Enterprise 2.0 Wrap Up - It's About Business Execution

The Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston wrapped up nicely last week. Attendees included a diverse group of practitioners, analysts and vendors who gathered to discuss the best ways to collaborate with employees, partners, and customers. The big take-away for me, and the most notable difference from past events, was a decisive shift from "Enterprise 2.0 solutions are interesting and I think I need to explore them" to "These tools solve real business problems and we must integrate them into our processes to stay competitive."

I think the source of this change in attitude was the realization that success with Enterprise 2.0 comes when collaboration tools are combined with a business process to solve a specific problem. The litmus test of course is business results. Here are two examples that I heard during the expo:

Many companies use recruiting management software to get the right people in the right jobs - these tools are process driven and assist in identifying positions, posting to job boards and recruiters, organizing interviews, collecting feedback and processing offer letters and other messaging along the way. By adding an E2.0 collaboration tool to the end of the recruiting process, companies can extend the benefits of successful recruiting and engagement to employee on-boarding. A new employee can create a profile, locate mentors, easily find information, connect with key contacts and other new employees, join groups and projects that are critical to their new role. It helps the new employee get up to speed faster with the connections and tools they'll need to get work done. It's an integrated process flow from recruiting to on-boarding that provides success metrics for the company and a welcome introduction for the new employee where they can begin to build their "career" brand.

Goal management software is being used by companies to communicate corporate strategies and track individual employee goals. It's a common sense process--to achieve success, everyone on the team has to know how success is defined and how their work contributes to the company objectives. Many times goal execution involves colleagues working together in ways that cross departmental and even organizational boundaries; often to analyze an existing process or create a new process. With CubeTree members can come together, have conversations, create content and produce real results. A collaboration platform is what enables employees to get work done efficiently, using it in conjunction with a goal management process is what makes sure that outcomes are aligned with the business strategy.

Conference goers made it clear that using E2.0 collaboration tools together with business processes for solving business problems is the key to driving E2.0 adoption within companies. This also accounts for the growing sentiment that an enterprise collaborative solution is no longer a nice to have, but critical for accelerating a company's overall business performance.