Feb 9th, 2009 |
It’s ironic that sessions that talk about how Web 2.0 tools and practices work in the enterprise don’t naturally fit into any of our tracks. Not that we haven’t always had sessions on this topic; you’ll find them scattered throughout the other tracks, especially Fundamentals and Strategy & Business Models. We’ve also addressed how specific roles and functions make Web 2.0 a part of how they work: the conversation sounds a little different for designers restructuring teams than for marketers or developers, so there have always been talks in those tracks just for those communities. But they way we chose to organize the content, most of the sessions end up describing customer-facing strategies.
For such an essential subject, we decided that cramming these sessions into a variety of other tracks didn’t do it justice. After all, Web 2.0 at Work is finally getting really interesting. As with any sea change, the discussion is at first mostly theoretical, with real-world examples scattered thinly around the landscape. We’ve been absorbing, processing, and integrating these principles into the fabric of our work now for several years, and change takes time. For the majority of businesses, we are only starting to see real results on a significant scale now. Sleek, savvy startups have signaled what’s possible, but they’ve never had to deal with entrenched cultures and technologies. Pilot projects in enterprises have shown promise (and pitfalls), but if our goal is system-wide evolution (or for the more ambitious, revolution), we need to see what happens when this stuff gets into the lymph nodes of the organization.
So in addition to several other sessions that live in other tracks, we’ve added four sessions on Friday dedicated to Web 2.0 at Work. A couple of them are still in discussion, but one I’m particularly excited about comes to us from the smart folks at IDEO, who saw the problem of enterprise collaboration as a perfect place to apply design thinking. By linking the needs and rewards of the organization to those of the individual participants, they’ve found ways to achieve high adoption rates in their own internal collaboration efforts. Doug Solomon and Gentry Underwood will share their experiences on the last day of the conference.
Other sessions you won’t want to miss include:
Economics 2.0: Highly Effective Strategies for Putting Your Business on a Recession Diet, from Dion Hinchcliffe, Enterprise Assets are Going Virtual, from Denis Browne of SAP Labs, and Stowe Boyd’s The Open Enterprise: How Web Tools And Culture Are Remaking Business.
And stay tuned for updates as we flesh out this track over the coming weeks.
[...] subtitle is “How to rethink work in the 21st century,” which fits nicely with the new mini-track Jen wrote about recently, Web 2.0 at [...]