So today I got to attend a fantastic session by Bruce Elgort and Chris Martin on "How I Went Beyond the Hype, Narcissism, and Trendiness to Become a Social Software Super Hero". That was definitely the best session I attended today. The team did a fantastic job at staying away from buzzwords, and got "real". About 8-9 videos were shown from various people (including me!) talking about their perspectives of a social business and the reasons to become one. Check out all the photos and commentary here.
IBM also introduced the IBM Social Business Toolkit. This is a new set of APIs that will allow you to integrate your own applications or 3rd party applications into the IBM Social Business framework. Why do you need this?
Today, business users are responsible for more information from more sources, and find they need to coordinate and respond to events in each application. The IBM Social Business Toolkit provides a single stream of business information that can be analyzed and personalized for each user.As I said, the idea is to take all your existing apps (and even those from 3rd party vendors) and merge all the activity and information across those existing silos into a single, unified view (or stream). So from this:
to this:
To keep up to date with all the happenings around the IBM Social Business Toolkit (and even start testing and using the API today), join the community and follow the blog here. Now let's see what kind of capabilities customers and business partners come up with!