• Cloud computing is a reality here and now, and is being used by businesses to reduce cost and redeploy expertise in a strategic manner
• Even if your business is not considering how cloud computing can be used in order to create a competitive advantage, remember that your competitors will be.
• Cloud is not just about saving costs, it’s about freeing up resources in to align them better with business strategy

I have to say that it was one of the best events that I have attended. The delegate level was very high, the speakers were all excellent, and the WiFi worked perfectly throughout! Plus Google showed their commitment to the cloud by running all the demos live over the Internet and most of the presentations were run live over the web using Google docs.

The conference was opened by Google execs Nikesh Arora (President Global Sales and Business Development) and Adrian Joseph (Managing Director, Google Enterprise EMEA), with some personal anecdotes on their experiences as digital immigrants.

Next up was Nicholas Carr with his talk titled Era of the Cloud: The Big Switch. As expected, he talks about the historical move from self generated power to mass scale power grids, but the general theme is how disruptive some innovations and trends such as cloud computing can be. If these are embraced, IT can be aligned in order to deliver real value to the business rather than “producing electricity”.

Next up Dr Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon on “The Cloud Capability” talking about why customers are actually buying cloud computing services.

Now time for the first panel, “The Perfect Storm”. I really enjoyed the panels, form me they were one of the highlights of the whole day. The first one has a high level/visionary focus and the next 2 panels are more practical with some real customers. Guy Clapperton moderates this panel On stage:

• Werner Vogels – CTO & VP, Amazon.com
• Nicholas Carr – Author, the Big Switch
• Paul Daugherty – Chief Technology Architect, Accenture
• Dr. Carsten Sorensen – Senior Lecturer Information Systems, LSE

Then, the next panel titled “Risk and Reward” - some real customers talking very frankly about their experiences. In this session, the Jaguar Landrover deal is announced. On stage is:

• Marcello Cordioli – CIO, Permasteelisa
• Olivier Carre-Pierrat – Infrastructures & Telecoms Director, Euromaster
• Jeremy Vincent, CIO Jaguar Landrover
• Claudio Umana – CIO, Fracarro
• Jean-Francois Caenen – CTO, Cap Gemini France

Then it was time for the Google Engineering team. I really enjoyed this session. They even touched on some futures which is very unusual for Google. Nelson Mattos starts it off and then Matthew Glotzbach does a fantastic demo.

During lunch, I took a look at the demo pods. These were manned by the Google “doctors” in their white lab coats – very cool. I watched some demos of Google Wave, Google Apps, and Enterprise Workflow  for Google apps with Google partner Cordys. CapGemini and Nordic Edge were also there although I ran out of time so didn’t get to see their stuff.

After lunch and it was time for the customer panel “Collaboration in the Workplace” with:

• Paul Cheesbrough – CIO, Telegraph Media Group
• Francois Blanc – CIO, Valeo
• Todd Pierce – SVP & CIO, Genentech
• Andy Beale – CIO, Guardian Media Group

It starts off with Paul Cheesbrough, CIO of Telegraph Media Group showing the results of their research relating to the move to Google Apps… for example he showed a stat that staff now spend 36% more time communicating with co-workers which has had a positive effect on productivity. There are loads of interesting things in here, take a look.

Now time for the big man, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com. Marc is an entertaining speaker, and despite the pretty salesy pitch, most people seemed to lap it up.  I really loved the demo double act of Tim Barker and Jager McConnell, who showed an amazing demo of “Service Cloud 2″ – my key takeaway was how a business can use Service Cloud in order to interact better with customers whether it’s by phone, twitter, facebook or old-school email. This could really create a competitive advantage since not many businesses really do CRM well.

Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm, was up next. This video is essential viewing. His session is all about the importance of focusing on core, essential business. IT energy should be focused on improving the business, not on running commoditized services (such as email for example). Geoff says it best, watch him…

Last but not least… the “Fireside Chat” with Dave Girouard (President, Google Enterprise) and Alan Eustace (SVP Engineering and Research, Google). This was an awesome session. When you watch this you can see the difference in culture between Google and their competitors. Open, honest, straightforward, insightful…

Thanks to the Google team for a great event. If you want to follow the happenings of the day over twitter, it all happened on the #atmosphere hashtag And if you missed atmosphere, you might still be able to attend the “Innovation at Work” event happening in London later this month. No famous authors, just pure time with the Google folks looking at the latest stuff from the Google Enterprise team.

Here is an interview by @davidwilcox with @carlhaggerty and @robgray (me) at #localgovcamp – Carl is talking about Devon’s Internal Social Networking initiative using blueKiwi.

The actual presentation notes are also quite useful – click on the little slideshare icon if you want to view the notes. It’s a pity I can’t embed them…

In my opinion, the main point of using a tool such as Yammer, is to open up communication across groups that may not know what each other are doing. What I saw in practice, was people creating far more private groups than open groups, mainly because of the fear of exposing information. While this is understandable, it defeats the purpose of using such a tool doesn’t it?

I have found that what works best is to have a much higher % of open groups, and as few private groups as possible. Private groups should only be used for things like maybe board level discussions etc. If you have too many private groups, you just end up reflecting the organizational silos that already exist, with a tool that should be used to break silos down?

What I take from this: I doesn’t matter if you have great tools if there is not a culture of sharing and openness.

Changing the culture to one of openness can be tough! Anyone managed to make some progress in this area of cultural transformation – got some real world stories? I’d love to hear them.

Thanks to Bertrand for contributing to this list. Check out his advice on this blog post

For those unfamiliar with enterprise social networking, I would describe it in a nutshell as web-based solutions that connect employees, business partners and customers by forming engaged virtual teams and communities around specific business objectives. No doubt some of the academics and purists will disagree with this, but hey it’s my blog and I’ll say what I want to

Real world lessons learned

Have an achievable business goal

A business social network with no goal eventually fails. Projects where people “just want to try it out” usually fail because there is no common goal or shared values. A group of people without shared values/goals is not a true community.

The justification is not always the same as the goal

For example the goal might be to improve communication and performance of a distributed team, but the financial justification could be around reducing costs. In this case, reducing costs is not the reason for doing it, but it keeps the FD happy.

Start small

If you start small, you don’t have to find a lot of money to get started. Whether you build something yourself or buy an off-the-shelf product, you should be able to get going for less than £25K (remember if you build it yourself it’s people’s time, hardware, software etc. so it’s never “free”). Even tools like Ning and Yammer, although not really “enterprise-class”, are good options if you have no particular goal and just want to mess around with some of the concepts.

Find champions

Champions will be the ones that make it happen. In an enterprise there will be many different initiatives, and each one should have a person that drives and engages their community or group. This is very much along some of the ideas behind tribal leadership.

Get executive buy-in

If you’re an executive, don’t buy a social networking tool “for the generation Y employees” without participating yourself. Exec involvement massively increases participation because people are driven by the visibility. If your peers know that you did something great that’s partially motivating. If our CEO knows, now that’s a motivation.

A social network without people has no value

Therefore participation is key. Focus the energy of the group around the goal, so as to drive participation. Combining the launch of your social network with a physical event is a great way to do this.

Define and explain what people are expected to do (for example are people required to come up with new ideas, ask questions, share their best practices?

Measure Frequently

measure activity, emerging content themes, participation type & rate, and achievement against the business goal. any decent enterprise social networking platform will have this capability. Social Networking is a means to improve business so the ultimate measurement should be about business

Prepare to adjust & tweak

people are not 100% predictable, live with it don’t fight it. if you’re measuring what’s going on, you can adjust to it.

Expect the unexpected

things don’t always go as planned. sometimes people do things in a different (and better) way to what you expected. embrace that and people will know that they are empowered

Some interesting questions?

1. should you have a “gardner” – someone who grows the community but also removes “weeds”?
2. along these lines – does moderation in an internal context inhibit contribution? i.e. why would I contribute if someone can override me?
3. should there be a strategy to change “lurkers” (people who read) into active contributors?

We had 2 great opening presentations from Stowe Boyd and Jon Husband

and here’s the keynote presentation that was delivered by our CEO, Carlos Diaz… have a look at the demo – I’m really proud of our R&D team for producing such goodness!

These days we are flooded by a plethora of 2.0 stuff aren’t we?…. Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, BI 2.0 Outsourcing 2.0,eCommerce 2.0, Resourcing 2.0, Project Management 2.0, Recruitment 2.0, Jake 2.0, KM 2.0, Library 2.0, Health 2.0, President 2.0, Government 2.0, Retail 2.0, Search 2.0, Mobile 2.0, Lift Trucks 2.0, or why not buy a Ford Fiesta 2.0? Microsoft was clearly ahead of the game because Windows 2.0 came out in the late 1980s!

What do all of these have in common? Well it’s obvious isn’t it? They are all better than 1.0

When will the madness end?
Even the experts get confused… at a recent retailing conference one of the keynote speakers talked in a very opinionated manner on his views of “web point twenty”!!!

Does it really matter what you call it?  Does anyone care?
Anyway it’s now back to the grindstone, I’m waiting for web point thirty-seven. Rumour has it that’s going to be the big one.

Do you have any ridiculous examples of people jumping on the “2.0 bandwagon”?

We are running an event on 28th November at the IoD in London.

It’s a bit of an introductory session to Enterprise Social Networking / Enterprise 2.0 etc. including some learnings from some of our large corporate projects. These learnings are relevant regardless of the technology that you use.

Register here

(posted by Rob Gray)

I’ve adapted the presentation to be shown online, with commentary on the slides where I would have been speaking.

I talk about 3 areas

• Reducing costs (by saving on event costs, and market research costs)
• Innovating (by providing an open and transparent way for people to share their ideas)
• Productivity (which is a by-product of the others, but also increasing revenue for example with more effective sales teams)

The main point is that there are many benefits to enterprise social software, but to get a business investment you sometimes need to focus on a cost reduction, in order to justify the investment…