The Results Are In: IBM Connections Benefits $26.5 million over 3 years !

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A recent commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of IBM titled The Total Economic Impact of IBM Connections analyzes the cost savings and business benefits of utilizing IBM Connections. The purpose of the study is to provide a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of implementing the IBM Connections social collaboration platform within their organizations to improve internal processes to engage, empower, and inspire both employees and customers and unlock new opportunities.

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with an IBM Connections implementation, Forrester interviewed existing customers with multiple years of experience using both the IBM Connections cloud and on-premises collaboration platforms.

As one example, Forrester refers to a representative organization with about 35,000 employees and calculated benefits of about $26 million over a three year period. These come from increased productivity, reduced turnover, and reduced IT costs.

Here's an infographic with some of the highlights:

Here's a testimonial from one of our customers where Jacob Andersson, Corporate Systems Manager at Verisure, talks about his experience with IBM Connections.



You can download the study from here. To start a free trial of IBM Connections, go here: http://ibmcloud.com/social.

Recap of Twitter Chat with infoBOOM

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Yesterday, I was invited to participate in a Twitter chat hosted by infoBOOM. In case you haven't heard, infoboom is the IBM community created for business leaders who want to share their opinions and validate strategic thinking with like-minded peers.

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My colleague, Luis Suarez participated in this Twitter chat about a month ago. Yesterday, we talked about the latest release of Lotus Connections, what Enterprise 2.0 means to me, millenials in the enterprise, organizations that block YouTube and other social media sites, and more.

You can see the full conversation by looking at #ibmsocial or I've made it easy for you by using Storify and aggregating all the tweets in to a single place:

Or you can see it here: Twitter Chat with infoBOOM on 16-Nov-2010 in case your browser doesn't load the tweets above..

What do you think?

One-Way Adaptability is Key in Social Software

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I forget now how I got this link, but I was recently notified of a report published by Accenture. The report, "New-Generation Workers" Want Technology Their Way, was published last month. The report has already been reviewed widely in the blogsphere, for example, here. I, however, wanted to add my two cents because I think it summarizes and emphasizes what I evangelize the most: social software should adapt to your needs, and not the other way around!

Now, Accenture's survey wasn't social software specific. It was about technology in general. However, I would like to point out the needs of this new workforce. And attracting this new workforce is often one of the business needs I hear from my customers. And that's one of the business needs that drive them to look at social software.

The needs of the new workforce:

• Millennials want to choose their technology
• Younger employees insist on state-of-the-art technology
• Organizations will need to provide new communication and collaboration channels. Millenials expect employers to provide communication channels such as online chat, instant messaging, mobile text messaging, and RSS feeds to communicate with their customers and clients.
• Coming to the end of e-mail as we know it. [...] High school and young college students spend less than two hours a week e-mailing, instead preferring text, instant messaging, and communicating on social networking sites.

In my opinion, this new workforce has figured out ways to be productive. They have a system. They know how to collaborate. And, they expect their employers to provide these same collaboration tools. I guess it's like taking away email for those of you addicted to email. How will you ever collaborate ?

Here are the preferred communication methods of these Millenials (graphic from Social Computing Magazine):

I'm actually surprised that they prefer mobile text messages over RSS feeds. But that's why it's important that when you are reviewing and selecting social software, you choose a platform that adapts to a user's needs. That way, the end user decides how to use the software, how to better take advantage of it, how to make the best of it.

Adaptability is also the sum of Principle 5 and Principle 8 of the Principles of Social Software.

Collaboration Matters Podcast - Episode 4 - My Journey From eLearning to Social Software

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I recently had the pleasure to join Neil Burston and Stuart McIntyre as part of their Collaboration Matters Podcast series! While I had already created several podcasts internally at IBM, I had never done one externally. Needless to say, I was very excited that they reached out to me in order to create my first external podcast.

If you are already following the Collaboration Matters blog, then you already know the news and probably even heard the podcast already! If you are not subscribed to the podcast, I would like to encourage you to do so. In Episode 3, Heidi Votaw and Suzanne Minassian talk about the latest and greatest in Lotus Connections 2.0.

So what is this journey from eLearning to Social Software ? Well, as I've mentioned before, I used to be an eLearning developer and consultant before taking on my current role. Thus, Neil asks me how I got into this whole social software space and how I became so passionate about the subject. We also talk about some challenges that I've run into in the past 2 years. In fact, let me give you a quick overview of what the podcast is about:

• 01:30 - Good morning to you - Buenas tardes desde aquí!
• 02:00 - Collaboration Matters is running the Connectr event (see slides below) and Lotus Connections Blog
• 02:20 - Luis, tell us about yourself, what you do, your role and how you got into this
• 03:20 - My job as an eLearning consultant and my first transition to social software... a "expected" evolution/transition
• 03:50 - How I learn by contributing content in the social software space
• 04:30 - The beauty of living in Puerto Rico
• 05:30 - My own, personal introduction to Lotus Connections
• 06:40 - Evaluate social software as an eLearning approach / solution for a customer in Tampa. I had been blogging since early 2006 and was familiar with Social Bookmarking but was not an avid user. I had to make a case for how these technologies could help solve their elearning needs.
• 07:55 - Results of the social software for eLearning pilot. Challenges that we encountered re: privacy in this multi-national environment
• 09:30 - Legal blocks to social software deployments in Europe
• 11:30 - My view, as a millenial, on the benefits of sharing knowledge with social software
• 14:00 - Why it was so hard to share before social software
• 16:20 - Which industries are using social software ?
• 18:10 - What really blew me away... social software at construction companies!!!
• 21:00 - How the product itself promotes adoption
• 22:45 - Have you seen any downsides to not having any formal processes behind knowledge sharing?
• 25:30 - How Lotus Connections, as an enterprise social software platform, promotes self-policing
• 27:35 - Tell us about the usage of social task management and Lotus Connections Activities
• 31:15 - The role of repeatable human processes and social software
• 32:40 - What's your favorite feature of Lotus Connections ? Definitely, Dogear, the social bookmarking component of Lotus Connections
• 35:00 - How feed readers help in my day-to-day job
• 36:40 - Complete the following sentence: "I love Lotus Connections because..." - it works with me! It's always with me, I depend on it, I trust it
• 38:00 - Closing comments...

One success story (of many) behind all this, is that I met Neil and Stuart strictly through social software. More specifically via my blog and Twitter. By using social software we collaborated effectively even though there was an 8 hour difference between us!! (It was 7:30am my time when this was recorded).

Neil, also told me that he was able to capture our conversation as a MindMap. I didn't know what a MindMap was until today. But no worries, I downloaded MindManager for Mac and was able to look at it. Pretty cool!!! The tool looks really interesting and I'm going to start playing with it more to see how I can use and apply it to my daily life. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.

Here are the slides used at the Connectr #6 event:

Slides from the Connectr#6 event:

Connectr #6

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: connectr lotus)

Ready to start listening? Subscribe to the podcast or download the MP3 from here. I hope you like it!

Giving the tools to millenials and letting them innovate

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Today, I spent the whole day at Bank of New York, one of our public references for Lotus Connections. They have partnered with CMU and have interns during the summer whose sole responsibility is to bring Web2.0 capabilities into their existing products. By leveraging Lotus Connections and other Lotus products, they are building new mashups to help Bank of NY employees collaborate more effectively. Of course, I can't go onto too much detail as to what they are doing.

My job was to teach these millenials the basics of Eclipse plugin and REST API development. After introducing the REST concepts, I talked about the Lotus Connections APIs and the different approaches to use them. Basically, since REST is pretty much XML over HTTP, you can pretty use our APIs from anywhere.

So the first example was to create an Eclipse plug-in that fetches data from Lotus Connections using the Abdera Atom Client. The cool thing about an Eclipse plug-in is that, well, you can plug it in into any Eclipse-based application such as Lotus Notes, Lotus Sametime, Lotus Expeditor, Rational Application Developer, etc, etc.

I also talked about WebSphere Portlet Factory and how they could use that to develop portlets. And not only JSR-168 portlets that run on a portal, but also portlets that can be run on Lotus Notes 8! They were really excited to see how they could develop rich client capabilities by writing 0 lines of Java code!!

Now their goal is to innovate and present back to the business side at the end of the summer what they've come up with. I'm extremely proud of this customer because instead of forcing interns to do A,B,C, they are letting their minds run wild and create new mashups that perhaps the business side wouldn' have thought of. I'm very anxious to see what they come up with by the end of the summer!