Archive for January 16th, 2012
Live @ Lotusphere 2012: IBM’s Social Business Strategy
At the Lotusphere 2012 session this afternoon entitled “IBM Social Business Strategy,” I had the opportunity to hear directly from two of IBM’s senior social business strategists, Douglas Heintzman and Andrew Warzecha.
IBM's Douglas Heintzman and Andrew Warzecha provide a detailed overview of IBM's social business strategy at Lotusphere 2012 earlier today.
The first headline on their first slide made a bold statement: A profound change is coming to business.
They spent the next hour explaining why, and to extent, how this change was already starting to occur, and its potential impact on the global business community.
Underneath that statement was a list of some of the chief characteristics that social businesses everywhere would start to take on:
- Talent as a cloud
- Digital reputation and individual brands.
- Leadership by connections
- Real-time teams.
- Collective intelligence.
- Engaged relationships.
- IT access anywhere.
Now, just think about those for a moment. Talent as a cloud, for example.
Heintzman explained that talent used to be found in organizations through other single-point based individuals who had an existing power base in the organization. They were the filter: Of knowledge, skills, etc.
Their role as the key node in the network is being increasingly supplanted by the reputation of key individuals in the organizations who have the skill to help make the firm a success.
Or collective intelligence, where our current inability to measure and monitor the sentiment of not only our customers, but also internally (think a negotiation with a union, a new medical benefits plan, etc.) is a missed opportunity to better understand real-time sentiment, a very powerful capability.
Talent as a cloud. Talent used to have to be found through power brokers, but now is more based on reputation.
Our inability to measure and monitor the sentiment of not only our customers, but also internally (a new negotiation with a union, a medical benefits plan, etc.), understanding the real-time sentiment of that becomes a very powerful capability.
As he continued to observe, history is filled with examples of people coming together with new insight/capabilities, and that social business simply represents another of those massive transformational opportunities.
Perhaps some of his sound bytes better tell the story:
- Social technology is changing the way we live. More than 7 billion pieces of content are shared each week on Facebook, and social networking accounts for 22% of online time.
- Smartphone shipments will outpace PCs by end of this year.
- Workers increasingly shift seamlessly between work/personal roles 24X7 using smartphones and tablets.
- There are 155 million Tweets each day (and yet 75% of folks still don’t believe advertising.)
This distinction between social media and social business is also an important one.
Social media is more commonly viewed as a new marketing channel, whereas social business, can help accelerate the velocity of business, provide for collective creative potential, and improve decision making in the organization.
Social media is more commonly viewed as a new marketing channel, whereas social business can help accelerate the velocity of business, provide for collective creative potential, and improve decision making in the organization.
Social business, in other words, encompasses organization and business operations, while social media provides a new communications and marketing platform.
If social business, then, is changing the way we work, the next logical question would be, “But how?”
In many ways. As an example, social media monitoring is now done by 11 out of the top 50 brands using social media as a sustainable tool for marketing (I will have to come back to this one, as I’ve been a part of the team embarking upon IBM Software’s own social listening efforts, and there are LOTS of lessons to learn there).
In terms of product and service innovation (our Rational line of software is very helpful in this arena), 44% of the Fortune 200 executives report using crowd-sourcing to improve corporate responsibility, and already 95% feel it has positive benefits.
89% of organizations are now recruiting from social networks, and 55% are planning to invest more in social networking and recruiting.
And finally, much to the contrary of conventional wisdom, 51% of companies permit employees to use social media for business purposes, up from 19% in in 2009.
It’s just not hyperbole that’s driving this shift, however. There’s a very real opportunity to drive business value from IT as it shifts from process automation towards people-centric processes: Everything from the the advances of “systems of engagement” (vs. “Systems of record”), to the demand for productivity and new markets that’s driving demand for social business transformation.
Renowned business thought leader Geoffrey Moore even suggested that such systems of engagement will drive 23% CAGR over the next several years.
So what’s the road map start to look like? What’s the great Google Map in the sky that will point the way?
Well, with social business as a market opportunity expected to reach $99 billion by 2015, I have no doubt we’ll see a variety of road maps emerge, but if you’d like to better understand IBM’s strategy, I’d encourage you to check out the IBM Social Business overview.
Live @ Lotusphere 2012: Day 1 Press Announcement — Social Analytics For Business
Today at Lotusphere 2012 here in Orlando, Florida, IBM unveiled new software and services that delivers comprehensive networking capabilities to the increasingly social savvy workforce.
Alistair Rennie, General Manager, Collaboration and Social Software, IBM
Now, organizations can apply analytics to their social business initiatives, allowing them to gain actionable insight on social networking sentiment anytime, anywhere and put it to work in real-time.
Social Business Requires Social Analytics
As part of today’s news, IBM is announcing new cloud services and the next-generation of its social networking platform, IBM Connections. The new software incorporates sophisticated analytics capabilities, real-time data monitoring, and faster collaborative networks both inside and outside the organization through IBM’s SmartCloud services.
Now, organizations can integrate and analyze massive amounts of data generated from people, devices and sensors and more easily align these insights to business processes to make faster, more accurate business decisions.
By gaining deeper insights in customer and market trends and employees’ sentiment, businesses can uncover critical patterns to not only react swiftly to market shifts, but predict the effect of future actions.
Analytics In Action
For example, marketing professionals can now gain real-time access to data that highlights patterns and consumer sentiment related to marketing trends and services allowing them to adjust campaigns on the fly.
With one simple click, professionals can react to this insight by automatically creating a social network bringing together experts across geographical and market intelligence and swiftly respond to these insights.
Social Is Growing…Are You?
The growing popularity of social networking is impacting the enterprise as the next-generation workforce expects more socially enabled applications at their fingertips. According to Forrester Research, the market opportunity for social enterprise apps is expected to grow at a rate of 61 percent through 2016, reaching $6.4 billion, compared with $600 million.
At the same time, organizations are embracing social capabilities to transform virtually every part of their business operations, but lack the tools to gain insight into the enormous stream of information and use it in a meaningful way.
To address these challenges, IBM is delivering new software and cloud services that brings the power of analytics to the social business:
- New social analytics software that integrates wikis, blogs, activity streams, email, calendaring and more, and flags relevant data for action. It allows for instant collaboration with one simple click and the ability to build social communities both inside and outside the organization to increase customer loyalty and speed business results.
- New software that integrates social networking capabilities with enterprise content management to better connect people with information so they can make informed decisions and act quickly.
- The new IBM SmartCloud for Social Business simplifies access to business-grade file sharing, social networking, communities, online meetings, instant messaging, email and calendar. In addition, IBM SmartCloud for Social Business will deliver a cloud-based productivity suite allowing users to co-edit documents in real-time.
- New messaging and collaboration software that brings the power of embedded experiences to the Web and mobile devices providing a single point of entry for all business processes.
In support of today’s news, IBM also announced new clients using its social software and cloud collaboration services making it one of the world’s leading providers of software-as-a-service (SaaS).
New clients, including employees of Kraft, Electrolux, MIT Lincoln Labs, Colgate-Palmolive, 3M, BlueCross Blue Shield of Florida, Dutch Tax Office, Premier Healthcare and Brunswick and are among the millions of users of IBM’s social software and collaboration services on premise, in the cloud and via mobile device.
To hear how the leadership and IT teams at IBM client TD Bank Group are working across the company to become a social business, participate in a Livestream broadcast on January 17, 2012, at 8:30 AM ET at livestream.com/ibmsoftware.
Getting Social In the Workplace
With today’s news, IBM is announcing the beta of the next release of its industry-leading enterprise social networking platform, IBM Connections. Powered by analytics, IBM Connections delivers the widest range of capabilities, including wikis, blogs, activities, to help organizations collaborate on the fly.
IBM Connections includes the ability to access enterprise email, calendar and business tasks from inside the Connections platform, further unifying the collaboration experience.
The IBM Connections Activity Stream brings together the best of enterprise software and public social networks to help employees become more productive by bringing the information they need to their fingertips.
The Connections landing page features a single location that allows users to view and interact with content from any third party solution through a social interface, right alongside their company’s content, including email and calendar.
The embedded experience of the news feed, also known as an activity stream, is expected to allow employees from any department inside an organization to explore structured and unstructured data such as Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, weather data, videos, log files, SAP applications, electronically sign documents, and quickly act on the data as part of their everyday work experience.
For example, an employee could share a document with colleagues, approve a transaction from an SAP system, act on a notification required in a business process like an insurance claim, and share content such as status updates and files, all from IBM Connections.
The embedded experience and single point of access allows users to have insight at their finger tips and share data from any place, whether on the road or in the office.
One of the key findings from the 2011 IBM Social Business Jam — an online, real time discussion with 4,000 participants — was that social business activities need to be integrated and aligned with business processes to be truly effective.
To help clients address this challenge, IBM is announcing IBM Connections Enterprise Content Edition, an integrated social content management solution that combines the scalability of social networking with enterprise content management and enhanced compliance and control features sought by users in regulated industries.
Designed to manage the entire life cycle of office documents, Web and social content, IBM Connections Enterprise Content Edition increases the ability to share knowledge, gain expertise and create high-value content quickly through advanced content, document management and workflow use cases.
A New, Secure Collaborations Cloud
According to Forrester Research Inc., cloud computing will grow from a $41 billion business in 2010 to $241 billion in 2020.
To address this growing opportunity, IBM is announcing IBM SmartCloud for Social Business. IBM is aligning its LotusLive services under the SmartCloud brand where it joins the ever-growing portfolio of business solutions that IBM delivers in the market that includes offerings in Commerce, Analytics, and industry-specific solutions like Smarter Cities.
The new service gives users one-click access to social networking, file sharing, online meetings, enterprise-class email, calendaring and instant messaging allowing clients to collaborate inside and outside the organization while pairing business transformation with the economic benefits of flexible cloud delivery models.
Additionally, a new capability of the IBM SmartCloud for Social Business is a cloud-based office productivity suite, IBM Docs. Now in beta and planned for availability in 2012, IBM Docs allows organizations, both inside and outside the firewall, to simultaneously collaborate on word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents in the cloud to improve productivity.
IBM Docs authors will be able to store and share documents in IBM SmartCloud, co-edit documents in real time or assign users sections of the document so they can work privately easing the management of multiple revisions from multiple authors in team-based documents.
GAD, one of the largest specialists for banking IT in Germany, is evaluating the use of IBM Docs in a private cloud in 2012 to facilitate browser based document creation and change management. Approximately 450 banks will be able to reduce costs and become more responsive to their customers through GAD’s bank21 solution.
Delivered in 22 languages, a 60-day trial of IBM SmartCloud for Social Business is available at no charge here.
Social Requires Mobility
In response to the burgeoning mobile workforce, expected to reach more than 1.19 billion people by 2013, IBM’s new social software supports the most popular mobile devices, including tablets.
IBM is announcing the beta release of IBM Lotus Notes and Domino, Social Edition, a social-enabled messaging and collaboration platform built on open standards that provides users with the ability to act on any work flow process directly within the email inbox.
Whether accessing email from a browser or desktop, or sharing videos and files, users no longer have to travel to a third-party site. In addition, with the embedded experience of social mail, users are more efficient when engaging in activity and more responsive to day to day tasks.
IBM intends to support mail, calendaring and contacts in a beta release of IBM Lotus Notes Traveler for Microsoft Windows Phone on Nokia and HTC devices; the beta is expected in the first half of 2012.
IBM is introducing a new, lower-cost program for BlackBerry users to access email in the cloud.
IBM is also introducing a new, lower-cost program for BlackBerry users to access email in the cloud. Built on the world-class expertise of IBM Mobile Enterprise Services and the sophisticated security of the Blackberry Enterprise Server, IBM helps bring the type of security and reliability expectations of on-premise email to cloud email environments, including built-in end-user and administrative controls for mobile device management.
Live @ Lotusphere 2012: Michael J. Fox Comes Back From The Future
I woke up this morning in spite of the assistance of my alarm clock, a small Casio gizmo I bought 15 years ago in the U.K.
My little Casio has kept me from missing many a meeting and flight, but today she failed me.
Lotusphere 2012 kicks off with a performance by OkGo for the thousands of attendees convened in Orlando, Florida.
So I can only say it must have been fate that I made it downstairs in time to see the musical kick off of OKGo, and shortly thereafter, the guest speaker for the opening session of Lotusphere.
Of course, if you know anything at all about Lotusphere, you know the lore behind the guest speakership. It’s a closely-held, top secret until the very last minute, and even then within the IBM whispermill, you probably didn’t hear right.
Me, I’ve learned to roll with it, and just not worry about who the guest speaker is, which is why I’m so incredibly glad my body clock told me to get up when it did, because this year’s Lotusphere guest speaker was truly special.
You might remember him from “Family Ties,” for which he received three Emmys and a Golden Globe.
You might remember him as Marty McFly from the “Back to the Future” trilogy.
Or you may have seen him most recently as attorney Louis Canning on one of my my new favorites, “The Good Wife.”
But however you remember Michael J. Fox, he’s not one to let you easily forget.
As soon as fellow Canadian and Lotus GM Alistair Rennie announced Fox’s name this AM, there was a roar from the crowd and an immediate standing ovation.
And for those who know Fox’s backstory — his early and celebrated thespian success, his diagnosis with Parkinson’s Disease at the ripe old age of 29 — well, you could easily have found yourself among them.
I know I did.
Celebrated Canadian thespian and Parkinson's disease advocate Michael J. Fox charms the Lotusphere 2012 audience with his inspiring and optimistic message.
Fox himself has admitted in his first book, Lucky Man, how it took him seven years to accept his diagnosis, and through a thalamotomy and ongoing treatment with Sinemet, he’s been able to manage the disease.
But from his discussion this morning before the Lotusphere audience, it was obvious he’s also transcended it. He’s refused to let the disease define him, and just like his role on “The Good Wife,” he’s allowed it to simply just become another part of him. Nothing less, nothing more.
As for Fox’s message to the audience, we’ll get to that, but know it was artfully woven between the conceit of one funny joke after another, so before long you’re thinking, “if this famous gentleman with Parkinson’s Disease can stand there and tremor and laugh at the same time, what the hell kind of problems am I having today??”
And in fact, that was part of Fox’s message. Known for his eternal optimism, he shared a story of a woman who, in the midst of some major flooding in Mozambique, had to scramble to the safety of a tree to deliver her baby, in the tree and above the rushing waters.
Fox then forcefully re-emphasized the storyline here: A lady…had a baby…in a tree!
Fox had some simple truths that he also shared, for acting and for life. For one, as an actor, you can never play the result. If they’re about to throw a pie in your face, it has to be as big a surprise to you as it is to them.
Two, life is all about possibliities. You may feel your life is certain and set and headed in one direction and you’re going to play a certain role and…well, then suddenly, it’s not.
What do you do then?
Fox has done quite a bit, actually. He’s been a strong advocate for Parkinson’s research, including stem cell therapy, and The Michael J. Fox Foundation was created specifically to help advance every promising research path to curing Parkinson’s.
He’s also testified before Congress, purposely skipping his medication that day in 1998 so that the legislators could see the full impact of the disease.
A very different kind of bravura for a very different kind of performance.
So what has all this to do with the matter of social business? Fox turned to online communities when he first received his diagnosis, and after going public with Barbara Walters and in People magazine, he realized the positive impact his going public was having on others.
He could sneak into chatrooms and compare his experience with others, and realized quickly this was his opportunity to reshape his own destiny.
Remarkedly, we have all been the beneficiary of both: His commitment to improving the world through Parkinson’s research, and in his continued commitment to acting (if you’ve not seen Fox in “The Good Wife,” now would be a good time to get introduced).
These days, his “Foxtrot Finder” is helping connect Parkinson’s patients to clinical studies. So, social business has everything to do with Fox’s endeavors, as it’s helping patients who need help come out from behind the shadows and get it.
Finally, back home, to Canada, to hockey. Like many young Canadians, Fox was a hockey nut, and Bobby Orr was his celebrated idol.
Many years into his celebrity, Fox was invited to play in a celebrity old timer hockey match, and when he came face to face with his idol, he was speechless.
Then, at one point in the match, Fox approached Orr rapidly on the ice and was able to sneak the puck between his legs and into the net.
Only later did Fox realize that that’s probably what Orr was explaining to him before the game, that he was going to allow Fox to make that score.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps Michael J. Fox really did score a point on the infamous Bobby Orr.
Regardless, he absolutely scored with the Lotusphere audience this morning here in Orlando.
Though I’m not one to necessarily buy into inspirational talks, I walked out of Fox’s keynote feeling as optimistic as ever.
But I will admit to being just a little sad about my ever-faithful alarm clock shirking its duty!
Live @ Lotusphere 2012: Turbo’s Late Arrival
First off, I don’t know what I was thinking traveling during the AFC/NFC playoffs. Did that happen last year?
Redmonk's James Governor, Silicon Angle's Alex Williams, and IBM's Rawn Shah talk social shop at Sunday night's opening kickoff party at the Dolphin & Swan Beach in Orlando, Florida
All I can say is, Thank God for Jet Blue and DirecTV. It was a nice flight from Austin to Orlando, where I would be attending Lotusphere and IBM Connect 2012, and I was able to see the NY Giants’ fleecing of Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field, no less, some 35,000 feet up in the air (save for those nasty mid-air turns where the satellite went south…or was it north?)
In any case, there’s been a lot of fun NFL football this weekend…there was yesterday’s 49ers rout that sent the Saints marchin’ home, and the ever-laser-like Patriot Tom Brady who made Tim Tebow look like a rank amateur in the Pats’ victory over the Broncos.
Now if I could just find out who won the Sony out in Honolulu. (Oh, it was Johnson Wagner…who’s he??)
But enough sports talk, it’s time to get down to business. At the opening Lotusphere kick-off party on Disney’s Swan and Dolphin beach, I got to catch up with some old blogger friends, not to mention made some new ones. And clearly, I need to update my RSS feeds: ReadWriteWeb’s Alex Williams has joined the cadre led by my old friend John Furrier at SiliconAngle, and James Governor with Redmonk explained how he’s in the throes of planning his first “Monkigras,” not to mention preparing for the global invasion of East London for this Summer’s Olympic games.
At the party this evening, I did some catching up with all the above, as well as some old IBM friends including Luis “What’s Your Email Address?” Suarez, and Rawn “What Social Book Are You Writing Now?” Shah. There were lots of Androids and iPhones in attendance at the party as well, though I saw only one Ice Cream Sandwich. Being a recent Android convert, I can honestly say I’m quickly grokking the Android code names.
As for tomorrow, I’m very excited to learn that former Apple executive and speaker extraordinaire Guy Kawasaki will be kicking off the IBM Connect event.
But for now, it’s time to get some needed slumber so I can be prepared for all things social and all things business in the am…with a particular emphasis on the former.
turbotodd
Turbotodd 