My first Sogeti Kickoff: a great experience

Last week, more than 400 people of Sogeti group were meeting at Les Fontaines, for the annual KickOff. It was for me the first big event since I have joined this company last October.

Les Fontaines, is the training/conference center of the Cap Gemini Group located 30mn from Paris. I have to say that it is really a great place. Click on the Les Fontaines to see  what I mean...

First of all it was a great experience to meet my colleagues from all over the world , Sogeti is a company of  16,000+ people, all over Europe, in the USA and India.  The main theme of this 2008 Kickoff was "Web 2.0", the reason why I was invited indeed. If most of the technical people are using internally and externally Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, blogs, ims, .. It was important to have during this kickoff an "overall" brainstorming about the use of this tools for the group, but also how we can leverage of knowledge to help customers to be more efficient in their business.

As part of this theme our marketing folks have invited external speakers:

• Rolf Jensen : talking about the Dream Society, explaining that the next step for business is to add an emotional aspect into it, to add value...  I am a emotional person, and I can tell that I am buying Rolf's idea, and like most of Apple fan you can tell how important are the emotions to do business...
• Rod Bekstrom, co-author of the well known book "The Starfish and The Spider" focusing on the fact an company must shift  from a centralized organization to a decentralized one. You can listen to the presentation online on Rod's site.. I have to say that I soon as I have finished my current readings (RestFul Web Services-O'Reillys & Get Things Done) I will order this book. I really found some inspiration in Rod presentation, and his ideas could be immediately put in place in your organization or at your customer site.
• Last but not least, Nick Donofrio, EVP Technology and Innovation, talked about the important of innovation for the enterprise, and how we do not control the changes but we should adapt to it in a productive manner to stay at the top. 

However, I would have loved to see Francois Nonnemacher on the stage too since I had the opportunity to see him talking about Web 2.0/Social Computing for the enterprise and he is terrific... and also because as far as I know he has worked at Cap Gemini few years back

I really enjoyed all these presentations, in addition to the one that I have cited, we had many Sogeti's speakers including Sogeti CTO Michiel Boreel.