Notes on Derek Burney, "Amplify the Impact of Your People with Enterprise 2.0 Technologies"

Derek Burney is the General Manager of the SharePoint Platform and Tools group at Microsoft.

Key talking points:

• People drive business outcomes. They develop customer relationships, improve operations, drive innovation, and build partner connections.


• A new world of work ...




• Key trends ... one world of business, always on always connected, changing workforce dynamics (the baby boomers are retiring, and taking with them key organizational knowledge ... it's being replaced by the 20'something millenials who have a different way of communicating and collaborating), and consumer adoption of Web 2.0 tools.


• Role of software ... simplify how people find each other and work together, find information and improve business insight, help retain and share knowledge, and build communities across organizational silos.




• A business productivity infrastructure needs to deliver unified communications (simplifying how we communicate with others), business intelligence (so individuals can track what's important to them), enterprise content management (forms management, content management, document management, Web content management, and associated processes), collaboration (via various tools -- wikis and blogs, expertise search, RSS, social networking, profiles, presence), and enterprise search (to connect people to the information they need), with a few other underlying platform things.


• There are four types of people that need to be enabled to help the organization succeed ... employees, community, customers, partners / suppliers / contractors / joint ventures. Eg, Disney ... has a complex of partnerships and networks. Five ways to amplify ...




1. Promote expertise and build communities in your organization ... getting the right people in the right place at the right time. But whereas this has traditionally been defined by job type and organizational level, this doesn't always work. Expertise isn't found in those structures, all the time. There are informal networks of expertise ... this is a great boost to productivity and effectiveness. Microsoft's approach to profiling expertise is the "My Site" in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Something are generated automatically, others are manually edited.


2. Strengthen customer relationships ... Driving marketing, sales and customer support through Enterprise 2.0 technologies. Core drivers = revenue and growth, web-based economies of scale, community creation as evangelism and support, and community leader advantage. Examples include WiseWoman (from The Body Shop), and mytalk.com.au.


3. Build next generation applications ... Next-generation applications take the ease-of-use of the front end with the power and depth and structure of data from enterprise applications. Microsoft argues that these applications are easier to use, more configurable, collaborative, and contextual, because people are using well-known front-end tools, eg, Office, and the capabilities for collaboration and more are integrated directly, rather than being something different. Another type is corporate mashups, to allow people to easily integrate data across the Web. Mashups are increasingly easy to build, through tools like Silverlight, Popfly (currently alpha), and more.


4. Unify your communication modalities ... One survey found that people get 51 messages a day through 7 different systems.


5. Accelerate product development and innovation ... Enabling that community of customers to interact with you through the development process. If you involve customers in the beginning of the development process, you can get tremendous benefit

At the conference, Microsoft announced the new Community Kit for SharePoint V2.

Summary: Enterprise 2.0 software and services can help drive innovation, community and value. Think about application scenarios across your entire network. Maintain the balance between empowerment and control.

Comments

[Roger Jennings]

Pingback from http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/linq-to-sharepoint-02-alpha-to-meet.html

[Sandy Kemsley]

I found Burney's talk to be a bit too much of a vendor product pitch. My notes on this session at http://column2.com/2007/06/enterprise-20-derek-burney/