IBM Connections is Now Available in the IBM Cloud marketplace

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As just communicated in the press release a few minutes ago, IBM Connections is now available in the IBM Cloud marketplace.  Here's the direct link in case you want to check it out.

The press release sums up the latest release of IBM Connections which is now available for download (in case you want to run it on premises) or in the cloud.

One of the highlights that we want to call out is the continued growth that we see in our ecosystem. For example, using our latest APIs and SDK, ISVs (independent software vendors) such as HootSuite, Bunchball, TemboSocial, ISW, among many, many others have created social apps on the IBM Connections Platform.

A key aspect of this release is secure external collaboration, where you can bring in external users (your customers, partners, suppliers, etc) into your IBM Connections deployment behind the firewall and still keep the right security boundaries to keep information safe. Jeff Schick, our VP for Social Software at IBM, calls out the importance of this:

When a workforce is out of synch or out of touch, the whole organization suffers from lost productivity, efficiency and innovation. With the open nature of today's business environment, organizations are looking to build new systems of people-centric engagement. The ability to bring key internal and external stakeholders into the conversation can facilitate a more collaborative, responsive and authentic way to work and deepen engagement.

Additionally, Superior Group's CIO, Tom DeClerck shares how IBM Connections has made the organization more agile by putting people back at the center of their business.  Speaking of Superior Group, here's a quick video that talks about the Superior Group's success on becoming a social business and the ROI they are achieving by using IBM Connections:



For more information, check out the entire press release.

From Adoption to Adaptation, from Enablement into Engagement - The Upcoming Luis Suarez Masterclass

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There are just 12 more days left for the IBM Connections User Group meeting in Prague! The 6th Social Connections event. There's still time left to register and book your travel plans.  With IBM Connections Next now just weeks away, this event couldn't have been timed any better.

As I mentioned a few weeks back, I'm going to join the IBMer who fired himself, Luis Suarez, so if you haven't yet, send us your toughest digital business question.

There's one more item that I want to highlight.  If you are going all the way to Prague, then you most definitely can't miss the Luis Suarez's MasterClass: From Adoption to Adaptation, From Enablement to Engagement.

Whether you are just getting started with your Social Business Adaptation Journey, or whether you are already a very well seasoned 2.0 knowledge worker, this workshop will provide you an opportunity to learn with other fellow practitioners through plenty of practical, hands-on advice, good practices, lots of hints and tips and, most importantly, all of the necessary knowledge resources available to date.  This is a great opportunity to learn how you can get the most out of your IBM Connections deployment. It will help you as well to even break free from the email yoke: Outside of the Inbox.


This will be an all day workshop and capacity is limited to 25 people to ensure that it's personal and focused.  Therefore, if you haven't yet, go ahead and register now.

Embarking in a Social Business Transformation? Check Out These Storyboards to Drive a Culture Shift

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We are now less than a week away for our May 21st event to unveil IBM Connections Next. If you haven't registered yet, go ahead and register now and spread the word to your friends, family, neighbors, customers, partners, etc.

One aspect to keep in mind is that as you embark on your social business transformation, you are ready to drive a transformation shift in your enterprise. After all, it's people who create value for your business, and without them, you won't be able to reap all the benefits.

One way to do that is via storyboards where you can paint a typical business scenario and clearly highlight how things are jus so much better when using a social platform, such as IBM Connections.

Jim Claussen, the same guy who is doing the daily 5 minute podcast on IBM Connections tips, has decided to publish a series of storyboards to help people understand how their lives can be so much better.

I've embedded the first two chapters below.  If you like them, you should do the same and embed these two presentations in your IBM Connections deployment to share with the rest of the organization. Here's chapter 1:

Making Connections With Jim - Chapter 1: Why Social Business from IBM

And chapter 2:

Making Connections with Jim - Chapter 2: Structuring a Brainstorm, the Social Business Way from IBM

I'll be interested to know what you think about this approach.  Let me know!

To be notified of other chapters once they are published, follow IBM Social Business on Slideshare.

GreenMonk: IBM Have This Stuff Mastered

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Over the weekend, I stumbled upon a keynote given by Tom Raftery at the SAP for Utilities conference in San Antonio. For those that don't know, Tom works for GreenMonk the Energy and Sustainability practice of industry analyst firm RedMonk.

The keynote is interesting as it talks about the aging workforce which affects a lot of companies in the utilities industry. Tom mentions a a statistic from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics which says that in 10 years 30 to 40% of the utility workers are going to retire.

Tom also mentions another company which expects 50% of its workforce to retire in 5 years leading to a huge loss of knowledge. Mr. Raftery recommends deploying an internal social network and cites the work that IBM is doing in this area. To my surprise, as he is talking about this, a screenshot of my blog appears in the screen.

I wondered how he got access to our blogging system behind the firewall. Then quickly remembered that my colleague Luis Suarez had asked for a screenshot of our blogging system a while back. I was also very happy that Tom had very good things to say about IBM's use of social media, specially our recommendations engine:

The blogger there is guy called Luis Benitez. One of the things to notice is, you see the little red circle up there, I’ve got that circling a way of recommending the blog post, if you are on the internal IBM blog and you read that blog and you go, “that’s a good blog post, I got a lot out of that”. You can click on that little green button and it gets an extra star.

So it’s a rating mechanism for a blog posts on that internal platform, the IBM internal blog platform. IBM has got 18,000 blogs on their internal blog platform, 18,000 individual blogs and that’s a huge sea of information. And as people blog and I say put up posts they’re either recommended if they’re good or they’re not and they get lost if not good. You can see as well they’re on this platform on the right hand side, you’ve got similar blogs listed, so this is the one you find particularly, interesting you see similar bloggers there and that’s automatically generated based from the content.

On the left hand side you got a what’s called tag cloud, clicking an any of those words from the tag cloud get’s you related content. So, it’s an incredible way of getting information spread out through the organization and collate it back in again. And as I say there is 18,000 of them there, this other blog, it’s a friend of mine, a guy called Andy Piper. Andy Piper celebrating in this blog post his sixth anniversary as an internal blogger on the IBM blogging platform, so he he’s been out there six years, in fact the blogging platform, the internal blogging platform IBM has, has been going strong for eight years now.

So IBM have this stuff mastered and they’re not the only ones there is lots of other companies doing, but it’s a great way of capturing information and sharing it throughout the organization

Here's a video recording of the full keynote (you can skip to 12:00 to see where IBM is mentioned):

Here's the full transcript of the video: Potent Social Media Strategies

10 Social Business Myths - Busted!

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Today, a colleague shared this video which was posted to YouTube a couple of hours ago as well. The video features Louis Richardson while doing a keynote in Denmark. I blogged about Richardson's presentation last week where he shows how to increase the value of email by embracing social software.

Richardson follows the format of the famous TV Show MythBusters. For those of you who haven't seen the show (which by the way is one of my favorite shows, always on my TiVo and one of my dream jobs!), 2 Hollywood special effects experts take myths for a test and prove whether or not they are real (or plausible). For example, the MythBusters once demonstrated that it doesn't make sense to run in rain as you'll get wetter that way. But I digress.

In the video, Richardson talks about the following myths:

1. Social is "new"
2. Social is a waste of time
3. Social will get out of control
4. You can prove social during a pilot
5. People love to share all they know
6. Social will replace email completely
7. Microblogging is useless
8. You know what your people want in a social solution
9. Social is just noise
10. Adoption is the measure of success

Here's the 30 minute keynote. The talk is about 24 minutes and there's about 8 minutes of questions towards the end. This video is a MUST watch:

Is there a myth that you've heard that wasn't addressed here?

SXSW 2012 Voting is Open - Please Vote!

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The staff at SXSW wants to know what kind of topics we want to hear at their event next March. So my team really needs your help in this year’s voting process!


But first - if you aren’t familiar with SXSW – (South By Southwest), it’s a set of film, music and interactive festivals and conferences in Austin, Texas. What started as a music festival that drew 700 attendees in 1987, has grown into a premiere set of events featuring new music and films and has earned a reputation as a breeding ground for emerging technologies. Last year more than 12,000 people attended.


The staff at SXSW is giving you a chance to weigh in on the event. You get to pick what panels make the agenda in 2012. Actually, your votes and comments account for 30% of the decision, the SXSW Advisory Board and staff make up the rest.


IBM has submitted more than a dozen topics – with six of them focused on Social Business. Pick one – pick them all! Those panels with the most votes have a much better chance of making the cut. Anyone can vote. You can vote for multiple sessions, but you can only vote once for each session. So please, get your mom to vote, ask your colleagues, inform your friends – and by all means, tweet about it!

Here are the IBM Social Business sessions you can vote on

• Sandy Carter: Social Media for Business: Culture eats Strategy for Lunch
• Nigel Beck & Jason Gary: Building Social Apps for Business Using Opensocial
• Kathy Mandelstein: Why Small is the New Big and Big is the New Small
• Rawn Shah: Get Lucky: Create Serendipity to Spur Innovation
• Suzanne Livingston & Luis Benitez: Enterprise Social Media Trends: Are We There Yet?
• Caleb Barlow: Enterprise grade social communications

HOW TO VOTE

To vote – you will need to create a panelpicker account. If you have an account from previous years – just login. But registering only took me about two minutes: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/


Once you are registered, vote for your favorite IBM Social Business sessions! You can see other IBM sessions that have been submitted too.


The panelpicker is open until September 2.

(originally posted in the Social Business Insights Blog -- resharing here so you can vote for my session!)

IBM: By 2011 Social Networking will be More Popular than Face-to-Face Collaboration

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I'm not really sure how I missed this one, but 2 months ago, the following IBM video appeared on YouTube. The video itself contains various business statistics such as the one highlighted in the title of this blog post: By 2011, Social Networking will be more popular than face-to-face collaboration. Interesting, right ? And just think that 2011 is only 2 years away. Social networking is no longer fad, but here to stay.

The video positions social networking as a great way to improve productivity and effectiveness, especially in today's business environment where it's esitmated that employees spend 25% of their time looking for information, and 42% of employees use the wrong information to make decisions... ouch!

This video is part of IBM's Smarter Planet strategy, which you may remember I recently presented at a local event for it. I'll let the video talk for itself.

So in 2 years, social networking is set to take over face-to-face collaboration. Is your organization ready for this revolution?

Alias and Anonymous Comments in Blogs

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Recently, I was at a customer who wanted to implement our blogging solution for their internal knowledge workers. They had some interesting requirements in terms of how users could comment and moderate blog entries.

The use case required the system to allow a central group to moderate blog entries before they get formally published. Additionally, blog authors could have the power to specify whether or not comments would be forced to anonymous. If comments were not forced to be anonymous, then users could comment using their real name or an alias.

Here's how the proposed solution looks like:

Blogs Anonymous

View more PDF documents from Luis Benitez.

I am bit concerned with all this moderation and 'secret identities', especially around adoption. And it makes me wonder... how many organizations have deployed an internal blogging solution that allow interacting with the solution with secret identities ?

New Quickr Desktop Application for Windows/Linux/Mac

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This is way cool! Rob Novak, aka Lotus Rock Star, just released a new Adobe AIR-based app for you to easily access all Quickr places from your desktop without ever needing to open a browser (well, except to download Rob's new app ). I've been using the app now for about a week and I really like it a lot (specially since I'm on a Mac and I didn't have a "Quickr connector" available to me).

And you know me.. anything that lets me use my applications without a browser, gets my love.

So go ahead and download your PandaBear now and accelerate your collaboration speed! Now I'm just hoping that this can be updated to work with the personal file sharing component of Lotus Connections. Have a great weekend!

Enjoy!

The problems of the aging workforce and social software

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Several days ago, I had an exchange over email about how to pitch Lotus Connections to a customer in the Energy Industry. This is a summary of the ideas that Ted Stanton, Laurisa Rodriguez, and myself came up with.

What seems to be a common thread in the Energy Industry is that it's facing an Aging Workforce. This is something that I first ran into when I met a customer in this same industry in Rio de Janeiro a couple of months ago. In this case, the pain points for customers are that they fear they will be affected by brain drain. How do you capture this knowledge before it's gone? Well, with social software, of course!

I consider myself a seeker and a contributor. I am always looking for an expert on something and I like to share my content. Before I adopted social software, however, I found myself turned off by the Knowledge Management (KM) solutions that existed within my enterprise. We had way too many databases. I kept asking myself: "Where should I post my content?" "Where are users searching for content?" "Why don't I have access to some databases?" "Why doesn't any of the existing databases have keywords/categories appropriate for my content?", etc. I'm sure these frustrations are shared by others as well.

How does social software, in particular, Lotus Connections help? Let's look at its capabilities:

• Profiles - Can be extremely valuable even if users don't manually populate information as much of the data can be pulled from existing enterprise data sources. The ability to integrate profile searches from email clients is something any age group likes.
• Communities - Owners of Communities can invite and recommend communities to other employees. Forums are extremely powerful and communities can become the place where people ask questions to a larger audience. Everyday people ask me questions, I advise them to check the forum and if you don't get what you need, create a post.
• Blogs - It only takes 1 person on a team to share information. If you have a 10 person team and 9 of them don't blog (over 50 crowd), that's OK. It only takes 1 person to take the best practices and lessened learned from the team and share them across the enterprise. This is kind of informal mentoring.
• Dogear - No brainier. Everyone has bookmarks. There is relatively no difference between bookmarking locally in a browser or through Dogear. Need to show users how easy it is to get started. Adding a "Dogear This" button to all internal web pages and integrating Dogear search results with the existing enterprise search engine starts viral adoption. When people ask me for links, I tell them to go search Dogear first.
• Activities - While this may be tough for baby boomers to adopt, the key is to find advocates of all ages. Once these advocates understand the technology and how to collaborate effectively with it, inevitably others will follow as they get added to subsequent activities.

Finally, any social software solution that follows the 10 principles of social software architecture must be easy to use. This simplicity reduces the time that it takes to learn how to use social software, it gets users on board more rapidly, and increases adoption. Lotus Connections, for example, was designed with usability in mind. It's really easy to use!

36 hours in Rio de Janeiro - Part II

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This is a continuation of Part I.

Day 2 in Rio de Janeiro started with me looking outside my hotel window and getting to see Cristo Redentor. I didn't realize the night before I had such a beautiful view of the statue.

Roundtable with Business Partners

Got to IBM at 9:15am (15 minutes late). Luckily, things in Brazil are like in Puerto Rico... meetings start about 30 mins late . Maybe it's a Latin America thing. I presented on the Business Value of social software and shared my personal success stories. I also talked about the how IBM is promoting adoption to its employees. I also did a demo of Connections 2.0 and the business partners were blown away by all the new features in 2.0 (which ships this Friday!).

Some business partners had a background in KM. When I talked about the typical adoption rate and how 90% of users are lurkers/readers/consumers, and only about 10% are actual contributors (comments, bookmarks, blogs, etc), they were surprised. I argued, however, that in the KM days if we ever got to more than 1% of active contributors, that was a LOT. They agreed!

One of them was also very experienced with 'change management' and we had a great discussion after the round table concluded. He said that the 12-step adoption plan that I presented was great, and it really applied to any organizational change. He also commented that he believes integration is key to adoption. The ability to use social software from anywhere is a must because people naturally contribute/collaborate in different ways. He, for example, blogs by using a voice recorder and then transcribing his thoughts into a blog! Very interesting approach, I thought!

Here's the feedback that I got from one of the BP's after the session was done:

O bate papo sobre Connections foi muito produtivo. Termos alguém com conhecimento para tirar nossas dúvidas comerciais e técnicas no formato apresentado realmente é muito bom. Ainda mais nos novos produtos da Lotus os quais ainda não possuímos expertise.

Recomendo repetir esta experiência sempre que possível.

36 hours in Rio de Janeiro - Part I

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I'm now in a plane back to the Puerto Rico after spending 36 hours in Rio de Janeiro evangelizing social software and discussing adoption best practices. Below is a summary of the activities I was involved in:

Meet with a customer's Online University Team

In the first 12 hours, I got to meet with the business owners of the company's Online University and the ones in charge of promoting educational offerings to the rest of the employees. I'm noticing, by the way, that this is a trend. A lot of people who have a background in eLearning are now moving on to social software.

Anyway, I discussed the IBM-recommended adoption program and went through all 12 steps in detail. I emphasized most of the ten principles of social software. The customer agreed wholeheartedly and even asked if IBM provides services to help them through the process. The answer, of course, is yes .

The customer LOVED Lotus Connections, but asked me to help convince their IT department that this was the right tool to use AND that IT needs to work together with them on their adoption strategies. Currently, the IT department is looking at using various open source tools (more on this later).

I, unfortunately, realized later that not everyone knew what Lotus Connections was so I did a demo after talking about the 12 step plan . We, however, had some great discussions.

• Cultural Shift - they stated that they need to go through a cultural shift to encourage people to share. I told them about IBM's deployments worldwide and how we have the experience to guide them through the process. Also, about 30% of the employees are set to retire in the next 5 years! What motivation do they have to share ? I encouraged them to set mentor relationships with the younger generation and get the latter to Blog!
• Diversity of workforce - Additionally, about 40% of the workforce has been hired in the last 3 years! (what a gap, huh?) and their turnover is pretty high too (only about 10% of the employees last more than 10 years). I told them they need to capitalize on this and get them all connected. Using Social Network Analysis (SNA) they can quickly visualize these gaps and work towards closing them.
• Pilot audience - They said they didn't feel comfortable choosing the right audience for their pilot and they also didn't know how long a pilot should be. I told them how important it was to choose trusted employees who are always willing to try new things. They must also be willing to add content to the system (nobody likes an empty site, right? Imagine going to Facebook and none of your friends are there. Would you come back ? Probably not, or probably in a year or so...
• Getting started - The customer said that Lotus Connections may be "too much". And I agreed. In fact, I told them that IBM recommends starting small - usually Profiles and one more service. It's easy to start with Profiles because as soon as you import data, you can get value out of it. Then I encouraged them to figure out what's the biggest pain point. Is it intranet search? If so, use Dogear. Is it having an easy way to share ideas and collaborate? If so, use Blogs. Is it finding communities of practice and leveraging their knowledge? If so, use Communities.

What was supposed to be a 1 hr meeting, became a 3 hr meeting. And the best part? The customer was the one that did most of the talking! They can't wait to get started.

Social Software in the 'Education' industry

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I had an interesting 2 hour meeting today with a Manhattan customer in the Education industry.  So many new feature requirements came out of that meeting that I'm scared that if I log them all on the internal Feature Request site I will crash it!

Anywho, in the meeting there were 4 customer representatives from the "Knowledge Management" (KM) group -- they were considered KM Subject Matter Experts: SME's!  So I start talking about Profiles and tagging and immediately get the first requests:

• Can tags be pre-populated?
• Can a drop-down be used for user to select tags instead of them entering it?
• Can an administrator control tags (i.e. Create, update, delete) ?
• Can taxonomy from WCM/Quickr be imported into Connections / Profiles?
  
• Can the profiles DB be populated from multiple data sources ?

After I heard these, I thought we might be talking to the wrong people.  Fixing the tags?  Pre-populating them?  Isn't this against the 'principles of web 2.0' ? Anyway, I said you could theoretically do that with services (i.e. pre-populate the tags table in the Profiles Database and then modify the UI accordingly).

They also asked about usage reporting.  This has been asked for before so I just told them it's coming in V2.0.  Alternatively, we could do something with WebTrends, for example.

Then we spent about 1 hour talking about Wikis and the lack of them in Connections.  This is a popular feature request and therefore Wikis will be there in V2.0 as well!  Anyway, they knew Wikis were part of Quickr.  They, however, wanted Wikis as part of Communities ("and by February 2008"!!!!).    I talked about the tighter integration between Quickr and Connections in Release 2.0 but that didn't do it for them.  They wanted Wiki's to be part of Connections so that it would be part of the user's Connections Dashboard.

In the end, it looks like services will have to write a whole new User Interface for Connections utilizing the Connections APIs. 

What's your experience with selling Connections to the traditional KM people?  Seems like at this customer they still wanted to follow a very strict pattern and not leverage the 'freeness' that Web 2.0 provides.