Watch out! China & Taiwan are all about Enterprise 2.0

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Lately, I've been hearing a lot about Enterprise 2.0 deployments in the United States, Canada, and Europe. However, I've heard very little as to what's going on in Asia.

I'm not sure how many of you have noticed, but IBM has a section in the product page of Connections where they highlight success stories. If you visit the link, you'll notice that the success stories are dominated by companies from Asia! I figured I would highlight 3 of those success stories here:

1. Chinese Deaf Association - This government agency was established in 1995 and it serves 200,000 deaf or hearing-impaired citizens in Taipei. Before implementing this platform, only 23,000 deaf or hearing-impaired citizens could be served and they had to book translation services 5 days in advance. Now, they can get access to interpreters via instant messaging and video chat. They are using Lotus Connections to build the first-ever community to connect the local deaf community with basic information about daily news, healthcare, legal services, jobs, all delivered via video clips.
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3. China Telecommunications Corporation - China Telecom is the largest fixed-line service and 3rd largest mobile telecom provider in China. After recently acquiring a new 3G license, they wanted to set up a platform to leverage its employee base and drive innovation. Using Lotus Connections, they created a unified innovation process which is also open to business partners and customers. The first idea was posted "a mere 10 minutes after launch".
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5. Digital China - Digital China is an IT services provider in China providing solutions to clients ranging from consumers to large industry firms. Digital China wanted to improve its agility and collaboration capabilities. Leveraging Lotus Connections, Digital China created an integrated services oriented architecture (SOA) platform to offer multiple self-help collaboration services reducing help desk support costs.

So what do you think? Is Enterprise 2.0 now a world phenomenon or are we still a decade away like Forbes suggests?

IBM's Use of Social Media Inside the Firewall

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So Friday, was a busy day for sure. On Monday, I told you how I had to be up at 7am to record episode 20 of the This Week In Lotus podcast. At lunch time, I headed over to the El Conquistador resort to speak at a panel on Internal Communications for the Association of Professional Public Relations of Puerto Rico.

The panel was 1 hour long and I only had 15 minutes to talk about how IBM is using social media inside of the firewall. The idea was that the other speaker would get another 15 minutes and then we would use the other 30 minutes to field questions from the public and/or the moderator.

Since I only had 15 minutes, I created this quick presentation which of course doesn't do justice to all the great things that IBM is doing, but should serve as a teaser.

IBM's use of social media behind the firewall

View more presentations from Luis Benitez.

I volunteered to go first and noticed a lot of people taking notes (and almost no one live tweeting). After my 15 minutes were up, I sat down and anxiously waited for the Q&A part of the panel. However, the other speaker stood up for 55 minutes.

Because we were limited on time, we only had a chance to answer 1 question from the public and it was about guidelines. The other speaker mentioned that his company doesn't have a social media policy.

I, of course, mentioned that IBM has a set of Social Media Guidelines and that they are available for others to model after it. In fact, Mashable recommends that you create your social media guidelines by copying those from IBM. And it turns out that the keynote speaker for the conference was Deirdre Breakenridge who is a big fan of IBM's work and even mentioned it while she was here.

The moderator was also able to get one question in and it was related to how IBM takes action when an employee does something wrong like accidentally publish confidential information. This is a common "fear" as highlighted in the book The New Social Learning (which I need to dedicate a full blog post to). I spoke about how our community mostly self-polices each other and that there are people out there watching out just in case and we have a formal structure to take action in case something happens (which I won't go into detail here). I also mentioned the advice from the book, "educate people on how to use [the tools] effectively for work".

So I know it's a short presentation, but I promised to post it here for others to reference it later on.

What's the Business Value of Social Software?

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If you are looking at ideas on how to improve the efficiency of your organization, division, or department, then I have a webcast just for you. Tomorrow, a set of 3 panelists from IBM will be addressing CIOs and Line of Business owners with the goal of getting everyone to leave with a new approach on how social software can deliver real business value.

Here's the details for tomorrow's webcast.

Date: October 6, 2010
Time: 11 am ET
Duration: 60 minutes

IBM Panelists:
Randy Frink
Sales & Distribution, Software Sales

Louis Richardson
Software Group, Worldwide Sales

Martha Mealy
Market Segment Manager - Social Software, Mashup Center

Additionally, attendees will get a free copy of a whitepaper: "Web 2.0 @ work: How CIOs can Help Drive Business Returns by Improving Organizationally". To register for the webcast tomorrow, click here.

Enjoy!

Skype, Tungle, & Mac application sharing comes to the IBM Cloud Web Meetings

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Today, IBM announced a long list of updates to its collaboration cloud offering. I tried to count all the new features, but there are simply too much to count them manually. A rough estimate comes to about 150 new features!

One of the things that's very attractive of the new updates is its seamless integration between mail and other collaborative services, whereas other vendors force you to go from module to module.

Additionally, I'm really excited about the integration with Tungle. If you haven't signed up to Tungle, you should do it today. It simplifies the process of scheduling meetings with people outside of your company (which probably means that you don't have access to their calendar availability). Tungle fixes this and it's now directly integrated within LotusLive so you can easily schedule meetings with your LotusLive contacts.

Moreover, the Communities component of Lotus Connections is now part of LotusLive which has been a popular customer request. Other changes within Lotus Connections include the ability to tag people and add custom profile fields.

Lastly, but not least, Mac users rejoice: application sharing is now available for Mac users. This is in addition to the nifty free web meeting application for iPhone/iPad.

Here's a video that walks you through the new features:

To view the video in full screen, go here. Don't have a LotusLive account? Start a free trial today.

Enjoy!

It's Podcast Season!

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Two weeks ago I told you about a podcast I'd recorded with my colleague Sacha Chua. This time I got to participate in the This Week In Lotus podcast. As you may remember, I talked about this podcast several weeks ago because they were discussing the IDC report where IBM is named the Market Leader in Enterprise 2.0 Platforms.

So, last week Stuart McIntyre, one of the show's hosts, invited me to join the podcast. That meant that last Friday I had to be up and ready by 7am. That was pretty easy, however, given I have a 2.5 year old and a 2 month old who are ready to go and have fun by 5am.

In this episode, we get a chance to talk about:

• the article from FAST company re: Why IBM could be bigger than Facebook in Social Media
• my new job
• Jon Mell returning back to IBM from Headshift
• and other great stuff for a fun filled hour

Make sure you catch the tips section, I think there's a couple of things there you'll like.

To listen to this episode, click here or subscribe via iTunes.