I’m delighted with a recent invitation to moderate a panel on Social Media Revolution in the Workplace on February 24, 2010 down in Mountain View at Google. The event runs from 6 to 9 pm PST and is hosted by the IIT Madras Alumni Association of America (abbreviated as IITMAANA, pronounced as eye-eye-tee-maa-na).
Did you know that one of the definitions of ‘moderator‘ is (in physics) a substance, such as water or graphite, that is used in a nuclear reactor to decrease the speed of fast neutrons and increase the likelihood of fission?
IITMAANA’s goal is to gather together friends and alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and promote charitable, educational events for their community. I’m intrigued to see what the IITM community’s level of understanding is of social computing in the enterprise. I have a feeling that this panel discussion will be geared more towards the workplace shift we’ve been experiencing and the consequential change in moving towards people-centric vs. data-centric tools, the broad advantages of collaborative technologies, and we’ll address questions pertaining to obstacles to adoption. I don’t think this will be a very technical discussion that will discuss with granularity the specific tools from the vendors my panelists represent. However, I could be entirely off the mark. I’ll just need to take an audience pulse up front and let the conversation flow (although I hope there is some controversy – no one likes a panel where everyone nods their heads and agrees with everyone else’s opinion).
I’ll be joined by:
- Anshu Sharma – Sr. Director (Force.com Product Management), Salesforce
- Greg D’Alesandre - Product Manager (Google Wave), Google
- Oliver Marks - Founding Partner, Sovos Group
- Raju Vegesna – Evangelist, Zoho
- Christopher Morace – Sr. Vice President of Products, Jive Software
- Ross Mayfield – Co-Founder, Socialtext
Here’s a bit more detail on the event:
The way we work is changing rapidly, offering an enormous competitive advantage to those who embrace the new tools that enable agile and simplified information exchange and collaboration to distributed workforces and networks of partners and customers.
Collaborative technologies liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email. It provides business managers with access to the right information at the right time through a web of inter-connected applications, services and devices. Collaboration allows the collective intelligence of many to bubble up to the surface, translating to a competitive advantage in the form of increased innovation and productivity.
In this panel we chat with industry experts and vendors to explore topics such as:
- Who is driving the adoption of collaborative tools?
- What are the biggest barriers to adoption and how does one prove the business value / ROI around social computing?
- How does one be a better evangelist with their organization?
If you’re in the Bay Area, come down and hang at Google with me, this stellar lineup of panelists and the eye-eye-tee-maa-na. Looking forward to the discussion.
