Enterprise 2.0 by ExampleEnterprise 2.0 by Example

My title is taken from the name of one of the demonstrations set up at the Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) Enterprise Forum held in Paris last week. ALU used this year's forum to launch its new enterprise marketing strategy, the Dynamic Enterprise. (Those who saw my post last month on the Genesys notion of the Dynamic Contact Center may see a family resemblance here - Genesys is a subsidiary of Alcatel-Lucent.)

My title is taken from the name of one of the demonstrations set up at the Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) Enterprise Forum held in Paris last week. ALU used this year's forum to launch its new enterprise marketing strategy, the Dynamic Enterprise. (Those who saw my post last month on the Genesys notion of the Dynamic Contact Center may see a family resemblance here - Genesys is a subsidiary of Alcatel-Lucent.)One of the constructs of the Dynamic Enterprise is that a new generation of employees is increasingly frustrated to find that the tools in their workplace lag behind what they are accustomed to in the consumer world. The Enterprise 2.0 by Example demo station in the exhibition hall showcased a social networking tool that was used by a team within Alcatel-Lucent as they worked to pull this year's forum together.

The tool used was developed by a French company, BlueKiwi. As a Facebook user, the portal page developed by BlueKiwi for Alcatel-Lucent had elements familiar to me: a list of team members (similar to Facebook's friends), recent postings by team members, access to documents posted by my team (similar to Facebook's photo albums), etc.

What's missing relative to Facebook is also quickly apparent. No notifications that friends have achieved a new Vampire level or requests to compare movie taste with others. According to ALU Worldwide Strategic Marketing Director for Enterprise Xavier Martin, the team initially tried to use Facebook for collaboration and coordination activities as they worked on Forum activities. They soon found it ineffective for a business purpose, for reasons similar to those listed above - too much extraneous clutter.

Two hundred marketing and corporate development professionals participated in the BlueKiwi trial, code-named All.U.Link. Both companies were pleased with how the trial went, measured by the level of communication shared during the three weeks running up to Forum.

Working with the SOA-based interfaces of both companies' solutions, BlueKiwi and Alcatel-Lucent were able to enrich BueKiwi's standard offering with click-to-call capability. It's not hard to imagine that the wheels are turning at Alcatel-Lucent figuring out how to productize a combined social networking/unified communications offer with an even richer set of communications capabilities.