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Hello from the Gartner Symposium/ITXPO 2009 in Cannes!3. November 2009 – 15:49 by Renate Mitterhuber |
At the moment I am visiting the Gartner Symposium in Cannes which runs till Thursday, November 5th. All together I have the chance to visit nearly 500 sessions and workshops in four days. On the first day I was concentrating on the topics “social software”, “collaboration” and “web 2.0”.
Nikos Drakos and Gabriel Zany from Gartner started with the workshop “Getting what you need from the social software vendors” and Andrea di Maio, leading analyst for the public sector within Gartner, spoke about “From citizen-centric to citizen-driven and employee-centric government”.
At the workshop we worked in smaller groups concerning on the target groups “teams”, “community (internal)”, “network (internal)” and “external network/community”. Although we were broad mixture of people from different companies (most of them), scientists/universities (less) and administrations (very few), we found out that we work on the same challenges.
Here they are:
- How can we motivate people to participate?
- How can we get the experience from the outside to the inside the system/the companies?
- How to deal with negative feedback?
- How to handle with the speed the new media is penetrating our working fields?
- How to handle problems within the frame of global deployment (e.g. different cultures and languages)?
- Which kind of tools and methods are proved for the future? Which are the “good tools”?
- How can we find out what the market/our customers wish to get from us? What influences them most?
The recommendations we identified (very similar in every of the three groups) were:
- Focus on the culture, it is not about the tool.
- Become a learning organisation, be able to deal with feedback
- Get better in community understanding: what drives the people/customers, when will they participate?
- Strong leadership and role models will be helpful
- Tools and methods have to be user friendly
- Security is a big factor
The conclusions were:
- It is not a question of when, but of how to organise collaboration and participation.
- The main question is the culture inside the company/organisation. Rules which are helpful to organise the traditional IT cannot be transferred in a direct way to social software. What we need is a frame, but there must be still enough room to fill it.
- Show the benefit/the value of social software integration to people on the level of decision making because they are not used to this kind of tools.
- If you try to manage collaboration and participation in a traditional way you will not be successful.
So far for the first! I keep you informed although it is hard to stay in the congress centre while it´s so sunny and warm outside, the Mediterranean is dark blue and the city is really such a nice place… but you don´t have to pity me: the programme is also very attractive.
One Response to “Hello from the Gartner Symposium/ITXPO 2009 in Cannes!”
By Rolf Luehrs on Nov 4, 2009
apparently most of European Govts and PA’s are still not aware of challenges and chances of social media. The same impression has Andrea DiMaio, analyst at Gartner who is just as you blogging about the symposium.
PA’s “seem to be unwilling to challenge the status quo and to believe that anything can happen from the bottom-up and from the outside-in. (…) So after two days in Cannes, my statement about North Americans being more likely than Europeans to get government 2.0 is even more valid. I hope my last day in Cannes tomorrow will give me hope, as I believe European citizens and government employees are using social media as much as their North American counterparts and denial will not help for long” https://bit.ly/11Xq8B
Maybe you should have a word with him and tell him about the best practice cases in Europe…