Enterprise 2.0 Preview: Leading The Charge For Change

Enterprise 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, Calif., will start fast and just keep moving.

When Enterprise 2.0 kicks off on Monday, Nov. 14, with a series of workshops, the first keynotes will follow Monday night rather than waiting for Tuesday, as in past years. Keynotes will follow the fast-paced format introduced at the June conference in Boston. "We want them to be very quick and to the point, so each keynoter gets 20 minutes to speak," said Paige Finkelman, general manager for Enterprise 2.0 and The BrainYard.

One broad theme she sees across the keynotes, workshops, and sessions is "leading the charge for change," meaning both technological and organizational change.

Enterprise 2.0

"I love doing opening keynotes, so I can tell people how to be skeptical for the rest of the week," said Daniel Rasmus, author of "Listening to the Future" and "Management by Design." As a specialist in scenario planning, he will be reporting on "Lessons from Organization Next," a workshop that challenges participants to rethink how they would manage their organizations into the future--actually a few different futures. Part of the exercise is to consider the impact of some radically different futures, from "freelance planet," where today's trend away from employment to self-employment is carried to extremes enabled by collaboration technologies, or "falling skies," where terrorism and financial calamity make the world fall apart, making the challenge how to rebuild and start again.

"The primary thing I'm trying to communicate is the insight that the world of tomorrow is going to be different from today," Rasmus said. "But even under the fog of uncertainty that overlays the world, there are techniques you can use to think through and analyze what could come."

Other keynotes will range from Don Tapscott on how macrowikinomics can help cure what ails our economy to Box CEO Aaron Levie on his vision for bringing Web 2.0 standards into the enterprise.

Part of Wednesday's program will be an enterprise gamification panel discussion moderated by gamification guru Gabe Zichermann, with panelists from SAP, Bunchball, and Squidoo.

[A gamification pioneer aims to transform itself into much more. See Badgeville Takes Cue From Facebook With 'Behavior Graph.']

"Gamification has been a somewhat of a fringe topic at past Enterprise 2.0 shows, but this time we're bringing the conversation to the main stage," Finkelman said. "We're also gamifying the conference," she added, noting that DoubleDutch is providing a mobile application which will help attendees track their conference activity and gain recognition for their participation.

Another major trend, the consumerization of IT, will be the subject of a mainstage panel moderated by Byte editorial director Larry Seltzer. Panelists will include Robert Scoble, the blogger, author, and technology evangelist, and Oliver Marks, co-founder of the Sovos Group, change management expert, and chair of the conference track on people, culture, and internal communications.

Because Enterprise 2.0 is as much about people and organizations as it is about technology, human resources management--as enabled by technology--has always been a major theme of the conference. Marks said that program theme will get off to a good start with "The Evolution of Talent Management," featuring Mark Bennet of Oracle and Andrew McCarthy of Ultimate Software, "two seasoned professionals who know the evolution of enterprise needs for HR technology extremely well."

Attendees will also get a glimpse about how Facebook uses social software to "manage their 3,000-person internal culture, half of whom are 'millenials.' Molly Graham will discuss how their rapidly evolving culture is geared up for bold, fast-moving growth and evolution," Marks said. Technology provider Rypple will provide additional insights into what it's been like to work with Facebook.

Social software is also increasingly important in sales and marketing, and the programming on that track will focus on case studies and practical lessons, said Sameer Patel, a partner at the Sovos Group.

"I'm really thrilled that we've been able to make this a 100% practitioner track this time," Patel said. "There's only one panel, and everything else is deep case studies." Also, although some of the case studies feature technology companies and other early adopters like Citrix and Toshiba, the program also features mainstream corporate organizations like SuperValu, 24 Hour Fitness, and Aetna. For example, "SuperValu has really a tremendous case study how using collaboration tools as part of an overall global strategy allowed them to become sort of a hyperlocal company," Patel said.

Other conference tracks will cover social media architecture, video and unified communications, internal and external community management, and mobile computing.

My participation will include chairing the technology leadership track, moderating a Tuesday morning panel discussion on "Designing Social Applications," and assisting UBM community manager Ted Hopton with a Tuesday afternoon "BrainYard Birds of a Feather Discussion"--an opportunity for us to brainstorm with our readers on topics including mobile apps and corporate transparency.

See you there.

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard

Attend Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara, Nov. 14-17, 2011, and learn how to drive business value with collaboration, with an emphasis on how real customers are using social software to enable more productive workforces and to be more responsive and engaged with customers and business partners. Register today and save 30% off conference passes, or get a free expo pass with priority code CPHCES02. Find out more and register.