It’s been a while since I’ve been to CeBIT in Hanover. At its height during the late 90s and early 2000s, the time of the dot-com boom, it had over 800,000 visitors and covered everything form of technology from consumer electronics to enterprise IT. The consumer electronics part happens elsewhere now but it has a dozen halls of enterprise technology, 180,000 visitors and over 2000 exhibitors – it is still a huge event by any standards. Within one of the main halls, alongside very large stands for Deutsche Telekom, Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft, Software AG and others, the Social Business Arena was a 3 day “show within a show” focussing on Digital Transformation. I was delighted to be invited across, at late notice, to do the opening keynote when the organizers and my good friend Dion Hinchcliffe called me Saturday evening to say Dion was needed back home urgently.

I’ll post my keynote later on, but here is Bjoern Negelmann interviewing me just after the keynote on Monday talking social as an enabler for Digital Transformation. I talk about social as the glue that can, if deployed correctly, connect the organisation’s people and processes to do things more effectively. We go on to talk about Digital Transformation as a term becoming a bit of a catch all for many social and digital components. “Is Digital the new Black?” asks Bjoern. But no, it’s not just fashion, it’s vital!  I explain that a successful business must use these social and digital components, many of which have only come in to our personal and business lives over the last 10 years or so, to create value and drive the business forward. The C-Suite needs to get educated, but I also talk about how there are no one size fits all solutions – the approach will vary depending on the “digital state” of your company, and “digital experience” of the leaders.

Most of the presentations were in German – I think only Sameer Patel and I spoke English on that first day, but there were some great conversations going on.  You can follow them at #cebitsba.