From Burton Catalyst Conference-Barcelona
This week I've been for a couple of days in Barcelona attending the Burton Catalyst Conference, that is the European version of it. I had the opportunity to talk about "Enterprise 2.0, connecting collaboration to the Enterprise Applications" and also to participate in a panel about "New realities in collaboration and content management".
My presentation talked about the merge in the UI of the enterprise application and the content & collaboration capabilities. Both are critical pillars for an effective E2.0 strategy. The corporate view of the Internet mash-up is a framework that provides the means to expose the existing applications and data sources already existing. The corporate view of You Tube is the ability to establish social networks with peers leveraging the new collaborative capabilities like wikis, blogs, tagging,...etc
From the conference itself, I found it very interesting that the Burton analysts covered topics such as "Attention Management" and "Content Analytics". As I've posted before http://javiercabrerizo.blogspot.com/2007/09/information-relevance.html, the management of Attention is going to become a must for modern organizations and technology that helps better do it are going to be critical. Burton's analyst Craig Roth is an expert on the topic: http://knowledgeforward.wordpress.com/
The other area that I found very relevant was the content analysis part. I continue to believe that companies will adopt tools and methods to start understanding what they have as corporate content and how they use it. With the massive growth in volume of content, and the growing relevance for most knowledge workers, this appears to me as a no brainer.
Finally a couple of good questions from the audience. How to manage the growing demand for Internet based collaborative tools that users are asking to adopt? In my view, use what I called an ambidextrous IT approach: keep the discipline on the systems that need it, and be open with ephemeral content that users need to collaborate with. And the second one, which questions companies should be asking that they are not? My answer: If you decided to have one ERP system instead of 5, why are you having 5 ECM systems?
