Archive for the ‘industry summit’ Category
Customer Sessions At The IBM Smarter Commerce Summit
Well, we’re nearly mid-summer here in the great state of Texas, the sun is shining, and IBMers are hard at work planning for the forthcoming Smarter Commerce Summit to be held down in Orlando, Florida, September 5-7.
This event is the third in a series of Smarter Commerce events we’ve held the last year. First, there was San Diego…then there was Madrid in May (You can read some of the coverage of that event here).
And now, Orlando.
But this will be no Mickey Mouse expedition.
The IBM Smarter Commerce Summit in Orlando will provide business execs and practitioners with the insight and resources they need to more effectively connect with their customers.
Orlando’s event will bring together over 150 business and practitioner breakout sessions comprised of everything from new technology to best practices to industry perspectives and yes, even some visionary thinking from the likes of tech guru Guy Kawasaki, who will be keynoting there.
But there’s another aspect of the Smarter Commerce Summit that makes it such a one-of-a-kind event: You get to hear directly from our customers.
Scores of them.
In fact, if you click here you’ll get an up-to-the-minute view of the customer-led sessions for the event thus far. I built a quick tag-cloud this afternoon to give folks a flavor of some of the types of discussions one is likely to find in those customer sessions:
The larger words are more dominant in terms of their use, so you can judge by the cloud there’s going to be mucho focus on IBM customers, as well as topics focusing on “marketing,” “Mmanagement”, “commerce,” “global,” “integration,” and much more.
You can also find broader access to the Session Preview Tool to get a glimpse of all the currently-scheduled sessions.
You can also start following the #ibmscgs Twitter hashtag to keep up with key announcements and information leading up and throughout the course of the event.
If you’re already sold on the idea and just want to know where to go register, visit this link for all the details and the registration form.
IBM Industry Summit: The Podcast Recap
Though my partner-in-crime Scott Laningham wasn’t able to join me live and in person during my recent trip to Barcelona, he was certainly there in spirit, and he was also gracious enough to join me for a recap discussion earlier this week for developerWorks.
In the 13-minute recap, Scott and I walked through some highlights of the trip and the first-ever IBM Industry Summit — and even sneaked in a few holiday shopping tidbits to boot.
Enjoy our short walk down IBM Industry Summit memory lane, and for those of you in the U.S., I hope you enjoy a restful and thankful long holiday weekend.
You can find the podcast here.
IBM Industry Summit: IBM Video Analytics For Smarter Government
As mentioned in my earlier post, I’ve been attempting to mix things up a bit, and lo and behold, as I walked around the Industry Solutions Expo here at the IBM Industry Summit in Barcelona, I had the opportunity to speak with Hans Kahler about how IBM is applying smart video analytics in the public sector, bolstering public safety and learning all sorts of things about video “events.”
Imagine this: A single security camera in a big city like New York or Chicago can capture upwards of 50,000 events, per day (car passing by, pedestrian walking by, etc.). How to make sense out of it all and separate the unimportant “events” from the critical ones?
Watch the video and find out!
Working Better Together
I arrived here at the Palau de Congressos de Catalunya this afternoon, where the IBM Industry Summit is being held.
But this morning, I worked remotely from my hotel room.
Something I’ve done a lot of this year. Working remotely.
Away from home. On airplanes. In coffee shops. In bars. On vacation (but not very often).
Via my BlackBerry. And now my iPhone.
What is work? Where is work?
Work is definitely not someplace I go, although I go a lot of places.
Work is definitely not constrained by a clock or calendar, at least not in the way it was during the Industrial Revolution.
Work is definitely not bounded by an office or even a country.
Of course, this is a far cry from when I started my career in 1991.
Back then, work was mainly an IBM office, with my IBM white shirt, going to an IBM location in Southlake, Texas, working with mainly my IBM colleagues.
We were still international back then — that’s been a part of our name almost from the outset — but I would argue we hadn’t been “globalized.”
Working remotely with colleagues was limited to some amigos in The New York Times Custom Publishing Company, an IBM partnership with whom I worked on several IBM customer publications.
Want to know how we collaborated across great time and distance during that Jurassic Age?
One, via FedEx.
Two, via a mainframe terminal session in VM/PROFS. (For you of the Facebook generation out there, VM was a much more reliable social collaboration tool without the relationship status updates and no graphics.)
Oh yeah, and via Ma Bell.
A lot’s changed since then.
Most of the people I work with now don’t work in an office.
Many of them aren’t located in the U.S.
None of them on my team are in Austin, where I live (or, as I like to joke, where I visit).
How is that possible?
In a word, technology.
In a more specific word, software.
Starting with Lotus Notes back in the mid-1990s, and later our instant messaging product, Lotus Sametime, and most recently, using Lotus Connections, I have transcended time, space, and location. And so have 400,000+ of my IBM colleagues around the world.
Because work is no longer a time or a place or a clock or a date.
Work is a neural network.
Work is a collective human organism, billions of neurons connected together, sharing information and knowledge, wisdom and resources, expertise and insights.
With Lotus software, work is wherever you may be in the world, because it connects you to whatever or whomever in the world you may need.
Work is available increasingly on whatever device or contraption you wish to carry around, including the mobile ones, for the rest of you who are on the go.
Work defies time because it’s always there.
It defies space because, unlike me, it doesn’t need an airplane to arrive.
It brings out the best of IBM and allows us to find and share the best with all our constituents: our partners, our suppliers our customers.
That is something that will increasingly distinguish the best organizations around the world.
I work for one of them.
You can read here how you can use Lotus Software to become one of them, too.
Dateline: My Barcelona Office, Palau de Congresso de Catalunya, Sala A….for now.
IBM Industry Summit: Setting The Stage For A Drastically Different World
At the IBM Industry Summit this week here in Barcelona, executives from companies around the globe representing industries across the spectrum will be in attendance.
One of the key themes those executives can expect to hear discussed at the Summit is the challenge of responding to increasing complexity.
Hearkening back to the 2010 IBM Global CEO Study, which I provided a summary of in this blog earlier in the year, 79 percent of executives surveyed believed that they expected the high level of complexity only to increase, and yet only 49 percent of those polled felt they were prepared for that complexity.
The combined insight from 1,541 interviews conducted with C-level executives around the globe in the 2010 IBM Global CEO Study: Be creative, reinvent customer relationships, and embrace complexity by building dexterity.
Call that “The Complexity Gap.”
Mastering The Complexity Gap
Edward Lonergan, president and CEO of Diversey, Inc., responded in the published results that “The complexity our organization will have to master over the next five years is off the charts; a 100 on your scale from 1 to 5.”
So how to even start an attempt to master such massive complexity?
That led to the second of several key findings in the study.
CEOs asserted that creativity is the most important leadership quality in our new and more complicated world.
Not a characteristic one typically hears as being highly valued in the boardroom, yet with all this acknowledged complexity, executives seemed to be saying traditional rules don’t apply, and creative leaders tend to encourage experimentation through their organization.
In the study results, they also indicated that creative leaders make deeper business model changes to realize their strategies, and take more calculated risks and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.
Collaboration Inside And Out
But that innovation can’t stop just short of the corporate firewall.
The third key finding was that CEOs around the globe believe that the most successful organizations co-create products and services with customers, and they also integrate those customers into core processes.
An astounding 95% of "standouts" surveyed in the IBM Global CEO study data revealed An astounding 95 percent said that “getting connected” with customers is their top priority.
You’ll be hearing more about this key meme from IBM in an announcement later today, but this idea is recognition of a simple concept: Customers know best.
The most successful organizations not only partner with their customers to create new products and improve services — they also adopt new channels to engage and stay in tune with them, and they glean more intelligence from the barrage of available data and make customer intimacy their number-one priority.
Simplify, Simplify
Henry David Thoreau spoke of simplification in his renowned Walden.
But he also wrote there that “it is characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”
Truth is, when it comes to successful organizations, the CEO study data revealed that the better performers manage complexity on behalf of their organizations, customers, and partners.
How?
Through simplification, for one.
They simplify operations and products, but they also increase their dexterity to change the way they work, access resources and enter markets around the world.
In fact, more dexterous leaders can expect to generate 20 percent more of their future revenues from new sources than other CEOs.
In this climate,
Adapt And Evolve
So, as the IBM Industry Summit prepares to get underway here in Barcelona, leaders around the globe may want to review the findings of this important study in more detail (you can get more information on the CEO Study here.)
It provides some excellent food for thought in helping shape your thinking about how you might start to manage your organization’s own complexity, whatever its nature, and it will no doubt set the stage for what should prove to be an informative and insightful week here in Spain.
For those of you following from afar, I look forward to sharing more from the IBM Industry Summit here in this blog throughout the week.
turbotodd
Turbotodd 