After all of the travelling that I have done over the course of the last few months you would think I would start getting used to the fact that the worst part of travelling is to catch up with everything that has happened while you have been away. And I am not talking about just corporate e-mail, since that is not a problem for me any longer. It doesn’t exist for me anymore. I am just talking about getting together with my various social networks, teams and communities and find out what has happened since I left. In this case, beginning of last week! And WOW! Have things changed or what? Thank goodness folks have been telling me what’s been happening and I have caught up with everything I needed to!
So we are back again, resuming our regular blogging activities over here and with plenty of things to share with everyone! So I better get started so that you folks can catch up with what’s been happening lately. To get things going, here is a blog entry where I am going to be sharing with you folks the highlights from Day 2 at the IBM Innovation event "Shape Your Future", that I have blogged about a bit already last week.
The day was just as exciting, if not more, as Day 1, with plenty of things happening, like meeting up & speaking with my resource manager in The Netherlands, who I haven’t seen since 2003! Talking about working virtually and still at it rather strongly, while distributed, eh? Goodness! 
But let’s talk about the Shape Your Future event itself, since I am sure that would be much more interesting for you. The morning started with a quick, short wrap up from what happened the day before and from there onwards we moved to the first keynote speaker of the day: Marcel Bullinga, who talked about Innovation & The Future. If I were to describe Marcel’s pitch with a single word, it would probably be inspirational! Yes, nothing more, nothing less to expect from a futurist! Utterly enjoyed it and, as you may be able to see from all of the live twittering I did during his session, rather intense, too! And only keynote speaker not wearing a suit! Just the kind of people I like! 😀
If you would want to have another glimpse of what Marcel talked about on the topic of Innovation & The Future have a look into this video link that condenses pretty much his thoughts in a bit over 90 seconds! Once again, rather intense!
Alternatively, you can check out as well Future Check and you will see what Marcel is predicting for 2020. Quite some fascinating stuff & very much looking forward to exciting times ahead of us, too!
From there onwards, we moved on to the next keynote speaker session with Peter Hagedoorn, Senior vice president & Chief Information Officer(CIO) at Océ and Rob Beijleveld, Managing Director at ICT Media BV Owner, who both talked about the Enterprise of the Future, Implications for the CIO.
Anther really interesting and engaging talk where I captured a number of different twitterings with which I can surely identify with and which are reflecting on what the CIO of the Enterprise of the 21st century would be like. Keywords like prosumers; Internet companies; globalisation; people, processes & tools; etc. etc. But I think I could summarise the entire keynote session with a couple of quotes I captured live:
"Modern organisations are open collaboration communities, business decisions are taken at all levels, processes are global and are the glue in the company to company collaboration; all IT-technologies are allowed (Provided they can communicate)"
Or this other one:
"Legacy "thinking" companies will not survive in the globalised Internet society; thus change or die"
Does it ring a bell? (hehe)
From there onwards, it was time to move into the breakout sessions, where, if you remember, I was going to be one of the speakers; within the section "Social Innovation" and already on the subject of "Thinking Outside of the Inbox – How to Survive without e-mail?". The session went really really well, with a full room packed with folks, very interactive and engaging and getting lots of great feedback! Wish it would have been recorded, so I could share with you what was on people’s minds while I was telling them to challenge their inbox. But alas, it wasn’t. Either way, always refreshing to get feedback from people on what would be some challenges for them and sharing some practical tips from my side on how I have been managing without corporate e-mail for nearly eight months!
From there onwards, the event went on further with lunch and another round of breakout sessions, which I skipped, because I had the great honour of doing a press interview with Het Financieele Dagblad (With Jeroen Bos) to talk about my new reality of working with social software tools, as opposed to corporate e-mail. Unfortunately, the article with the interview, with the title "Hemels werken zonder e-mail", was only done for the paper version and currently not available online, so I am afraid you will have to grab a copy of the paper and read through it, because I tried to track it online and I couldn’t find it… (I know, a pity… Not very 2.0, eh? heh … Sigh)
Anyway, after having done the press interview, and after finishing off with some serious social networking while having a cup of coffee, we all headed to the last one of the breakout sessions and right from the beginning I knew I was going into the right one! Yes, that one of Joel Waterman, Program Director, Lotus Unified Communications Products South West Europe, who talked about "Collaborative Innovation". 
This was probably one of the best presentations from the two days and one of the breakout sessions from which I learned the most. I live twittered quite a bit on it! And if I were to describe the main reason(s) as to why I enjoyed it quite a bit, it would probably be the fact that Joel showed everyone why social networking tools like Beehive, Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr, Lotus Sametime, Lotus Notes 8, etc. are my main tools to provide "Collaboration in context" and away from the traditional mail box. Very very powerful to see how UC2 (Unified Collaboration + Communications) will be shaping up how we collaborate and share our knowledge without not necessarily using corporate e-mail. Yes, I know, double w00t!!
The presentation that Joel was just so spot on that I had to ask him whether I could share it externally or not, outside of the firewall, and after having a very good conversation with him, I managed to get the deck from him and I have uploaded it, with his permission, into my Slideshare.net address. You will be able to find it over here, and I have also embedded it below, so that you can check it out right away. Hint: Pay special attention to slides 20 & 31, if you would want to know some more about some of the key success factors I have been going through all along, while giving up on e-mail:
Innovation Week – Shape Your Future – Joel Waterman
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: ibm communications)
From there onwards we went off to the last keynote session of the day with Peter Korsten, Global Leader IBM Institute for Business Value, who talked about the CEO Study 2008, which was actually a repeat session on the same theme from Day 1. So instead of me talking to you all about it, why don’t you just head over to Enterprise of the Future and find out some of the really fascinating stuff that came out of it on the topic of disruptive innovation!
And that was it! Time to then get things going with some pure social networking activities having a drink or two and a couple of snacks and preparing for a lovely evening with some friends in good old Rotterdam where two words would be the highlights of the evening: Summo (Restaurant) and cocktails!
And you probably know what followed up next, right? heh
Hope you enjoyed the review with the highlights for Day 2 of Shape Your Future and look forward to the next IBM Innovation event, which, by the way, is just around the corner 😉 And I will be there, too! …
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