Oliver Marks's Conference Blog

People and Data — a conversation with Andreas Weigend

olivermarks — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:07:13 GMT

I'll be speaking with former Amazon Chief Scientist Andreas Weigend at 11:30 today. We'll be talking about how people are at the heart of the enterprise — authenticity and transparency are key to powerful relationships with customers, employees and partners.

Value creation through customer strategy and collaboration pays huge dividends — Amazon and other consumer vendors have led the way in this area, and there are huge benefits to applying these data strategies both internally and externally in the enterprise.

People, process, technology and scaling.

olivermarks — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 23:08:39 GMT

For my talk Real World Enterprise Strategy tomorrow I'll be focusing on people, process, technology and scaling, followed by a discussion with Greg Reinacker, Founder and CTO of NewsGator Technologies, and David Coleman, author of the book Collaboration 2.0, and a long time collaboration expert.

Most of us understand that to plan out an enterprise collaboration environment we need to iterate through people, their processes and then identify appropriate technologies. Scaling is the third dimension and needs very careful consideration — it can be very hard to scale up a system that is designed to be a certain size, and federation has its challenges. I'll be exploring the realities of dealing with people, their egos and rivalries, and other barriers to the organizational transparency that is a vital ingredient to setting up large scale collaboration environments.

Office 2.0: Eating our own dogfood…

olivermarks — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:32:10 GMT

I posted the following at ZDNet on my Collaboration 2.0 blog:

It’s been a fascinating experience helping Ismael Ghalimi organize the third Office 2.0 Conference, which runs from September 3rd to 5th at San Francisco’s St Regis Hotel. As well as the terrific group of sessions and speakers we’ve organized, plus the action packed Unconference prologue, there is an extremely solid, state of the art Enterprise 2.0 back-end taking shape. Office20.com is an instance of Jive Software's Clearspace, and conference participants will also be accessing a state of the art suite of products under single sign on.

Conference goers will be using their HP 2133 Mini-Note PC to utilize and interact with:

Conference blogs and full social productivity capabilities in the Office 2.0 Jive Clearspace environment
A full Google Apps account — email, chat, calendar, docs and and sites hosted on the office20.com domain
Veodia video

This software as a service foundation will be augmented by a constellation of complementary services such as Presdo’s meeting scheduling service, a Launchpad exhibitor. As I write these various initiatives are also being worked on, such as the ability to swap virtual business cards… Augmenting this deep long-term infrastructure on the Office 20 site there is the rapidly increasing Office 2.0 Launchpad featuring companies such as Enleiten, Itensil, Joblogs, who are launching at the conference, as well as MindMeister, Plutext, Postful, TeamWork Live, Wrike and Zooos.

This is a great opportunity to show off new technology solutions, and it’s not too late to take part in this section of the event if you are a small technology startup! The launchpad will feature up-and-coming technologies, while exhibitors such as Yuuguu will be back this year to demonstrate and discuss their mature and growing technology solutions on the showfloor in exhibitor pods.

For those that can’t travel to San Francisco for the event, there will be the opportunity to participate remotely using the powerful Software as a Service infrastructure. The live sessions are shaping up to be really special, and we will be projecting Twitter feeds on the walls where both speakers, panelists, and the audience can see them to add a further dimension to the back channel conversations happening in real time.

I’ve been busy planning sessions, including my keynote on Real World Collaboration Strategy, and also what promises to be a fascinating conversation with Andreas Weigend, former Amazon Chief Scientist, around information asymetry and data strategy, and treating customers as individuals. Andreas studies people and the data they create. At Amazon.com, he specialized in understanding how people behave online, helping Amazon build its customer-centric, measurement-focused culture. We’ll be discussing the intersection between internal collaboration environments and external customer and partner communities. Andreas and I recorded a podcast over the weekend as we planned this session out, you can find parts 1 and 2 on Andreas’s site.

This is truly going to be a fascinating event, with some extremely interesting sessions underpinned by state of the art technology.

I’m really looking forward to it and hope to see you there!

Office 2.0 Conference

olivermarks — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 21:50:06 GMT

I can't believe a year has passed since the last Office 2.0! I look forward to seeing old friends and making new ones in September. As one of this year's organizers, I've been involved in proposing and contacting speakers, and we have a very interesting set this year, with a strong focus on real world, in the trenches experience.

I'll endeavor to update this blog regularly as the conference approaches.