E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

SMT Blogger of the Week – Luis Suarez, The Blogger from Paradise

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!!, to all of those folks who may be celebrating it today! I know that for plenty of the people who get to read this blog, today is a special day with plenty of things to celebrate and enjoy throughout. Well, you are not alone. I am, too! A day like today, 17th of March, back in 2004, my life, both on a work and personal levels, changed drastically! I came to live and work remotely to Gran Canaria, the place I once fell in love with about 12 years ago! Yes, that is right! Today is my fourth anniversary enjoying quite a unique situation: The Blogger from Paradise.

It is funny! Earlier on this morning, I had the intention of sharing with you folks something new I was going to re-introduce into this blog, as a way to celebrate these four years I have been living over here fully engaging with social software both inside and outside of the corporate firewall, and lo and behold, there I was having to postpone it for a few more hours, as I got alerted about something that I thought would be worth while sharing as well as part of such important celebration as today’s.

Yesterday late afternoon, I got contacted, through Skype, by Jerry Bowles, Co-founder and CEO from the Social Media Today collective, and he kindly asked me whether I would want to do an IM interview with him detailing some more about my role within IBM as a social computing evangelist as well as sharing some further thoughts on the impact that social software is having not only within IBM, but also with its various employees, like myself. Of course, I just couldn’t resist such an interesting offer and the result of it is SMT Blogger of the Week – Luis Suarez, The Blogger in Paradise.

In that particular article you would be able to read our Skype IM conversation on what kind of impact social networking has been having with myself and my various interactions with other knowledge workers, including my own boss, Gina Poole, who still keeps actively engaged with the internal blogosphere. Quite an interesting read, which clearly indicates how things are shifting within the corporate world, where employees may not longer be stranded in a fixed office in a traditional work location. On the contrary, with today’s pervasiveness of social computing along with the high penetration levels of broadband Internet connectivity, knowledge workers may be having the unique opportunity to decide where they would like to be working as their most motivating space to deliver on the job day in day out for an extended period of time!

Now, I am sure that everyone would understand that there are various different circumstances on how various knowledge workers get to interact with other colleagues, customers or business partners, but it is also very accurate to think that the traditional restrictions we once had about having to work from a fixed office work location may no longer be relevant in today’s distributed world. Such is the impact that social software is having amongst our current workforce where over 42% of the total population is now mobile; and I am surely glad to be one of those very very lucky guys who has got his dream job within such a large enterprise. And in Paradise.

Many people keep asking me what is the main business value from social software, and all along I have been saying something that certainly resonates with plenty of other folks out there as well. I am sure. In my own case, the main business value I am getting through social computing is the fact that the last three jobs I have had, have actually been given to me because of my corporate blogging activities, amongst several other tasks related to social networking. So, for those folks out there who may be thinking that that there isn’t value in social software, they ma need to think about it, because throughout my own experiences you can see that the impact can be tremendous, to say the least!!

What a great way to celebrate four years of coming to the place where I feel like home. Always have. Always will. And get to work on what I am really passionate about at the same time: Social Computing, Community Building and Knowledge Sharing! The picture shared below is just one of the thousands and thousands of reasons why I fell in love with the island four years ago and still am, just like in the first day …

Roque Bentaiga

Tags: St. Patrick’s Day, Saint Patrick, Patrick, Gran Canaria, Paradise, Jerry Bowles, Social Media Today, SMT, IBM, Blogging, Metablogging, Blogs, Gina Poole, Corporate Blogging, Corporate Blogs, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Innovation, Workplace, Virtual Teams, Online Communities, Skype, Mobile Workforce, Mobility, Flexibility, Work Life Balance, WLB, Working At Home, WAH, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Management, KM, Gran Canaria, Roque Bentaiga, Bentaiga, Mountains

Giving up on Work e-mail – Status Report on Week 5

As you may well remember, last Friday I was in Madrid hosting a workshop on IBM Lotus Enterprise 2.0 and I must say that it was such a hectic and incredibly inspiring day overall that I didn’t get a chance to create the weekly blog post detailing what my progress report has been for the entire week last week as I was getting done with week 5 without work related e-mail. So I thought I would spend a few minutes today to share with you what has happened last week, specially for those who may have been following this experiment I have been having for the last few weeks.

To get things started here is a screen shot of the weekly report, week by week, and entering already the sixth week:

As you may have noticed, last week was a remarkable one! For the fifth time in a row the number of incoming e-mails has gone down again from the previous week, and this time around quite significantly, going from 39 to 35!! Yes, that’s 35 you are reading here!! That means an average of 7 e-mails a day vs. the 30 to 45 I used to get way before I got things going. Pretty impressive!!

I am actually starting to enjoy it more and more, as diverting most of the conversations to online social software spaces where I get to hang out has helped me get rid of that stress factor that e-mail is, specially when you come back from a trip, a vacation, a customer visit, a conference, a workshop, you name it. It has helped me to just carry out all of those social software interactions, while away, with the exact same outcome than e-mail, but a much faster response, too!

At the same time, and this is the part I am enjoying the most, I have finally given up on that famous cliche I used to go with: "Catching up with e-mail after a few days gone!". Well, that is no longer there. It’s just getting to work in the morning and be productive from the very first moment. Priceless!

Finally, one of the major highlights from last week’s escaping e-mail has been the fact that more and more people keep talking about it, so much so that during the course of this week I’ll be doing a couple of interviews with journalists as well, that I confirmed last week, and with whom I am going to be sharing my experiences on how the experiment is going and what I am trying to achieve with it, i.e. moving away from e-mail for public conversations into the social software space. And at the same time get folks to question and challenge the validity of the various e-mails they receive on a daily basis. Thus stay tuned for those, as I am hoping to be able to link to them very soon!

And this coming Friday I’ll be sharing another blog post with this week’s report. So far starting really good! … 7 mails today!

Tags: IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, e-mail, email, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Productivity, Conversations, Dialogue, Openness, Progress Reports, Conversations, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, e-mail Backlog, email Backlog, Stress