After a few days of Gartner Symposium/ITxpo conversations, keynotes and sessions – my top three leadership and execution takeaways are:

1. People, not information technology, will always be the real enablers of customer and business success
2. Innovation is the means for cross-functional teams to focus on what really matters to current and future customers and partners
3. Urgency is both a call to action and competitive advantage

True, I'm simplifying here and wearing Ektron's Global Community Practice (GCP) hat. But I'm also drawing on thoughts from Carol Rozwell (above); Anthony Bradley and Mark McDonald, authors of the #thesocialorg book; Diane Morello, Jim Murphy, William Clark and many other people here at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo and beyond.  Note the related webinar on November 3rd; please see details at the end of this post.

People

Regarding the people takeaway, let's replace social media with people media for the rest of this blog post. By doing this, I think you'll see business and customer value more clearly.

It's reasonable to say that people media has turned the corner from interesting to imperative, especially when looking at business from the outside in. The opportunity is for businesses to do people media activities that help them achieve business performance goals. It's about enabling people to focus on what's important for customer success.

Most organizations are using people media to strengthen customer relationship and increase brand awareness. There's also evidence that people media is helping organizations to improve productivity and reduce business costs via collaboration and optimization. What's important to remember is measuring people media is not the objective but, instead, measuring business performance (i.e. customer responsiveness, product improvement, time to market, etc.) influenced and enabled by people media.

Anthony Bradley and Mark McDonald -- authors of 'The Social Organization' -- almost entitled their book, 'The Amplified Organization' because they believe people media is an amplifier of success if applied with purpose across the organization. Anthony and Mark provided five management principles in their session and they cover these extensively in the book:

1. It's about productive mass collaboration and not technology
2. Treat social [people] media strategically
3. Take responsibility for creating and fostering collaborative communities
4. Stay focused on purpose -- key to productive collaboration
5. Guide and nurture mass collaboration; not command and control

While on the people topic, William Clark's session on context-aware computing was very interesting. And while he admitted this space is emerging, context-aware is the intersection of mobile, social, digital and physical worlds. The main actors are, of course, people that fall into consumer, provider and organization categories; enabled by technology.

In the 1990s, very few CIOs got the Web. But very soon, context will be as influential to mobile consumer services and relationships as search engines are to the Web. Enterprises should prioritize and seek out information for context delivery. It's like a puzzle of intent, environment, identity and community. And web content management is a key component in your context-aware infrastructure. 

Innovation

Diane Morello's masters of innovation session was outstanding, especially if you read between the lines with an open mind. Master Innovators are people who achieve exceptional results over and over again.  I captured ten thoughts from the session that help Master Innovators create repeatable results:

1. Think and act big
2. Have deep drive to help people
3. Solve problems around a cause (that people care about)
4. Have courage and take calculated risks
5. Involve the community for ideas and feedback
6. Apply leadership-based values to help achieve a cause/goal
7. Passionate speaker and relevant for a diverse audience
8. Observe, study problems and live what others experience
9. Apply proven innovation processes across the organization
10. Maintain a creative space that enables and rewards innovation

Urgency

As mentioned in my October 17th #GartnerSym post, there is a real sense of urgency and intensity here in Orlando given the opportunities and issues that are well covered in the media. The under performing economy, customer acquisition, experience and satisfaction, business growth, putting people back to work, etc. 

Circling back to people and what can be done to increase customer and business success, I'm personally going to continue to focus on and innovate as quickly as possible on how to learn from, reach, engage and empower Ektron customers, partners, developers and employees. And we're going to share insights from our own people media investments, execution and global community with anyone who wants to tune in and contribute.

Let's start now! Join me in a live webinar on Thursday, November 3rd at 1:00 PM EST entitled, 'Your Social Organization: Do You Have a Meaningful Plan for 2012?' I'm going to include more details and insights from #GartnerSym sessions as well as other sources and thought leaders from the global community.

If you have thoughts you would like for me to address during the webinar, please follow us on Twitter and tweet your question or idea before November 1st by using the #EktronGCP hashtag. I'll do my best to weave your thoughts into the webinar and conversation on Twitter during the webinar.