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The structured approach of Business Technology Management (BTM) is a proven methodology that seeks to unify business and technology decision-making at every level within a company.

Originally conceived to address the needs of large enterprises, there are now very apparent benefits for both small and medium sized businesses. Let's consider the growing body of evidence that supports that business case.

Put simply, BTM is applied to ensure that a company's business strategy can be realized by the technology it deploys. This approach is used by business leaders to align, synchronize and even converge technology and business management for the purpose of ensuring better execution, risk control and profitability.

The Path of Total Convergence
Clearly, these are the type of guiding principles that should transcend all businesses, regardless of their size. Let's explore the meaning of those three states of progression.

Alignment is defined as a state where technology supports, enables, and does not constrain the company's current and evolving business strategies. It means that the IT function is in-tune with the business thinking about competition, emerging threats and opportunities.

Synchronization implies that business technology (BT) not only enables execution of current business strategy, it also anticipates and helps to shape future business models and strategy. In this state, BT leadership, thinking, and investments may be ahead of business needs.

The state of Convergence includes both alignment and synchronization, with technology and business leadership willing and able to operate simultaneously in both spaces. Essentially, the disciplines have merged in both the strategic and tactical senses. A single leadership team working together to orchestrate one intertwined agenda.

A Business Impact Case Study
Does this seem like an academic exercise? Consider the following facts, and then you decide.

According to the BTM Institute, in research covering 50 industries, companies with a more converged business technology management exhibited superior revenue growth and net margins relative to their peer group:

• 12% average annual revenue growth vs. 4% for their industry groups.
• 36% average annual earnings per share growth vs. 7% for their industry groups.
  

Not only did these companies grow at a faster pace than their peers, but they also exhibited consistently greater returns than those of their competitors:

• 6% higher EBITD margins than those delivered by their industry groups.
• 4% average higher return on equity, 8% average higher return on assets and 14% higher return on investments.
  

Therefore, perhaps the most important question is not whether you should strive for BT convergence, but how will you be able to compete with those companies that have already evolved to that state? It's something to think about, as you consider your next steps.

Source: Business Technology Roundtable

During the panel, a number of very interesting questions were raised. where does my document end up in the cloud? Can I trust the infrastructure to hold it?

Among the topics for discussion that I believe we only scratched the surface, were:

• Document 2.0 and legal / preservation constraints

• Document 2.0 and Information Overload

• Enterprise adoption of Document 2.0 and barriers
  

• Technology enablers and infrastructure for Document 2.0

If there is interest, we could continue the discussion here, possibly on the Office 2.0 panel page. Please reply on this message (unless we can use some kind of voting capability?) to let me know.

- Francois

The Office 2.0 Conference 2008 is over now, and we've received a lot of feedback. Overall, the conference was a great success, and its content has significantly improved from last year. Yet many attendees pointed out that putting the show together in less than two months is making it very difficult for a lot of people to participate, either as attendees or sponsors. As a result, we've decided to give ourselves a full year to organize the 2009 edition.

The location remains the same, dates are set to September 21-23, 2009 (Monday through Wednesday), registration is open ($1,495 until December 31st, 2008), and we will keep our tradition of giving away a mobile device to every paying attendee. Also, we have made some changes to our sponsorship packages in order to simplify things, and make sure that early-stage companies get proper representation. Next year's theme is "The Global Office" and our goal is to gather one representative from as many Global 500 firms, national governments, and top 100 universities as possible.

This year, we got 500 registrations, 450 of which happened once the conference's website was released, less than a month before the event took place. For next year, the website is already online, more than a year before the opening keynote, so we expect to sell out quite early. As a result, we will reduce the number of press passes down to 50, and the number of free guest passes down to zero, so make sure to register early if you want to guarantee your spot at the event (the hotel cannot accomodate more than 750 people). The same is true for sponsors. We look forward to meeting you again in San Francisco next year.

For reference purposes, the video recordings for all 2008 sessions are now available from the agenda.

Update: GE (#12 on Fortune's Global 500 list) just confirmed that they will come back next year.

I enjoyed the 100% SaaS session yesterday, but have to say that I felt a bit unfulfilled in the end. We all had lots of fun with the preparation for the panel. Doug Harr's view that 100% SaaS means that your whole IT infrastructure simplifies down to a wireless router in your communications closet is certainly a provocative one.

We had lots of spirited discussion on what we saw as the boundaries (none of us think 100% SaaS is truly realistic today, particularly when you think about desktop software, personal productivity, telephony, file sharing, data warehousing, etc.), but all of us are seeing more and more companies, including our own firms, at 80% or 90% SaaS, and we all are getting tremendous benefits from this.

The questions from the audience took us more into the current state of SaaS than into what we think the future looks like, and what we know the industry needs to do to move the needle more and more toward 100%.

Here is some additional coverage:

• I've got some deeper thoughts on my SaaS 2.0 blog.
• Gadi Shamia has a summary of the panel and his thoughts on his Ala 360 blog.
• Ben Kepes  also covered the panel in his diversity.net blog.

I'm at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco, where day 1 has just concluded. As with all conferences, the most valuable parts have been the discussions outside of sessions. And I can tell you that the corridors have been humming here. The conference is a who's who of business-centric cloud computing — everyone here believes that the future will exist in the clouds.

Here are some of the sessions I've enjoyed today, including the Google keynote, Project Management 2.0, and Money 2.0 (with video embedded below)...

A panel discussion that the Twitterverse is no doubt interested in — check out the Twitter cred of the participants:

• Robert Scoble (Fast Company)
• Guillaume Cohen (Veodia)
• Gary Griffiths (LiteScape)
• Loic Le Meur (Seesmic)
• Alain Mowad (Polycom)

The panelists introduced themselves and their businesses/offerings. The panel ranges across the spectrum from super high quality Cisco Telepresence systems, down to Seesmic for low quality ad hoc solutions.

Loic Lemeur announced that Twhirl will include video within the next two weeks. He discussed the fact that video allows relationships to be formed around the world without actual presence — it brings people closer together.

Robert told of WalMart's ability to buy fabric internationally over video conferencing, since the quality is so high.

Cohen tells of the savings that video conferencing brings — gas, time,  environmental, etc. People can work remotely easily — so long as the video integrates tightly with their existing workflow processes — people feel more comfortable giving feedback over video than "in the flesh." Veodia does all the hard work in the background, and serves up one button for users to push — delivering up the best quality that the connection available can give.

Mowad says that Polycom is much more focused on real time video sharing — gives examples of tele-medicine and tele-education.

Questions from the floor...

What are the coolest things the tools could have?

• Someone who has video on 24hrs a day when she works remotely — a sense of intimacy when they're not there.
• How do you create a technology that becomes so immersive that one feels that they're really there?
• Video brings an experience as close as possible to real life.
• Video enables Seesmic to run an international development team with real-time collaboration.

How can video-conferencing work when there are larger teams?

• Remote-controlled monitors that move depending on who is talking!
• There's a threshold beyond which video conferencing just doesn't work — 9 or  10 people perhaps?
• There is a perception of presence — the host of offerings — audio, video, IM, etc. build up a feeling of intimacy that means that the group feel together — even if the camera is focusing on someone else at the time.

Discussion ensued about the fact that going forward, the ability to catalogue audio from a video stream is needed — allowing for searching and text string recognition.

All in all an interesting panel — I guess it's all about context and  preference — I'm a text guy and that's my preference — others work in images.

While the 2008 edition of the Office 2.0 Conference is still going on, we're already starting to plan for the next one. For the first three editions, we've done everything in less than 2 months, as a way to prove that Office 2.0 tools and the GTD can significantly increase productivity. Today, I think we made our point, and moving forward, we'd like to take the event to the next level, especially with respect to the quality of the online infrastructure we're building to support it. As a result, we decided to give ourselves a full year to organize the 2009 edition. At present time, we're looking at Monday through Wednesday, September 21-23, 2009. Please let us know if you can think of any other event taking place at the same time, or close to it.

I'll be speaking with former Amazon Chief Scientist Andreas Weigend at 11:30 today. We'll be talking about how people are at the heart of the enterprise — authenticity and transparency are key to powerful relationships with customers, employees and partners.

Value creation through customer strategy and collaboration pays huge dividends —  Amazon and other consumer vendors have led the way in this area, and there are huge benefits to applying these data strategies both internally and externally in the enterprise.

I still am looking for the future of Office 2.0. I believe in the future, but still have concerns over the path we suppose will happen. We talk about all the great web tools that are being developed. But the biggest customer stories are all around the adoption of interaction hubs — wikis, self service, etc. I think that these are noble and worthy projects, but it feels like so much more should be happening. At Office 2.0 2006 we talked about making it easier for people to work and get things done — but other than these few use cases, have we made it easier for users?

I think the promise is there. Google talked about Tripit — being able to aggregate and automate to make trips easier. Sure, there are some hiccups, but the promise is there. But the promise is no different than Microsoft's many years ago if Enterprise's adopted a homogeneous MS network. With any solution, ambiguity is a killer because it makes for fuzzy results. And, as an example, relying on email as a vehicle to decompose a trip (while easy) may not give the certainty required for Enterprises.

To really get Enterprise buy-in we need to build bridges to non-cloud apps and make those bridges solid. While Office 2.0 apps are good for new initiatives that can get sandboxed, to really become either platforms or core to the Enterprise we need to better integrate into these systems. The reality is that as more of these uses become successful, bigger vendors will add these capabilities to their offerings.  And they will see the real money from this. The lucky few leading Office 2.0 vendors will get acquired, but others will not — and with cheap and free business models the norm, they will not only go down but take their customers down too. So, we need to get to the real value for people — and this should affect how they can work in the Enterprise — and mostly this is in a non-2.0 world.

A question was asked in a session today — "if you were starting out today as a business, why would you not build all online apps?" I guess the reverse is "why would I, if I was an existing Enterprise, buy Office 2.0 apps when my existing trusted vendors can have this capability soon?" We can't afford to be something that can be sandboxed.

But, let's leave on a more positive note — what excited me today: Google Talk translations — way cool!  And hints at so much more. Also — The possibilities! I didn't get a chance to do my vendor visits yesterday and I hope that these can yield some a-ha moments.

Is quite simply stunning... Massive hats off to Ismael, Swisscom, and Covad for getting it going — it's fast, reliable, dependable, and has sufficient pipe size to serve up whatever everyone wants.

Awesome, awesome, awesome.

After attending conferences where there is no connectivity — it is an amazing experience.

GE SupportCenter

Communities of Practice focused on improving processes.

     Knowledge capture

     processes

     They surface their entire org chart - 400,000 employees

     50,000 communities?  That sounds like too many.  Is it really a community or a workgroup?

          One example is an Excel community.

          RSS, Wikis, blogs, calendars, chat and more

     Partnership with Zoho for document management