Here is the panel session that I took part in at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris this week, on 11th & 12th February 2014.  We were discussing the key factors for strategic enablement of enterprise 2.0, social business, and social collaboration in organisations. Emanuele Quintarelli set the scene presenting a survey of Italian firms. Then the discussion, moderated by Bjoern Negelmann, was between:

• Emanuele Quintarelli – Digital Transformation Practice Leader, Ernst & Young
• Luis Suarez – formerly Social Computing evangelist, IBM Software group
• Dr. Chee Chin Liew – Enterprise Community Manager, BASF SE
• David Terrar – Founder & CXO, Agile Elephant
• Simon Levene – Senior Strategy Consultant, Jive Software

There was actually some tension between the speakers, resulting in a great discussion.  The tension is between the likes of Emanuele and myself who want to lift the argument to real, hard, business numbers and metrics that the executives in the C-Suite can understand in a business case, versus Luis and others at the conference who want to focus on the culture change required in the workplace, on improving employee engagement, the move to knowledge sharing, open business and collaboration, with use cases that are effective.  Both are important.  But to accelerate things, it’s my belief we need cold, hard business logic combined with the inspiration to change to open business.  Listen to the discussion and you decide.

Here are a few key quotes I’ve lifted out of the dialogue:

“7 out of your 10 colleagues don’t give s#%! about what you do today!”

“need more doing than talking”

“go back to the core nature of how work gets done”

“how can I help you today?”

“but first of all we need to make it clear to the business where is the benefit”

“does management agree or recognise social as an enabling tool for more engagement and to solve the problem of the fundamental (financial) crisis?”

“not happening yet because we are talking about collaboration, we are not talking about measurable business benefits”

“the majority of people in this room are believers in this thing”

“it’s up to us as a community to get out there and communicate it better to the average business person in the street

“it’s all about use cases, if you come up with a list of top 10, 15 use cases of how people work and socialise them”

“break a silo, and you go in to openness and transparency”

My post setting the scene and introducing the show is here, and my conference report will follow shortly.