We’re at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference this week, and had the opportunity to present at the unconference portion - Enterprise2Open. Several folks asked for the deck, which I’ve posted below. You can follow us on Twitter here and here if you want to see what we’re up to while we’re here.

Nate did a great job of giving a run down of what BE is doing around Enterprise 2.0. Slides to come.

Oliver Marks blogs about “What is Enterprise 2.0” and what E2.0 means to the corporate IT department - a truly important definition. Getting IT on board the E2.0 bandwagon is the difference between waiting a year for social computing to catch on in your organization and waiting much, much longer. Marks writes that, “At this point it appears that enterprise 2.0 is often seen as a threat to security by most IT department management.” That maybe true, but IT controls some hot commodities that E2.0 evangelists inside corporations want to get their hands on - SSO (most commonly, AD), and a friendly firewall policy, to name a few.

Most importantly, E2.0 foreshadows the eventual transformation of IT from the people who provide your desktop applications to the people who run the machinery that keeps all the user-provisioned, in the cloud apps talking to one another. We all know utility computing is the future - where does IT fit? It becomes a provider of shared services, provisioning user profiles and authentication out to cloud apps selected by end users. Moving to this model will let IT focus on what it does best, and let users focus on what they do best - making their own decisions about what technologies work best for them.

Andrew McAfee reflects on a dinner with Eric Schmidt during last week’s Management 2.0 conference (I’m excited to read the findings; it looks like they get posted later this month). McAfee’s question to Scmidt: What about Google’s management style is so powerful, yet still transferable to other organizations?

“They can learn to listen. Listening to each other is core to our culture, and we don’t listen to each other just because we’re all so smart. We listen because everyone has good ideas, and because it’s a great way to show respect. And any company, at any point in its history, can start listening more.”

- Eric Schmidt Reveals Google’s Secret

So it’s not just the fact that Google has a bunch of people with “145 IQs”. There is something more - decisions are collaborative, and not the exclusive territory of the CxO.

What makes this level of collaborative decision making possible? Enabling technologies are naturally important. But, an open management organization that’s conducive to dialoguing with staff is even more key. Achieving this in modern enterprise is where things get tricky. What Enterprise 2.0 technologies make possible, Management 2.0 should embrace.

To start, I’d suggest organizations try the following:

• Look at areas of your operation where embracing employee input is critical to a successful outcome. Innovation around internal processes, products and service offerings immediately comes to mind. Create islands of managerial flatness here, supply enabling technologies, and create incentives for participation. Enabling technologies here might include an innovation market, like Spigit.
• Break the ice by putting management on the same footing as employees. At my firm, we’ve had a positive experience using the commenting and discussion features of Confluence to allow employees to post questions, and inviting the VPs to answer. The resulting knowledgebase is a searchable way for future employees to get up to speed.
• Give employees a voice: Give any employee who so chooses the ability to blog internally. It’s quick, cheap and an easy way to make employees feel more connected and less alienated. It also gives management a new insight into the ebbs and flows of communications within their organization. The blog post that has 100 + comments and has been read by thousands might be worth listening to.

Earlier this year, amidst intense rabble rousing to herald the arrival of 08, I had what at the time seemed like a vision. Perhaps even an epiphany. Dare I say…a revelation. Admittedly, most things that penetrated my champagne haze were met with an internal “dude…that is a great idea” but unlike my notion of genetically engineering peanuts to grow in butter form, one in particular stuck. It stuck so much that it became a resolution. And now, at roughly lunch time for 2008, I have kept my resolution.

My resolution was to “listen to more talk radio”. (I know, I know…far from earth shattering. But listen, when you start about 25 degrees south of “somewhat informed”, any news will help.) And in keeping my resolution, I had the chance to hear Don Tapscott interviewed on NPR about the applicability of Web/Enterprise 2.0 for government. Thanks to that interview, and a rising demand from clients, I have decided to start a series of posts focused on the specific applicability of Enterprise 2.0 for the government organizations I have worked with either directly or indirectly.

I mused earlier on transparent international development work and am happy to see what I believe are some excellent steps in that direction from the Millennium Challenge Corporation. As a baseline, I think MCC has done an excellent job in adding functionality to their website that fosters a sense of transparency as well as enlightens taxpayers to the challenges of development work. One of the most interesting additions in recent months is the posting of the models used to determine a significant funding driver, the Economic Rate of Return. Additionally, the CEO Blog and Poverty Reduction Blog provide insight into the complex and challenging work of executing billions of dollars of international aid with a staff capped at 300. External stakeholders are waving the 2.o flag and sharing MCC content for the world to see. I believe MCC’s web property is fast becoming a popular and effective way to not only educate, but engage constituents from many perspectives. At the very least, odious SEO jockeys think so.

MCC has undoubtedly made strides toward the Gov 2.0 goal line, but I posit that more can be done. MCC can and should engage the international development online community to not only increase awareness, but to harness their collective intelligence in addressing difficult challenges. The blogs and ERR models are a great step forward, but it is almost transparency for transparency’s sake. Use that transparency to foster a community that not only talks to you, but more importantly, interacts with each other to solve your problems.

• What if instead MCC’s blogs expressed various internal perspectives and gathered external feedback on something like Google’s lobbying to include ICCR obligations in their funding determination?
• What if MCC publicly embraced a pre-existing development professional social network, another development agency, and a professional services firm to orchestrate insight around common problems from otherwise disconnected perspectives?
• What if MCC implemented an idea market for to determine funding priorities of US taxpayer dollars or innovate on solutions to what must be the daunting challenge of breaking new ground in the development world?

With private sector examples of the value of crowdsourcing like the Goldcorp Challenge, it is easy to see the potential crossover into Government 2.0. As a government corporation with an emphasis on operating like a business, MCC is well positioned to realize those same benefits for US taxpayers.