Is your enterprise 2.0? (Montréal 8/24/09 Conference)

I gave a presentation last week in Montreal at the Allar-Hervieu event; “Votre entreprise est-elle 2.0?”. Of course, it was in French and I was pleased that it attracted some of the more important Montreal-based public and private companies.

Over 75 executives, with extensive experience in the importance of collaborative computing and the emerging impact of Web 2.0 technologies, were present at the event. This was a breeze of fresh air as many such conferences are occupied by Web industry enthusiasts looking for networking opportunities and prospects. Not this time! This time the communication firm Allar-Hervieu of Montreal targeted the right audience with the right message.

The presentation was made by 3 speakers delivering a logical story-line that addressed the positioning and reality of the emergence of the Web 2.0 in the enterprise, the use of content-capturing technologies and the need for thoughtful communication plans through concrete examples. and lastly how this chaos of information can be best consume to help the enterprise measure the pulse of what is happening through organic correlation and emergence ranking in opposition to complex portals, popularity ranking and KM tools.

This event was our first open product demonstration. I used live examples relating to the audience's organizations... Hydro-Québec, H1N1 trends and Canadian news events. The Hydro-Québec live demonstration was particularly relevant since it outlined a current controversy about donations to private schools. Our technology was able to show the formal media perspective in contrast (and correlated) with social media citizen contributions. Additionally, we also noticed that the Hydro-Québec debate was clearly francophone-driven as a contrast of 1 to 10 was visible when tuning the linguistic preference.

This demonstration of correlated aggregation of emerging sources originating from the formal and informal demonstrated to the audience the potential for organizations to benefit from this technology within their intranet as well as linking them to the Web.