Ben’s Blog

Today was a long day indeed.  After waking up late I rushed downstairs to grad a quick bite to eat and some coffee before heading into today’s first breakout session: “Work Green, Work Virtually” with Jessica Lipnack and Jeff Stamps.  I was a little disappointed that there was such a low turn out for this session but it allowed those of us in the room to have a good conversation on many topics ranging from politics, oil, green initiatives and finally virtual teams.  After hearing some of the barriers people encounter when trying to setup a flexible work environment I was thankful that our office is fairly laid back.  I am also more driven to find creative ways to meet virtually with clients and peers on other campuses at GVSU.

Next the entire group filed into the ballroom for the large sessions focused on Enterprise 2.0 initiatives in practice.  First up was Mark Woolen (VP CRM Product Strategy) from Oracle.  His 20 minute session morphed into a 45 minute sales pitch which threw off the entire morning’s schedule - judging by audience reaction most people tuned out at the 10 minute mark.  Thankfully, Pete Fields (Senior VP, eCommerce) from Wachovia Bank came up next and did everything right.  He focused his discussion on making a case for Enterprise 2.0 technology based on what he heard us asking in other sessions - wow, he tailored his presentation to the audience.  I could tell he passionately believed in the direction he was leading Wachovia and shared some insights that I hadn’t considered before.  A couple take aways would include:

1. He was able to finance Enterprise 2.0 initiatives by working with managers who gave him 5% of their annual travel budgets in return for collaborative tools.
2. A large portion of the work force will soon be leaving and taking a tremendous amount of knowledge with them.  It is in any organizations best interest to download this info into some tool for others to access before this happens.
3. Incoming generation Y employees have grown up with tremendous social networking and collaborative tools - they expect to have access to these in the workplace to do their work and are often stifled by the lack of the “social aspect” and often disengage or leave because of bureaucracy or environments that are too rigid.

Pete later appeared on a panel with other presenters and again gave some great tidbits of information.  I think next year he would be a great keynote speaker as he seems to really “get” this stuff and sums it up so well.

After lunch I attended a couple more breakout sessions - I was really looking forward to both of these, but the first session on mashups was a dud.  The panel that was assembled to discuss mashups seemed to be limited to sales/marketing experience and when asked for practical applications of mashups, or cool mashups they had seen, it was a struggle to find anything that didn’t involve a map.  The second breakout was titled “Making Wikis Ridiculously Successful,” and this was interesting.  The conversation ballooned to include blogging, micro-blogging and knowledge management.  Some take aways included:

1. Let go.  Trust employees to manage the content and don’t worry about their content. Find a balance between policy, risk tolerance, and culture.
2. Seed the wiki/blog/fill in the blank with content and evangelize the tool pre-launch.

Finally, a question was posed on how do organizations account for time spent blogging or contributing to a wiki.  Specifically, if employees bill for their hours or attribute all their time to a client or project, how do you account for time spent on these tools.  There wasn’t a real answer to this, but there was an underlying worry in the room that these initiatives may just be a time-suck for their employees.  I guess go to take away 1 above - just trust that employees are smart enough to find their own balance.

Was the day really this long?  Next came the social/beer/mingle with vendors time downstairs.  I saw most of what I wanted to see the day before but there were some new faces in the room and I spent a little more time in the Microsoft booth.  I dropped a card in the drawing for a Zune and I won!  Anyone need an 8gb Zune?

Finally, the last item on the schedule was a 6-8pm panel discussion between a couple vendors in the social networking space.  I’m not sure what the takeaways were, but the conversation was amusing and the panel worked so well together in answering the audiences questions.  I’m glad I stuck around for this - it was a lot of fun.

At this point it was 8:30pm and I had yet to step outside; once I did I found the heat had broke and it was beautiful outside.  I walked a little, picked up the T and found a little Italian restaurant where I ordered the special despite having no idea what the waitress said.  I picked up something about shrimp and what I thought was clams over linguine.  Turned out to be a plate full of whole mussels in the shell with a couple shrimp.  The special was great - I wish I knew what it was so I could order it again sometime.

And to think, there is still one more day to go!