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

How IBM Uses Social Media to Spur Employee Innovation

I have mentioned already a couple of times how my first contact with social software tools inside IBM, my current employer, was around the year 2000, when one of the communities I still belong to (And still one of my favourite ones, too!) decided to put together a wiki where we could all contribute and share our knowledge across. From there onwards, the continuous learning experience of transitioning from traditional collaboration and knowledge sharing tools to these social tools has been quite exciting, to say the least. But I am sure you may be wondering when did IBM *really* got started with all things 2.0 on a wider scale, right? Well, this is a blog post where I will share some of those insights myself.

However, I am not going to start telling you all sorts of various different details on how IBM has been adopting social software tools over the last few years, starting probably on that landmark date of late 2003, when a blogging platform called BlogCentral  first became available through the Technology Adoption Program (a.k.a. TAP). No, I am not going to do that. Mainly, because I am not very fond of re-inventing the wheel myself, and, secondly, because there is a stunning online resource out there that has done a wonderful job in describing very thoroughly how everything got started and where we are now.

Check out the article put together by Casey Hibbard, over at Social Media Examiner, under the title: "How IBM Uses Social Media to Spur Employee Innovation". Casey has been working with my fellow IBM colleague, and good friend, Adam Christensen, putting together, perhaps, one of the most tremendously comprehensive and thorough articles / reports, available out there that clearly describes in very simple, effective and helpful terms what IBM’s Social Media strategy is at the moment, and how it all got started a few years back.

In a way, the article itself is a lovely trip down the memory lane on how things got started, not only from the perspective of what social tools there are out there available to us, from back then till today, but also how something so important as IBM’s own Social Computing Guidelines came about and how IBM made a conscious decision to not just have a single corporate social media voice, but instead have thousands of voices! making them all become *the* brand. I know that this may surprise a few folks, but if there would be a single word that I could use to describe it I would probably stick around with effective.

Another interesting part from the article itself that both Casey and Adam talked about is the section on "No Policing", which I am sure it is going to come about as a shocker, specially for those businesses out there that still live in a command-and-control world. Well, here is an interesting, and very relevant, quote from Adam on what IBM means with that "No Policing":

"We don’t police. The community’s largely self-regulating, and so there hasn’t really been a need to have someone go about and circuit these boards and blogs" Christensen said. "Employees sort of do that themselves… And that’s worked wonderfully well"

Indeed, again thanks, for the most part, to those Social Computing Guidelines I mentioned above. Thus, as you will see, it’s not unrealistic to have such policy. Yes, I am sure you would be thinking by now there is a lot to risk involved, but then again, there is plenty more to gain. And having had those guidelines for nearly five years now, and living by them quite dearly, I can assure you that the advantages have been much more numerous than the disadvantages. But you can read more about it on the article itself…

Finally, you will be able to see a couple of other very interesting, and revealing, sections around the subject of the key role from Jams in helping mature those efforts of social software adoption as well as how social media plays that paramount role within the Smarter Planet initiative. Rather fascinating read!

Before I let you go though, as I am wrapping up this blog post, I will tell you what’s my favourite part of the entire article; one that has always been in people’s minds with regards to their own social software adoption efforts (And initiatives): proving the business value of social software. Yes, the good old dilemma of figuring out the ROI of social networking. Now, if you have been reading this blog for a while already, you know what my ¢2 of the conversation are. So I’m going to finish this article with Adam’s take on it (Which, by the way, I wholeheartedly agree with 100%!!):

""I think if you d ask any senior executive at IBM, How important is it for our employees to be smarter? , inherently they understand that these tools can play in helping with that, Christensen said. "I don’t see myself rarely or ever having that hard conversation on the value of engaging employees in these spaces.""

Spot on, don’t you think? All the way coming down from the top! It’s all about how smart and productive you would want to be with these social tools as a knowledge worker. And next time that someone asks me what IBM is doing in this space of Social Computing or what my thoughts are on proving the business value of social software, I guess you folks know where I will be pointing people to, right? …

Exactly!

Tags: Social Media Strategy, BlogCentral, Technology Adoption Program, TAP, Casey Hibbard, Social Media Examiner, Adam Christensen, Social Computing Guidelines, Guidelines, Policy, Brands, Branding, Voices, Jams, Smarter Planet, Business Value, ROI, Return On Investment, Leadership, Smart Work, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Innovation, IBM, Social Networks

Into the Big Blue Yonder

Social networks are very powerful, aren’t they? Every single day that goes by it amazes me the incredible potential social networking has got both inside and outside of the corporate world and just beats me why not more and more knowledge workers are making extensive use of them to be able to share their knowledge amongst themselves and collaborate with others in a much more efficient and effective way. Here is the latest example I have bumped into in the last couple of days: Into the big blue yonder – IBM gambles on a shift from the KM model.

Yes, indeed, over the last week or so, a couple of good friends from various social networks, where we all hang out,  kindly pointed me to this very good and enlightening article from Rob Lewis, from KnowledgeBoard, titled "Into the big blue yonder", where you would be able to read how IBM is shifting away from the traditional Knowledge Management space and moving into an area that is starting to flag as Knowledge Sharing and where the focus is not only that traditional KM, but a blend with the next generation of knowledge sharing tools, i.e. social software tools and social computing, in general.

Like I said, the article makes for an interesting reading and thought I would just mentioned a couple of quotes that I feel would be relevant for the different discussions held in this blog in the not so distant past. After all, Rob mentions several quotes from yours truly that I have shared in various blog posts in the recent past, so why not, right?

"IBM now sees organic and unimposed sharing as the biggest agent in the circulation of knowledge. Its stated strategy is to facilitate that sharing, not through any vertically integrated structure but through the empowerment of its many communities and individuals to network as openly and efficiently as possible."

Does it ring a bell? For someone like myself who got started with traditional Knowledge Management when it was at its prime time many many moons ago, I am finding it quite fascinating the shift that corporations have started to make to such new model where (online) communities help drive the adoption and embracing of social software within the corporate world and beyond. It’s actually thanks to those communities that things are changing rather rapidly. Innovation is thriving and it is rather encouraging to see how traditional KM is starting to let knowledge workers take advantage of these emerging social software technologies in order to perhaps be more productive, be more in control of the knowledge and collaboration flows and manage their own knowledge and experiences, where for the first time, they themselves are in control vs. the corresponding organisation(s). Refreshing is the word that comes to mind!

But there is more:

"“If we can build sufficient maturity in our internal communities, they can take on that role,” Cooper says. “They will start to become actively responsible for the education of their members and for the identification and generation of new intellectual assets.”"

I am sure that for those folks who have been doing community building all along the above paragraph will sound as something they would say it is pretty much common sense, but I am thinking that such involvement from communities into the workplace is actually helping them have a paramount role in helping knowledge workers engage closer with one another, sharing their knowledge, collaborate and innovate as a result of that process, and all of that in an environment where communities allow for plenty of free form type of interactions to take place and in a protected space at the same time, i.e. that one of the community itself, thus breaking the hierarchies, traditional structures and organisations to empower, once again, knowledge workers to be in control of the knowledge they  try to manage.

From there onwards the article covers a number of the different IBM social software tools that have been fully operational for a good couple of years already. Examples like BlogCentral, which is currently going over the 200,000 blog entries & comments, or WikiCentral, with over 200,000 IBMers collaborating in it on a regular basis. From there onwards Dogear, along with QEDWiki, Jams, BluePages (IBM’s corporate employee directory) and several other technologies get a mention and although some of the statistics would probably need to be updated, it is still worth while a read.

But if there would be a quote with which I feel rather identified from the article article, apart from those other ones that were extracted from various other blog posts I have put together in the past, this would be the one that clearly represents where we are and where we are moving:

"“It’s a social cultural thing,” says McNairn. “If you’re a company with something to hide, you’ll stay away from social networking. But IBM wants to embrace those tools, and then take them to the extreme to see how valuable they’ll be from a business perspective.”"

That, to me, folks is what Enterprise 2.0 is all about and why I am surely looking forward to keep pushing the limits, because after all, are there any in the social computing space? I doubt it… It will be down to us all to decide whether we would want them or not… and somehow I feel that we already got the answer to that one!

Tags: IBM, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, KM Model, KM 1.0, KM 2.0, KM 0.0, Rob Lewis, KnowledgeBoard, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Communities, Online Communities, Virtual Communities, Community Building, Learning, Social Software Adoption, Social Computing Adoption, Control, Trust, Command-and-Control, Command and Control, BlogCentral, WikiCentral, Dogear, QEDWiki, Jams, BluePages, Ian McNairn

IBM Lotus Enterprise 2.0 Workshop Outline – Madrid – March 2008

As you may have read already, today I am in Madrid, staying over here for a couple of days while tomorrow I get busy participating in a workshop titled IBM Lotus Enterprise 2.0 where I will be providing a presentation on Social Computing @ IBM (A very similar one to the one I provided just recently at the Lotusphere Comes To You events in both Zürich and Geneva, respectively) and then I will be providing a series of demos on some of the most popular IBM social software tools. To give you an idea of what I will be demoing here is the listing of tools I will be covering during the course of the entire morning:

- Lotus Connections (With all of its various components: Blogs -with our very own BlogCentral, Dogear -Social Bookmarking tool, Profiles, Communities and Activities and showing some of the new features put together for v2)

- Beehive, Fringe, Atlas -a.k.a. SmallBlue and one other tool I will probably be talking some more about over the course of the next few months around the area of expertise location.

- Lotus Quickr, Media Library and Cattail, all of them as team / community collaborative spaces with both open, public and private access, where knowledge workers can have a public or protected environment to help them share their knowledge and experiences.

- Lotus Sametime and Sametime 8 Advanced (With all of the various different social networking related plugins available that extend the traditional concept of Instant Messaging into new levels)

- Wiki Central & Bluepedia (Where I will show how IBM has been working already for a good number of months on our very own version of Wikipedia: Bluepedia)

Of course, there will be a few other tools that I will be mentioning, like the Lotus Greenhouse or Lotus "Bluehouse", along with Lotus Notes 8, where I will be mentioning all of its integration capabilities and how, now more than ever, you can certainly state that it is just so much more than e-mail client!! (i.e. You got to love all of those widgets coming through!!), but in general those are the guidelines I am planning to go through.

Yes, indeed, a whole morning through packed with plenty of excitement as I would be able to talk, discuss and demo how each of those tools have been disrupting the way knowledge workers share their knowledge and collaborate inside IBM and beyond. It should be plenty of good fun, for sure, since I will be having plenty of time to cover each and everyone of the various tools I mentioned above.

As I get to wrap up this blog post, I am also going through the final finishing touches of the whole show, where everything seems to be working just fine, at least, at this point of time. We shall see how things go tomorrow when everything should be up and running, ready to go! Let’s hope that technology and a good Internet connection would not fail me … Fingers crossed.

And not to worry, I am not sure I would be able to share most of the stuff I will be doing tomorrow, but I am certainly planning to continue talking plenty more about each of those various IBM social software tools and surely after I prune the presentation deck I will also be sharing it over at Slideshare. Thus stay tuned because there is plenty more to come!!

Let’s get ready for the show now!

Tags: IBM, Lotus, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Computing, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Communities, Learning, Workshops, Madrid, Lotusphere, Lotusphere2008, LCTY2008, Zurich, Geneva, Lotus Connections, Connections, Blogs, Blog Central, Dogear, Social Bookmarking, Profiles, Communities, Actvities, Beehive, Fringe, Atlas, SmallBlue, Lotus Quickr, Quickr, Media Library, Cattail, Lotus Sametime, Sametime, Wiki Central, Bluepedia, Wikis, Lotus Greenhouse, Lotus Bluehouse, Lotus Notes 8, Notes 8, Widgets, Slideshare