar has a great view, and means you can regularly rub shoulders with BBC luminaries and producers, but the coffee is lousy and the service even worse. Open Coffee and Seedcamp just hooked up with UCL, and since this is my old university I made contact with UCL Advances. This is the department with a stated aim to stimulate collaboration among researchers, business and investors with an aim to drive innovations that benefit society and the economy - a perfect fit for what CCC is trying to achieve, and with their help we hope to connect with some interesting people. They’ll be promoting what we do in their e newsletter.

I’ve checked out the two places they offered us as a venue, and I’ve decided we’ll start at the relatively new Print Room Café, run by the UCL Union. It’s in the centre of the campus, but easy to find, with good coffee and food, some comfortable sofas and even tables outside in the courtyard if we’re still there next spring. We’ll move there from tomorrow, 12 November from 10:00 to 12:00 and will be there every other week alternating with CCC Leicester as usual.

From the South side of UCL’s campus, which runs along Torrington Place opposite Waterstones, go along Malet Place, passing the new engineering building on your left and under some construction. Carry on to the end of Malet Place, through the arch in to a courtyard. As you walk down Malet Place, you’ll see the Print Room Café through the arch on the other side of the courtyard. You won’t need to go through any security to get in to the campus or the café, and the natives are friendly. If you really need it, here is their map, but I have to say it’s confusing. The café is in the South Wing marked by a coffee cup near the South Junction entrance. In any case, I’ll be there with my mobile switched on (07715 159423) for anyone who gets lost.

Just yesterday (I’m on US Mountain Time, even if my blog isn’t) I was speaking In Zurich at the first SOMESSO conference. I really enjoyed it, and I’ll say more about the content another time. It was a great event in a quality venue (Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute), with classy food, top class audio visual resources, in stylish surroundings, but guess what? - the conference WiFI service failed several times during the show. Now as you know, I’ve blogged about this topic before and Zoli, Ben Kepes and others have picked up on the subject. Now Ben has suggested the Decent Access Initiative. I’m almost going all Networky (pun very definitely intended) and saying “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more!”

We have to demand decent WiFi access from our technology conferences. I realize it’s not easy. I realize it’s not cheap. I realize that often it’s provided by the venue or the hotel and you have to haggle a service level with them. Maybe the problem is that these places cater for generic conferences, and don’t realize the extra strain on bandwidth that a bunch of twitter happy, live blogging, video streaming tech conference goers will put on your network infrastructure. But I know it can be done well - I’ve seen it at Ismael’s Office 2.0 Conference. You lose so much value without WiFi. Every conference now has an unofficial Twitter back channel, as well as live blogging, and occasionally live streaming video. I “attended” a London Social Media Camp recently, via Joanne Jacobs Apple Mac webcam - it was awesome to be able to dip in for some of the sessions in between family commitments. I got some great insights from following the Web 2,0 Expo in Berlin a week or so ago. So when WiFi works it provides great feedback for the conference organizers, adds value, content and new conversations for the attendees, and broadens the reach of the conference, allowing people to watch or get a flavour of the show from afar. When it doesn’t - it sucks.

So, please join us in the Decent Access Initiative, and always say DAI to our conference organizers.

Update: I completely forgot to mention that my friend Luis Saurez picked up on the topic too in one of his 3 excellent posts on the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin (sorry Luis!). I know he’s planning to post on the topic again - he gets just as angry as me about it.

The ”micro-blogging” service Twitter is heading towards the mainstream as a means to connect with a network of people you trust and admire for advice, and as a source of information.   It gets mentioned on the BBC, or even Fox News, but there are still plenty in the business community, or even the traditional IT and Communications communities who need some help in understanding what it really is and why it’s useful.  I was presenting to 60 people at a CMA event last week, and less than 10 hands went up when I asked who knew Twitter. I’ve been meaning for sometime to write some form of guide, but now one of my twitter friends has written one, so I don’t have to.

As a quick introduction, Wikipedia says:

“Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.”

Twitter’s own website “blurb” says the New York Times calls Twitter “one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet.” TIME Magazine says, “Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app,” and Newsweek noted that “Suddenly, it seems as though all the world’s a-twitter.”

Dennis Howlett, over on IT Counts has said:

“Laura Fitton has written extensively about this based on her own experiences. When I was in Boston earlier in the month we met and were looking for restaurant recommendations. She Tweeted her 5,300 person network and within a minute, four recommendations came back. Voila! This may sound like a trivial example but I see it repeated over and over every day. Everything from “How do I answer this issue?” to “Help, I’m in trouble!” turn up and within minutes, people receive useful responses, often in the ‘direct message’ channel cof their respective networks. “

My friend Luke Razzell has just written an 11 page paper, which you can download here. The paper explains Twitter, with several examples, like Dennis’s above, of how you can get value from the service and your Twitter friends. It has good quotes, and plenty of links. It’s provided in PDF form to make it easy for you to use the web 1.0 method of emailing it to your friends and work colleagues, or even printing it out as a handout. It’s provided under the Creative Commons share alike licence, so feel free to share and distribute it as much as you like, providing you attribute Luke as described in the terms.

I wouldn’t suggest that your company has a “Twitter strategy” in the way that a few years ago you wouldn’t have had a strategy for a particular brand of email service. However, l do think that plenty of products will be incorporating the Twitter concept, which falls somewhere between Instant Messaging and email, and has enormous potential as a collaboration tool. SocialText have incorporated the approach with Social Signals, and it’s already in the roadmap for our product. I’d be very interested to hear about people’s experiences with Twitter and use of Luke’s guide.

Over the last few days I’ve been watching a frustrated twitter stream from presenters and attendees at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. Apparently there has been plenty of WiFi downtime. You would think an organization like O’Reilly, who actually own the web 2.0 brand when it comes to running conferences, would make sure that the twitter crowd (or tweeple) and the blogging fraternity were well served with access and bandwidth. Sadly this is the norm for almost every technology conference I’ve attended in the last year or more. Most recently at last week’s SAP TechEd 2008 in Berlin there were several periods where the WiFi service disappeared, frustrating the bloggers, analysts and press. There was good service with direct wire connections in the blogger and press rooms, but being able to connect from anywhere is essential, both for the people present, and for those of us watching vicariously. For example this morning I could see JP Rangaswami’s slides that had been loaded up in advance of his session “Web 2.0 vs. the Water Cooler: How Web 2.0 Has Changed the Way We Communicate at Work”. Although I wasn’t there, I was able to follow the #w2eb twitter stream while working in a café in Broadwick Street, Soho and get live commentary from people like @elsua, @elsuacon, @frogpond and @lisaharris. Thank heaven it was working today!

The only conference that has got it right that I’ve attended, spoken at or read about in the last 3 years is Ismael Ghalimi’s Office 2.0 Conference. Since the whole premise of the show is to live in the cloud for your office productivity and computing needs, it is logical that everyone attending would want to connect their laptop, netbook, BlackBerry or iPhone to record the event, so WiFi was top priority. In the main conference room there were WiFi repeater boxes on 5 foot stands at intervals down both sides of the room, and the same sort of set up covered all other presentation rooms and meeting areas. The conference was supplied with 40Mbs of bandwidth by laser connection from the conference hotel’s roof. The whole of this was organized, I understand, by Swiscom’s events division. The result - perfect WiFi that worked for everybody from everywhere throughout the event.

But that’s not all - how many conferences have you been to where the sharp guys and gals get in the room early and are connected in corners, or near walls to the few power points available? With Ismael’s conference there were power blocks wired at intervals along almost every row of the conference room. It was always easy to plug in and get power. (By the way, when is battery technology going to make the leaps and bounds that processor speed and memory has done over the last few decades? Maybe the subject of another post sometime!)

So a big shout for Ismael, and a big request for O’Reilly and other technology conference organizers to match up to his standard!

I’ve just arrived back from a very enjoyable 3 days in Berlin at SAP’s TechEd 2008 conference. The theme was “Connect, Collaborate, Co-innovate” and I could see plenty of connections, some good examples of collaboration, and one stand-out example of co-innovation (called ESME - more on that in a later post). It started with Community Day, a multi-threaded not quite “unconference” with sessions for the SAP Developer Network and the Business Process eXpert communities. I mostly followed the BPX oriented track and was struck by the quality of the people presenting, and the BPM execution tool project Galaxy that SAP has on offer. Craig Cmehill organizing for SDN, and Marilyn Pratt steering the BPX crowd did a great job of putting together a good program on the first day, as well as organizing, respectively, Tuesday’s hackers night and the first Process Design Slam. The Slam was, effectively, a business game built around dropping an egg safely from a great height with a limited set of materials to help cushion the fall - great fun, although my team was one of the many who cracked under pressure.

Last week, because of the current economic crisis, SAP implemented a series of cost saving measures including a headcount freeze, limits on travel expenses for internal meetings, and certain projects being put on hold. Speaking to Zia Yusuf, SAP’s Executive VP in charge of the platform ecosystem, he told me, with some feeling, what it was now like to be travelling in economy seat 57E - the cuts being shared across all levels of the company. I agree with him that the cost cutting is obviously the right thing to do, but he recognizes that they will be criticised from many directions - some saying this is a corporate knee jerk reaction in panic, while others will think this is a necessary wake up call which will address some of the waste that goes on inside a company the size of SAP. Personally, I hope some resources get reallocated internally to things like support of SDN and BPX, because there is such good work going on there.

Some of that cost saving and panic showed through on that first community day, where there were some notable absences of people who hadn’t travelled across the Atlantic, the dropping of “giveaways” that had been handed out in the Las Vegas version of the event, and a number of technical difficulties when PCs wouldn’t connect to projectors properly. That’s not like the slick, professional SAP we are used to at all. Sig Rinde and I noticed that, although there were a lot more senior SAPpers involved handling the somewhat nervous introductions at the start of the day, Craig Cmehill shone as the real leader on stage.

Zia’s introduction to the main conference on Tuesday highlighted some very impressive statistics - 50% of the world’s business transactions touch an SAP system somewhere, 1000 people join the SAP community each day, the conference has 308 sessions, is being attended by 4,500 people from 32 countries and 750 companies, including 32 partners. He noted that the SDN and BPX communities are democratizing innovation. The communities have 1.4 million members, who have asked 1 million questions in the forums, and created 4 million posts. That’s quite a community, and the SAP team should be proud.

The main keynote session from Leo Apotheker, SAP’s Co-CEO, highlighted his sales oriented style compared to outgoing Henning Kagermann’s studied, engineering approach from previous events. It was an entertaining presentation, but I was underwhelmed by the lack of content or new announcements. There were some good customer case study examples - Asian Paints transforming itself from just being a commodity paint manufacturer to an end to end supplier of interior decorating services , or Hugo Boss catching up with the likes of Zara in the fashion industry, using technology and rapid feedback systems to move from 4 collections a year to 52. SAP have a strong story, but it seems mostly incremental enhancements and more of the same. Because I’m particularly interested in Software as a Service, there was one thing that stood out for me. At TechEd 2006 in Amsterdam there was a fair amount of airtime given to what was then code named A1S. In 2007 in Munich, what had become Business ByDesign was a key component in the strategy for winning new names for SAP, and we had separate roundtable sessions on the product, and with key customers. In this year’s keynote Business ByDesign appeared on one architectural slide diagram at the end of Leo’s pitch, but wasn’t even mentioned in the words. In a subsequent press and blogger conference, when asked about the product, Leo gave a primarily political sounding answer saying as little as possible and referring the questioner to announcements earlier in the year, and that there was no change. If I was a Business ByDesign customer or partner, I would be pretty worried by the lack of comment in the current strategy vision or compared to previous events. 

Two very interesting initiatives mentioned, that I’ll be writing some more about, are the SAP EcoHub and their collaboration with Innocentive to provide the SAP Innovation and Technology Pavilion. The former is an Amazon style marketplace for SAP applications - that sounds promising. The latter is different kind of marketplace where SAP Ecosystem members - customers, partners and the SAP organization itself- can post challenges and seek help along with their budget price for delivering whatever is required. Partners or individuals can then connect and make money providing solutions or expertise.  You can also check out videos from the whole event to see some of what you missed.

Lastly, a bit of fun. Wednesday evening culminated in a Steve Winwood concert in the main hall. Now I’m a fan, so this was a real highlight for me. However, considering that the vast majority of the audience were just SAP related guys and gals of varying ages who may or may not have even heard of Steve Winwood, remember Spencer Davis Group, Traffic, or Blind Faith, he did a fantastic job. There was much dancing in the aisles and down front of stage, and I don’t know anyone who didn’t have a really great time. He played early stuff, including a particular favourite of mine (Can’t Find My Way Home from Blind Faith), to please the crowd mixed in with his current Nine Lives album. It was awesome. Particular thanks need to go to Mike Prosceno of SAP, who as well as doing a superb job of organizing the Blogger thread in the conference, managed to get us access to the VIP area down the front.