Hackathon Crowdsources Radical Ideas In ManagementHackathon Crowdsources Radical Ideas In Management

Enterprise 2.0 is as much about new ways of managing organizations as it is about new technologies, and participants at this week's Enterprise 2.0 conference will be invited to help prove what's possible.

Registration will open on the Management Hackathon website following the keynote presentations at Enterprise 2.0 in Santa Clara Monday. The online conversation will continue throughout the year, with a progress report due at the next Enterprise 2.0 event, June 18 to 22, 2012, in Boston.

Enterprise 2.0

The hackathon is a collaboration among Management Innovation eXchange (MIX), Saba Software, and the Enterprise 2.0 conference, a UBM TechWeb event. Saba is using the project as a showcase for its Saba People Cloud enterprise social media platform, which will provide the collaborative foundation for the hackathon.

MIX business architect Michele Zanini said that technology is creating great changes in business and opening up new possibilities for innovative ways of managing organizations, "but where we're still in the very early days around innovating the management model itself."

MIX is a spinoff of the Management Lab created by business strategy author and consultant Gary Hamel, focused on exploring ideas for more agile management. It begins with the idea that most companies are organized around theories of management established 50 years ago or more, when the world was much different.

The MIX website already hosts a community of management innovators who are encouraged to publish essays on big theories, as well as more tactical "hacks."

[Software innovation is also rewarded at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. Enterprise 2.0: Meet The Launch Pad Finalists.]

"We want the content to be practical but also radical," Zanini said. "You won't find the more mundane practices or tips highlighted there." There are no filters preventing participants from posting poor quality content, but the community has proved effective at identifying and promoting the ideas that are most relevant and valuable, he said. The 15,000 registered users have produced 1,000 pieces of content so far.

"Not all of it is great. But we ask people to submit a case study or a hack, and a good 15 to 20% of it is really interesting, groundbreaking content," Zanini said. "One of the big hypotheses we've been able to validate is, will people really take the time to write this stuff? We've found that they do take the time, out of passion or the promise that they could be recognized as management innovators."

The Management Hackathon will specifically focus on using "principles of the Web to build organizations that are fit for the future," according to a promotion for the online event. The software environment should also lend itself to more collaboration around ideas, rather than simply publication of them. "We want to complement these ideas with real collaboration," Zanini said.

Milind Pansare, the senior director of social cloud applications at Saba, said his company sees its approach as complementary to MIX's goals. "We understand that software by itself is not the answer," he said. Still, MIX has been operating as "a regular website," rather than a collaboration platform. By applying enterprise social networking to the venture, "we think we can really take it to the next step," he said.

By joining with the members of the MIX community, Enterprise 2.0 conference goers will have a chance to turn that next step into a giant leap.

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard

The Enterprise Connect conference program covers the full range of platforms, services, and applications that comprise modern communications and collaboration systems. It happens March 25-29 in Orlando, Fla. Find out more.