Office 2.0 – GTD with Office 2.0

We’re getting a 3-minute demo of the following apps:

• Vitalist – created in Poland, looks nice; but I’m so happy with the way OmniFocus is coming along that I’m unlikely to be moving to an enterprise 2.0 tool myself.
• Smartsheet – this looks wonderfully cool, going way beyond what you can do with Excel. The permission structure is very granular – people can be able to only edit some portions. This looks to me one of the most promising apps here today.
• Nozbe – also looks nice, love the paper integration as well. The integrated timetracking is something that I’ve been trying to obtain for some time.
• PlanHQ – GTD for company planning. Looks great!
• Ismael shows how he uses Salesforce for GTDing contacts.

The discussion from this point on became very interesting to participate in, so I couldn’t blog anymore :D

Office 2.0 – Enterprise collaboration

Dan Farber just started a very lively panel discussion asking Gafni from SAP if they use Zimbra. Sam Lawrence has the approach that the most important is to make it very simple to work with people you work with and new people. Focus on making it very easy. Oliver Marks of Sony hosts a worldwide collaboration platform online for Sony PS developers – offering a lot of support. Paul Pedrazzi of Oracle says that the siloed apps was that way for a reason, but is shifting the approach towards an app lab. They launched a social network, putting the person at the center of everything – by giving others the ability to see the entire picture of a person. Simons of BEA touches a sensitive point: web 2.0 needs to plug more into what already exists, whereas fun is what we usually think about re 2.0.

Openness in enterprises? Sony is prepared to pay handsomely for the source code but won’t consider anything hosted. Companies are starting to look at the possibility of sharing, looking at what other companies are doing.

What are people doing to implement? SAP trying to understand what can be transparent in an organization and what cannot? Zimbra has a real estate agency client who has no way to share content quickly among each other, share presence data – but know they can have competitive advantage by making this underlying data available.

The notion of “people-centric”; the social web is however very challenging for companies. Farber asks what are the experiences of the participants. Pedrazzi decided to not ask for permission, but just build using the same login and using the HR data. Just sent an email to launch, propelling from 3 to 8000 people within one day. What triggers implementation – improving communication so that the friction goes down. Social networks allow people to focus.

The sales cycle of social computing adoption into the enterprise – you need to get an approver at the enterprise management level.

If customers are being exposed to the technologies – what are the vendors doing to satisfy that need?

Probably the greatest question: suites OR interoperability? People will do what they want anyway; the power is swinging to end users. If you design the applications right, users can integrate very easily. The consensus seems to be on mashable modules rather than suites.

What’s still missing? More and more content types. Time zones are still a problem. It is also much easier to consume than to create – in Oracle, wikis are already adopted, but blogs are only now being explored.

Of all of the people on the panel – Oracle, SAP, Sony – nobody is at all excited about videoconferencing. Confirms what I have thought for a long time – videoconferencing gets much more media attention (on account of being so sexy) than it pragmatically deserves.

Office 2.0 – Mindmapping

I have been live mindmapping the session on MindMapping here. Later in the day I’ll try to upgrade to a pro account so I can actually embed it here, but for now, the MindMeister map is public.  MindMeister very generously made a gift a a pro membership to me… but WordPress flushes out the embed code when I try to place it here. If anyone has a solution, please let me know.

Enjoy!

Office 2.0 – Online communities

Finnern told us the key to having a large number of community participants is to give out iPhones :D

The first question: where do we start? We are in a different place than we were; we’rea learning how social communities work. The rise of social web is driven by its utter simplicity – driving enormous growth. Most of the content is created by “us”, propelling the peer production model. The blogosphere is the biggest conversation in the world.

Self-formed communities – ex. KatrinaList. CafeMom is a sample of a real-people social network vs. SV network. Average people in an organization will not have time to adopt these tools. This is something that we have not yet found a solution for.

Problems: the 2% troublemakers; the 9x problems (new tools must be nearly 10 times better for people to have incentive to switch – Harvard research). Many are concerned that 2.0 will decrease productivity [and we're all so excited about how they increase productivity?].

Diane Davidson – found that when people say bad things, approaching them directly solved the problem. After some time, WebEx found people asking “can we do this in a community?”

Robert Duffy – Intel is opening up, looking at social media to make sure they keep being relevant. Participating not just internally but also going out to other places where discussions are going on as well.

Mark Finnern – finds that most of the growth on SAP’s communities for business processes consulting comes from word of mouth.

Josh Hilliker – when launching Intel vPro, wants to talk to the people within partner organizations who are bloggers passionate about silicon. Research is moving from talking to individuals in enterprises about what they want – to talking to the community as a whole.

Mike Walsh – talks about companies outside of the usual adopters (hi-tech industry) looking at online communities and obtaining great benefits?. [This is something that I am very interested in. Does anyone know of a company in the construction industry using enterprise 2.0?] Mike gives two interesting examples that I will have to look at: Dwell.com and Autodesk communities. I wonder

Comment from the audience: “Community can be a nice way of saying that we are shifting the burden of tech support unto our customers.” Diane sees it more as broadening of what gets done, a win-win situation. Offering joint ownership of our products [Apple, where are you?] Josh makes a good point that community is faster than support.

Audience asking for 5 tips on how a start-up can build a community. Answers:

• start with a great product
• one-on-one relationship
• listen and react so people feel heard
• hire your top contributors
• set your goals so people internally are on the same page
• find your greatest advocates
• market the community
• keep it open as much as possible (a minimum of private areas)
• reward people for providing good content and participating

What resources to allocate for launching a small community and growing it?

• do you want to build your own platform or buy? integrated or best-in-breed?
• WebEx had almost no resources internally
• need to find people internally who are willing to change the way they work
• Intel has a few positions of “Community Manager” (Josh’ position). Very very nice!
• Josh also makes the point that launching communities in Intel is very much like a start-up
• Intel has a goal of shifting the content to the community and ultimately spinning it off

Very nice panel, thanks to all the panelists!

Office 2.0 – Knowledge Worker 2.0

Stephen Collins has an interesting point about the KW 2.0 being cross-generational. They wnnt to know how they can give and get value. This is perceived as a lack of loyalty – when it is in fact just looking for value. They will then walk out the door with a wealth of unshared information.

How to make sure they are engaged? Give them a community – let them collaborate will colleague. Need for awareness; these people love to share. People get demoralized at work when the effort they put in doesn’t get recognized. It is very important to have a Learning organization culture. Silos kill knowledge sharing – you need to kill walls. KW 2.0 dont’ have respect for authority: this derives from knowledge rather than power. Need to have management validate the new working style. The metrics around what you’re doing need to be changed: the output should count, not the number of hours they spend there.

Office 2.0 – Death of the app

Live notes

Killing off the idea that an app is selected by the IT group. The boundaries of a personal app vs. a company app is on its way out. Apps are dissapearing because you no longer think about the app itself, only about the things you’re trying to get done. Focusing on the end user. .. with each one being different in the way they accomplish their work. All the apps that are half-baked… they all need databases to run on. The economics of innovation have changed.

We have lots of little apps… will it continue? Will users have to integrate them? Or still the buy and consolidate platform?

If users don’t care about the app anymore, is it becoming a commodity?

We don’t really say it, but I see that everyone is wishing the IT department to be dead.

Etelos iPhone application for Office2.0

Some quick thoughts on the very nice platform that Etelos has provided for Office 2.0:

• The profile asks for our blog RSS, but automatically puts an http:// in front of it, rendering it useless.
• If the blog RSS can be fixed, where can we watch everybody liveblogging during the conference?
• The business card replacement is absolutely marvelous. Yesterday, at the Unconference, I flinched every time I had to exchange business cards. However… where can I see a list of the people to whom I have sent my information? Edit: within a couple of hours, Etelos solved this.

Office 2.0 Unconference – continued

Ah, the tyranny of bloggers. I’ll post more about the panel discussion on emerging economies on BusinessIdeas.ro.

At yesterday’s Unconference, I participated in the following discussions:

1. Introducing disruptive technologies
2. How can Office 2.0 vendors make money
3. Does the virtual enterprise really exist?
4. Enterprise 2.0 in emerging economies
5. Productivity in office 2.0

Interesting takeaways and further questions:

• Once a Web2.0 product “succeeds”, it quickly loses coolness (see graph). J. C. MacDonald said that once Groove sold out to Microsoft, it “feel off the cliff of coolness”. If coolness (“Whuffie“) is the currency of choice in the Web2.0 world, and monetary success quickly brings a coolness penalty, what are the long-term options for 2.0 business?
• Disruptiveness is relative. I fully agree with Neil Raden’s point that (paraphrasing) “disruptive” is a coward’s synonym for innovation.
• Dave Mosby raised the very interesting question of how to raise pain awareness. Self-protective denial keeps people sane (“We manage just fine with email!”). I look forward to exploring this question throughout the conference, maybe in the Culture and Technolgy panel later in the day.
• Robin Carey shared some very thought-provoking ideas on the way social media could be used in NGOs and for social issues reporting. I will certainly follow up on this theme, as I find it tremendously promising. This recent Economist article is a good introduction (also covered in more detail by the excellent Humanitarian.info).

By the way… Twitter is still down. Very bad timing for me, as I was looking forward to twitterring through the conference.

Office 2.0 Unconference

Back from the Office 2.0 Unconference and opening cocktail.

The Unconference was extremely rich in content and people met. A number of people suggested it takes a day or so to digest the discussions. So I will be heeding their advice and waiting until tomorrow to post more details about it.

In San Francisco for Office 2.0

I have just arrived in San Francisco; the next three days I’ll be participating in the Office 2.0 conference. To be exact, in the Unconference for the first day.

I’ll follow up with some thoughts for the panel discussion I’ll be participating in: Culture and Technology.

If anyone else is participating and wants to meetup, let me know at serrin@hivetalk.info, +1 626 807 8269, or http://twitter.com/Serrin. At about 500 participants, it’s certainly going to be an exciting event.