At the invitation of Honeywell, yesterday we spent a day at their annual TechNet meeting at their R&D center in Minneapolis, MN.
TechNet is a small group of large corporations which meet informally to benchmark technology learning and collaboration tools and initiatives. This is a secure, and tightly knit forum for these large corporations to share their pain points and best practices, and learn from each other as they often are operating in similar operational evnironment in terms of scale. For the first time, they invited a select group of outside vendors to participate in this forum.
The companies who were invited to present were - Connectbeam, Google, Safari Online Books, and SocialText.
It was a very informative session, and it was a treat to get some very direct insights into some very specific pain points, common across these large enterprises, in the areas of collaboration, and knowledge and information sharing and discovery. Earlier in a session with Rich Hoeg we discussed how such companies are measuring ROI on these initiatives, and he outlined some very direct and clear ways of how these technologies and initiatives are being justified inside these organizations.
I am not at liberty to disclose specific discussion points or names of the companies that were present at the TechNet meeting, but they ranged from manufacturing, telecom, semiconductor, and services sectors.
It was invigorating to see and hear that the problem around better collaboration, learning - information sharing and discovery, and people (expertise) discovery is real and paramount at these places. There are people tasked and dedicated to figuring this out. They are all encouraged by and are already using and looking at new social media/Web 2.0 for the enterprise styled tools and applications and converging to share best practices and learning from each other.
