My Webcom 2009 in a few words

You may have a few ideas of what I liked at webcom if you followed my twitts yesterday, but before going deeper into each topic into future posts, here’s what I found really interesting. Some thoughts, ideas, favorites in a jumble

• Don’t refuse abnormality because it’s tomorrow’s normality. Cycles from the one to the other are getting shorter and shorter. Companies have to understand what something that is abnormal today means. It’s, once again, a matter of culture and its impact on decision making and organizational performance.

• “Open is the future”. Open stack, open mesh, open social.. But there are cases when, according to me, it can be counter productive. Anyway it’s the best (and only ?) mean to fight against personal fragmentation on many social platforms, private or corporate, and to turn into a platform centric world into a people centric one. Everything can be portable, not everything must be. Toward an “open governance” ?

• Turning the pyramid model into a network. Nice, I wrote about that this morning. But this just don’t happen by luck and a preliminary analysis is desirable. I was really impressed by Jessica Lipnack (Netage) presentations and the use of the l’Orgscope. According to me it’s an essential approach to design an enterprise 2.0 project, knowing that it as to articulate with the actual corporate structure and its purpose which is to produce, deliver processes. But it implies a deep understanding of how things are actually getting done today.

• Then came the “usual suspect”. Companies are facing challenges that will force them to adopt new tools. Even if there’s nothing new for those who know him, Claude’s approach, relying on demographic, sociological elements and cross-generation dynamics is still relevant. More than the “2.0″ dream that relies on unexpected serendipity miracles. Another traditional issue is open innovation about which Innocentive is still relevant according to its deep experience and their record of achievements.

• And a little “family touch to end. The very refreshing presentation made by Cyrille de Lasteyrie (CEO  Hellotipi) had two interests. The first was to show how a strong message could be delivered through storytelling without mentionning a product or service. The second is that he made us think about the sociological dimension of social media, about people’s concerns about privacy an about cross-generations dynamics that are made possible by massive social media adoption within the society. I have no doubt that businesses will have a lot to learn  to what will happen in these family networks because the person that walks though his office’s door is the same than the one who shares pictures of his baby with his family. Beyond constrained behavioral changes, his expectations and fears remain the same in his mind.

A last word about the conference itself. Wifi worked perfectly well what does not happen so often in such events. But it was a pity for all those who couldn’t attend that the streaming didn’t work (but all the videos will be put online soon).

It was my second time at webcom (always in may…I’m affraid of the weather at the november session ;-) ). I attend very few conferences to protect myself from the “bowl” effect : always being with people who think like you often makes you forget the “real enterprise”. Here, a lot of “real” people, looking for answers to their concerns, I really had the impression that something is transmitted instead of self-contragulating among “experts”. Of course, there were the speeches (interesting, no bla-bla that only highlight the speaker without any value for the audience), the business contacts…but also a human contact with the people, the city, I hardly find elswhere. A business event that makes you feel well is so rare…

It’s really worth crossing the ocean. Anyway, we don’t have such a “web, business and enterprise” conference in France. A real pity.

Entreprise 2.0, hiérarchie, innovation participative, montreal, netAge, open innovation, organigrammes, organisation, orgscope, réseaux-sociaux, web-2.0, webcom, webcom2009,décision,performance organisationnelle,

Webcom 2009 : My schedule

As promised, this is the schedule of the speeches I’ll attend tomorrow. We shared the work out with the other bloggers.

We will all cover the plenary keynotes, and I’ll focus more particularly on :

• 8h50 : Case Study : Who do you think we are? Opening our information architecture to the outside world.Maybe you’ll wonder what’s in it for me. My purpose will be to rely on this case in order to understand if it can apply to an internal problematic and to what extent employees can be involved in the design of the corporate information system.

• 10h00 : The New Normal: the Web as a High-Performance Tool in a Shifting Economy. You can guess why I will attend just by reading the summary. At the same time, I would have liked to hear Caroline Allard speaking about Corporate Indentity through Social Networks for obvious reasons. It doesn’t matter since Caroline promised me an individual interview, what will make it simplier for me to have her insights on more specific issues.

• 10h40 : Real intranet tools to boost communication & innovation in the enterprise.  No need to explain….

• 11h20 : Open Innovation – the fuel for growth and change. Essential, isn’t it ? It’s been such a long time I’ve been looking at what Innocentive is doing…

• 14h10 : Knowledge, skills, and information-sharing: balancing new technology and human potential to add value to your organisation

• 14h50 : Panel: Data Portability does this means something for YOU ! ? My purpose here is to get the essential basics in order, afterwards, to widen it to internal corporate issues and, later again to think about data portability between personal and business platforms. People are more and more torn between many platforms to the same things in different contexts although they are only one unique person. I don’t think this unproductive situation will be able to last a long time at the current pace.

So, see you tomorrow on twitter, starting at 8h00. I think I’ll make live coverage, trying to add a thought here and there. I’ll try to mix french and english in order to please all my followers. Afterwards I’ll try to provide you with more deeper analysis. It may take a little time since my days are unfortunately only 24hrs long ;-) and I want to take the most from my vacation week in Montreal and see all my friends here.

Humm…. and don’t limit yourself to me. On twitter (and elsewhere) the official tag will be… webcom2009

conférence, Entreprise 2.0, montreal, web2.0, webcom, webcom2009