Today, as part of my pre-sales software engineer job at bestware, I was attending an Enterprise 2.0 1/2 day seminar which I had a small part in setting up. Our primary goal here, of course, was to help our partners understanding the ins and outs of the 2.0 mindset and, consequently, help them sale the Lotus Connections software suite to their customers.
Although 2.0 makes everything more simple to the end-user, justifying the benefits of some non-trivial management readjustment is far from being a simple affair. So we hired the services of Nextmodernity, a consultant firm in the 2.0 area to explain this to our partners. The plan was to start with explaining what “Enterprise 2.0″ means, then presenting Lotus Connections as a capable social tool, and finally, start an open discussion with the audience to see how this could be all made to fit together.
Nextmodernity dispatched one of their top-notch individuals, and as expected, Marc de Fouchecour was up to the task delivering a simple yet effective What/Why/How speech, using simple laymen terms (after all, this is also what 2.0 is about !) to lay down the foundations.
Now, the expected objections were raised. These partners are essentially “IT” companies, so having to deal with the higher execs to explain them how the whole management concept can benefit their business seemed to some of them as something of an extraordinary task – or at least – something they were possibly not ready to do just yet. Here, the implied answer was simple : Just as we weren’t competent to deliver the appropriate 2.0 message, we hired competent consultancy, so could they !
Also the usual fear of the rogue poster, whistleblower and no-good-doer were brought up and the usual rebuttal was given : not only are there not that many of them, but giving them a playfield may actually help mitigate whatever damage they may be doing out in the wild !
The proverbial foundations having been laid down, we could now deliver our own personal message on how Lotus Connections could be offered as a solution. The demo went smoothly – despite IBM having rolled out a brand new version on their internal servers, almost (but not quite) throwing our resident IBM specialist off foot – demonstrating how all the pieces fit together.
The seminar ended with the mandatory luncheon – and – I make it it was a good sign – lasted well beyond the timeline we had set ourselves by more than a couple of hours !
Going back at the office with renewed perspectives and the feeling of having moved forward, I went to see the boss (not my boss. I mean *THE* boss), with the firm intentions of testing all of this on him.
Mind it, I wasn’t taking any risk. In my company we have a pretty liberal policy about what we can tell to our hierarchy.
But I’ll keep this one for next time !
–Ivan