Milan hosts Enterprise 2.0 INT forum

So my last few posts have covered the major capitals of the world,where I have attended Web conferences within these last weeks, London, Rome and now Milan.

The International forum on Enterprise 2.o was organised and co-sponsored by Open Knowledge, a skilled Enterprise 2.O team of 8 partners based in Milan.

The speakers where great, and included Ross Mayfield Founder of Socialtext, who spoke on "breaking down the barriers to success in an increasingly complex world" George Siemens from the University of Manitoba, who spoke on knowledge without management, and Laurence Lock Lee who gave us some great Ideas on Social capital and its origins.

The full programme of speakers can be found here.

One of the most entertaining talks for me, was, Andrew Gilboy's of EMEA Oracle talk on " from content to people." He told his story of himself as a young manager in Australia, asking the board of Coke to adopt the idea of using email in its infancy, and being turned down by the board, as they said they couldn't see value. He then later met a man who told him that he too had presented in the past to the Coke board on adopting barcodes, and they couldnt see the value in that either.

His advice to the room was: Don't expect the company/corporation to see the value in adopting and embracing Enterprise 2.0 or social media to make teams communicate better. "Your hope lies in improving the relationship with customers by using these tools."

Swiss Re also gave a good talk on how they got management to buy into using social media tools.

Shantrez Miller spoke on the methods they used.

Lunch was a light-hearted Italian affair as we walked to local resturants. Ours was The Duke near Missori, where I had the pleasure of sharing a table with Ross Mayfield, Emmanuele Quintarelli the organizer and George Siemens, where we debated the twitter phenomenon.

There where panels discussing innovation within Italy in Italian, using Enterprise 2.0, and many questions were asked. A full translation service into English or Italian was provided throughout the conference, which I was pleased I didn't need, being a long time resident Of la Italia.

After lunch there were panel discussions and  David Terrar of Wordframe gave a short talk on some of the pioneers using the enterprise to build communities within their SME s

II was a full and interesting day, and then there were beers in Milan at Rosso Pomodoro.

Were you there? what was your takeout at #E2 09,or would you simply like to comment about the Enterprise. Send us a comment

Donna Jackson,

Social Comunications Specialist

Wisequeen