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

My New Business Card for Enterprise 2.0 in Boston – Did You Get Yours Already?

I am sure I am not the only one experiencing this: you bump into people all over the place (Customer meetings, workshops, seminars, conference events, TweetUps, etc. etc.) and you end up with several dozens of business cards you keep promising yourself you will look back into when heading back home. Yet, you arrive and that bunch of new business cards gets piled in a drawer with all the others. Several hundred of them! And you never look back! That drawer remains closed till the next time you will fill it up again!

Well, that’s what I have been going through myself over the years. And I think it’s time that I put a stop to it. And look for some much more revolutionary and innovative way of keeping in touch with all of those great people I get to meet every so often. So, here, here is my new business card:

What the…? That’s not a business card, Mr! I bet that’s what you are thinking about this very moment. Well, yes, folks, that’s my new business card. A poken. My poken. My new business card. When I was last time in Madrid I met up with Nacho Guijarro, who happens to be a mutual good friend from a fellow IBM colleague, César Vitero, so we got to talk for a while and he introduced me to the concept of the Poken, and I went "My goodness! I want one of those! Like right NOW!" And a few minutes afterwards I had mine. Way too cool!

Pokens are fun! And they surely fulfil a need that most of us with a heavy presence in the social software world out there were missing out big time: a way to keep in touch with our new connections online and in our mutually shared social software spaces! Traditional business cards don’t do that; they are just too much focused on the physical world alone, which is probably why I never go back to them or why I don’t plan to use them for much longer! Yet, with my Panda Bear Poken (There are several designs, by the way, to suit everyone’s needs!) things are now different. Much different; I have got my list of new contacts right there! At my fingerprints and at the same social software spaces we already share a presence at! Just wonderfully simple and effective!

Well, I do realise that not many folks may have pokens with them, but I am surely looking forward to hook up with folks who may have one while attending this week the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 event in Boston. It sounds like it’s going to be plenty of good fun and I am surely hoping to put together another blog post at a later time detailing what my experiences have been during this week.

For now, though, if you would want to find out plenty more what Pokens are good for and how they can enhance a face to face event to help continue further with your new connections into the virtual world of socials software, check out this great presentation that my good friend, and fellow IBM colleague, Thorsten Zoerner, put together just recently on how an IBM event got the most out of the Poken experience…

So … Do you have your poken(s) ready, folks? I’m surely looking forward to have them "shake hands" then! Bring it on!

(Oh, and if you would prefer the traditional one, you can still get it from me if you go over here)

Tags: e2conf, Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Boston, Conference Events, Events, Conferences, Workshops, Seminars, Customer Meetings, TweetUps, Twitter, Social Software, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, Business Cards, Biz Cards, Connecting, Connections, Friendships, Relationships, Face to Face, Virtual Handshakes, Handshakes, Meetings, Nacho Guijarro, César Vitero, IBM, Pokens, Poken, Thorsten Zoerner, IOD2009, Slideshare, IBM Information On Demand, Berlin, 2009

Clay Shirky on Institutions vs. Collaboration – Business 2.0

Earlier on today, while I was getting started with my morning catchup routines, I got things going with my twitterings with this particular tweet: "Having one of those days where I keep questioning whether it’s all worth it pushing the limit as a 2.0 evangelist going against the current". Quite an interesting one, don’t you think? And perhaps a bit more loaded than what I thought it would come out as… Well, shortly after my good friend Jon Mell (From Headshift) shared the following tweet responding to that one I just shared above: "@elsua hold that thought, I should have a blog post for ya this afternoon."

And so I was intrigued… Knowing Jon, I was very intrigued. So I kept going along with my day and all of a sudden he goes and tweets back again the following tweet: "New blog post – Business 2.0 looking at business driving enterprise social software tools, rather than the other way round http://is.gd/YTjJ". And the suspense was over!

I right away head over to that blog post that he put under the heading "Business 2.0" and my head was completely blown away! What an outstanding reading! One of the best I have read through in a long while! Going through it felt good. Perhaps too good! But if you have been a knowledge worker for a while now getting exposed to social software in general and making heavy use of it you will know exactly what I mean and also you would come to the conclusion that exciting times are ahead of us! And I just can’t wait!

Here is one of the several precious gems that Jon shared in that article:

"Organisations need to trust these professionals, they will not be in the office from 9-5 every day. These are exactly the sorts of people who thrive on their personal networks, they are the people who you go to when you need to know what’s going on. Social software brings the same level of productivity increases for these people as type-writers and then word processors did for a previous generation of workers. It takes their natural propensity to connect, to share, to add value and extends it in the same way the internet extends our access to information."

To then finish off with this other one:

"It won’t be enough to hire knowledge workers to survive and thrive in this recession. Organisations will have to change their business practices to take advantage of their abilities, and provide them with the tools to be effective. Word, Outlook and even Sharepoint won’t cut it. They will need custom built social platforms, or products such as Confluence, Jive, Socialtext and Lotus Connections."

Those two quotes probably describe some of the stuff I have been doing for a long while now so well that it’s even scary! I probably wouldn’t have been able to describe it much better myself! And I bet that folks who see themselves as Knowledge Workers 2.0 in the current business world they would feel the exact same way. I am sure! And they probably wouldn’t be wrong…

So what does that blog post from Jon Mell have got to do with the first part of the title from this blog entry, i.e. with Clay Shirky? And that ambiguous title of "Institutions vs. Collaboration"? Well, believe it or not, quite a lot. Allow me to explain …

You will need to go into the TED – Ideas Worth Spreading Web site and check out a presentation Clay did back in 2005! around this very same subject, but perhaps with a bit more powerful message on how the process of knowledge sharing and collaborating was starting to shift from old models into new ones and all of that provoked by the emergence of social computing. And that dating back to 2005! The title of that presentation is Clay Shirky on institutions vs. collaboration and you will be able to find it over here (Embedded version below…) and, like I said if earlier on today, if reading Jon’s blog post was quite an inspiration and a burst of fresh air, Clay’s 20 minute presentation will be like being hit by Inspiration in its purest form! Yes, that good!

Needless to say that is one of those TED videos everyone who considers themselves as knowledge workers should watch; whether you watch it before or after reading Jon’s article it won’t matter; you will be ending up on the same sweet spot, only four years apart in time from one to the other! And you will be left with a single thought in your mind for a long while: exciting times are ahead of us and I am surely excited to be part of it all! And you?

Tags: Business 2.0, Institutions, Jon Mell, Headshift, Knowledge Workers, Knowledge Workers 2.0, Confluence, Jive, Socialtext, Lotus Connections, Connections, Clay Shirky, TED, Ideas Worth Spreading, Inspirational, Inspiring, Inspiration, 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, Twitter

Big Blue’s Collaboration Challenges with Mark Hennessy

Earlier on today, a fellow IBM colleague, and good friend, John Rooney, shared in various microsharing Web sites (Both internal and external) a link to a recent interview I thought would be rather interesting for folks out there who would be keen on reading further on IBM’s efforts exploring the world of social software and using its 400.000 + employee workforce as testbed for many of the social tools most of us have been exposed to for a while already and some of which eventually make it into IBM products in the area of Enterprise Social Software.

The interview itself was hosted over at Forbes’ CIO Network, where I hoped the embedded options would be a rather pleasant user experience to go through overall, but I guess I was asking for a bit too much. Yuk! So I am afraid you will have to head over there and watch Big Blue’s Collaboration Challenges.

The interviewee is one of the folks I have been admiring and respecting for a long while now, ever since he came into his current job, and not because of the job title he has (IBM’s vice president and Chief Information Officer), but eventually because he is one of those executives who walks the talk; blogs (Internally) on a very regular basis and everyone is more than welcome to reach out to him with any question / comment / concern / query they may have and that would need his help. In fact, just recently he did an internal podcast of about 13 minutes with another of my favourite high level executives, Bob Moffat Jr. where they both talked about social software and the business value they are both getting from making use of these social tools. Won’t say much more on that topic, since I’m working on whether I can share that podcasting episode outside of the firewall some time soon! Thus stay tuned for a potential new update coming up soon…

So, of course, I am talking about Mark Hennessy, IBM’s vice president and CIO, who spends a little bit over five minutes sharing several stories on how IBM is making use of social networking tools to reach new levels of productivity. The link to the interview can be found over here, like I mentioned above already, but here are also some other tidbits you may be interested in as well that he talks about for a few minutes:

• IBM Lotus Sametime: with over 10 million instant messages shared across every day (Yes, 10 million!!); and highlighting the fact it’s the biggest productivity boost for real-time collaboration and interactions available out there to us, IBMers, and certainly my number #1 tool to keep living "A World Without Email"
• WikiCentral: our internal wiki platform from which Mark shares plenty of business & uses cases on how wikis can be used inside the corporate firewall to help improve collaboration and knowledge sharing across teams and communities to take innovation into new levels. Quite a story on this one! I tell you.
• Business Value of social software: Mark shares how IBM’s focus on measuring the business value of social software is based on measuring the output, not the social tools themselves; i.e. how many folks are using them; how many new ideas are being created; and so forth. And for that a key role has been played all along by the Technology Adoption Program (a.k.a. TAP), where early adopters and innovators / developers work together on pushing the limits on innovation by co-creating the next wave of social tools and interactions.
• And, finally, Cloud Computing: in this fragment he gets to talk about a couple of mature cloud environments, one of them being TAP itself, with over 120.000 IBMers participating on a regular basis following a self-service provisioning model; you will also find out plenty more about his thoughts on what cloud computing is, where it is heading and how IBM is benefiting from it, both internally and externally. Very enlightening, for sure, specially for those folks who may want to know more about what IBM is doing in that space…

And, that’s it. Those are some of the major areas that Mark Hennessy gets to cover in this five minute interview at Forbes’ CIO Network ("Big Blue’s Collaboration Challenges") and which I hope it would have last for a lot longer as he always has got plenty of really good insights and stories on how he engages himself with the rest of the IBM population to help shape up the next generation of the collaboration, knowledge sharing and social computing tools we will use tomorrow.

Yes, I know you would agree with me on this one. It was just far too short and would have wanted to watch plenty more! Don’t you think? … Wonderful stuff though!

Tags: John Rooney, Rooney, Forbes, Forbes CIO Network, CIO Network, CIO, Chief Information Officer, Vice Presidents, Executives, Challenges, Opportunities, Walking the Talk, Drinking Our Own Champagne, Bob Moffat Jr, Mark Hennessy, Lotus Sametime, IBM Lotus Sametime, Sametime, Real Time, Real Time Collaboration, IM, Instant Messaging, Productivity Boosts, WikiCentral, Wikis, Business Value, Use Cases, Business Cases, Technology Adoption Program, TAP, Early Adopters, Innovators, Developers, Cloud Computing, Cloud, Computing, 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, A World Without Email