Earlier this week I attended the 1st meeting of the newly formed ‘Web 2.0 Forum‘, hosted by GAIT, a prominent Knowledge Management consulting company in Israel. The meeting was held at an insurance company who’s CIO is a true collaboration evangelist, who single handedly transformed the IT in that company, and brought it to the 21st century.
The participants of the forum included colleagues and friends, vendors and customers, from every aspect of the IT arena – tech, academic, business, HR, knowledge management and consulting. It was very refreshing doing a round table with colleagues who share my passion, and I thank Gil (GAIT) for inviting me to the forum. The next meeting will be hosted at IBM, where I’ll expose the forum to some of the super cool platforms and solutions IBMers are using daily, and to the Lotus Collaboration solutions that spur from our own experience.
One of the Web 2.0 Forum goals is to increase the penetration of web 2.0 technologies and platforms into the business, and one of the main points from the round table the participants had revolved around the difference between Web 2.0 (facebook, blogs, linked-in, twitter, etc) and Enterprise 2.0 (Portals, social software, collaboration, social bookmarking, etc).
Although Web 2.0 is alive and kicking in Israel, personally I feel that Enterprise 2.0 isn’t here yet. It’s knocking at the door, pleading the security guy to let her in, but no access. Blocked.
Web 2.0 Forum should help all knowledge advocates in Israel to change that.
Later that week I met with a prominent pharma customer, who attended LCTY Israel late March. After the event, during lunch, we started talking about their interest to build ‘something’ at their infrastructure, that would increase the collaboration and sense of community at the workplace. I noticed that although they were very positive about collaboration and community, their organization didn’t share their enthusiasm. There is work and there is fun – and right now, Web 2.0 is categorized under fun. That’s exactly why Web 2.0 Forum is important – to change the culture, and making CIO/CTO/CEO understand that Enterprise 2.0 = Growth.
That’s quite a chllenge, but hey, I didn’t say it’s gonna be easy… 🙂
In that context, of changing the mindset regarding the business value of Enterprise 2.0, a presentation I gave at Knowledge Management Summit, early March – Understanding Social Networking – Getting Started.
