Day 3 Highlights - Conference Wrap Up

Well, DIG 2008 wrapped up yesterday. I just got back from Vegas and have finally recovered from the long flight back to Boston. It was a great event and some of the informal feedback from attendees confirmed that feeling. It would be great to get some comments from attendees on what people thought was valuable and where we could improve for next year.

Day 3 was focused on Enterprise 2.0. If you aren't familiar with E2.0, our keynote for the day was able to level set the group on the definition, usage and benefits. Andrew McAfee from Harvard Business School, who coined the term Enterprise 2.0, provided his perspective on E2.0. From his presentation he provided the following definition:

"Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within
companies, or between companies and their partners or customers."

He also identified a list of representative technologies below this definition: wikis, blogs, prediction markets, social networking software, RSS, links, search, tags.

After Andrew's keynote, we then moved into our case study presentations with R. Todd Stephens, Mat Fogarty and Euan Semple. We followed up the case study presentations with Q&A. I was happy to see that we got a lot questions from the group, since prior to the conference a large majority of the attendees (70%) had no plans in their organizations to adopt E2.0 technologies.

We concluded the DIG conference with an entertaining talk from Jeff Ma. If you aren't familiar with Jeff, he is the real life character from the book "Bringing Down the House" and subsequent movie "21". Aside from the challenge of being the final presenter at 4 pm, Jeff kept the crowd entertained and was peppered with questions by the group at the end.

I haven't had a chance to step back and try to put the different presentations and dialogs over the week into something coherent. I took a ton of notes during the 3 days and we have the audio recorded, so it will be good to go back and listen to the presentations and discussions. We are hoping to make some of these great assets available through the blog. Stay tuned.

I want to finally thank everyone that attended the conference: the speakers, delegates and sponsors I was happy to see that even with all the distractions of Las Vegas, everyone stayed engaged throughout the entire week.