How does a 105-year-old company integrate enterprise 2.0 technologies with business process management tools to increase the efficiency of its operations? It starts with taking a hard and practical look at the challenges behind:

• Accelerating the pace of decision-making and getting better results
• Getting more value from an organization’s intellectual assets
• Keeping clients and staff informed through transparency and easier ways to share relevant information
• Ensuring that the right information gets to the right people in a timely fashion

These would be daunting challenges for an IT organization managing static resources in a controlled operations center. When your organization is constantly moving at sea, you add another level of complexity.

Wallem Services Limited sets a new standard managing IT innovation and services on a global basis. Their offices are not only distributed around the world, most of their offices float. Headquartered in Hong Kong, the Wallem Group's 8,500 employees in 21 countries provide a complete suite of value-added management services for more than 300 vessels that are constantly on the move around the world.

Patrick Slesinger, director and CIO of Wallem, is working to transition Wallem from being a top-down, command and control directed business to one where transparency unlocks the value of information in Wallem’s systems and delivers the highest levels of customer value.

The Wallem procurement system integrates K2 Blackpearl workflow management engine with Microsoft SharePoint and the Attensa Managed RSS Platform to create an innovative enterprise 2.0 application that brings a collaborative and transparent approach to the vessel management procurement activities.

Attensa's CTO and co-founder, Eric Hayes and K2's Dave Marcus and Seb Garrioch are the technical team behind the project.

We work with customers in Web meetings, on the phone and in IM everyday. Getting to meet Patrick at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston was a joy. He is a true global citizen. He kicked off his presentation and demonstration of this mashup by saying, "Presenting a live demo at a conference can either be the stupidest or the boldest thing you can do to show a technology solution." The demonstration came off without a hitch, a rare occurrence given the flaky Internet connections at the conference hotel. Chalk one up for bold.

In his talk Patrick enlightened us about bunkers and lubes, gave his perspective on the acceptance of smoking around the world and shared how salty seafarer language can enhance or tank your presentation depending on the audience.

Here are some of the comments following Patrick's session

"It makes a lot of sense. You presented a business process.You presented a very clear use case and articulated it very well. It is one the best actual use cases of integrating Enterprise 2.0. into the business process."

"All these talks about democratizing the workforce, yours is the only example that reflects the real world."

And, from Mike Gotta, who hosted the presentation: "This is not the typical RSS application. That was great. I think it’s stunning how simple things can work so well."

In Patrick's words, “This is not an elegant solution. But guess what? It adds value. It’s simple. Everyone knows what’s going on. If my chief architect leaves, I can hire someone else who will understand it. Business isn’t at risk.”

Here are the slides and screenshots from the demonstration.

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