Lotusphere 2012

Several colleagues and I attended this year's IBM\Lotus Software Conference. As always, the sessions were intense and very future-oriented. Some key themes they emphasized this year:


Social Business is the way of the future

The pace of business is speeding up substantially (you have 60 seconds to engage your customer -- that's all!) and being productive is increasingly harder these days. According to IBM, forward-thinking organizations are 57% more likely to allow their people to use social & collaborative tools to be more engaged and productive to meet future challenges. Social Business ties information, processes and resources together using collaborative tools to streamline the way people do business. Gone are monthly business trips, on-call pagers, and emailed tasks. Instead, we now see video rich teleconferences, cellphone text messages, and activity driven action items.

At this year’s conference IBM offered some good solutions -- browser based collaborative tools, social analytics, and applications -- that boost user communities to become more productive and social. Not merely allowing, but empowering people to be dynamic in how they retrieve, interact with, and convey information is crucial to making Social Business work. We saw real examples of how IBM technologies were delivering Social Business solutions for various organizations (Bayer, Polycom, Premier Healthcare, GAD, TD Bank) all over the world. Watch a 60-second snapshot of the hottest Opening General Session announcements. "Social" is the new business model. "Social" means engaged, transparent, and nimble. This feeds really well into the work the Bank Group is doing on the Millennium Development Goals, and even addresses our Innovative Knowledge Sharing and Transparency initiatives. Along with "Collaboration" and "Community," expect "Social Business" to be a hot new buzzphrase!


Activity Streams (IBM Connections) bring everything together

Lotus long ago transformed Notes into more than just email -- it's effectively a "collaboration platform" that WBG people use all day, every day. Since it acquired Lotus Notes, IBM repeatedly tried to insert new "Social" features in Notes, but has increasingly focused on a bigger collaboration tool: IBM Connections. In this broader web-based platform, "Communities" could correspond to formal WBG Networks but also less formal shareholder networks -- and "Activity Streams" shows you the important updates from relevant data sources you select, such as internal/external Communities, Social Analytics, Activities, Bookmarks, Profiles, Sharepoint, File system, Group Calendars, Wikis, Blogs, Forums, Microblogging (status updates) etc.. Email is only one source in many! It's a bit hard to describe in black and white, so click here to see what an IBM Connections homepage looks like. This, or something like it, may become your personal work dashboard some day.


Unified Communications

It's not enough to pull all the computer pieces together -- in a Social Business, meaningful communication and collaboration also come from phone calls, Instant Messages, videocalls, and videoconferences -- IBM Sametime Unified Telephony (SUT) endeavors to unify the experience. We agree with IBM that people want to have one client that gives us everying -- presence/chat/voice/video -- on our computers as well as on our choice of mobile device. At WBG, we are already in step, as we have ICP providing our Unified Communications strategy and solutions, so this was slightly less relevant to us.


The Cloud

There was a lot of emphasis on IBM's cloud service, which was rebranded from LotusLive to IBM SmartCloud for Social Business (or "SmartCloud"). 80% of the Fortune 500 use one or more IBM cloud computing capabilities. They offer their full suite of collaboration products (including email) and you can get a free 60-day trial if you are interested.


Mobility gets you there

68% of the population accesses social sites via cellphone and 36% have made purchases from cellphone. iPhone/iPad popularity and Android's rapid consumption of market share means we -- and IBM -- can't focus solely on BlackBerry anymore. IBM is working to bring the best of "Social Business" to all of the major devices however they can -- either by developing their own client or by feeding a native-to-the-device client. "Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD) initiatives in organizations like ours are driving this. We got some good XPages tips and some ideas for Sametime on iPhone and Android!


Oh, and I needn't have worried about lacking gadgets -- I took my Christmas Present (iPad 2) and fit right in!

Looking forward to Lotusphere!

Ah Lotusphere!  Didn't think I'd see you again!  Very much looking forward to catching up on IBM's new collaborative technologies -- they've embedded a Connect conference in the middle of the Sphere this year.

I always have little prickles of fear that I won't be smart enough to understand what they're talking about, either high level or deep dive.  I somehow survive.  I also, lately, fear going to high tech conferences because (a) I don't have the latest gadgets or (b) I have them but don't know all the latest cool apps and ways to use them.  But I will suffer in silence with my brand, spankin' new tablet and put on an air of world-weariness -- that sometimes works.

Evolve first, watch-and-learn, or get out of the way.  I choose the middle path.  There, I've told you this dinosaur's trick!

"Social Business"

So there's social media and there's business, y'see.  And for the most part, businesses don't much care for social media because someone's told them they suck productivity out of employees like eating lemons sucks your cheeks in.  In fact, a lotta for-profit companies ban the use of social media (and games) on company-owned assets, while attached to the company network, and during company time.

Games? Yeah, Is see that, I suppose.  But it still goes back to the age-old Solitaire issue; you wouldn't have to spend the extra hours to strip it off every workstation if you had good managers who had a clue what their employees are doing all day.  Good management solves a lot.  But apparently it isn't found often.

But social media?  Sure, have a social media policy; limit time spent on social media to the exclusion of real work and make employees go through Corporate Communications before they post something about the company. But really?  In avoiding the possibility of a negative comment, you're precluding the good stuff.  You don't want Facebook to know that your employees enjoy working for you?  That they have good days at work?  That they feel trusted and empowered?  Your loss.

Undoubtedly every organization has a public-facing Communications person or department.  Undoubtedly that person or department is engaging in some form of social media to the good of the organization.  And undoubtedly that single entity cannot possibly convey the expertise that employees individually possess.  But Communications doesn't know what folks are up to (c'mon, if a manager doesn't, this crew has no chance) or even what kind of information the social sphere wants to know.

The best possible course of action for a forward-thinking organization would be to marry up the corporate social presence with their internal knowledge bank (employees).  That means letting employees say what they have to say to the world through whatever avenue is being listened to at the moment.  Even letting some of it be negative.  That's truth, baby -- TRUTH.  That kind of candor is gold.  Organizations can't PAY for that kind of honest, transparent public image.  Not even if they hire the best marketers.

Now you might think that embracing social media would add chaos to the organization.  And you might be a teensy bit right.  But embracing change (including a bit of chaos) is not only necessary in today's business world, but also smart.  Mark Fidelman wrote an excellent article about why IBM is in better market shape than Apple.  There were GRAPHS and CHARTS, so you know it's all true.  (wink)

This article alone should convince a tight organization to loosen up a bit when it comes to social media.

Evolve or die, I say.  Y'see?