There are days like yesterday where one gets to experience mix feelings upon receiving certain types of e-mails or bumping into specific blog posts that you thought would have been totally unexpected. There are news items that you come across and have a strong sense they may be related to April Fools’ Day, specially if they happen on the day before or on this very same day. Yet, when you come to digest them properly, you realise they are not and you are faced with some interesting piece of news that you just don’t know how you it is going to sink in!

Well, yesterday I had one of those days. And that’s probably why I am posting this entry today, I suppose, as I feel it deserves much more than an e-mail reply or a blog comment to an internal blog post I know is not going to be seen any longer by the original poster. Yes, that is right. Yesterday was the last day at the company from Sebastian Thomschke.

"Who?" - you may be asking yourself, right? I know that for most of you that name probably doesn’t ring a bell at all and that is fine. For some of us though that name meant a before and an after in how we boosted our productivity in IBM as far back as 2001! Yes, indeed, I realise that it may still not sound very familiar, but allow me to spend a few minutes sharing with you why I received with mix feelings the news that Seb was moving into other pastures…

Back in 2001 we used to have an online real-time collaboration tool called IBM Community Tools that a whole bunch of us, early adopters, started to play around with knowing that it was that kind of Instant Messaging tool that would disrupt tremendously the way we collaborated and shared our knowledge with other peers synchronously. Such tool introduced a good number of very innovative approaches towards connecting and reaching out to other knowledge workers. Examples like what was known, still is, as the Broadcast Suite, are the kind of stuff I am talking about over here.

Well, IBM Community Tools started to grab, more and more, the attention of plenty of other different people, and one of those folks was Seb himself, who was the very first person who developed plugins for such nifty application. Plugins that although not initially part of the specific tool, little by little, they eventually made it into the final product. So for a good number of years Seb has been providing us with an incredible amount of plugins each of which increased our own productivity tremendously! And all of that without asking for anything in return. Seb just simply ventured into exploring the potential of an IM tool that was going to revolutionalise the way we connect in real-time and decided to share his innovative approach on how you would work smarter, not harder.

From there onwards, and not only for that application, Seb took things into the next level and started hacking some really really cool Lotus Notes databases that still today have got a huge traction, to say the least! I am still using a few of them to help improve my own productivity. And yes, they work for the Notes 8.5 beta client on the Mac, too!

And, lately, he was also working on a new, very remarkable Enterprise 2.0 approach on how to enhance the overall experience of both the Intranet and the Internet to help accommodate knowledge workers have faster access to information. Unfortunately, I will not be able to comment much more on this, since right now that particular application I am talking about is on a pilot phase and hasn’t gone public. But believe me, if it ever does you will be the first to know

Either way, that’s what Seb did to this company. If you would be asking me to define in one single word, or a couple of them, I think it would be rampant innovation without asking anything in return! Now you understand where the mix feelings are coming from, right? Well, not only that, he is also a wonderful person. After all of these years hanging out together in multiple various online spaces, testing out his productivity hacks, providing feedback, improvements, enhancements, and whatever other discussions, we actually never got to meet up face to face. Till this year. In Lotusphere 2008! Yes, I had the enormous pleasure of finally meeting up with him and in person he is even nicer than what he is online! And those who know him personally could certainly comment on that one!

Thus that’s why yesterday and today I have been going through a bunch of mix feelings, because even though it is a terrific event to see how one of your good friends moves into other pastures and decides to start a new adventure, I am sad that he is no longer with us in IBM. I do seriously wish him all the very best of luck and I am sure that we would eventually meet up again at some point. Now you know why I titled this blog post like I did.

"Hang on?" - you may be thinking - "Wait, he just developed a couple of features for an application that is no longer there! You must be kidding, right?". Well, not really. For those folks who may not know it, IBM Community Tools, along with Notesbuddy (And I will talk about this one some time soon as well) are the two main sources of input that were provided to come up with what nowadays you know as IBM’s Lotus Sametime (Both 7.5.1 and Sametime 8!). And, in fact, a good number of some of the features and hacks he put together are now part of Lotus Sametime Advanced 8!

That is correct! What it all started as hacking away in his free time and see where he could push the limits through innovation, a couple of years later, became a very solid IBM collaboration and knowledge sharing tool! And even more merit comes into place when some of the Web 2.0 concepts you will find in Sametime 8 come from what he did in the past! And all of that just talking about the kind of impact his rampant innovation did to such product line! Just amazing, don’t you think?

If you are not sure just yet what I am talking about, a good number of the folks I follow have been sharing their thoughts already on IBM’s Lotus Sametime Advanced 8. You may want to go ahead and check out some of those links. For me, you would see now why I thought that this blog post would do a bit more justice to Seb than an e-mail reply or a comment to his internal blog post where he mentioned he would be moving on, starting today!

From here, I just want to give my sincere thanks for everything!!! to a former colleague and a good friend, I am sure to bump into once again, who showed us all the way of how far a single employee can push the limits if they set themselves to it! Seb proved it and for that he will be missed. Wherever he may go next, they just don’t know what they got in their hands. I do.

Well done, Seb!!

Tags: April Fools, April Fools Day, IBM, Innovation, Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, Online Collaboration, Knowledge Management, KM, Sebastian Thomschke, Synchronous Collaboration, IBM Community Tools, ICT, Notesbuddy, Broadcast Suite, Lotus Notes, Notes, Noes 8.5, Mac, Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Web 2.0, Social Media, Lotusphere, Lotusphere2008, Lotus Sametime, Sametime, Sametime8, Sametime Advanced, Lotus Sametime Advanced

I certainly realise about yesterday’s lengthy blog post on last week’s progress report on my fighting work related e-mail, and since I am trying to cut them short, much shorter, actually, I really am trying, believe me, but it is proving to be quite a challenge (As you may have seen already!),  I thought I would venture today into sharing with you folks one quick, brief entry on a link that a good friend of mine, and fellow IBMer, shared with me earlier on today through e-mail (Ha! I know, too funny, too! heh).

Yes, I am just smiling about it, as I am writing this, because after I watched it, I am now even more convinced than ever before that I am on the right track, even though today hasn’t been a good day so far. But more on that this coming Friday. For now, I would like to invite you to check out the superb presentation that Matthew Milan put together in Slideshare, under the enticing title "Leading with Insight":

where you would be able to find gems like this one that pretty much describes what I am trying to achieve with all of this giving up on work related e-mail:

"To be insightful, you must embrace the following …

1. You must ask thoughtful questions
2. You need to look beyond the obvious
3. You shouldn’t be afraid to reframe the problem
4. You must learn to trust your gut"

Because after all "Insight is a state of mind … and a way of doing business"

Just spot on!

Tags: IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, e-mail, email, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Matthew Milan, Critical Mass, Leadership, Insight, Slideshare, Business

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

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

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

Earlier on today, in our IBM internal blogging platform, Blog Central, one of the most respected, popular and knowledgeable bloggers on social computing within the enterprise made an announcement that I surely was looking forward to for a long long while! Yes, one kind of announcement that got me really excited, to the point that I thought I would share some of that excitement over here. Gia Lyons is now blogging externally!

Yes, that is right, folks! If you are into social computing and social software within the enterprise and beyond; if you would like to find out a whole lot more about IBM’s Lotus Connections; if you would like to find out some more about how IBM is actually driving the adoption of social networking within the corporate world; and if you would want to find a whole lot more from what’s in Gia’s mind, I would strongly encourage you all to subscribe to her, now external, blog!

Here is the blog post where Gia was mentioning she was going public: Public Gia. Read further on to see what she will be talking about and how you will be able to keep in touch with her through her blog (Yes, I know, about time! heh). And to give you a sense of what she has already posted in her external blog, here you have got some very interesting blog posts to get you going:

1. Connections is like the global lunch room. Beehive? Global cocktail hour!
2. The Connected Age: Are you a bursty Web worker?
3. The nature of males

Thus there you have it, another passionate IBMer blogging outside of the corporate firewall around the subject of social computing and social software, willing to dive into the external conversation on the Internet blogosphere with all of us. So go over to her blog, say "Hi!" and add her blog to your blogroll. I can guarantee you will be able to learn a thing or two, like we have been doing ourselves with her internal blog for a long while now, and have plenty of good fun all along!

Welcome on board, Gia, to the Internet Blogosphere! See what pressure can do to ya? heh

Tags: IBM, Metablogging, Blogs, Blogroll, Gia Lyons, Connected, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Connections, Lotus Connections, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Communities