It's about the Tools Adoption Results

I've been spending some time lately with social business and collaboration consultants, Oliver Marks and Sameer Patel, discussing where we're headed with the Enterprise 2.0 industry and the role the Enterprise 2.0 Conference plays as a catalyst for this market. Oliver and Sameer spend their days helping companies - large companies - understand how best to leverage social and collaborative tools. But what I find refreshing in our conversations is that they move very quickly to focus on what we're trying to achieve with these technologies and strategies. How are we utilizing Enterprise 2.0 to achieve demonstrable and measurable results?As an industry we've spent a lot of time discussing the merits of social and web 2.0 tools in business. That's been an important part of the Enterprise 2.0 conversation as I firmly believe that the disparity between consumer technology and business technology has largely fueled the Enterprise 2.0 market.At our Boston conference I heard time and time again, "it's not about the tools, it's about adoption." The burning question was how to change the business culture to better utilize these tools. There's no question that culture and adoption play a massive role in being successful with Enterprise 2.0 but there's more to this.What many Enterprise 2.0 experts and practitioners fail to recognize are the end results they are trying to achieve. Yes, replacing the corporate intranet with a wiki is generally a major step forward for businesses. But the promise of Enterprise 2.0 goes far beyond that, into functional areas within the organization that can also benefit from the underlying framework, strategies and tools that comprise Enterprise 2.0. That's where the real value lies and that's also the trickiest part to fully understand, dissect and integrate with an enterprise-wide strategy.With Oliver and Sameer's help and guidance, our San Francisco conference is going to tackle this challenge through a series of sessions and half-day intensive workshop that Oliver and Sameer will co-chair. The workshop will address how to build a business case for enterprise-scale performance acceleration - a must attend program for anyone tasked with driving a company-wide Enterprise 2.0 strategy. The breakout sessions will look at how an Enterprise 2.0 strategy can unlock value in specific functions within business including; business partner networks; customer support and collaboration networks.Oliver and Sameer are putting tremendous effort into this program to provide attendees with actionable information and best practices. We hope to build on this program at future events so please let us know how this resonates with your interests or suggest topics you'd like them to address:@olivermarks@sameerpatel@swylie650Further discussion on this topic from Oliver and Sameer:

Enterprise 2.0 and the Paradigm of Social Partnerships - Pretzel Logic

How To Sell Collaborative Business Performance Internally - ZDNet