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

IBM Lotusphere 2009 Highlights

Well, not many, I am afraid. At least, for now. More than anything else due to the lack of DAI (Decent Access Initiative). Yes, that same one David Terrar managed to put together under "Always say DAI – conference WiFi" a couple of months back and which, it seems, keeps failing more and more these days. That’s right, the lack of proper WiFi while attending conference events, specially technical / Internet related ones.

A few days back, you would remember, I put together a couple of blog posts where I was sharing further details about the good number of online resources about the event itself, i.e. Lotusphere. Resources that I was planning on using myself as well as check them out throughout to see what was going on, specially for such an event of these dimensions (I bet plenty of us would have wanted to clone ourselves to be at multiple places while in there!).

Well, it didn’t happen. From day one (Monday to me, since I arrived Sunday evening) and right till the very last day, Thursday, the WiFi connection at Lotusphere was everything, but functional. Don’t take me wrong, I am ok without it, since I was there in person, but given the relevance of the event, we all know it is a good thing to share the news with the rest of the online world, so we all expect to have a fully functional Internet access. Yet, it didn’t happen.

Most of you folks who have followed this blog for a while now, as well as my twitterings, know that I have adopted the approach to live tweet @ elsuacon, so that apart from capturing live thoughts I’d then want to blog about at a later time as highlights, I would also have the opportunity to share those thoughts with anyone out there who would want to follow up on them. Well, at Lotusphere, it didn’t happen, at least, as often and as much as I would have hoped for. On the contrary, rather erratic!

To the point where I gave up altogether and decided to focus on enjoying the event from an offline perspective, i.e. lots of superb conversations face to face with the folks attending / presenting / demoing at the event. And in that respect I had a blast! (More on that at a later time)

By the end of the event, at the Closing General Session it was mentioned how the wi-fi didn’t cope with the high peaks throughout the event, not because of the bandwidth, but because of the lack of enough access points for us all to access the Web and while I do praise the explanation, and apologies, of what happened, I am still disappointed that such an important and relevant conference event as Lotusphere didn’t plan ahead that well, in this area, the fact that technical folks are always going to carry multiple devices with wi-fi enabled, at the same time that they would be watching on the Internet the unique events that took place throughout the week. That’s to be expected, I would think, specially coming from where it is coming: IBM.

Poor planning? Maybe. I don’t know. For me though one of the biggest disappointments of the year. For sure. Why? Because I realised that even my own company cannot put together a proper wi-fi network connection for us all attending it live to cover the IBM event of events as thoroughly as we would have hoped for! And that, my friends, hurts. Ouch! It really hurts!

(You may be wondering whether I will be putting together further highlights of the Lotusphere event, right? Well, yes, I am, but they are going to be just like my live tweets. Erratic and not complete. So I’m going to wait for all of its content to become available online, including the recordings, if they are made available as well, that is, and comment further on those sessions I thought were worth while talking about, specially those dealing with the same topics I get to blog about over here. Stay tuned!)

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Social Networks, Networking, Conversations, Dialogue, Connections, Relationships, Lotusphere, Lotusphere 2009, Lotusphere09, LS09, Events, Conference Events, Orlando, Florida, Internet Access, Wi-Fi, DAI, Decent Access Initiative, David Terrar, Twitter, Live Tweeting, Highlights

Giving up on Work e-mail – Status Report on Week 50 (Impact of Social Software in HR)

Still on the road, currently in Madrid (Where tomorrow I am scheduled to do a couple of internal events on Social Software at IBM), and after a rather interesting event in Orlando with Lotusphere 2009, here I am again back at my regular blogging, this time around with another weekly progress report on my quest to giving up e-mail at work that I have started a few months ago, as most of you already know.

I hope later on this week to be able to share with you some further insights on Lotusphere, as I am sure plenty of you would be interested in that very same topic. But for now, I’m going to continue sharing with you that weekly progress, so that you get to see what’s been like after the last couple of weeks with some interesting events and the transition into IBM Spain I’m about to complete a month of already! Thus without much further ado, here is the weekly report from last week:

Right on target, indeed! Like I have mentioned a couple of times already, now that I am consistently on the average of 20 to 30 e-mails a week, I have got a new target which is getting below 20 e-mails a week! And, as you would be able to see from the report above, I have managed to do that, even though I was gone from the office the entire week and my connection to the Internet was more than desirable. But yet, there it is, 16 e-mails!! Nice one!

And now, on to the interesting link that I have bumped into the last few days. This time around it is going to be a Spanish link, but still incredibly relevant to the overall discussion. It comes from Gonzalo Martin, who, so far, has put together one of the best review posts from a conference session I have done in the past, in this case EventoBlog, "El hombre que mató al correo electrónico", colaboración con EventoBlog, and who, this time around, created a very compelling, enlightening and educational presentation (Put together by himself with the help of his community! Yay!!) that describes the impact of Social Software in Human Resources: "Charla sobre medios sociales para los alumnos del máster de RRHH de la Carlos III".

In the past I have mentioned how HR needs to start getting their act together in order to benefit the most from Social Computing, because, in my own experience, and while talking to other folks, they seem to be the last ones getting on board (This recent blog post is just a small proof of it) and it shouldn’t be like that.

If HR is all about the people and for the people, then they should hurry up quite a bit and dive into social software right away, before they lose their touch with those very same people. Because once the train starts to move on, there is no way to catch up! Lucky enough, Gonzalo’s presentation sets up quite nicely the steps to follow in order to jump into the bandwagon and keep up with the conversation:

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Social Networks, Networking, Conversations, Dialogue, Connections, Relationships, e-mail, email, Productivity, Communication, Re-purposing E-mail, No-Email, Challenge Your Inbox, Progress Reports, Thinking Outside the Inbox, Information Overload, Lotusphere, Lotusphere 2009, Lotusphere2009, LS09, IBM Spain, Gonzalo Martin, EventoBlog, HR, Human Resources