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

The Company as Wiki by Best Buy

Continuing further with interesting video links that describe how large businesses are making use of social software, both inside and outside of the firewall, to help improve the way knowledge workers collaborate and share their knowledge (And how they can enhance their own interactions with their customers), here is another one I bumped into a couple of days back and which I can certainly recommend as being very insightful and thought-provoking, specially for those folks who may not buy too much into the concept of social computing within the corporate world.

The video describes in a bit over four and a half minutes how Best Buy dived into the world of Web 2.0 to create the next generation of collaboration and knowledge sharing tools within the company to help employees connect with one another across the various different sites and share their knowledge in smarter ways. Concepts like facilitating a working environment where knowledge workers can make extensive use of social software with applications like Blueshirtnation (BSN), The WaterCooler, wikis, Loop Markeplace (Idea Management a la IBM’s ThinkPlace), TagTrade, Geek Squad, etc. are some of the most interesting things happening at Best Buy while they are getting exposed to social software in a corporate environment.

The video clip itself touches base as well on something as important as well as very relevant nowadays: business values, at the same time that it includes a couple of very insightful quotes from Don Tapscott on how disruptive enterprise social software can be within any business. Like I said at the beginning, a worth while watching video! For sure!

You see? That wasn’t that difficult, was it? Yet, the many benefits mentioned are just far too many to let them go by, just like that! Is your business ready to dive in? The waters, as usual, are lovely!

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, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, Productivity, Best Buy, Blueshirtnation, BSN, The WaterCooler, Wikis, Loop Marketplace, ThinkPlace, TagTrade, Geek Squad, Don Tapscott, Business Value, Values, Business Values, Customers, Clients

IBM Lotusphere Comes To You Highlights – Zürich March 2008

As you may well remember, not long ago I created a blog post where I was mentioning how I was going to be this week in Zürich, Switzerland, presenting as one of the keynote speakers at the Lotusphere Comes To You event. With the rest of the week on customer meetings & workshops talking about Social Computing @ IBM. Just this morning I have been told that all of those meetings I had planned for the rest of the week have been postponed for a later time. So here I am putting together this blog post where I will be sharing some of the highlights from Monday’s event, and then I will be sharing another one from yesterday’s highlights.

I know I will be back to Zürich as soon as by the end of April, so perhaps I will expand further on those different events I had planned and which then got postponed. We shall see.

For now a couple of highlights from Lotusphere Comes To You – Zürich March 2008:

It was the first time that I ever made it to any Lotusphere Comes To You event and must confess that I was a bit nervous just before getting the show started. Being the kickoff keynote speaker session talking about Social Computing @ IBM to about 100 customers and business partners, surely puts plenty of expectations straight up front to you to do the right job! And not sure why, must have been how incredibly well organised the whole set up was, but there I was with my Mac, the other presenters with their ThinkPads and no other computer in the whole room! Ready to rock!!

What a great event it was! I spent about 40 minutes talking about the kind of impact social computing is having within the enterprise and how it is tremendously disrupting the way we share our knowledge and collaborate with others and how communities are the primary social computing drivers within the corporate world of social software. I mentioned as well how they are the ones who are defining together which tools to stick with and which ones to bypass. How for the first time they are responsible for the tools suite they would be using with their own community members. And how organisations are starting to pay more and more attention to how communities are operating and increasing their overall productivity and knowledge shared by making use of these social tools.

From there onwards I shared a number of different screen shots with some of IBM’s most popular social software tools, both inside and outside of the corporate firewall. To name a few of them: Lotus Greenhouse, alphaWorks and alphaWorks Services, Blogs (Including some BlogCentral stats where we recently reached over 200,000 blog posts and comments since late 2003), Lotus Connections, developerWorks Spaces, IBM Jams, ThinkPlace, Fringe, Dogear (Part of the Connections bundle), Beehive, WikiCentral (And wikis in general).

Then from there onwards we had a bunch of different questions on how it may potentially work within the corporate world and what may be potential issues, like taxonomy vs. folksonomy, security, privacy, letting command-and-control go, etc. etc. Yes, along the same lines of what you usually can expect for the kind of presentation I gave.

Reason why I am mentioning all of this in here is because originally I thought I would be able to share the slide deck with you folks over here, but unfortunately while I was revising it to sanitise it a bit I am not going to be able to. Most of the slides are screen shots from those various tools where it is showing the names and telephone numbers, amongst many other details, from various of my social networks along with their pictures and I don’t think it would be fair to them to expose them, just like that, because of a presentation. I rather prefer to respect their privacy, just as much as they would be respecting my own, and that’s why I am going to leave things as is.

Sharing the slide deck without the tools / screen shots section would not be having the same effect, so perhaps what I will do is come up with some kind of mockups and share them accordingly as time goes by. We shall see. Or perhaps I’ll ask my social networks whether they would like to come up on the show or not. We shall see. Will keep you posted.

From there onwards, and while Ron Sebastian and Jutta Kreyss, were providing their own presentations on demonstrating the latest Lotus offerings from Lotusphere 2008 and Best Practices on the Open Client, respectively, I actually had to go to the IBM Research Lab in Rüschlikon to present that exact same presentation to an IBM client within the banking industry. 12 people sitting in a small room and with plenty more time to dive into the various topics and get a bit of a much more interactive section, which is what happened in the end.

Some folks out there say how both the banking and government industries, perhaps banking even a bit more, are a bit reluctant from Web 2.0 and social computing behind the corporate firewall. Well, what I experienced with that particular customer and their understanding of social computing was rather quite the opposite. Ready to rock and get some action going to help empower their knowledge workers to be in control of the knowledge flow again and get back into the conversations! Fascinating stuff!! Really.

I thoroughly enjoyed that very first occasion of presenting at Lotusphere Comes To You and no more, no less than in Zürich, one of my favourite European cities, specially when after a hard working day of having some really good and exciting conversations about the stuff you are passionate about, you go out with some friends and enjoy a super lovely evening with a chocolate fondue to end up the event and then off to dinner for a meat one! And, of course, some lovely Swiss beer, too! … It just cannot get better than that!!

Fantastic!!

Tags: IBM, Lotus, Lotusphere2008, Lotusphere, Lotusphere Comes To You, LCTY, LCTY2008, Collaboration, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Computing, Communities, Social Media, Learning, Innovation, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Zurich, Switzerland, Ron Sebastian, Jutta Kreyss, Mac, Greenhouse, alphaWorks, alphaWorks Services, Blogs, Wikis, BlogCentral, WikiCentral, Connections, developerWorks, developerWorks Spaces, Spaces, IBM Jam, ThinkPlace, Fringe, Dogear, Beehive, Rüschlikon, Fondue, Beers

IBM’s 6h iForum – Joint Innovation with Clients by Tony Morgan

While I am waiting for clearance on whether I would be able to blog the first keynote session we had from IBM’s 6th iForum – Capitalising on Innovation, held last week in Zürich, or not, I thought I would go ahead and share with you the presentation from the next session that came up afterwards. It was done by one of my fellow IBM colleagues, Tony Morgan, who gave a talk on "Joint Innovation with Clients" and how it can work successfully with customers and business partners.

I must say that his presentation was actually one of my favourites (Perhaps on the Top 3 / 5!) not only because of the superb slide deck he did put together (And which I have shared already over in Slideshare), and shared with us, but also because he provided a very good overview of how Innovation, despite what some people keep saying, needs to be closely tied in with Collaboration, both inside and outside of the corporate firewall, i.e. with customers, business partners, etc. etc.

Yes, indeed, there is probably no better way to keep up innovating at a rampant pace than by focusing on driving collaboration with your partners and customers: listening to their needs, acting and co-working collaboratively into finding specific solutions is probably the best way to move forward into an environment where everyone benefits from such joint knowledge sharing activities.

What is interesting as well from Tony’s presentation is how he has used himself and his interactions with one of his customers to share how a Joint Innovation Partnership / Value Creation Centre (a.k.a. VCC) would actually work out successfully by putting together a number of indispensable items to help build it up and on to the right track straightaway: having a mission, a scope, a group of people, some processes in place, some tools (Both formal and informal, like ThinkPlace, Jam events, Communities (of Practice), etc.) and, finally some support and governance guidelines.

Finally, right after that very helpful description Tony gets to cover what would be some of the most relevant and important factors for success (Read through along the lines of how to measure innovation successfully (More on this later…)) and from there onwards the slide deck will get wrapped up with a very nice summary, which I am not going to spoil for you

Thus without much further ado, here you have got the embedded slides from Slideshare, with the direct link to it, in case you may be subscribed to the RSS / Atom feed and would want to check it out further, so that you can find out why this was, in my opinion, one of the best speaker sessions from the entire event. Too bad it didn’t get recorded. Perhaps something to get done for the next time around…

Tags: IBM, iForum, iForum 2007, Innovation Forum, Zurich, Switzerland, Events, Innovation Events, Innovation, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Slideshare, Tony Morgan, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Learning, Joint Innovation, Clients, Customers, Business Partners, ThinkPlace, Communities, Jams, Measuring Innovation, Joint Innovation Partnership, Value Creation Centre, VCC, Customer Solutions