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Showing posts with label Social Business. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Social Business. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 12, 2019
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Complimentary Certification Exams at #IBMConnect 2013
on December 6th, 2012
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IBM Connect 2013 will take place from January 27-31, 2013, at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, FL USA. We're connecting the longstanding Lotusphere and last year's Connect conferences — and making them one. IBM Connect combines the deep technical content that you've loved for 20 years with the learning you need to accelerate your move beyond social media to drive real business value with social and collaborative technologies.
Whether a professional has been charged with making their organization more social-enabled or they are focused on building or deploying social solutions, IBM Connect is the place to help professionals grow their social circles and business opportunities. For both the business-minded and technology-focused, this conference has the tools, tips, and tricks professionals need to exponentially improve their business outcomes with social solutions — from strategic planning and managing to administrating, analyzing, and developing solutions.
One of the biggest draws at this event has always been the certification testing and prep labs, and IBM Collaboration Solutions is pleased to announce that COMPLIMENTARY EXAMS ARE BACK FOR IBM CONNECT 2013. For the first time in years, we have approval to offer a spectacular pricing structure to both IBM Business Partners and our IBM clients and prospects, but conference attendees will have to act fast to ensure they receive their complimentary test(s). Here is how it works:
- The first 500 IBM Business Partners who test at conference are eligible for two complimentary exams.
- The first 500 clients* who test at conference are eligible for one complimentary exam.
- Subsequent exams will be available for $75 each, a significant discount off the developed market price of $200 US (or equivalent).
- Courses covering Lotus Notes Domino 8.5, Portal 8, and Social Software accessible at no charge
- Online access to prep resources and certification guides
- Assessment tests written by the exam developers available at no charge
In order to allow for greater flexibility and provide clients and partners with the best possible experience, testing candidates will be served on the spot. There is no need to pre-register and be held to a specific time slot. To take an exam, simply sign-in outside the testing lab in the Swan Hotel's Lark room. Professionals who have taken certification tests in the past are encouraged to bring their testing ID.
For more information, or to register for the conference, visit IBM Connect 2013.
*IBM employees are not eligible for this offer.
Monday, November 12, 2012
Unprecedented IBM Software Promotion!
New! IBM Collaboration Solutions (ICS) Collaboration Loyalty Program
***Hurry! Offer expires at the end of the year!
Collaboration Loyalty rewards clients who have already invested in ICS Collaboration and Social Software. It allows clients to receive a 15% discount on new licenses you acquire in addition to 15% off maintenance on years 2 and 3.
If you elect to participate, the value of additional Collaboration Licenses and the out years of maintenance would be blended together to give you 3 equal payments over 3 years to be financed at 0%. With the Collaboration Loyalty Program, you can purchase any software in the Collaboration Portfolio including but not limited to:
To reiterate: as a member of the Collaboration Loyalty Program you would have the option of leveraging IBM Global Financing at rates as low as 0% which could potentially spread out your Lotus Renewal Cost into three equal annual payments and provide you with even more predictable annual costs.
Please let me know if the ICS Collaboration Loyalty Program is something that interests you -- I would be happy to provide you with more information about this very valuable offer.
You can contact me via my marketing page at ibm.com/myrep/jagaeta.
***Hurry! Offer expires at the end of the year!
Collaboration Loyalty rewards clients who have already invested in ICS Collaboration and Social Software. It allows clients to receive a 15% discount on new licenses you acquire in addition to 15% off maintenance on years 2 and 3.If you elect to participate, the value of additional Collaboration Licenses and the out years of maintenance would be blended together to give you 3 equal payments over 3 years to be financed at 0%. With the Collaboration Loyalty Program, you can purchase any software in the Collaboration Portfolio including but not limited to:
- Lotus Notes and Domino for new employees or applications: Check out our new "Social Edition".
- Sametime Standard for web meetings and mobile chat
- Quickr for document management or file sharing
- Smartcloud for web based meetings, collaboration, and email in the cloud
- Connections to find experts and share knowledge
To reiterate: as a member of the Collaboration Loyalty Program you would have the option of leveraging IBM Global Financing at rates as low as 0% which could potentially spread out your Lotus Renewal Cost into three equal annual payments and provide you with even more predictable annual costs.
Please let me know if the ICS Collaboration Loyalty Program is something that interests you -- I would be happy to provide you with more information about this very valuable offer.
You can contact me via my marketing page at ibm.com/myrep/jagaeta.
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Healthcare Leveraging Big Data for Social Business
This was originally published on IBM's Social Business Insights blog on September 26th, 2012.
Healthcare has become a social business. The evolution towards social media, consumer expectations for quality and value in healthcare, and the urgent need to get healthcare costs under control are transforming the way healthcare is obtained, delivered and paid for. Social business strategies can reach consumers and make a real impact on the health of our society and also help healthcare organizations build flourishing businesses.
I found some interesting statistics and trends from Pew Research, AHRQ and McKinsey around cell phone usage, demographics and chronic illness that help prove the case:
- 55% of American cell phone users go online using their phones, a 24 % increase from 2009.
- Nearly half of young adults (18-29 year olds) do most of their online browsing on their phone.
- 40-50% of all black and Hispanic cell internet users do most of their online browsing on their phone, double the proportion of whites.
- An estimated 150M patients in the U.S. in 2010 were chronically ill, 25.6M have diabetes
- Nearly 11% of the non-white population, or 2.74M is suffering from diabetes (whites = 6.2%)
The challenge:
We know that healthcare data is very fragmented and all too often the patient is treated for a specific incident in time as opposed to consistent care over time. There are also issues of integration, patient privacy, secure access, liability and other things that come along with data sharing.
In order to improve patient health and outcomes, especially for chronically ill, we must evolve to a patient-centered system. Clearly this is not a new thought or notion, nor is it easy. The difference today is that we have new and cost effective technology that reaches from the systems infrastructure all the way through to the end-user consumer with interactive mobile applications that can be leveraged to impact healthcare.
The opportunity:
We now have the ability to capture all kinds of data we couldn’t capture before -- structured and unstructured “big data” from electronic medical records, correspondence among providers, patients and insurers, labs/tests, social media sites, medical devices and monitors. Natural language processing, text analytics and streaming analytics can be used to find the relevant information, aggregate it, make sense of it and analyze it to create highly valuable insight for more personalized care and better outcomes.
Social business solutions help healthcare providers and insurers provide better, more personalized care and also differentiate their service to become more competitive.
The proof:
Watch this video of Children’s Medical Center of Dallas, who created a private online community for children with diabetes and their families to communicate with their doctors, get access to their medical information as well as relevant information for their illness, and join communities of other like patients and track vital information about glucose levels, diet and activity. Patients can better manage their chronic condition and Children’s Medical Center of Dallas can provide more personalized care and treatment.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts is delivering a more personalized member experience and saving money at the same time by identifying high risk patients and bringing together demographics, benefits plan, historical claims information and evidence based rules to create customized alerts and recommendations. Taking it beyond the basic use of finding a provider, checking on a claim or validating coverage, the personalized member portal creates alerts and reminders that will help a member manage his health in an effective manner. Web traffic has increased by 40%, the number of members registering at the member portal has increased by 26%. Among the members who were surveyed about the personalized member portal experience, 76% receiving periodic health assessment (PHA) alert said that they would take a PHA, 61% receiving brand vs. generic Rx alert said that they will consider generic drugs and 81% of members surveyed said that they would like to receive personalized healthcare reminders and are likely to visit the personalized member portal to take control of their health.
As a society we are getting smarter about how we approach many things. These examples demonstrate how innovative healthcare organizations have successfully implemented social business to improve the health of patients. Many organizations are quickly moving in this direction. The 2012 CEO study found that 68% of healthcare CEOs believe that they will use social media to engage their clients, and two-thirds plan dramatic improvements in both internal and external collaboration, In short, healthcare CEOs are planning a significant increase in the use of social technology to connect individually with their consumers.
Friday, September 14, 2012
IBM Connections Merges Social Business w/ Big Data Analytics
by Darryl K. Taft
Originally published at eWeek.com on September 13th, 2012
IBM has announced a new version of its IBM Connections software, the company’s enterprise social networking platform—with support for iPhone 5.
As part of the announcement, IBM unveiled new software and services that bring the power of big data analytics into the hands of today's social-savvy workforce any time, any place. Now, organizations can apply analytics to their social business initiatives, allowing them to gain actionable insight on information generated on networks and put it to work in real-time, IBM said.
IBM announced the availability of IBM Connections 4, which incorporates analytics capabilities, real-time data monitoring, and faster collaborative networks both inside and outside the organization, whether on premise, in the IBM SmartCloud or using a broad range of mobile devices, including the new iPhone 5.
IBM also announced that leading companies around the globe, including Bayer MaterialScience, Colgate-Palmolive Company, LeasePlan, Primerica and Teach for America, are using its social software to achieve returns on their social business investments.
Big Blue officials said for three consecutive years, IDC ranked IBM No. 1 in enterprise social software. And more than 60 percent of the Fortune 100 companies have licensed IBM social software. IBM says its position in analytics has been established through a strategy that required the expansion of R&D, acquisition, and business initiatives across its hardware software and services portfolio.
The rise of social media is prompting business leaders, from the chief marketing officer to the chief HR officer to the CIO, to evaluate how to create opportunities that drive business transformation through the use of social technology, creating real business value, IBM said. According to Forrester Research, the market opportunity for social enterprise apps is expected to grow at a rate of 61 percent through 2016.
At the same time, business leaders lack the tools to gain insight into the enormous stream of information and use it in a meaningful way, IBM says. According to IBM's CEO Study, today only 16 percent of CEOs are using social business platforms to connect with customers, but that number is poised to spike to 57 percent within the next three to five years. A recent IBM study of more than 1,700 chief marketing officers reveals 82 percent plan to increase their use of social media in the next three to five years.
"To truly realize the full potential of a social business, leaders need to empower a company's most vital asset—the information being generated from its people," said Alistair Rennie, general manager of social business at IBM, in a statement. "Now is the time for business leaders to embed social into their key business processes to shift their business from the era of 'liking' to 'leading.'"
IBM Connections integrates activity streams, calendaring, wikis, blogs, a new email capability and more, and flags relevant data for action. It allows for instant collaboration with one click and the ability to build social, secure communities both inside and outside the organization to increase customer loyalty and speed business results. The new Connections mail capability provides simplified access to email within the context of the social networking environment.
The new software enables users to integrate and analyze massive amounts of data generated from people, devices and sensors, and more easily align these insights to business processes to make faster, more accurate business decisions, IBM said. By gaining deeper insights in customer and market trends and employees' sentiment, businesses can uncover patterns to not only react swiftly to market shifts, but predict the effect of future actions, IBM argues.
"I am thoroughly enjoying the ability to engage with a variety of employees through micro-blogging," said Patrick Thomas, CEO of Bayer MaterialScience, in a statement. "I can get information out quickly, but even more importantly, I can encourage two-way communication and stimulate an open-communication culture by breaking through barriers."
The new capabilities in IBM Connections empower employees from every line of business, such as marketing, human resources and development, to gain actionable insight into the information being generated in their social networks.
For example, the Connections landing page features a single location that allows users to view and interact with content from any third-party solution through a social interface, right alongside their company's content, including email and calendar. The embedded experience of the news feed, also known as an activity stream, allows employees from any department inside an organization to explore structured and unstructured data such as Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, weather data, videos, log files, SAP applications; electronically sign documents; and quickly act on the data as part of their everyday work experience.
IBM Looks to Differentiate Itself From Others in Social Media
With its recent $1 billion acquisition of Kenexa, market leadership and thousands of customers, IBM is aggressively going after the emerging social business market to differentiate itself from others in this space. This is another example of how IBM is identifying higher-value growth opportunities, such as business analytics and Smarter Commerce, and building and acquiring capabilities across the company to go after them. IBM officials said they believe the rise of enterprise social networking is becoming the next IT battleground. And IBM is fielding competition from the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce.com, Google and others that are currently tapping this market or beginning to creep into it.
Meanwhile, IBM said there is strong demand for Big Blue’s social business platform in regulated industries, with 41 percent of Connections 4 beta participants in banking, finance and health care institutions.
For example, Primerica, a leading distributor of financial products in North America, will use Connections and WebSphere Portal, to transform how its agents engage with its 2.3 million policy holders on the fly, to provide increased value for its customers. The company plans to use social business software to improve the overall client experience, drive competitive edge and stay on the forefront of innovation in the financial services industry.
LeasePlan, a leading vehicle leasing and fleet management company, is using IBM's social software platform across the organization's 40 subsidiaries, in 30 countries and over 6,000 employees. With nearly 800 communities formed, 400 blogs and more than 800 forums, the platform has become an integral component to business operations for the organization, increasing efficiency, enhancing knowledge retention, increasing innovation, and helping to improve customer care and insight.
"By collaborating with IBM, we've been able to transform our business processes,” said Wim de Gier, senior global project manager for corporate strategy and development at LeasePlan, in a statement. “Our internal social network allows employees to find experts faster, leading to better customer service, superior workforce effectiveness, and enhanced product and service innovation. It's allowing us to transform our organization into a social business."
To support the burgeoning demand for social business solutions in growth markets, in the fourth quarter of 2012, IBM will open two social business customer support centers to serve its Asia-Pacific and Latin American clients: one in Manila, the Philippines, and one in Sao Paolo, Brazil, to support the rapid adoption of social business tools in these growth markets. The Philippines and Brazil centers join a roster of IBM social business centers in North America, Dublin, Japan, China and India.
IBM's growing business partner network of more than 39,000 business partners is bringing new capabilities to IBM's social platform every day in areas including gamification, video, compliance, project management and mobility. For example, Actiance provides compliance capabilities to thousands of organizations globally, SugarCRM helps sellers use social networking and analytics for effective selling, and Bunchball provides gamification capabilities to IBM Connections.
Originally published at eWeek.com on September 13th, 2012
IBM has announced a new version of its IBM Connections software, the company’s enterprise social networking platform—with support for iPhone 5.
IBM announced the availability of IBM Connections 4, which incorporates analytics capabilities, real-time data monitoring, and faster collaborative networks both inside and outside the organization, whether on premise, in the IBM SmartCloud or using a broad range of mobile devices, including the new iPhone 5.
IBM also announced that leading companies around the globe, including Bayer MaterialScience, Colgate-Palmolive Company, LeasePlan, Primerica and Teach for America, are using its social software to achieve returns on their social business investments.
Big Blue officials said for three consecutive years, IDC ranked IBM No. 1 in enterprise social software. And more than 60 percent of the Fortune 100 companies have licensed IBM social software. IBM says its position in analytics has been established through a strategy that required the expansion of R&D, acquisition, and business initiatives across its hardware software and services portfolio.
At the same time, business leaders lack the tools to gain insight into the enormous stream of information and use it in a meaningful way, IBM says. According to IBM's CEO Study, today only 16 percent of CEOs are using social business platforms to connect with customers, but that number is poised to spike to 57 percent within the next three to five years. A recent IBM study of more than 1,700 chief marketing officers reveals 82 percent plan to increase their use of social media in the next three to five years."To truly realize the full potential of a social business, leaders need to empower a company's most vital asset—the information being generated from its people," said Alistair Rennie, general manager of social business at IBM, in a statement. "Now is the time for business leaders to embed social into their key business processes to shift their business from the era of 'liking' to 'leading.'"
IBM Connections integrates activity streams, calendaring, wikis, blogs, a new email capability and more, and flags relevant data for action. It allows for instant collaboration with one click and the ability to build social, secure communities both inside and outside the organization to increase customer loyalty and speed business results. The new Connections mail capability provides simplified access to email within the context of the social networking environment.
The new software enables users to integrate and analyze massive amounts of data generated from people, devices and sensors, and more easily align these insights to business processes to make faster, more accurate business decisions, IBM said. By gaining deeper insights in customer and market trends and employees' sentiment, businesses can uncover patterns to not only react swiftly to market shifts, but predict the effect of future actions, IBM argues.
"I am thoroughly enjoying the ability to engage with a variety of employees through micro-blogging," said Patrick Thomas, CEO of Bayer MaterialScience, in a statement. "I can get information out quickly, but even more importantly, I can encourage two-way communication and stimulate an open-communication culture by breaking through barriers."
The new capabilities in IBM Connections empower employees from every line of business, such as marketing, human resources and development, to gain actionable insight into the information being generated in their social networks.
For example, the Connections landing page features a single location that allows users to view and interact with content from any third-party solution through a social interface, right alongside their company's content, including email and calendar. The embedded experience of the news feed, also known as an activity stream, allows employees from any department inside an organization to explore structured and unstructured data such as Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, weather data, videos, log files, SAP applications; electronically sign documents; and quickly act on the data as part of their everyday work experience.
IBM Looks to Differentiate Itself From Others in Social Media
Meanwhile, IBM said there is strong demand for Big Blue’s social business platform in regulated industries, with 41 percent of Connections 4 beta participants in banking, finance and health care institutions.
For example, Primerica, a leading distributor of financial products in North America, will use Connections and WebSphere Portal, to transform how its agents engage with its 2.3 million policy holders on the fly, to provide increased value for its customers. The company plans to use social business software to improve the overall client experience, drive competitive edge and stay on the forefront of innovation in the financial services industry.
LeasePlan, a leading vehicle leasing and fleet management company, is using IBM's social software platform across the organization's 40 subsidiaries, in 30 countries and over 6,000 employees. With nearly 800 communities formed, 400 blogs and more than 800 forums, the platform has become an integral component to business operations for the organization, increasing efficiency, enhancing knowledge retention, increasing innovation, and helping to improve customer care and insight.
"By collaborating with IBM, we've been able to transform our business processes,” said Wim de Gier, senior global project manager for corporate strategy and development at LeasePlan, in a statement. “Our internal social network allows employees to find experts faster, leading to better customer service, superior workforce effectiveness, and enhanced product and service innovation. It's allowing us to transform our organization into a social business."
To support the burgeoning demand for social business solutions in growth markets, in the fourth quarter of 2012, IBM will open two social business customer support centers to serve its Asia-Pacific and Latin American clients: one in Manila, the Philippines, and one in Sao Paolo, Brazil, to support the rapid adoption of social business tools in these growth markets. The Philippines and Brazil centers join a roster of IBM social business centers in North America, Dublin, Japan, China and India.
IBM's growing business partner network of more than 39,000 business partners is bringing new capabilities to IBM's social platform every day in areas including gamification, video, compliance, project management and mobility. For example, Actiance provides compliance capabilities to thousands of organizations globally, SugarCRM helps sellers use social networking and analytics for effective selling, and Bunchball provides gamification capabilities to IBM Connections.
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Live Webcast: The Success of Your Business is Social
    
September 13, 2012
1:00 PM
Welcome and Insights from InformationWeek
1:10 PM
From Liking to Leading: The Success of Your Business is Social - Alistair Rennie, GM, Social Business, IBM
1:20 PM
Real World Experiences, Customer Stories - Hosted by Brian Gillooly, Editor in Chief, InformationWeek
1:40 PM
A Dynamic Business Platform - Jeff Schick, VP, Social Business, IBM
1:50 PM
Live Q & A
2:00 PM
Simulcast Concludes
| It's no secret that social technologies are dramatically changing the way people interact, collaborate, engage and get work done. But how can you as a leader tap into the power of social to drive real business value? Join IBM and InformationWeek at this live event via simulcast as we explore the changing face of business at an exclusive leadership summit. Learn from market-leading organizations who are already seeing the benefits of being social today...and discover how to enable more employees to be innovators and more customers to be advocates. We'll discuss ways you can harness these unique capabilities NOW to gain competitive advantage:
For up-to-the-minute details about this simulcast event, visit this site often. You'll find specifics regarding speakers, agendas and special announcements. Register today to attend the live broadcast. Attendee Profile: This event is geared towards executive level decision makers in large organizations. Sponsor reserves the right to review and decline registrations. |
Brian Gillooly
Editor-in-Chief,
InformationWeek
Alistair Rennie
General Manager,
Social Business, IBM
Wendy Arnott
VP Social Media & Digital Communications,
TD Bank Financial Group
Michel Min
Head of Strategic Comm. and eMarketing,
Omron Europe
Wim de Gier
Senior Global Project Manager, LeasePlan
Daniel S. Pelino
GM, Global Healthcare & Life Sciences, IBM
Mark McLaughlin
Director of Strategy for Insurance, IBM
Jeff Schick
VP, Social Business,
IBM
Jeffrey A. Rhoda
GM, Global Gov't and
Education, IBM
|
Friday, August 31, 2012
Great Use of Social Media for Business / Marketing
The power of social media/marketing.Businesses, take note.Great job,@jetblue! ow.ly/dnG0i@martystg@davidjbarger@jetbluecoo
— Joe Gaeta (@joegaeta) August 31, 2012
Monday, August 13, 2012
Thursday, July 5, 2012
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Sunday, June 24, 2012
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
@IBM Named Worldwide Marketshare Leader in #Social #Software for Third Consecutive Year #in
ARMONK, N.Y. - 18 Jun 2012: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that for the third consecutive year, IDC ranked IBM number one in worldwide market share for enterprise social software. According to IDC's analysis of 2011 revenue, IBM grew faster than its competitors and nearly two times faster than the overall market which grew approximately 40 percent.*
The growing popularity of social networking continues to explode, with more and more organizations looking for ways to adopt social business practices to integrate global teams, drive innovation, increase productivity and better reach customers and partners.
According to IDC, the enterprise social platforms market is expected to reach $4.5 billion by 2016, representing growth of 43 percent over the next four years.*
While this demand is on the rise, organizations are still looking for ways to embrace social capabilities to transform virtually every part of their business operations, from marketing to research innovation and human resources, but lack the tools to gain insight into the enormous stream of information and use it in a meaningful way.
"Social software is gaining in momentum in the enterprise," says Michael Fauscette, group vice president for IDC's Software Business Solutions Group. "Companies are seeing significant gain in productivity and increasing value from successfully deployed social software solutions including supporting ad hoc work by bringing people, data, content, and systems together in real time and making more effective critical business decisions by providing the 'right information' in the work context."
Today, more than 35 percent of Fortune 100 companies have adopted IBM's social software offerings including eight of the top 10 retailers and banks. IBM's social business software and services is unique combining social networking capabilities with analytics to help companies capture information and insights into dialogues from employees and customers and create interactions that translate into real value.
IBM's social networking platform, IBM Connections, allows for instant collaboration with one simple click and the ability to build social communities both inside and outside the organization to increase customer loyalty and speed business results. IBM Connections is available both on premise and in the cloud.
In the past year, new IBM Connections clients include Lowe's Home Improvement, Electrolux, TD Bank, Newly Weds Foods, Russell's Convenience stores, Bayer Material Science, The Ottawa Hospital, Premier Healthcare Alliance, Earthwatch, and the law offices of LaVan & Neidenberg.
"The opportunities for organizations to adopt social business processes to connect people and speed innovation is limitless," said Alistair Rennie, general manager, social business, IBM. "A successful social business can break down the barriers to collaboration and transform the next-generation workforce, from device to delivery vehicle of your choice, to improve productivity and speed decision making."
For more information, visit www.ibm.com/socialbusiness.
*IDC, "Worldwide Enterprise Social Software 2011 Vendor Shares, Jun 2012, Doc # 235273
 |
| Click HERE for larger image. |
According to IDC, the enterprise social platforms market is expected to reach $4.5 billion by 2016, representing growth of 43 percent over the next four years.*
While this demand is on the rise, organizations are still looking for ways to embrace social capabilities to transform virtually every part of their business operations, from marketing to research innovation and human resources, but lack the tools to gain insight into the enormous stream of information and use it in a meaningful way.
"Social software is gaining in momentum in the enterprise," says Michael Fauscette, group vice president for IDC's Software Business Solutions Group. "Companies are seeing significant gain in productivity and increasing value from successfully deployed social software solutions including supporting ad hoc work by bringing people, data, content, and systems together in real time and making more effective critical business decisions by providing the 'right information' in the work context."
Today, more than 35 percent of Fortune 100 companies have adopted IBM's social software offerings including eight of the top 10 retailers and banks. IBM's social business software and services is unique combining social networking capabilities with analytics to help companies capture information and insights into dialogues from employees and customers and create interactions that translate into real value.
IBM's social networking platform, IBM Connections, allows for instant collaboration with one simple click and the ability to build social communities both inside and outside the organization to increase customer loyalty and speed business results. IBM Connections is available both on premise and in the cloud.
In the past year, new IBM Connections clients include Lowe's Home Improvement, Electrolux, TD Bank, Newly Weds Foods, Russell's Convenience stores, Bayer Material Science, The Ottawa Hospital, Premier Healthcare Alliance, Earthwatch, and the law offices of LaVan & Neidenberg.
"The opportunities for organizations to adopt social business processes to connect people and speed innovation is limitless," said Alistair Rennie, general manager, social business, IBM. "A successful social business can break down the barriers to collaboration and transform the next-generation workforce, from device to delivery vehicle of your choice, to improve productivity and speed decision making."
For more information, visit www.ibm.com/socialbusiness.
*IDC, "Worldwide Enterprise Social Software 2011 Vendor Shares, Jun 2012, Doc # 235273
Friday, June 15, 2012
How @IBM Builds Vibrant #Social Communities
Jeff Schick, IBM’s Vice President of Social Software, interviewed by David Kiron
Originally Published by MIT Sloan Management Review on June 13, 2012
WHEN COMPANIES USE THE TOOLS that they sell to the outside world, the common expression is that it “eats its own dog food.”
“I prefer the French version of the expression, ‘We drink our own champagne,’” says Jeff Schick, the vice president of social software for IBM, and the key player in bringing social networking both to the IBM global staff and to IBM’s corporate customers.
And why not? IBM’s products are more akin to a fine wine than to a canine commodity. “IBM itself deploys our technologies for our own business purpose,” says Schick. “We’re a user of Sametime, we’re a user of Lotus Notes, we’re a user of IBM Connections. We use all of our collaboration technology across the 430,000 employees and another 75,000 contractors that are inside of IBM at any given moment.”
Schick has been pivotal to IBM’s work in social technology for decades. He’s been a developer, he’s been in the field working with clients, he has run lines of business like enterprise content management, he’s the creator of IBM Connections, and now he’s in charge of the company’s entire collaboration space, including messaging, unified communication and office productivity technologies overall.
In a conversation with David Kiron, executive editor of Innovation Hubs at MIT Sloan Management Review, Schick, who tweets at @jeffschick, talks about how, as part of the big picture of creating collaboration capabilities, IBM thinks about what kinds of things companies can do to create go-to forums, the incentives that make people participate and the value — both financial and creative — that social tools bring to a workplace.
How important are collaboration tools within IBM?
I see IBM as a social business, because of the way we’ve broken down the barriers of reaching out to the people within the organization, but also how we’re leveraging these same tools externally facing, to interact with our partners and clients.
When I joined IBM 25 years ago, there weren’t any personal computers. My dad also worked at IBM, and I could log in with a big terminal into the mainframe and basically look up my dad’s name and find his phone number. But that was it for collaboration tools.
Almost a decade and a half ago, with a mandate from our senior executive team, we began pursuing this idea that we needed to get the right person with the right opportunity at the right time to yield the right result.
We operate in 170 countries around the planet, and as we staff development teams that will build a product and locate it in different countries around the world, we need to bring the right folks to bear. We need to bring the right skills and the right intellectual property together to support how we work with our clients.
How did that get started?
So about fifteen years ago we built our first Web-based employee profile that, for the most part, merged all of our basic business card-type data with all of the skills- and experience-based information. Over time, that manifested itself as something that feels very close to a complete view of the employee, because it has expanded beyond their basic information and skills and certifications and projects that they worked on to include what they’re micro-blogging about, what they’re sharing on their wall, the communities that they participate in and the colleagues that they’re connected with.
This opportunity to really leverage our most important asset in IBM, and that’s its people, is critical to our business. We could not do what we do today if we didn’t have these sorts of capabilities to share and connect our people.
Right inside IBM, we have almost 70,000 communities that represent every science that we do, every industry that we serve, every product that we build, every standard that we observe. Some are made up of a narrow access-controlled list of people, maybe focused on an acquisition, and some are communities with tens of thousands or even a hundred thousand people, sharing information about a particular focus area.
Even with this long history of social business activity, have you witnessed a step change in the last few years in terms of the things that you can do?
Yes. I mean, I think about this all the time, both internally at IBM for how we operate, and in terms of the products we create for our customers, like IBM Connections.
Can you quickly describe what IBM Connections is?
Connections is an integrated social software platform for business, with profiles, blogs, Wikis, discussion forums, communities, ideation, rich media, micro-blogging, a wall-type feature. It’s positioned so that it’s meant for the enterprise. You leverage it in your intranet or your extranet or Internet, so it can run in your intranet or on your dot.com or dot.org or dot.edu or whatnot.
The big picture is to create collaboration capabilities. For instance, e-mail is not the best way to collaboratively edit a document. Perhaps a Wiki or an online cloud docs-type capability is. The best way to get your question answered may not be to send that off to a narrow-cast distribution list; it may be to pose that question into a discussion forum on a community focused on that topic. We've almost singlehandedly eradicated the IBM e-mail newsletter by having our visionaries and communicators, business owners, communicate through blogs. We have almost 40,000 active bloggers inside of IBM, sharing all manner of information.
That’s a change in mindset along with an expansion of technology.
You’re absolutely right. It’s not all about the technology. I think culture plays a huge dimension in how successful organizations are in transforming themselves into a social business. This stuff is so easy to use that it’s not about what button to click to post a blog, but how do you create a vibrant community? How do you create a community that’s the place to go, where you have community ownership, executive sponsorship, visionaries, communicators, all of the right content that people are looking for and a healthy set of readers and lurkers that are genuinely benefiting from that.
Do you have any specific examples that illustrate how IBM builds communities to get the right information to the right people at the right time for the right task?
Sure. To single out a specific area, we have over 80,000 consultants in IBM, as Global Consulting Services. That consulting organization thrives on having specific domain experts that they can bring to bear on business problems that our clients have.
We have a community that we call their Practitioner Portal. Its goal is to stop reinventing the wheel when we build deliverables. If we’ve built a proposal or a body of work for one airline in North America and we have a similar proposal in Asia Pacific, is there intellectual property or knowledge that we can leverage there, in order to build a better solution or deliver it in a more timely basis? They use that portal to leverage content more quickly, to locate relevant people faster, to discover people that they don’t know that can help them on the project and to grow their own capabilities by leveraging the tacit knowledge and wealth of information that’s out there.
When we look at the productivity savings, it’s tremendous and we’ve been able to quantify that into real cost savings at IBM.
Okay. And that’s just among IBM’s consulting community.
That’s right. Here’s another example. We use developerWorks as a large community on IBM.com, and in fact, it’s a community that has over a million people from both inside and outside the company participating. That community has sub-communities on all manner of topics, such as people focused on doing development using various IBM technologies.
When we built developerWorks a decade ago, it really was a place where people would go to download a manual or some sort of how-to guide or some frequently asked question. It was a place where you could find published content. But with the advent of social capability, it’s become a place for people to generate content and share it very easily. So we’re connecting IBM’ers with clients, client to client, client to partner, in ways that are very satisfying to the people participating. And that tacit knowledge that they’re sharing then becomes the tacit knowledge or domain knowledge of developerWorks overall, searchable and discoverable.
As a result, we’ve moved from a company that was very heavily leveraging phone support to leveraging communities with discussion forums, with people manning that and participating in the discussion. Again, overall cost savings for IBM is significant.
And how do you calculate that?
Just based upon what it took to pick up the phone and answer the call and resolve any questions that people had, versus moving our support people to discussion forums and creating answers that are searchable and discoverable. Now people aren’t picking up the phone or even posting a question in a discussion forum; they’re able to just find the answer.
How do you get people to participate? You said earlier that one of the big issues is how you create a community that’s not a dud — something vibrant, with content people look for and with a healthy set of readers and lurkers. Does IBM provide incentives to participate? Are people motivated simply by the value of authorship?
I think that across IBM, we’ve created a culture of sharing. So while the example I used was consultants, the same is true within the sales organization, the development and engineering teams, the marketing teams.
I think what ends up happening is that someone who is a reader or a lurker, one day they’re downloading a piece of content, and the next day they’re saying, “this helped me,” and the day after that they’re saying, “I modified it and I uploaded it here, and here’s the improvements that I made or here are the subtle changes I’ve made.”
But we’re being proscriptive as well. We have people that are missioned and goaled on this, based on their personal business commitments. So the end objective is a prize or money.
We’re also using other interesting incentives, like gamification. We have a language translation service inside of IBM where literally I could take a document, a highly technical document, and submit it, and through machine language translation, augmented by crowd-sourcing in terms of bettering the dictionary and improving the translation, I can almost with complete reliability convert a document into almost every language that we do business in. That was developed by people inside of IBM who helped build the dictionary in the machine language technology, and those folks, for those efforts, are ascribed points, and the top folks in the leader board are awarded funds which they can in turn donate to their favorite charities.
So, we’re not only making this part of people’s jobs, but for those people that have some time and want to help, and where it’s not conflicting with their day-to-day responsibilities, we’ve thought of new ways to incent them to participate and better what we do.
Can you talk about what kind of burdens come in a sharing culture? Once people become recognized as stars and very knowledgeable about one thing or another, are they always in demand?
I do think that the lens on those people can be really highlighted. You’re right: the guy who used to be, say, the local expert on a technology in Europe, who worked in Germany and only had e-mail in the world of collaboration, now that he can start to describe best practices, things that he’s thinking about, and he’s opened up the aperture of people that know him, think of him and turn to him. Does that create some greater burden or pressure in terms of helping folks? I think it does.
But with that said, I think we are in recognition of that, and we are starting to think about what should be an expert’s role in terms of the role they play more broadly in IBM versus their specific country-based focus. The creation of these new pressure points allows us to rethink our organization and what people do. The idea that people are after you all day and you’re having a hard time doing your day job, that seems like not a sustainable position. That’s something we have to make adjustments to.
That makes me wonder if you see any change in the role of the human resource function within the organization — either at IBM or in other firms as they adopt IBM’s social business tools.
I do. As I travel around the planet, the role of human resources and what you can ask an employee to do or not do is subtly different. For instance, I spent time recently in Germany, and more than a healthy amount of discussion with clients was about, “Gee, there’s a workmen’s council in your organization, made up of different workers from different areas of the company. And as you make policy on employees and what they can do or cannot do, or tools that they can use and cannot use, the workmen’s council plays an instrumental role in whether or not they’ll permit that.” A group like that works hand in hand with human resources on changes that would take place in the organization.
An example is that we’re rolling out social software at Bosch in Germany; and working with HR and workmen’s council. So we ask, what should be our policy in asking an employee to fill out their profile? Can the company mandate it? Or is that not permissible? Have you established a set of business conduct guidelines that talk about the ethical aspects of being an employee, the way you need to behave, the way you would conduct yourself in terms of business, including blogging and responding to questions in Facebook?
So human resources does take an active role in describing and creating policy around leveraging social, both inside an organization as well as outside the organization. And this has become such a popular discussion with us that we actually publish our Social Computing Guidelines right on IBM.com, so people can understand the policy that we hold our employees accountable to.
Can you describe the Blue IQ team and what they do, and IBM’s social business center of excellence and what it tries to do?
Like we talked about before, it’s important to any organization that aspires to be a social business that it thinks about adoption. How do I promote these technologies inside of the organization? There’s always a set of people that will like these sorts of technologies, who maybe are already leveraging social things in their personal life. But how do you take a part of an organization and really get them to use these technologies to better connect people with people and people with information?
We created an ambassador program inside of IBM that we call the Blue IQ team. It’s an idea to have knowledgeable, skilled, passionate people play the role in transforming the part of the organization they work in by leveraging social. So, for instance, we have several people that work in our microelectronics division. Their day-to-day responsibilities are focused on semiconductor manufacturing. But they’re also using micro-blogging to let their colleagues in the semiconductor manufacturing leadership team know that, say, in the 300-millimeter fab facility, they had a 96% yield on the substrate for the weekend process. They’re reporting on the chip fabrication process that occurred when they were on site and their colleagues weren’t. And that’s also the way that these sorts of events and notifications are getting to the leadership team.
How did the leadership team find these things out before? Maybe they got a phone call, maybe they got an e-mail, maybe they had an operations meeting. Now, they can get this through the notification service of their social software.
And the center of excellence?
The center of excellence is another instrumental structural configure inside of IBM. It’s not dissimilar from what many other companies have that we’ve worked with, like TD Bank. It’s really a steering organization. The center of excellence is a set of thought leaders who think about the areas of social business within the organization, and handle any of the challenges, issues, obstacles that present themselves.
So our social business executive steering committee will ask, what should be our privacy policy, in terms of content sharing and employee disclosure? What should be our privacy policy? What should be our policy for permitting employees to leverage Twitter? What should be our policy for allowing employees to create their own communities? What kind of social media monitoring should we be doing to do sentiment analysis of what’s being said on the Internet related to, say, a specific product launch?
Given that that’s a new initiative on the part of IBM, the center of excellence brings best practices to bear in that area.
I was struck by your comment that you have an executive steering committee on social business?
Yeah, absolutely.
Who is on that committee?
The vast majority are executive-level, but it’s a wide spectrum of folks that represent legal, compliance, HR, sales, marketing, product creation folks and represent a snapshot of the people that would be affected by these decisions.
So it’s primarily a policy-making group—
Call it a governing board. It’s policy, it’s decision, it’s strategy. It’s what IBM should be doing, and how should we be doing it. It’s getting that whole thing plumbed.
David Kiron is executive editor of MIT Sloan Management Review's Innovation Hubs.
Originally Published by MIT Sloan Management Review on June 13, 2012
WHEN COMPANIES USE THE TOOLS that they sell to the outside world, the common expression is that it “eats its own dog food.”
 |
| Jeff Schick |
And why not? IBM’s products are more akin to a fine wine than to a canine commodity. “IBM itself deploys our technologies for our own business purpose,” says Schick. “We’re a user of Sametime, we’re a user of Lotus Notes, we’re a user of IBM Connections. We use all of our collaboration technology across the 430,000 employees and another 75,000 contractors that are inside of IBM at any given moment.”
Schick has been pivotal to IBM’s work in social technology for decades. He’s been a developer, he’s been in the field working with clients, he has run lines of business like enterprise content management, he’s the creator of IBM Connections, and now he’s in charge of the company’s entire collaboration space, including messaging, unified communication and office productivity technologies overall.
In a conversation with David Kiron, executive editor of Innovation Hubs at MIT Sloan Management Review, Schick, who tweets at @jeffschick, talks about how, as part of the big picture of creating collaboration capabilities, IBM thinks about what kinds of things companies can do to create go-to forums, the incentives that make people participate and the value — both financial and creative — that social tools bring to a workplace.
How important are collaboration tools within IBM?
I see IBM as a social business, because of the way we’ve broken down the barriers of reaching out to the people within the organization, but also how we’re leveraging these same tools externally facing, to interact with our partners and clients.
When I joined IBM 25 years ago, there weren’t any personal computers. My dad also worked at IBM, and I could log in with a big terminal into the mainframe and basically look up my dad’s name and find his phone number. But that was it for collaboration tools.
Almost a decade and a half ago, with a mandate from our senior executive team, we began pursuing this idea that we needed to get the right person with the right opportunity at the right time to yield the right result.
We operate in 170 countries around the planet, and as we staff development teams that will build a product and locate it in different countries around the world, we need to bring the right folks to bear. We need to bring the right skills and the right intellectual property together to support how we work with our clients.
How did that get started?
So about fifteen years ago we built our first Web-based employee profile that, for the most part, merged all of our basic business card-type data with all of the skills- and experience-based information. Over time, that manifested itself as something that feels very close to a complete view of the employee, because it has expanded beyond their basic information and skills and certifications and projects that they worked on to include what they’re micro-blogging about, what they’re sharing on their wall, the communities that they participate in and the colleagues that they’re connected with.
This opportunity to really leverage our most important asset in IBM, and that’s its people, is critical to our business. We could not do what we do today if we didn’t have these sorts of capabilities to share and connect our people.
Right inside IBM, we have almost 70,000 communities that represent every science that we do, every industry that we serve, every product that we build, every standard that we observe. Some are made up of a narrow access-controlled list of people, maybe focused on an acquisition, and some are communities with tens of thousands or even a hundred thousand people, sharing information about a particular focus area.
Even with this long history of social business activity, have you witnessed a step change in the last few years in terms of the things that you can do?
Yes. I mean, I think about this all the time, both internally at IBM for how we operate, and in terms of the products we create for our customers, like IBM Connections.
Can you quickly describe what IBM Connections is?
Connections is an integrated social software platform for business, with profiles, blogs, Wikis, discussion forums, communities, ideation, rich media, micro-blogging, a wall-type feature. It’s positioned so that it’s meant for the enterprise. You leverage it in your intranet or your extranet or Internet, so it can run in your intranet or on your dot.com or dot.org or dot.edu or whatnot.
That’s a change in mindset along with an expansion of technology.
You’re absolutely right. It’s not all about the technology. I think culture plays a huge dimension in how successful organizations are in transforming themselves into a social business. This stuff is so easy to use that it’s not about what button to click to post a blog, but how do you create a vibrant community? How do you create a community that’s the place to go, where you have community ownership, executive sponsorship, visionaries, communicators, all of the right content that people are looking for and a healthy set of readers and lurkers that are genuinely benefiting from that.
Do you have any specific examples that illustrate how IBM builds communities to get the right information to the right people at the right time for the right task?
Sure. To single out a specific area, we have over 80,000 consultants in IBM, as Global Consulting Services. That consulting organization thrives on having specific domain experts that they can bring to bear on business problems that our clients have.
We have a community that we call their Practitioner Portal. Its goal is to stop reinventing the wheel when we build deliverables. If we’ve built a proposal or a body of work for one airline in North America and we have a similar proposal in Asia Pacific, is there intellectual property or knowledge that we can leverage there, in order to build a better solution or deliver it in a more timely basis? They use that portal to leverage content more quickly, to locate relevant people faster, to discover people that they don’t know that can help them on the project and to grow their own capabilities by leveraging the tacit knowledge and wealth of information that’s out there.
When we look at the productivity savings, it’s tremendous and we’ve been able to quantify that into real cost savings at IBM.
Okay. And that’s just among IBM’s consulting community.
That’s right. Here’s another example. We use developerWorks as a large community on IBM.com, and in fact, it’s a community that has over a million people from both inside and outside the company participating. That community has sub-communities on all manner of topics, such as people focused on doing development using various IBM technologies.
When we built developerWorks a decade ago, it really was a place where people would go to download a manual or some sort of how-to guide or some frequently asked question. It was a place where you could find published content. But with the advent of social capability, it’s become a place for people to generate content and share it very easily. So we’re connecting IBM’ers with clients, client to client, client to partner, in ways that are very satisfying to the people participating. And that tacit knowledge that they’re sharing then becomes the tacit knowledge or domain knowledge of developerWorks overall, searchable and discoverable.
As a result, we’ve moved from a company that was very heavily leveraging phone support to leveraging communities with discussion forums, with people manning that and participating in the discussion. Again, overall cost savings for IBM is significant.
And how do you calculate that?
Just based upon what it took to pick up the phone and answer the call and resolve any questions that people had, versus moving our support people to discussion forums and creating answers that are searchable and discoverable. Now people aren’t picking up the phone or even posting a question in a discussion forum; they’re able to just find the answer.
How do you get people to participate? You said earlier that one of the big issues is how you create a community that’s not a dud — something vibrant, with content people look for and with a healthy set of readers and lurkers. Does IBM provide incentives to participate? Are people motivated simply by the value of authorship?
I think that across IBM, we’ve created a culture of sharing. So while the example I used was consultants, the same is true within the sales organization, the development and engineering teams, the marketing teams.
I think what ends up happening is that someone who is a reader or a lurker, one day they’re downloading a piece of content, and the next day they’re saying, “this helped me,” and the day after that they’re saying, “I modified it and I uploaded it here, and here’s the improvements that I made or here are the subtle changes I’ve made.”
But we’re being proscriptive as well. We have people that are missioned and goaled on this, based on their personal business commitments. So the end objective is a prize or money.
We’re also using other interesting incentives, like gamification. We have a language translation service inside of IBM where literally I could take a document, a highly technical document, and submit it, and through machine language translation, augmented by crowd-sourcing in terms of bettering the dictionary and improving the translation, I can almost with complete reliability convert a document into almost every language that we do business in. That was developed by people inside of IBM who helped build the dictionary in the machine language technology, and those folks, for those efforts, are ascribed points, and the top folks in the leader board are awarded funds which they can in turn donate to their favorite charities.
So, we’re not only making this part of people’s jobs, but for those people that have some time and want to help, and where it’s not conflicting with their day-to-day responsibilities, we’ve thought of new ways to incent them to participate and better what we do.
Can you talk about what kind of burdens come in a sharing culture? Once people become recognized as stars and very knowledgeable about one thing or another, are they always in demand?
I do think that the lens on those people can be really highlighted. You’re right: the guy who used to be, say, the local expert on a technology in Europe, who worked in Germany and only had e-mail in the world of collaboration, now that he can start to describe best practices, things that he’s thinking about, and he’s opened up the aperture of people that know him, think of him and turn to him. Does that create some greater burden or pressure in terms of helping folks? I think it does.
But with that said, I think we are in recognition of that, and we are starting to think about what should be an expert’s role in terms of the role they play more broadly in IBM versus their specific country-based focus. The creation of these new pressure points allows us to rethink our organization and what people do. The idea that people are after you all day and you’re having a hard time doing your day job, that seems like not a sustainable position. That’s something we have to make adjustments to.
That makes me wonder if you see any change in the role of the human resource function within the organization — either at IBM or in other firms as they adopt IBM’s social business tools.
I do. As I travel around the planet, the role of human resources and what you can ask an employee to do or not do is subtly different. For instance, I spent time recently in Germany, and more than a healthy amount of discussion with clients was about, “Gee, there’s a workmen’s council in your organization, made up of different workers from different areas of the company. And as you make policy on employees and what they can do or cannot do, or tools that they can use and cannot use, the workmen’s council plays an instrumental role in whether or not they’ll permit that.” A group like that works hand in hand with human resources on changes that would take place in the organization.
An example is that we’re rolling out social software at Bosch in Germany; and working with HR and workmen’s council. So we ask, what should be our policy in asking an employee to fill out their profile? Can the company mandate it? Or is that not permissible? Have you established a set of business conduct guidelines that talk about the ethical aspects of being an employee, the way you need to behave, the way you would conduct yourself in terms of business, including blogging and responding to questions in Facebook?
So human resources does take an active role in describing and creating policy around leveraging social, both inside an organization as well as outside the organization. And this has become such a popular discussion with us that we actually publish our Social Computing Guidelines right on IBM.com, so people can understand the policy that we hold our employees accountable to.
Can you describe the Blue IQ team and what they do, and IBM’s social business center of excellence and what it tries to do?
Like we talked about before, it’s important to any organization that aspires to be a social business that it thinks about adoption. How do I promote these technologies inside of the organization? There’s always a set of people that will like these sorts of technologies, who maybe are already leveraging social things in their personal life. But how do you take a part of an organization and really get them to use these technologies to better connect people with people and people with information?
We created an ambassador program inside of IBM that we call the Blue IQ team. It’s an idea to have knowledgeable, skilled, passionate people play the role in transforming the part of the organization they work in by leveraging social. So, for instance, we have several people that work in our microelectronics division. Their day-to-day responsibilities are focused on semiconductor manufacturing. But they’re also using micro-blogging to let their colleagues in the semiconductor manufacturing leadership team know that, say, in the 300-millimeter fab facility, they had a 96% yield on the substrate for the weekend process. They’re reporting on the chip fabrication process that occurred when they were on site and their colleagues weren’t. And that’s also the way that these sorts of events and notifications are getting to the leadership team.
How did the leadership team find these things out before? Maybe they got a phone call, maybe they got an e-mail, maybe they had an operations meeting. Now, they can get this through the notification service of their social software.
And the center of excellence?
The center of excellence is another instrumental structural configure inside of IBM. It’s not dissimilar from what many other companies have that we’ve worked with, like TD Bank. It’s really a steering organization. The center of excellence is a set of thought leaders who think about the areas of social business within the organization, and handle any of the challenges, issues, obstacles that present themselves.
So our social business executive steering committee will ask, what should be our privacy policy, in terms of content sharing and employee disclosure? What should be our privacy policy? What should be our policy for permitting employees to leverage Twitter? What should be our policy for allowing employees to create their own communities? What kind of social media monitoring should we be doing to do sentiment analysis of what’s being said on the Internet related to, say, a specific product launch?
Given that that’s a new initiative on the part of IBM, the center of excellence brings best practices to bear in that area.
I was struck by your comment that you have an executive steering committee on social business?
Yeah, absolutely.
Who is on that committee?
The vast majority are executive-level, but it’s a wide spectrum of folks that represent legal, compliance, HR, sales, marketing, product creation folks and represent a snapshot of the people that would be affected by these decisions.
So it’s primarily a policy-making group—
Call it a governing board. It’s policy, it’s decision, it’s strategy. It’s what IBM should be doing, and how should we be doing it. It’s getting that whole thing plumbed.
David Kiron is executive editor of MIT Sloan Management Review's Innovation Hubs.
Monday, June 11, 2012
Today's Hyperconnected Society #ibmsoftwarestory #in
Optimize the way we share knowledge and expertise.
Children's Hopsital Boston did:
- Over 200 million tweets sent every day.
- 77% of the world's population are mobile subscribers.
- Leading businesses are 57% more likely to use social and collaborative tools.
Children's Hopsital Boston did:
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Friday, June 1, 2012
CEOs Embark on a New Era of #Leadership as They Embrace a More #Connected #Culture
IBM CEO Study: Command & Control Meets Collaboration
CEOs embark on a new era of leadership as they embrace a more connected culture
Press Release - ARMONK, N.Y - 22 May 2012: A new IBM (NYSE: IBM) study of more than 1,700 Chief Executive Officers from 64 countries and 18 industries worldwide reveals that CEOs are changing the nature of work by adding a powerful dose of openness, transparency and employee empowerment to the command-and-control ethos that has characterized the modern corporation for more than a century.
The advantages of the fast-moving trend are clear. According to the IBM CEO study, companies that outperform their peers are 30 percent more likely to identify openness – often characterized by a greater use of social media as a key enabler of collaboration and innovation – as a key influence on their organization. Outperformers are embracing new models of working that tap into the collective intelligence of an organization and its networks to devise new ideas and solutions for increased profitability and growth.
To forge closer connections with customers, partners and a new generation of employees in the future, CEOs will shift their focus from using e-mail and the phone as primary communication vehicles to using social networks as a new path for direct engagement. Today, only 16 percent of CEOs are using social business platforms to connect with customers, but that number is poised to spike to 57 percent within the next three to five years. While social media is the least utilized of all customer interaction methods today, it stands to become the number two organizational engagement method within the next five years, a close second to face-to-face interactions.
“One of the most compelling findings is how in tune CEOs are about the implications and impact of social media,” said Bridget van Kralingen, senior vice president, IBM Global Business Services. “Rather than repeating the familiar lament about de-personalizing human relationships, this view leans heavily in favor of deepening them, and using dynamic social networks to harness collective intelligence to unlock new models of collaboration.”
Greater openness is not without risks. Openness increases vulnerability. The Internet – especially through social networks – can provide a worldwide stage to any employee interaction, positive or negative. For organizations to operate effectively in this environment, employees must internalize and embody the organizations values and mission. Thus, organizations must equip employees with a set of guiding principles that they can use to empower everyday decision making. Championing collaborative innovation is not something CEOs are delegating to their HR leaders. According to the study findings, the business executives are interested in leading by example.
By the numbers
CEOs regard interpersonal skills of collaboration (75 percent), communication (67 percent), creativity (61 percent) and flexibility (61 percent) as key drivers of employee success to operate in a more complex, interconnected environment.
To build its next-generation workforce, organizations have to actively recruit and hire employees who excel at working in open, team-based environments. At the same time, leaders must build and support practices to help employees thrive, such as encouraging the development of unconventional teams, promoting experiential learning techniques and empowering the use of high-value employee networks.
The trend toward greater collaboration extends beyond the corporation to external partnering relationships. Partnering is now at an all-time high. In 2008, slightly more than half of the CEOs IBM interviewed planned to partner extensively. Now, more than two-thirds intend to do so.
“Innovating together with your partners is a win-win for both,” Peter Voser, Chief Executive Officer, Royal Dutch Shell plc says. “At Shell, we not only deal with energy, we also need to focus on challenges such as water and food as they’re all interlinked. That’s why driving innovation together, also across industries, is extremely important.”
Other findings
The IBM study found that a majority (71 percent) of global CEOs regard technology as the number one factor to impact an organization’s future over the next three years – considered to be a bigger change agent than shifting economic and market conditions.
Across all aspects of their organization – from financials to competitors to operations – CEOs are most focused on gaining deeper insights about their customers. Seven out of every ten CEOs are making significant investments in their organizations’ ability to draw meaningful customer insights from available data.
Given the data explosion most organizations are facing, CEOs recognize the need for more sophisticated business analytics to mine the data being tracked online, on mobile phones and social media sites. The traditional approach to understanding customers better has been to consolidate and analyze transactions and activities from across the entire organization. However, to remain relevant, CEOs must piece together a more holistic view of the customer based on how he or she engages the rest of the world, not just their organization. The ability to drive value from data is strongly correlated with performance. Outperforming organizations are twice as good as underperformers at accessing and drawing insights from data. Outperformers are also 84 percent better at translating those insights into real action.
About the IBM 2012 Global CEO Study
This study is the fifth edition of IBM’s biennial Global CEO Study series. To better understand the challenges and goals of today’s CEOs, IBM consultants met face-to-face with the largest-known sample of these executives. Between September 2011 and January 2012, 1,709 CEOs, general managers and senior public sector leaders were interviewed worldwide to better understand their future plans and challenges in an increasingly connected economy.
For access to the full study findings and case studies, please visit: http://www.ibm.com/ceostudy
CEOs embark on a new era of leadership as they embrace a more connected culture
Press Release - ARMONK, N.Y - 22 May 2012: A new IBM (NYSE: IBM) study of more than 1,700 Chief Executive Officers from 64 countries and 18 industries worldwide reveals that CEOs are changing the nature of work by adding a powerful dose of openness, transparency and employee empowerment to the command-and-control ethos that has characterized the modern corporation for more than a century.
 |
| Click image for larger view. |
To forge closer connections with customers, partners and a new generation of employees in the future, CEOs will shift their focus from using e-mail and the phone as primary communication vehicles to using social networks as a new path for direct engagement. Today, only 16 percent of CEOs are using social business platforms to connect with customers, but that number is poised to spike to 57 percent within the next three to five years. While social media is the least utilized of all customer interaction methods today, it stands to become the number two organizational engagement method within the next five years, a close second to face-to-face interactions.
 |
| Click image for larger view. |
Coming after decades of top-down control, the shift has substantial ramifications – not just for the CEOs themselves – but for their organizations, managers, and employees, as well as for universities and business schools, and information technology suppliers. IBM’s research finds that technology is viewed as a powerful tool to recast organizational structures. More than half of CEOs (53 percent) are planning to use technology to facilitate greater partnering and collaboration with outside organizations, while 52 percent are shifting their attention to promoting great internal collaboration.
“One of the most compelling findings is how in tune CEOs are about the implications and impact of social media,” said Bridget van Kralingen, senior vice president, IBM Global Business Services. “Rather than repeating the familiar lament about de-personalizing human relationships, this view leans heavily in favor of deepening them, and using dynamic social networks to harness collective intelligence to unlock new models of collaboration.”
Greater openness is not without risks. Openness increases vulnerability. The Internet – especially through social networks – can provide a worldwide stage to any employee interaction, positive or negative. For organizations to operate effectively in this environment, employees must internalize and embody the organizations values and mission. Thus, organizations must equip employees with a set of guiding principles that they can use to empower everyday decision making. Championing collaborative innovation is not something CEOs are delegating to their HR leaders. According to the study findings, the business executives are interested in leading by example.
By the numbers
CEOs regard interpersonal skills of collaboration (75 percent), communication (67 percent), creativity (61 percent) and flexibility (61 percent) as key drivers of employee success to operate in a more complex, interconnected environment.
To build its next-generation workforce, organizations have to actively recruit and hire employees who excel at working in open, team-based environments. At the same time, leaders must build and support practices to help employees thrive, such as encouraging the development of unconventional teams, promoting experiential learning techniques and empowering the use of high-value employee networks.
The trend toward greater collaboration extends beyond the corporation to external partnering relationships. Partnering is now at an all-time high. In 2008, slightly more than half of the CEOs IBM interviewed planned to partner extensively. Now, more than two-thirds intend to do so.
“Innovating together with your partners is a win-win for both,” Peter Voser, Chief Executive Officer, Royal Dutch Shell plc says. “At Shell, we not only deal with energy, we also need to focus on challenges such as water and food as they’re all interlinked. That’s why driving innovation together, also across industries, is extremely important.”
Other findings
The IBM study found that a majority (71 percent) of global CEOs regard technology as the number one factor to impact an organization’s future over the next three years – considered to be a bigger change agent than shifting economic and market conditions.
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Across all aspects of their organization – from financials to competitors to operations – CEOs are most focused on gaining deeper insights about their customers. Seven out of every ten CEOs are making significant investments in their organizations’ ability to draw meaningful customer insights from available data.
Given the data explosion most organizations are facing, CEOs recognize the need for more sophisticated business analytics to mine the data being tracked online, on mobile phones and social media sites. The traditional approach to understanding customers better has been to consolidate and analyze transactions and activities from across the entire organization. However, to remain relevant, CEOs must piece together a more holistic view of the customer based on how he or she engages the rest of the world, not just their organization. The ability to drive value from data is strongly correlated with performance. Outperforming organizations are twice as good as underperformers at accessing and drawing insights from data. Outperformers are also 84 percent better at translating those insights into real action.
About the IBM 2012 Global CEO Study
This study is the fifth edition of IBM’s biennial Global CEO Study series. To better understand the challenges and goals of today’s CEOs, IBM consultants met face-to-face with the largest-known sample of these executives. Between September 2011 and January 2012, 1,709 CEOs, general managers and senior public sector leaders were interviewed worldwide to better understand their future plans and challenges in an increasingly connected economy.
For access to the full study findings and case studies, please visit: http://www.ibm.com/ceostudy
To hear what Shell CEO Peter Voser has to say about partnering to drive innovation, please visit: http://bit.ly/ShellCEO
Contact Information
Bipasha Dahncke
IBM Media Relations
1-914-765-6148
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Imagining the Marriage of #SocialNetworking & #Cloud
By Bethann Cregg, Vice President for IBM Social Business Cloud
This was originally published by IBM on the "Building a Smarter Planet" Blog on May 17th, 2012.
Increasingly, organizations are using cloud computing and social networking to help them embrace new market opportunities.
Over the past several years cloud computing has matured to a point where it’s considered a mainstream technology service. The benefits can seem endless. It helps to reduce IT costs, it’s easy to set up, scales to your business’ storage needs seamlessly, provides customers, partners and employees with remote access from anywhere at anytime, it’s secure and security-rich. Expected to grow to more than $214 billion by 2020, cloud computing has become a catalyst for capturing new business value.
Similarly, social networking for business has exploded over the past several years. Forrester Research reports that the market opportunity for social enterprise apps is expected to grow at a rate of 61 percent through 2016, reaching $6.4 billion. Once viewed as a tool for students and teens to connect with one another, businesses are now adopting similar concepts to better connect their employees, partners and clients and to transform globally. These organizations are transforming into social business as every department, from HR to marketing to product development to customer service to sales, are using social networking the way they use any other tool and channel to do their job.
They’re integrating social networking tools into traditional business processes to fundamentally impact how work gets done and to create business value. They’re deepening customer relationships, generating new ideas faster, identifying expertise, enabling a more effective workforce and ultimately driving their bottom line.
Imagine what could happen if you were to marry cloud computing and social networking.
Many organizations, of all shapes, sizes and industry, are already doing so and creating significant business value.
For example, within the RICOH Company, Ltd., an international supplier of office and industrial equipment, the Business Development Center is collaborating in the cloud creating products faster with an expected improvement in cycle time for new product introduction of 20 percent. Chefs at Newly Weds Foods, a world leader in food ingredient technology, have reduced department travel and meeting costs by 10 percent. Strategic Decisions Group (SDG), an international strategy consulting firm, has also achieved more than 60 percent cost reduction in their Asia Pacific e-mail system costs, all thanks to using cloud services.
‘Colleagues in Care’ Global Healthcare Network (CIC) is using social networking tools in the cloud to virtually connect medical workers and volunteers from around the globe. Using this technology, the volunteers and those on the front lines taking care of patients are armed with an online medical knowledge system that includes treatment options, clinical pathways, and best practices specific to the situation in Haiti. For example, doctors on the ground in Haiti now have immediate access to information. Previously, a healthcare worker typically had no access to a specialist to consult about a specific medical condition. They can now immediately determine how to best care for a patient directly in front of them, at the same time collaborating with colleagues to determine more population-based strategies of effective care.
Organizations like Colleagues in Care, Neiman Marcus, University of Texas El Paso (UTEP), Strategic Decisions Group (SDG), Hindustan Motors, Bonduelle and Apave have chosen the cloud to help drive social business adoption across the enterprise. These organizations are seamlessly collaborating, sharing information and ideas, resulting in increased efficiency, improved productivity and in the case of CIC changing the very fabric of healthcare delivery in an areas devastated by earthquake.
Social and cloud are opportunities that organizations are realizing can’t be missed, they’re becoming must-haves that businesses can’t ignore. Have you taken advantage?
This was originally published by IBM on the "Building a Smarter Planet" Blog on May 17th, 2012.
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What’s the one thing all organizations have in common? They must identify new ways to grow revenue and expand their business to stay competitive.Increasingly, organizations are using cloud computing and social networking to help them embrace new market opportunities.
Over the past several years cloud computing has matured to a point where it’s considered a mainstream technology service. The benefits can seem endless. It helps to reduce IT costs, it’s easy to set up, scales to your business’ storage needs seamlessly, provides customers, partners and employees with remote access from anywhere at anytime, it’s secure and security-rich. Expected to grow to more than $214 billion by 2020, cloud computing has become a catalyst for capturing new business value.
Similarly, social networking for business has exploded over the past several years. Forrester Research reports that the market opportunity for social enterprise apps is expected to grow at a rate of 61 percent through 2016, reaching $6.4 billion. Once viewed as a tool for students and teens to connect with one another, businesses are now adopting similar concepts to better connect their employees, partners and clients and to transform globally. These organizations are transforming into social business as every department, from HR to marketing to product development to customer service to sales, are using social networking the way they use any other tool and channel to do their job.
They’re integrating social networking tools into traditional business processes to fundamentally impact how work gets done and to create business value. They’re deepening customer relationships, generating new ideas faster, identifying expertise, enabling a more effective workforce and ultimately driving their bottom line.
Imagine what could happen if you were to marry cloud computing and social networking.
Many organizations, of all shapes, sizes and industry, are already doing so and creating significant business value.
For example, within the RICOH Company, Ltd., an international supplier of office and industrial equipment, the Business Development Center is collaborating in the cloud creating products faster with an expected improvement in cycle time for new product introduction of 20 percent. Chefs at Newly Weds Foods, a world leader in food ingredient technology, have reduced department travel and meeting costs by 10 percent. Strategic Decisions Group (SDG), an international strategy consulting firm, has also achieved more than 60 percent cost reduction in their Asia Pacific e-mail system costs, all thanks to using cloud services.
‘Colleagues in Care’ Global Healthcare Network (CIC) is using social networking tools in the cloud to virtually connect medical workers and volunteers from around the globe. Using this technology, the volunteers and those on the front lines taking care of patients are armed with an online medical knowledge system that includes treatment options, clinical pathways, and best practices specific to the situation in Haiti. For example, doctors on the ground in Haiti now have immediate access to information. Previously, a healthcare worker typically had no access to a specialist to consult about a specific medical condition. They can now immediately determine how to best care for a patient directly in front of them, at the same time collaborating with colleagues to determine more population-based strategies of effective care.
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| Click image for larger graphic. |
Social and cloud are opportunities that organizations are realizing can’t be missed, they’re becoming must-haves that businesses can’t ignore. Have you taken advantage?
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