Intelligent Enterprise

I attended Experience!Tech 2008 last week at the MaRS Centre in Toronto — nice to attending a conference in my hometown for a change. The opening day's sessions are beamed to us live from the IDC Directions conference in Boston, so although we have the timeliness of seeing the speakers present, it's not quite the same as seeing them in person.

Unfortunately, it appears that I missed the only good presentation of the opening morning, given by Grover Righter of iMobileInternet, but apparently the slides are online and a number of my peeps were Twittering about it. The rest of the morning's presentations, all provided by IDC executives, sound like guys who are either scrambling to figure out what Web 2.0 is, think that they're teaching Web 2.0 101 to some of the suits in the audience, or inadvertently loaded a 2006 slide deck. Honestly, if I hear one more middle-aged guy talk about how his kids shop/watch TV/live their lives on the Internet (implying, of course, that he still has his executive assistant print out his email for him), I will not be responsible for my actions. Obviously, I'm living in Middle Age 2.0, because I'm sitting in the audience Twittering with the people who are sitting directly beside me, and creating this blog post.

We're in the presentation by Scott Lundstrom of IDC that is causing a great deal of barely-suppressed laughter in the TorCamp group around me, as he very carefully explains Web 2.0 to us:

• Blogging as a business (said very slowly, to make sure that we all understand that you can actually make money at this)
• Schadenfreude as a business model (a view, in my opinion, held by those who are terrified of the transparency that social networking brings; in fact, he refers to "the bloggers" in a very "us versus them" way, as in "you don't want to become a victim of the bloggers" — oh, wait, am I victimizing him with this post? :-)

Last up for the morning is Frank Gens of IDC looking at enterprise IT in the "post-disruption" marketplace, listing what business execs want from their CIOs. The top five:

• Need to speed up
• Improve information access
• More innovative ideas from IT
• Improve IT support
• Support modern tools (e.g. Web 2.0) — this was not previously surveyed, but made the top 5 in its first year
• More high-value business services

He then moves on to what CIOs want from their suppliers:

• Very competitive pricing
• Support for industry standards — this has moved up significantly in the rankings
• Understand my industry/business
• Clear business case for offerings
• Strong community of "solutions" partners

IDC is really big on surveys, so not surprising that the presentation is mostly made up of their survey results (no real innovative ideas here) plus a few case studies (such as P&G, who have done some very innovative things in R&D and business intelligence). Unfortunately, the conclusions that he draws are out of date and not revolutionary thinking at all: "services will be delivered over the web", "Google will buy Salesforce.com or some other player in the SaaS space", "the mobile web is important", "big names will drive the market", "disruption is the new status quo."

"Eureka 2.0″? Oy vey.

I think that Scott Brooks summed it up best.