Collaborative Thinking

Saba Social Left Out Of IBM Deal

Interesting news item - on the one hand, it seems straightforward. IBM partners with a well-known human capital management vendor that has a strong offering in the LMS/e-Learning space. The Saba partnership provides IBM with a few things:

• It allows IBM to exist this business and provide existing Lotus Learning customers a migration path (to Saba)
• It allows IBM to sell Saba's learning solution directly (augmenting the value proposition of WebSphere Portal via a learning accelerator)
• It allows IBM's human capital management consulting practices to sell a learning solution that sits on top of IBM infrastructure

However, there are some nuances in the deal. The focus of the partnership is between Saba's platform and IBM's WebSphere platform, not the Lotus software stack. Specifically, there was no mention of what the deal means in terms of Lotus Connections and Saba Social. As learning strategies focus more on the informal, more social aspects of how people learn, display talent, gain/share expertise - the deal creates/reinforces a competitive touch point. It's unclear to me, how Saba can expect IBM to sell its social networking solution over Lotus Connections (as it stands today). By giving IBM the upper hand in selling the core Saba platform into IBM accounts - has Saba abandoned any real hope of selling Saba Social into those accounts? I think so. And that's not good news from a long-term perspective for Saba. Our field research project identified strategic talent and learning initiatives as key factors driving interest in enterprise social networking projects.

One of Saba's main challenges as it enters the social networking space is to overcome significant go-to-market hurdles (being well known by customers and prospects in the HCM space does not necessarily transfer over being well known to decision-makers on social networking strategies. One technical/tactical workaround would be for Saba to deliver modules that integrated within Lotus Connections (via a plug-in/widget of some sort, or through Connections' REST and other programmable interfaces). Overall, it still strikes me that this deal makes it harder for Saba to sell its own social networking approach into IBM shops. Given Saba's platform exploits IBM infrastructure, that tactical workaround might become strategic unless the company can shift gears and extend other collaboration platforms, such as Microsoft SharePoint, or focuses on vertical capabilities (such as social network analysis with learning and talent in mind). 

Saba Expands Relationship with IBM Around People Management

REDWOOD SHORES, CA and CAMBRIDGE, MA,  May 12, 2009 — Saba Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: SABA) and IBM today announced that they are working together to help businesses harness and develop talent.

The companies are combining expertise to offer organizations a threefold approach to people management. This includes human capital management services and consulting from IBM and advanced enterprise learning solutions from Saba. In addition, IBM will offer a new Learning Accelerator for WebSphere Portal that is based on Saba Learning.

The combination of IBM and Saba can help businesses save time and money by reusing the same IT infrastructure for learning that is used for their corporate intranet and extranet. In addition, enterprises can capitalize on the many opportunities for informal and formal learning created by the “always on,” collaborative and social networking-focused culture of today’s businesses. By combining learning opportunities with portal-based collaboration, employees, customers and partners can participate in broader informal learning channels, making them more effective and productive.

.....

As part of Saba’s unified people management platform, Saba Learning is a comprehensive management system for formal and informal learning that enables organizations to identify, manage, develop, and measure the capabilities and knowledge of people throughout an enterprise, as well as empower them to connect and contribute their expertise. Saba Learning provides organizations with leading capabilities for catalog and curriculum management; compliance, continuing education, and competency management; for-profit training; content development and management; virtual learning; informal learning; and collaboration.

IBM Global Business Services’ worldwide human capital management practice provides advisory and implementation services to enable enterprise performance through improved workforce effectiveness. The IBM Workforce & Talent Solutions (WTS) offering integrates services from Human Capital Management practice with a wide range of tools, technologies, and IBM Research projects, including Saba’s learning and people management applications. WTS is the first holistic offering in the talent management marketplace that addresses the science of people management throughout the entire employee lifecycle.

Since Saba and IBM support open standards, Saba's learning capabilities can be surfaced in context within WebSphere Portal. This combination can also be expanded to other IBM collaboration tools allowing people to easily locate experts, share information and participate in broader communities of interest.

When Saba’s learning capabilities are coupled with WebSphere Portal, businesses can empower employees to work smarter. The personalization capabilities of a portal can display customized views of the applications and information a person needs based on their job role. Surfacing formal learning opportunities within this context can help employees relate what they are learning to the task at hand. In addition, portals help make learning easier by putting content in a context where it is most meaningful to end users.

Saba - News & Events - 2008 -Saba Expands Global Reach with Hewlett-Packard Relationship

Additional Analysis:

The New IBM - Saba Relationship

IBM and Saba have worked together for years. Almost five years ago Saba integrated IBM's middleware into its product so the companies could work well together, and today Saba supports the entire range of IBM middleware in its product set. IBM actually uses Saba internally as its formal learning management system for all 300,000+ employees. (IBM's informal learning is done in a far different way, which we describe in detail in our in-depth case study on IBM's Learning on Demand solution.)

Last year IBM's Global Business Services organization announced that its worldwide Human Capital Management Practice was offering an end-to-end solution for enterprise talent management solutions built around Saba. This offering, which is still relatively new, has taken hold and has resulted in many major new Saba implementations.

IBM Adopts Saba as its Learning Technology Partner

Learning From Media Interaction Patterns

Interesting approach towards collaborative learning:

NBC News' educational arm NBC Learn has launched iCue: part social network, part news source for students age 13 and up, built upon NBC's vast video news archive.

iCue's learning environment is based on a concept called CueCards, which are video clips and related news stories fashioned into virtual trading cards. The content of these will focus on US history, government, and politics, as well as English language study and composition. CueCards can be collected, annotated, traded, indexed, and even integrated into games.

The collaborative learning platform was developed based on research from MIT's Education Arcade group, which continues to monitor iCue's usage in an ongoing study that users can opt into. MIT Comparative Media Studies will watch how the site is used to learn how to build a better learning environment for modern classrooms.

BetaNews | NBC launches 'social education' site iCue

The "Cognitive Age": Revisiting Information & Media Literacy

An interesting string of thoughts across the articles below. I'm not sure the term "transliteracy" will catch on, but the issues and questions raised in the compendium of articles below are worth contemplating in terms of educational strategies for youth as well as expected skills/competencies of a next generation workforce.   

The Cognitive Age - New York Times

The central process driving this is not globalization. It’s the skills revolution. We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. This is happening in localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up every free trade deal ever inked.

The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can now travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the most important part of information’s journey is the last few inches — the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain. Does the individual have the capacity to understand the information? Does he or she have the training to exploit it? Are there cultural assumptions that distort the way it is perceived?

The Cognitive Age - New York Times

Video: Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo SF 2008

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody

... I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

It's also become my motto, when people ask me what we're doing--and when I say "we" I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that's what I'm going to tell them: We're looking for the mouse. We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes.

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody

Transliteracy: Crossing divides

Transliteracy might provide a unifying perspective on what it means to be literate in the twenty-first century. It is not a new behavior but has only been identified as a working concept since the internet generated new ways of thinking about human communication. This article defines transliteracy as “the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks” and opens the debate with examples from history, orality, philosophy, literature, and ethnography. We invite responses, expansion, and development.

Transliteracy: Crossing divides

Two Projects, One Mission: Harvard and MIT join forces to prepare youth for the digital age

Harvard researcher John Francis describes a unique collaboration between Project New Media Literacies, lead by Henry Jenkins, and the GoodPlay Project led by Howard Gardner. This begins a five-part series of posts about how to teach core media skills alongside the roles and responsibilities of good cyber citizenry.

Spotlight on DML | Two Projects, One Mission: Harvard and MIT join forces to prepare youth for the digital age

Another Example Of Video In The Classroom

Shades of things to come:

Carleton University in Canada has created a video portal for students, according to Campus Technology, which allows them to share, annotate, search, index, and even remix class lecture videos. The full-length video from each class is uploaded to the site after the lecture. Students can add their annotations and metadata which is then searchable by the community and can be complied into “video notebooks” to create study guides on particular topics.

iLibrarian » University Video Portal Lets Students Remix Lectures

OLPC in NYC

If you are following education and technology trends (especially within urban settings), you might find this blog worth tracking:

Teaching Matters will run a collaborative pilot with the Department of Education to test One Laptop Per Child mobile computing devices in connection with our Writing Matters content in a middle school ELA classroom. The purpose of the pilot is two-fold. First, we want to determine if the OLPC device can significantly lower the cost of technology access for schools by lowering the total cost of ownership (hardware and ongoing maintenance.) Second, we will test this environment in conjunction with a curriculum designed to improve teacher practice in the teaching of writing. The curriculum has been designed to take best advantage of one to one computing environements.

Many laptop programs have failed to increase student achievement and purposeful learning because teachers have been provided with devices and training but no meaningful redesign of the instruction and curriculum now possible with the technology.

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