What to Expect from Enterprise 2.0

Next week, the Enterprise 2.0 conference will convene in Boston. The gathering, which will attract 1500 attendees from 40 countries, is attended by vendors who build Web 2.0 and social networking technologies for the enterprise, as well as IT practitioners who have implemented the applications within their organizations.

The show promises to have some interesting case studies that detail how companies and organizations have used Web 2.0 and social tools to make their organizations more open, collaborative and social. I’ll be posting several stories from the show, including one related to Microsoft’s social features in SharePoint and how it affects the collaboration market. (Follow me on Twitter to see when they get posted).

Yesterday, I caught up by phone with Steve Wylie, the Enterprise 2.0 conference’s general manager. He says attendance from last year held flat, which, in this economy where travel budgets have been cut substantially, is pretty solid.

Here are some things he said to expect:

• More case studies. According to Wylie, the complaint often leveled at social software conferences (and vendors who attend them) is that they are heavy on product and short on actual use cases where implementing the software in the enterprise yielded results. Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Hamilton, Jet Blue, and State Farm Insurance.
• On Tuesday, we’ll see the results of the Open Enterprise research, which industry experts Stowe Boyd and Oliver Marks conducted. According to Boyd (who I spoke with yesterday as well), the research will highlight how some companies have utilized social software (successfully) to create a culture of openness in the enterprise, where information that used to be locked away in e-mail becomes visible for more people to collaborate with.
• The role of IT in deploying social software. According to Wylie, the early implementations of social software was done by line of business people who purchases software as a service (SaaS) offerings without IT knowledge. Now, that is shifting, as IT has a greater role in making social software a strategic initiative.

I’m looking forward to meeting with some of my favorite sources face-to-face. But my job is to serve all of you, so if there is something you want me to ask during the conference, or report on in general, please feel free to contact me.