Tags: IBM, TLE, PLTE, TLE-2007, Technical Leadership Exchange, Innovation, IBM Technical Community, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Management, KM, Collaboration, Communities, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Paris, Social Networks, Connections, Conversations, Networking, Social Capital

As I have just mentioned, this is a follow up weblog post from the previous one I have shared regarding some of the highlights from IBM’s 2007 Technical Leadership Exchange event held in Paris last week. If in the previous entry I mentioned how one of those highlights was the networking opportunities, here is something for you that will show you how some times things are not as easy and straightforward as some people may think.

Yes, the networking opportunities were great, as I have mentioned previously, but sometimes it takes time for them to take off. Here is an anecdote to detail some of that. Throughout the few days the event took place, the organisers of the event actually set up a number of different roundtables for lunch on various topics of interest to help people get together and talk about what they are interested and passionate about. Most of those tables, during the course of the event, were actually packed with people chatting away exchanging experiences and whatever other stories.

All of the tables except one! One that when I saw it in the photocopies I was given I was very excited to attend and hang out with other folks. Yes, indeed, the table on Web 2.0, Collaboration and Social Computing. What? You say. Yes, that is right, all of the other tables were completely packed, except for the one on Social Computing. Jeeezzz, how can that be? I thought. I arrived late for lunch the first day and, while I was waiting on the queue for some food, I spotted the table and just saw one other colleague sitting there (Richard Hopkins - a.k.a. Turner Boehm, who I met at that same table after I got myself some food and who shares plenty of my same interests around the virtual worlds, the metaverse and, of course, Second Life). He was actually sitting there by himself for about 15 to 20 minutes, the time it took me to drop by the table and join him.

How surreal is that? A roundtable for lunch around the subject of Social Computing and nobody, but one person shows up during the first 15 minutes! Goodness! Talking about networking! Anyway, not to worry, it gets better! Wait for this one. Each of the roundtables actually had a leader, someone who would moderate the table and get some of the action started. Well, for the two days that the roundtable was running the leader didn’t show up, even though we knew the person was present at the TLE event! Yes, that is right. You are reading it right. That person didn’t show up at all! Not even to say something while we were all over there waiting. Sigh.

Yes, I guess that shows how some times social computing and Web 2.0 is harder to get than you think and how sometimes you get major massive disappointments like that one! But thank goodness they only last for a few minutes because you only need to put together a table for social computing evangelists to get together and no matter how few there would be around they will come over. And we did.

The two days we had a fantastic set of conversations about how social computing is impacting the corporate world and exchanged lots of stories on funny anecdotes like the one I just mentioned above on how some times the job of a social computing advocate and evangelist is harder than initially thought. But we all love it! It is that energy that sucks us all into wanting much more! Meeting up with other interesting people, getting to know them and their passions for social software, knowledge sharing and collaboration, learn from one another on different experiences and, better yet, build up trustworthy and everlasting relationships that we could all use when going back to our daily jobs.

That is exactly the kind of interactions I have been having with Roo Reynolds (Metaverse evangelist) throughout the whole event, along with a whole bunch of other folks I will be talking about in another follow up entry. I have known Roo for a number of months, perhaps even a couple of years already, and throughout all of that time we have been interacting through our social networks quite a bit, but it was this particular event that gave us the chance to get to know each other face to face. About time!, you may say. And you are right! It was certainly one of the major highlights from the entire event as it gave me the chance to place a face behind all of the interactions we have been having throughout all of these months. And like him, a few others.We talked for hours and hours no end and still felt like a five minute conversation! Nice! Very nice!

In short, no matter how hidden we, social computing evangelists, may well be, in the end, we are going to come out and share with the world how social computing is going to impact them big time! And the best part of it is every chance we get we are going to use it. Those leader-less roundtables we made together gave us the chance to have some incredible conversations and be even more re-energised than ever. So much so that we got a whole bunch of other folks interested and excited about the whole thing, but that would another story for another weblog post. Coming up soon!

(That is what conference events like this one are all about! Not so much on the irony of social computing but more the power of networking!)

Tags: IBM, TLE, PLTE, TLE-2007, Technical Leadership Exchange, Innovation, IBM Technical Community, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Management, KM, Collaboration, Communities, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Paris, Social Networks, Connections, Conversations, Networking, Social Capital

In previous weblog posts I mentioned how it was going to be a bit difficult for me to detail most of the stuff I have been exposed to while I attended last week’s IBM’s Technical Leadership Exchange event in Paris. Given the nature where most of the materials, although not confidential, would be of a sensitive nature for this kind of outside-of-the-firewall audience, I am just going to do my best on detailing what has been the main highlight from the overall event, which I am sure you have guessed already from the title of this weblog entry: The networking opportunities. But let’s start from the beginning.

In last year’s event in Madrid I must confess that the networking opportunities were not as good as I thought they would be. There were very few breaks and too short overall, so when you got quite comfortable with the whole thing you find out that the event is over! This year though things have been quite different. We had plenty of different networking opportunities, with breaks in between keynote and elective sessions of about 45 minutes and plenty of time for lunch, too! And all that without counting the networking events put together after the long day attending different sessions. It looks like the organisers of the event actually acted upon the feedback many of us provided in this respect last year! Great stuff!

Yes, this year they had to put together more sessions under the same name time slot, but I think that was a good thing. I know I have missed out a few presentations I couldn’t make, while I was attending others, but then again that is the whole point of recording them all for later viewing, don’t you think? However, there isn’t a single chance that you can miss out on the opportunity to network with other folks! And specially in this kind of events where you know that such a huge bunch of folks would be coming along.

And that is exactly what I did! I used every single opportunity I was given to hang out with different folks and had a great time throughout. So much so that to me, such opportunities to network in these events are actually much more rewarding, educational, enlightening, thought-provoking and so forth than making it to the elective sessions themselves. Don’t take me wrong, breakout sessions are great and they do provide lots of good content to digest throughout time, but the thing that cuts it for me for any such event as this one is basically hanging out with other people, connect with them, share experiences, knowledge and, collaborate, why not? on the same subjects we are all passionate about. Re-energising is the first word that comes to mind

Does it get any better than that? I doubt it. That is why to me the main highlight from this year’s IBM TLE event has been the opportunity to network with others and help build up new relationships and nurture those that I already had from the past and which I also find equally valuable. The rest was good, but getting to know other people who you have got so much in common is, to me, priceless. And worth while on its own the two days travelling, back and forth. I guess you could say that I am the kind of person who prefers to work and improve his own social capital skills rather than the explicit knowledge skills that I know I can get from elsewhere. Although, check out my next weblog entry around the subject of "The Irony of Social Computing". It would make you have a good laugh and think about things twice, specially if you are involved around the area of social computing within the Enterprise…

Tags: IBM, TLE, PLTE, TLE-2007, Technical Leadership Exchange, Innovation, IBM Technical Community, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Management, KM, Collaboration, Communities, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Euro Disney, Paris, N95, Twitter, Free Wireless, Roo Reynolds, Michael Coleman, Andrew Webb, Flickr, Pictures, Work Life Balance, WLB, Social Networks, Connections, Conversations

Oh dear, where did that week go again? Goodness, I cannot believe that today is my first day back at work after having spent a fantastic week attending IBM’s Technical Leadership Exchange conference event in Euro Disney, Paris, and then enjoying four wonderful days in lovely Paris doing a bit of sightseeing here and there! I know that I mentioned back then, before starting my trip, that I would be doing some more weblogging about the APQC KM & Innovation event and also about some of the stuff I have been exposed to during the course of the IBM event last week. But alas my network connectivity had other plans for me, errr, I mean, for us.

Euro Disney is probably not the best place to try to get 2,200 IBM folks connecting to the Internet through free wireless at the same time with their Thinkpads while getting started with the event itself. Of course, it crashed the network. And for four days! Ouch! That hurt! And quite a lot! So what I was planning on doing , i.e. weblogging a few times during the course of that week, actually never happened. It just wasn’t doable.

And, what is worse, the paid wireless fees were not the cheapest I have seen in a long while! So I didn’t get connected at all. I have been happily making use of my N95 for the very basic Internet stuff (a.k.a. twittering away all along!), but for weblogging further thoughts and insights on what was going on in my mind back then it was not what I expected / wanted. Thus my regular weblogging activities went dead for a few days to the point where I didn’t even get a chance to reply to most of the comments that folks have been sharing all along with some very interesting thoughts altogether! Yes, that is right! Very disappointed!

And then Thursday afternoon, I went downtown to Paris (Close to Rue de Rivoli) to enjoy a lovely long weekend till Monday evening when I got back. And that time around the everlasting battle between the work - life balance was actually won by life, of course! It is Paris, after all, don’t you think? I just couldn’t get down to weblogging when there were so many cool things to check out since last time I was there about five years ago!

That is why I didn’t get a chance to weblog much while I was enjoying that long weekend break in Paris. There is always something to do, something to check, something to see, someone to meet up with, lots and lots of interesting food to try out (I went out every single day for lunch and dinner and throughout all those times I only had French food once! The rest was Thai, Indian -twice-, Chinese -DIM SUM-, Tibetan, and so on. Loved it!) and the list goes on and on and on! Phew! I met a whole bunch of people with whom I have been connecting already on the Web through our social networks, so it was really nice to be able to put a face to a name, a voice, a blog post, you name it. As the time goes by, I will certainly share some further thoughts about this, because, as usual, it was one of the major highlights from the entire week!

Yes, that is right. I am now back, for the first time in years my mail inbox is now empty! Yeah, sorry, had to say it … EMPTY! and I am now on a massive catch up mode with the several thousand RSS feeds waiting for me to scan through and check out what most of you have been doing while I have been away. The fun continues, indeed, but I think I am going to cut this weblog entry short right here and just point out to you some of the different Flickr pictures I have already started uploading into my Flickr account. Some of which you can already see through this post to give you a sense of what I went through in that lovely long holiday break !

Oh, and if you are looking for pictures of the IBM TLE event I must say that I didn’t take any since I thought that plenty of other folks would. And, indeed, Roo Reynolds, who I finally got to talk to after hanging out together in Web 2.0 for probably too long!, Michael Coleman, another fellow IBMer who is all into KM, collaboration, community building, innovation and social computing, and Andrew Webb, who I have been in contact with quite a lot as well as we also seem to be sharing a bunch of common interests around the world of social computing, have been sharing a whole bunch of them to get you going.

For the rest, let me finish off this post sharing with you folks that my regular weblogging activities will resume shortly… It is good to be back!

Tags: IBM, TLE, PLTE, Technical Leadership Exchange, TLE-2007, IBM Technical Community, Innovation, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Management, KM, Collaboration, Communities, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Blogs, Blog Central, Wikis, Wiki Central, Podcasts, Media Library, Social Bookmarks, Dogear, Sametime, Lotus Sametime, Lotus Connections, Connections, Second Life, Fringe, Web Conferencing, Eurodisney, Paris

As most of you may well remember, this week I am going to be away from the office, attending IBM’s Technical Leadership Exchange event, a.k.a. IBM’s TLE,. in Eurodisney, Paris. Right now I have just finished the first day where we have gone through some Lab sessions, an Introduction presentation for the speakers, since I am speaking tomorrow afternoon and, finally, a Welcome reception where there have been a whole bunch of poster sessions on different IBM related topics. I am not sure how much of it I will be able to weblog about during the course of the week since the entire event is just for an IBM audience, so I may as well continue writing a couple of weblog posts from the recent event I attended in Houston, the APQC KM & Innovation event. However, there is just one single thing that I have noticed and which I have found quite interesting and somewhat revealing. At least, to some degree.

And that is the fact that, after I have been checking out the program with the whole bunch of different keynote and breakout sessions, there are going to be very few sessions, in fact, so far I can only locate about five of them, that would be dealing with the subject of social computing and how it is getting adopted by the enterprise, whether it is for IBM internal purposes or externally with other businesses. Interesting, don’t you think? Well, it gets better, because I have been talking to a good number of people coming from all sorts of different places in Europe and to most of them social computing is something relatively new where there are actually getting acquainted with some of the concepts and whatever else. But there is still some more!

This IBM TLE event is one of the most prestigious and well known within IBM’s technical community, in fact, there are two of them. One always taking place in the US, this year in Anaheim, California, for an Americas and Asia Pacific audience, and then a second one in Europe for an European audience. The event taking place in the US had a whole bunch of different sessions regarding social computing and social software tools within the corporate world and while I have been catching up with most of the replays I have been looking forward to checking out what the TLE European counterpart event would bring together. And so far, just five different breakout sessions! Yes, I know, not too many! And also while I was hanging out at the main room where a bunch of different poster sessions were presented, none of them (At least, of the whole bunch I got exposed to!) were actually tackling items related to social software and how the corporate world has been embracing it all along. Which got me thinking really about the kind of impact that social software is having all over the place, but in particular here in Europe. Not much, you would imagine, right? Yes, that may well be the case and that is something that I thought we were in the brink of making things change, and for good, but apparently, it may take a little bit longer than what I had expected.

I thought we would be having several dozen sessions during this particular event on how people are adopting social networking tools in order to help knowledge workers collaborate and share knowledge easier with other peers along with customers and business partners. It looks like things are a bit slower here in Europe, as far as slow adoption is concerned. And I know a whole bunch of you folks out there would probably agree with that statement as well. This is something that I have experienced myself in the past for the last few years and time and time again I have managed to sneak myself in these sorts of events to show and demonstrate to different people coming from different backgrounds how social computing is a new area worth while exploring and which will always help improve people’s productivity by allowing everyone to produce, and manage, more of their own content and establish different connections with others. This is the whole purpose of the breakout session I will be doing tomorrow afternoon, just after lunch.

And, for once, I thought I would not be as alone as most of the times for the last few years, but somehow I have the little suspicion that it may be just a few of us who will be showing everyone the true potential of what is coming, or, better, of what is already there, ready for all of us to make good use and extend our own capabilities in order to become smarter at what we do. For instance, I had a fascinating conversation during the reception with a couple of folks on the many benefits of Second Life and how its further adoption may not be as easy as what some of us would have thought, specially for the older generations of the workforce, who are already quite comfortable with making use of their own collaborative tools suite in order to share knowledge and communicate with others. Very enlightening, to say the least!

I wish I were able to share the slide deck over here, so that everyone out there would be able to see what IBM is currently doing at the moment adopting some of the most prominent social software tools and driving the next wave of interactions. Alas, most of the information contained in the slides provide a good bunch of sensitive information, including screen shots of the different applications, and therefore would not be able to share it. However, if you have been reading from this weblog for a good number of months you will probably know how IBM has been evangelising on the extended usage, and adoption, of weblogs (Blog Central), wikis (Wiki Central), Social Bookmarks (Dogear), Podcasting and social media (With the Media Library), People portals (with Fringe), social tagging to drive innovation (with ThinkPlace amongst others), Collaborative Group Instant Messaging (With Lotus Sametime 7.5.1 and Web Conferencing) and a whole bunch more stuff I have been sharing over here all along, including the coming together of most of them under the about to go live LotusConnections, where some really exciting news are currently taking place as well!

Thus stay tuned, because although I may not be able to weblog about some of the stuff I will get exposed to I will certainly share some of my experiences over the course of the week, based on the different conversations I may be having along the way, specially in the different areas I would want to enquire people about. And you probably know what I mean with that. To summarise the impressions from today and, perhaps also this lengthy weblog post that I started at 33,000 feet while travelling to Paris, I can probably say very safely that there is still plenty of work to be done in helping knowledge workers understand that if there is anything good about social computing, and its adoption within the corporate world, is how it empowers them to be control of the conversations and share what they know with others, when they would want to and choosing from a wide range of options so that there is always a social software tool out there that they would be benefiting from it a great deal. So the exciting battle is still there! And I am all ready for it!

Tomorrow there is a fully packed agenda with some keynote speakers and breakout sessions. I will be doing one of those breakout sessions and then later in the evening hanging out at Eurodisney, the theme park, which I am sure is going to be great fun ! Free wireless and Wi-Fi have not been very good at different intervals today, which is why I am creating this weblog post now, so I am hoping things would improve tomorrow a great deal. We shall see. Oh, and before I let you all go, I want to take this opportunity to thank you all sincerely for the great comments you have been leaving in multiple of the weblog posts I have been creating the last few days. Things have been very busy with attending multiple events and catching up with everything else, so I haven’t had a chance to respond properly to them. It is certainly my intention to do so, probably when things would slow down a bit, so please bear with me while I am getting through this week attending this event. I will eventually be sharing some further thoughts on some of the great insights shared so far so that we can get the conversations going as they should. Appreciate all the valuable input and hang in there while I am getting through this event and share some more of my experiences around it.

Now time to hit the bed and get a good night sleep for tomorrow. Long long, but very exciting day ahead of us! More tomorrow … of course!

Tags: APQC, APQC2007, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, KM Events, Innovation, KM Training, KM Learning, Communities, Communities of Practice, CoPs, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, KM 2.0, Houston, Carla O’Dell, Relationships, Social Networks, Trust

After yesterday’s quick break, here I am back at sharing further insights on the APQC KM & Innovation event I attended last week in Houston. This time around though focusing on the actual two day event that took place as I didn’t get a chance to attend any other KM related training. And this is where things are going to get a whole bunch more interesting, and fun!, as I will just be putting together some further thoughts on what I really liked about each of the different sessions and, hopefully, at some point in time I may be able to share some of the different presentations, which at this point in time are being placed in a specific online space for us to download. We shall see how that goes.

Right, here it goes. The "Welcome to the conference!" speech was actually done by Jim Lee sharing with us a bunch of slides showing the history, over the course of 30 years, from APQC. Quite interesting and educational, if you would want to know some more about some of their major achievements. To finish off the introduction Jim shared one particular YouTube video clip  that I have also shared over here some time ago and which clearly shows how much things are changing in the current business world. Remember?

Then from there onwards we had the first keynote session with Carla O’Dell, Ph. D. President, APQC, around the subject of "The Role of Knowledge Management in Innovation". There are plenty of different things that I really liked about her pitch but perhaps the one that hit home the hardest was the fact that Knowledge Management and Innovation, for a number of years, were walking different paths, but apparently things are shifting rather rapidly in this respect over the last couple of years and nowadays they both walk hand in hand. Or, at least, that is the perception from a good bunch of KM advocates and innovators alike.

Here is an interesting quote from the slides:

"Innovation happens at the intersection of need, information, relationship, expertise and diversity"

I bet that particular quote will ring a bell to many of the folks who regularly read this weblog as that is exactly the kind of impact that social computing is bringing into the corporate world to help drive that particular innovation by allowing people to share their knowledge and collaborate a lot easier. Yes, indeed, I was happy to hear about that! You can tell.

One of the other things I enjoyed quite a bit was, apart from the clear distinction made between Invention and Innovation, how innovation, according to Carla, is all about connecting people to people to facilitate conversations to happen and, as a result, Knowledge Management is in a position to drive and change culture using (that) power of the network. How cool is that? What better validation of the power of social networks than to indicate that they are the key primary drivers from both KM and Innovation and how, as time goes by, they become fundamental to businesses in order to generate more revenue. About time, don’t you think?

Well, it gets better. Because with both KM and innovation walking hand in hand we are enabling the breaking of the silos amongst organisations and helping knowledge workers trust each other much more effectively and therefore allow every to share even more. And you know what? Communities are going to play a key role in this particular adoption of the social network within the corporate world. But that is something that I am going to leave for a follow up weblog entry as there have been a couple of other interesting points that I would want to share over here as well along those very same lines. So stay tuned!

Overall, a very good session, indeed, provided by Carla and with plenty of messages that have hit home very closely and which I was very happy to hear about after the three days of KM training I attended previously, as you have been able to see from previous blog posts. Good stuff! But not to worry, there is more to come …

Tags: Mobile 2.0, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Knowledge Management, KM, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Collaboration, Communities, Mobile Workforce, Twitter, Nokia, N95, YouTube, IBM, TLE, TLE2007, PLTE, Podcasting, Vodcasting, Digital Camera

Remember when not long ago I created a weblog post over here where I was mentioning how in the end I would give in to the world of Mobile 2.0 and jump into the bandwagon and try to become a bit more productive while I am on the road, specially with all the travelling I got involved with over the last few weeks? Well, well, well. I have just reached that stage, because a couple of days back I mentioned in one of my twitterings how I am now a proud owner of one of Nokia’s latest gadgets: the N95.

Yes, that is right. In the end, after a rather long search and a hat-tip from a good friend of mine, I managed to purchase one these lovely gizmos and so far I can only say that I am just loving the experience! I knew it was worth while the wait. I knew it would be a pricey gadget (Around the 700€!), but then again from what I have seen the last few days so far it is worth while every penny! And so much more!!

The quality of the product is just outstanding, with an incredibly intuitive user interface and packed up with lots and lots, and really helpful, features for those of us on the road who still want to keep in touch with our most frequently used social software tools. Certainly, the N95 is "What computers have become" and I am really glad that I have purchased it just before my trip to Paris next week, because it would allow me to take it for a heavier and much more thorough test than what I have been doing the last few days where I have been sitting in front of the computer most of the time.

I must admit that it would probably take me ages to describe some of the most popular features put together that I have been enjoying so far, so instead of doing that I am just going to link to a YouTube video with an excellent review of the N95, that I have mentioned over here in the past as well, so that you can check what some of those powerful features are.

One of the things that I really like about this particular phone is that apart from the usual regular phone calls and SMS capabilities there is always something new to learn. I mean, in the short time I have been testing out every single day I have found out a new feature or capability I was not aware of, even though I have gone through the user guide a couple of times already (I guess they forgot to include those!). And that is what makes this particular gadget so interesting, that there are so many features that I am sure it would please everyone out there. Even the most demanding!

So far I am loving the experience. I never thought that such device would have such massive impact in the way I interact with most of my social networks and social software tools. Take, for instance, the example from Twitter, where now with the fine release of Twitter Mobile, I can keep up with what my Twitter friends are doing, which from the perspective of attending conference events it sounds like the ideal companion to not miss anything and still be in touch with everyone. And you can record audio and video with an incredible quality, at the same time that the 5 Megapixels camera it is just as good as my good old digital camera! WOW! *Very* impressive!

Anyway, I will probably be relating some of the experiences with it next week as I will be in Paris attending IBM’s Technical Leadership Exchange and I am surely going to bring it with me as my one and only computer while I am on the event! I bet my shoulders would be very grateful, too!

Here you have got a couple of pictures I took the first day from such a fine piece of hardware and software! … Yeah, I know, you can stop drooling now! But I just had to share it as I felt it was about time that I put myself to the test of working out if Mobile 2.0 was made out for me or not. So far I have got the feeling that I am up for it, and with gadgets like the N95 the job looks a lot easier, too!!