FuturTech 2008

FuturTech is the University of Michigan's premier business and technology conference, bringing together thought leaders and top talent from large companies, small business, non-profits, and academia. Events include a tech fair, panel discussions, two keynote speakers, and a case competition. FuturTech is organized by students from the Ross School of Business, the College of Engineering, and the School of Information.

Morning Keynote

Jason Beckerman, founder and CEO of Teach The People, gave the opening keynote presentation during which he talked about social media and social networks and how they are affecting our lives.

He made some interesting points. Like how people are more willing to express feelings and interact with strangers on social network sites. He also noted the affects social network sites and technologies can encourage organizing people by interest.

With global social networking sites like FaceBook, recruiting efforts and more focused marketing campaigns, or "Micro Targeting", is possible because of the amount of publicly accessible information available. The distance between people and information continues to shorten.

He made a point about how Internet and the social interaction that is emerging in the Web 2.0 space is heralding a "conversation economy." For any business operating in the conversation economy, staying alive means encouraging and continuing conversations.

How Technology Transforms the Community

"How does the development of new technologies result in social change? There is a new generation of people whose use of technology has transformed the way in which they engage with the greater community. Civic engagement is no longer just volunteering at a soup kitchen. Civic engagement is more and more about changing behaviors and beliefs through platforms of technology."

The panelists for this session were Michelle Darwish, Julielyn Gibbons, and SI Professor Dr. Paul Resnick. Michelle is an editor with DetroitMakeItHere.com and a Business Lives Editor for Crain's Detroit Business. Julielyn is a well known online activist and blogger for ProgressMichigan.org. Professor Resnick teachs at the School of Information and is known for his eCommunities development course.

The session started out with each panelist talking about how what they do represents transformation in the community and the way technology encourages engagement. Paul Resnick described a recent "skunk works" project called, "SmearBusters" that encourages the spread of truth by targeting political smear posts and getting volunteers to post corrections and links to truth as comments.

Michelle Darwish talked about her work trying to grow the creative community and to keep people in Michigan by promoting sites that encourage social networking and knowledge sharing among the demographic of designers, writers, artists, and other creative professionals.

Jamielynn described how social networking and blogging allowed her to more effectively campaign during the recent elections. She used FaceBook ads to creatively microtarget women in certain age brackets with one ad and women in another age bracket with a similar, but tailored ad. It was interesting because the type of marketing she is doing is still fresh...but what happens when that field becomes saturated?

Enterprise 2.0 Platforms in the Workplace

"Business social software market is expected to grow to $3.3 billion by 2011. How are organizations planning for the adoption of these tools? How are they making the ROI case? How will the adoption of these tools change organizations?"

The conference booklet describes this panel the best; "Enterprise 2.0 is the term for the technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email. The goal is the business managers gain access to information at the right time, through a web of inter-connected applications, services and devices that drive productivity and harness the wisdom of the crown and coworker alike."

This was by far the most interesting panel of the entire conference, and the one that really hit home.

Sharepoint at Johnson and Johnson

One panelist, Abigail Lewis-Bowen, works for Johnson and Johnson managing Portal & Collaboration for their global Procurement functions. She talked about her work trying to drive the adoption of Sharepoint. I had a chance to talk with her before the panel and we shared perspective about working with Sharepoint. I described Sharepoint out of the box akin to being handed a truckload of car parts that properly assembled represents a Porsche. She laughed at totally agreed, pointing out that Sharepoint deployment doesn't mean adoption. She added that for such an effort to have a chance at success there needs to be an enabler of the technology, somebody that understands the parts and is able to work with the teams using them to best fits the tool to their needs.

Abigail also talked about the challenge that culture poses to adopting Enterprise 2.0 technologies. She noted particularly that classical corporate hierarchies pose the greatest challenge to collaboration. Departmental silos and the lack of knowledge sharing leads to fragmented processes and inefficiencies as disconnected parties keep reinventing the wheel.

Wikis at Lockheed Martin

Another panelist, Ramsey Hassan, is an Innovation Lead with Lockheed Martin. He has some very interesting things to add to the subject of Enterprise 2.0. In a business as large as Lockheed Martin with 140,000 employees and 60,000 engineers, getting people to communicate is challenging.

Ramsey made an excellent point about how corporate culture has long been based on a "need to know" strategy that we must become a "need to share" if a business wants to keep momentum. As knowledge experts move on in the business and retire, a lot of tacit knowledge is lost. He works to find ways to capture this knowledge for the next generation work force.

At Lockheed Martin they have tried blogs, wikis, document sharing, news status updates, social bookmarking, etc. He has found that blogs weren't as successful as wikis and that wikis were adopted more readily among the engineer types and are proving useful in knowledge sharing.

Not a Technology Thing, it's a Cultural Thing

Steve Smith, a manager in Environmental & Quality Systems, Information Technology, at Ford Motor Company had a very interesting perspective on Enterprise 2.0.

He started off by noting that he has been trained in "Web 1.0" where authoring is NOT collaborative. From his perspective, he understands Web 2.0 to be about collaboration and "knowledge management." He realizes that Web 2.0 technologies are about capturing, sharing, and enriching knowledge within an organization and that's why enterprises should care about it.

He noted that technology is not the problem. The technologies that are making Web 2.0 possible have existed for a long time. He astutely points out that it is a cultural thing that encourages or discourages collaboration in the Web 2.0 arena.

For so long in the enterprise, rewards have been based on knowledge, where "knowledge is power." It has long been a matter of job security and specialization. Employees are concerned that they won't be considered critical if what they know is known to everybody. Smith points out that Web 2.0 is about leveraging intellectual capital across the enterprise and that the knowledge experts are the magnetic binders that can make connections and encourage sharing.

Not "what you know", but "who knows what you know"

David Carter, co-founder and CTO of Awareness Inc. made a number of excellent points about enterprise 2.0 efforts.

One point he made that really stood out was how the combination of content with personal profiles have a way of establishing weight through a form of reputation building. If a person documents something or describes a learning process and you are able to learn personal details about that person such as how long they've been with the company, the types of projects they've worked on, who they've worked with, etc., all this adds up to their perspective having more weight and thus influence on the readers. Separating content from context doesn't allow this type of reputation recognition in the Enterprise 2.0 knowledge sharing space.

He went on to describe strategies that he has learned over time to encourage knowledge sharing in the enterprise. Like having "deep experts" spending 30% of their time driving documentation and aggregating knowledge. He noted though that it was pockets of people who really started this, an emergent sharing as opposed to a top-down "you shall blog" approach.

Carter described how they had to learn to behave differently as leaders in the organization to encourage Enterprise 2.0 practices. He noted that as management, it wasn't effective to force people to blog or document processes. Rather they sought to add incentives that would encourage people to share. Things like "activity meters" showing who is doing what or a weekly, "ten things I'm working on" site that encouraged people to succinctly articulate what they were learning and doing.

His most poignant point had to do with what he considers a reversal of a long-standing adage about "it's what you know" that matters transforming in the Enterprise 2.0 environment to "it's who knows what you know."