Cultural change and Enterprise 2.0

- Is the “right” corporate culture the basis or an effect of successful e2.0 projects? -

Anja Wittenberger

In the context of enterprise 2.0 there is an ongoing discussion about the following question: 

“Do we have to change the corporate culture to be successful with the internal and external use of social media or is the cultural change a result of the consistent transformation to an enterprise 2.0?”

In addition to the general discussion my daily consultant experience clarifies that task. In customer projects I usually introduce to the clients how to use a wiki as a tool for preparing, executing and wrapping up meetings, for instance live reporting during the meeting by all participants.
Obviously it’s an easy and simple option to gain a higher benefit.
All participants agree that they have to handle many daily tasks which now can be processed with much more efficiency and transparency by using collaboration tools. The pleasure at work increases and they feel more confident and satisfied.
It’s easy to see that a wiki prospectively will be a standard tool during meeting like a flipchart or beamer.

Often the following objection arises: “But we can`t believe, that this is working within our corporate culture.”

So in my opinion two questions come up:
(1)  Is the “right” corporate culture or the relevant corporate evolution in connection with enterprise 2.0 the foundation for a success? or
(2)  Is the cultural change an effect for the successful evolution to an enterprise 2.0?

Improving Talent and Skill Management with Social Media in an Enterprise 2.0

In order to start a Enterprise 2.0 initiative you have to first build up Social Media skills within the company says Ellen Trude from Bayer Business Services. Offer a workshop or an information presentation about your own experience and ways of using Web 2.0.  But in order to do that you have to define the target group first and what the targets are.

The idea behind “Enjoy Social Media” is to provide the users with enough Social Media Literacy so that they can act upon independently in the Web 2.0 environment. Here fore a Social Media Skill Matrix with the three layers “Knowledge”, “Skill” and “Approach“ has been developed, the project got approved and the budget provided in order to build a learning environment designed through workshops.

Social Media Education at Bayer formally consists of  a Project Skill Matrix, a learning environment, workshops and customized solutions as well as presentations. The learning environment consists hereby of the curriclum, standards fort the „virtual trainers“ and the platform itself. Furthermore it consists of five different learning steps separated into two different levels (Discoverer & Explorer). The  five learning steps according to the social technographics level  are:

Implementing Enterprise 2.0 into Established Companies

Last week I had the chance to join the Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2010 in Frankfurt. Thanks to Bjorn Negelmann and Cathrin Gill for this opportunity for me and Milos by the way. After two days of interesting presentations and use cases and inspiring discussions I had much input to think about. So I decided to write my thoughts and my new gained knowledge down.

How to Implement Enterprise 2.0 into Established Companies?

In most cases, Enterprise 2.0 will be implemented into existing and established companies, often with an old history and a well known corporate culture which was developed over long periods of time. So implementing Enterprise 2.0 into such companies can be difficult. There might be resentments against this approach, maybe because the company failed like so many others in implementing the model of knowledge management not too long ago. But there can be other “fears“ too. Enterprise 2.0 changes the work behaviour of employees, it changes the role of mid-level management and the top-management; knowledge will be organized in another way. All these changes can lead to resentments in a company.

The Role of an Enterprise 2.0 - Manager

collaborative work of a generalist with pronounced business comprehension within a cross-functional team

Anja Wittenberger

This was one of the open space topics at the Enterprise 2.0-Summit 2010 in Frankfurt am Main. The probably most important European conference in the field of Enterprise 2.0 was filled with very helpful input and talks with other E2.0 experts. During the second day of the conference an open space took place with the leading question “What is the role of an E2.0-Manager?” and “Which tasks does he have and what kind of skills does he need?”

This text will give you a short summary of the outcomes of this open space topic.

At first, we clarified for the whole group that an E2.0-Manager is not a community manager and has a different range of responsibility. In details this means, that the E2.0-Manager is the person, who clears the way of change for enterprise 2.0 within an organization or company. He furthermore is responsible for the community managers within the company.
However, this discussion brought the group to the question, if this person can really be the type of manager in the conventional way? The discussion group negated this.

In fact he or she is:

Social Software - An Enterprise Perspective - Part 3: SWOT Analysis of Micro-Blogs

Today we are continuing our series on Social Software- An Enterprise Perspective with part 3, the SWOT Analysis of Micro-Blogs.

History & Definition

Noah Glass and Jack Dorsey from Odeo Inc. first began to experiment with the idea of an micro-blogging application in March 2006. In 2007 at the SXSW interactive festival twitter was first located at flat panel displays. This can be defined as the birth of twitter. Here and here you can find two impressions from the early days of twitter.

Microblogging is also known as micro-messaging or micro-sharing within a network. In this network colleagues share information with short messages (140-characters). This messages can be used as sort of a status update and can be shared, viewed and even posted mobile.