IBM Business Gets Social: How We Do Business Socially?

If I tell you that I can update my status message, post on my colleagues profiles, and follow a blog while at work - will you report me to my boss and tell her that I am not being productive? Well, that is what we are in my organization - we collaborate, we use technology and we share ideas. To be clear, we are not using Facebook to connect socially with our colleagues or with anyone within the organization around the globe - we have this platform we call the IBM Connections. 

 Live Tweets during the event

It is used internally to connect more than 400,000 employees - to connect those with common interests, to share and collect opinions about a certain idea, to support a project or just to deliver a message. You see, we regulary receive email notifications with link to top executives or even CEO's video blogs (it is like we are subscribed to video blogs like that of Petra Mahalimuyak's!). The top management team are "social" people too - and what is interesting is that even I, a practitioner from the Philippines can even leave a message or comment to the CEO's video blog and share my thoughts and opinions (and yes, she replies to the comments!).

This is just one of the many IBM Social Softwares that were shared to us during the Media Briefing of the Business Goes Social event which was conducted last Tuesday, in Makati Shangri-la.

To know how businesses get social, click Read More...

I will show you how the IBM Connections look like.. This is the profile of one of the speakers and IBM executives.

See, I even left a comment in his profile. Btw, I also use the Project Head Shot picture taken by Niccolo Cosme in my IBM Connections profile.

The IBM Connections is also a secured software. Here is the view of the communities I am part of. Community owners can set the privacy setting of the communities so sharing of information, files, pictures, links, or even blogs are only distributed to the members of the community.

I am a member of different communities, one is for my assignment in Indonesia for the the IBM Corporate Service Corps. The community has been helpful for us (employees from different geos) in sharing files, videos, and updates instead of sending the files through email.

Another interesting innovation is the Lotus Documents - it works like Google Doc which documents can be edited by multiple users. This proves helpful when sending document for validation, approval or delegation.  Action-takers get email notification regarding the actions that they need to take. So by accessing the application, there is no need to download file, open it, take action/update, and send back to sender.

 Kevin O'Connel,talks about IBM Connections

These are just some of the innovative ways we collaborate, embrace change and improve our processes in IBM. I am not an IT person, and I am not the most techie person in the team, but listening to the roundtable discussion yesterday, being amazed and excited about this innovations  and having the chance for my ideas and opinions be shared with the other IBMers around the globe make me more proud to be part of the organization.

 Simon Lee, Portal and Social Solutions Leader, IBM ASEAN; Kevin O'Connel, Lotus Technical Leader, IBM ASEAN; Lou Sassano, Business Unit Executive, WW Business Partner Channel Sales, Chris Haylock, Business Unit Executive, Messaging & Collaboration, IBM Asia Pacific; Ferdinand Macatangay, Channels Manager, Software Group, IBM Philippines.

The most interesting part - this solutions which we use internally will now be commercially available for businesses. Yes, you too, in your own workstation can also use such tools and applications. I am not a sales person, or IT person behind these solutions, but more information will be released regarding these solutions sometime in June (I think).

For more information regarding IBM Social Business, check out this site.

More interesting figures:

• For 15 years, IBM employees have used social software to foster collaboration among our dispersed 400,000 person team -- long before Generation Y became fixated with social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.
• In 1997, IBM recommended that its employees get out onto the Internet – at a time when many companies were seeking to restrict their employees’ Internet access.
• In 2005, the company made a strategic decision to embrace the blogosphere and to encourage IBMers to participate.
• In 2007, IBM launched its own social networking software for the enterprise: Lotus Connections 

 Some examples of IBM’s internal social media footprint today include;

• 17,000 individual blogs
• 1 million daily page views of internal wikis, internal information storing websites
• 400,000 employee profiles on IBM Connections, IBM's initial social networking initiative that alllows employees to share status updates, collaborate on wikis, blogs and activity, share files.
• 15,000,000 downloads of employee-generated videos/podcasts
• In the first-half of 2010, IBM employees participated in more than 126 million minutes of LotusLive meetings, IBM's software for conducting online meetings.
• More than 400k Sametime instant messaging users, resulting in 40-50 million instant messages per day

See more of events pictures here.