IBM Releases Glimpse into IT Future In The 2011 Tech Trends Report

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IBM has just released the results of its 2011 Tech Trends Report. The report provides insight into the most significant enterprise technology trends and is based on the input of more than 4,000 IT professionals and developers across 93 countries and 25 different industries.  This report is unique as it surveys the development community, the people that are in the trenches everyday making IT work for countless businesses around the world.


Whether you are interested in social business, open source, cloud, mobile or analytics, there is something for everyone in this report. I personally have an inclination towards cloud, mobile, analytics and social business, so the report was a great read to say the least.

Here are some key findings from the report (in no particular order):

1. Mobile - Android leads the way with 70% of respondents saying they are looking to develop for that platform compared to 49% for iOS.  Why are people choosing Android?  The openness and ease of development make Android the platform of choice.
2. Cloud Computing - 40% of respondents indicated that their organization is not using any mobile technology, but 75% said that in 2 years their organizations will begin to leverage the cloud representing a tremendous opportunity for cloud vendors.  The top motivators for adopting cloud technology?  58% say it's because of flexibility and scalability and 40% say it's to reduce capital costs. 
3. Social Business - Organizations are looking to deploy internal social business platforms (43%) and are considering using external deployments (41%) and using mass market social networks (20%).  The top challenge cited by organizations?  48% cited end user adoption of their social business platform, a topic I've talked a lot in the past. 

In the following video, Sandy Carter, VP of IBM Social Business, talks about the results of the social business survey.



In this second video, my colleague Suzanne Livingston talks about the results found in the mobile area:



To view the report and learn more about the Tech Trends, check out: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/techtrendsreport

Social Media Club Boston on The Evolution of Social Business

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Last week, the Social Media Club of Boston and IBM partnered up to talk about the Evolution of Social Business. While I couldn't assist in person for obvious reasons, I liked the ability to catch up via the uStream replay (below). The club celebrated its 5th anniversary and the outgoing president started the meeting with a re-cap of the club. This was very interesting to me in various levels. First, as you may know, I lead the Social Media Club of Puerto Rico so I like to learn about how other clubs structure their events. Second, the event was sponsored by my employer, and, third, my big boss was one of the panelists .

The following participated in the panel:

• Alistair Rennie, General Manager, Social Business, IBM
• Andrew Carusone, Director of Integrated Workforce Experience (IWE) and Community Governance, Lowe’s Home Improvement (you may remember Lowe's awesome story on how they use IBM Connections to increase sales by million$ )
• Ric Fulop, Partner, North Bridge Venture Partners

Following the tweets generated by the event over at #SMCBoston, I knew I had to watch the replay. I specially liked these tweets:

"Awesome #SMCBoston event, "The Evolution of Social Business," last night at IBM Innovation Ctr. Learned a TON!" --Kirk Hazlett, Curry College Communication Professor; PRSA Fellow, and PRSA Director (2011-2012)

"This is not a tool discussion." @alistair_rennie at #smcboston --@jimstorer (principal at The Community Roundtable)

"Glad to see IBM support #smcboston & the local Boston community by having @alistair_rennie join us tonight #IBMsocialbiz" --Rachel Happe, former IDC analyst and principal at The Community Roundtable

"IBM has been great supporting #smcboston and other great Boston innovation communities like @MassInno Thx @#IBMSocialBiz" --Bob Collins, Partner at Human 1.0 / Digital Media & PR Strategist. Content Creator and Host of Boston's Social Media Breakfast

"Interesting demo of internal IBM employee search directory "Faces" @IBMWaltham. Very cool #SMCBoston pic.twitter.com/YOljxNeT" --Dave Cutler, Blogger, columnist and social media strategist.

The event was also highlighted by Bill Ives and in Mass High Tech.

Andrew from Lowe's did a fantastic job introducing how and why Lowe's embarked in the Social Business path. As part of his introduction Andrew told the amazing story of how they were able to increase sales at their retail stores by using social software behind the firewall (in their case IBM Connections). The specific example was about how an employee was having a challenge replenishing a specific type of pain tray. They had gone from selling 2 paint trays per week per store, to more than 15 trays per week per store. The employee didn't know how to get more trays in so they could sell more. As other employees saw the question, they wondered how this particular store was selling so many paint trays since the average was just 2 per week. The employee shared how they configured the display for the tray and all stores followed suit and they saw the same increase in sales, nationwide!

Ric is an entrepreneur and gets to read to hundred of business plans per year and has identified three trends: 1) consumerazation of the enterprise, 2) conversational web, and 3) next generation optimization. I don't want to spoil all the details so watch the recording.

Here's the video recording of the event (1 hour and 20 minutes):

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How To Get Twitter Feed Added to IBM Connections Profile

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IBM Connections Profiles is all about aggregating user information from various sources into a single place.

Yesterday, I noticed that JustNudge, an IBM business partner (the ones who created the Profile Completion widget), had created another widget. This time, their new widget gets the user's Twitter feed and brings it in directly to their Profile as shown below.

Sharon Bellamy from Applicable also got this working on her own server and it looks great!

JustNudge is offering this widget for free for a limited time so go ahead and get it while it's hot. I installed it on my demo server following their instructions and it took me about 15 minutes to go through the process. Very easy!

To get the widget, go here.

To Like or To Dislike: Is That The Question?

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A little over two years ago, I blogged about YouTube's decision to abandon their 5-star rating system and instead go for a Thumbs Up/Down approach. Yesterday, I blogged about Tom Raftery's keynote where he highlights IBM's use of binary recommendations in our blog engine. Then I stumbled on yet another article about Facebook prohibiting Dislike on their system from Mashable.

Mashable's Op-Ed highlights that developers were trying to use Facebook's new OpenGraph protocol to convert dislike into one of the possible options for users. However, trying to do that, gives this error to developers:

It seems most social networks today (Google +, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, IBM Connections, Instagram, etc) use a binary system: either you like something or you don't. Of the ones that I use frequently, I think only YouTube has kept a system where you can pick one of three choices: do nothing, give a thumbs up, or give a thumbs down.

The Op-Ed makes a case as to why Facebook prevents dislikes in their system: it could hurt the advertising business and could lead to cyber-bullying. To me, this makes total sense, and makes me think it wouldn't be appropriate to have this sort of negativity in an organizations' social platform.

A common concern that I hear from various organizations in terms of privacy and controlling the content in a social platform. They are concerned about employees not using the right tone and perhaps falling into a trap where things might be misconstrued because they might have not been written in the right tone. When this comes up, I usually recommend instituting a set of Social Computing Guidelines and monitoring the conversations to avoid problems. Typically, I get a very positive reaction from a large number of customers who appreciate that there's no way to dislike content within Connections.

Recently, however, I've had a few people ask that we introduce a way to down vote ideas within IBM Connections. Currently, you can only "like" things within Connections (i.e. you can vote up on ideas, you can give blogs/files/wikis a star, etc). In other words, there's no way to express your discontent with something, unless you manually type it in as a comment.

So I'm hoping to hear from you. Is this a good thing? Should you be able to "dislike" a file that someone posts? Or a wiki that someone created? What implications would there be on adoption if negativity where to to become rampant (like it is in some parts of YouTube) within a business' social network? Should the ability to down votes, if introduced, be prohibited for certain users?

IBM Releases New Native iPad App for IBM Connections

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Several weeks ago, IBM released native apps for the BlackBerry, Android and iOS platforms for their industry-leading social software platform: IBM Connections .

With today's update, the new iPad app takes advantage of the iPad real estate and provides a great tablet experience for iPad owners that wish to connect to IBM Connections, which according to IDC is the worldwide social software leader based on market share. The update converts the previous iPhone app into a universal app which means that the same app will work on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

The update rounds out IBM's mobile offerings since there are now Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, and iPad native experiences for IBM Connections.

Continuing with their Social Everywhere strategy, IBM has made all apps available for free including this new iPad app. Mobile is definitely becoming a key feature in terms of driving adoption towards an organization's social software platform.

Today's update not only adds a new iPad interface, it also provides new round-trip editing capabilities and it fully supports the new iOS 5. Additionally, with today's update, the app integrates into iOS' file upload mechanism allowing you to take files from any app (for example in Mail, or in Dropbox) and uploading those directly to IBM Connections).

Here's a quick demo of the new app for the iPad.




To download the app directly from the iOS App Store, click here.

Originally published in Technorati here: http://technorati.com/blogging/article/ibm-releases-native-ipad-app-for/