After arriving to a very cloudy Amsterdam on the Wednesday afternoon, we were excited to see what the city had to offer. Canals, cyclists, coffee shops were surrounding us when we were walking the busy streets of Amsterdam. I almost got run over by a cyclist – luckily I survived thanks to Francisco that had his eyes on every cyclist in town.
Indeed we live in an era of social networking! We had a few drinks in a busy pub close to the popular Dam square where we suddenly started chatting with Ricardo, a Brazilian/Canadian engineer and patent holder. Many great ideas and stories were discussed over a couple of Heinekens and we are excited to meet Ricardo again, very soon in sunny Portugal this time.
Thursday and Friday – time for the event! The two days brought interesting perspectives on how social media presents a radical shift for organizations. It is important to see social networking as a journey and understanding that the cultural change will not happen over a night. In fact, it is crucial to be flexible and to be prepared for working with different generations as well as getting ready for the realities of participation. We will always have creators, contributors, browsers and couch potato’s within our network. But we must say – it is not all about engaging and studying employees – we must think beyond that. As we are coming from pure innovation we feel that we also have to focus on specific business processes and cover a broad range of user groups and mix several Web 2.0 capabilities organized towards a specific business purpose. So – it is not only about adding tools and technology to your Intranet – we feel that the key to successful and engaging Intranet is to implement a technology that provides a solid ground for the true added-value – an embedded domain expertise that adds a business dimension to the technology.
Intranet & Portals 2010 was a great forum that brought together different industries and leading companies. We loved this year’s presentations from; BT, Mars, Allianz, Nokia and KPN among others – thank you for inspiring us! We are all sitting in the same boat – why not share ideas and help each other out over a cup of tea in Amsterdam. Let’s stay connected and see you all soon!
