IBM and InformationWeek will host From Liking to Leading, a live broadcast Thursday, September 13 at 1:00 PM ET. We will explore the changing face of business. Brian Gillooly, editor-in-chief of InformationWeek, will give his market perspective on business and the value of the social graph. Market-leading organizations will share the benefits they're realizing by being social. And IBM executives, Jeff Schick and Alistair Rennie, will discuss ways businesses can gain competitive advantage by enabling more employees to be innovators and more clients to be advocates.
In this webcast you'll have the opportunity to learn from other organizations ways you can harness these unique capabilities NOW to gain competitive advantage:
Create a smarter workforce that is socially empowered to attract and connect the right people to the information and expertise they need, whenever and wherever they need it
Create exceptional customer experiences that are socially engaged, across all channels, and can anticipate and meet individual needs before they ask
To view the invite and learn more, click on the image below:
Register today!!
Suzanne and I have submitted our abstracts so let me tell you about them.
First, I think is one that is going to be loved by all fans of the movie Office Space. If you haven't seen the movie, I highly recommend that you check it out (it's in Netflix right now). A funny scene in the movie is when an employee is reprimanded when not formatting their "TPS" report properly. So at SXSW we want to talk about how you can make that TPS report social! You can watch the scene below:
Second, we are proposing a panel so attendees can learn how companies have transformed their cultures to create a more engaged workforce, accelerate innovation, and lead in social business. With only 8% of organizations leveraging social collaboration tools across the entire enterprise, I truly believe that we need to do more to get this going and starting by transforming the corporate culture is key.
Would you like these to be part of the SXSW 2013 agenda? So do I!!! So here's how you can help out.
Discussions on the abstracts are highly important, so don't forget to comment. Also, while you are in the PanelPicker site, you may want to check out the other sessions submitted by other IBMers:
With the upcoming launch of IBM's newest Connections release, I can't help but get excited as to what's about to happen. And of course, when I see the product that I work on as the Cover Story of the USA Today, that gets me even more excited! As you probably saw in Ed Brill's blog yesterday, the USA Today ran a piece on how companies are seeing employee productivity increase with the use of social collaboration tools, such as IBM Connections. The article highlights Newly Weds Foods which uses IBM Connnections for its 2,700 employees to help them share sauces, batters, breadings, and more. To see a video of Newly Weds Foods testimonial, check this out. Also, check out the picture I took of the paper's cover story:
So the next question is, how big is the opportunity for social collaboration tools ? Well, another interesting piece that I ran into yesterday was the 2012 Digital Workplace Trends Report. In it, only 8% of enterprises surveyed claim to have a social business platform rolled out enterprise wide. The number at first seemed very small to me, but when you compare that with 33% of organizations that say they have sporadic deployments, it makes sense. However, it concerns me that companies are still taking a silo'ed approach instead of taking an approach where silos are destroyed.
What's very encouraging, and validates IDC prediction that spending will continue to increase in this area, is that the report found that 47% of organizations are planning to increase their investment in social collaboration tools.
Let's get straight to it. A beta version of IBM Connections "Next" has now been loaded up in the Greenhouse. Check it out here:
Ok so I still am not allowed to show you this externally so the only way to check out this beta of IBM Connections "Next" is to go to Greenhouse. If you are not part of the beta, go check it out now! And if you don't have a Greenhouse account yet, you can get one here!
Please go out to Greenhouse and feel free to post comments there about what you see. And also invite your friends to check out IBM Connections "Next" in the Greenhouse by sending them a link to this blog (or the short URL above).
I look forward to the comments you post in Greenhouse.
Many developers are quickly ramping up and building solutions for social business platforms. Because IBM's social business platform is the one with the biggest market share worldwide, we are seeing a large amount of partners and ISVs building solutions for our platform.
IBM Connections is now the platform of choice for companies embracing social business and I am extremely happy that this fourth development contest has a category specifically for it. I am eager to see what the awesome development community will development and submit to the contest.
Bruce also runs the Taking Notes Podcast and in the latest episode the podcast is focused solely on application development for IBM Connections. In the podcast, I cover an overview of the extension points and APIs available. The podcast also features Kudos, a gamification solution for IBM Connections and how it was built for that platform. To listen to the episode, check it out here.
Additionally, if you haven't played with the Social Business Toolkit my colleague, Konrad Lagarde, has published a tutorial that explains how to use the toolkit to build apps for our cloud-based solution. As you'll see in the video below, Konrad uses the toolkit directly on his Mac. The toolkit is a simple-to-use wizard which guides the developer through a series of steps to create the building blocks for the app along with the OAuth dance. Here's that video:
Earlier this week, 
