Lotusphere 2008: Social Computing Keynote

Rough notes from this morning's session:

• Theme: evolution of collaboration, information is power, importance of sharing, social computing and need for control from an enterprise perspective, connecting to people, etc.
• Quickr and Connections introduced last year.
• Client: Rheinmetal ... company of many business units, operational independence of business units, built through M&A, public company, global company, need to collaborate across diverse infrastructure ... defense contractor, security very important, Quickr, Connections etc. chosen (IBM over two other competitors). Content, collaboration and innovation as key factors.
• Other Quickr/Connections clients: Colgate-Palmolive and Bank Of New York Mellon
• Client: Teach For America ... non-profit focuses on educational equality ... only 1 in 10 students in low income communities will graduate college ... national corps of recent college graduates and professionals ... corps members teach for 2 years in urban and rural areas ... 5000 corps members, 12,000 alumno, 425K student participants ... challenges: fast workforce turnover since workers retire in 2 years - most people are under 30 so knowledge loss and issues with exchanging experiences ... need to have a set of tools attractive for members ... blogs, wikis, etc. Inefficient ad-hoc collaboration, expertise location, etc. Tried open source - settled on IBM platform. Benefits include access to learning sources, collective knowledge, access to experts, community-building.
• Client: Bank Of New York Mellon ... merger challenges ... social and collaborative technologies critical in a merger process ... how to get 23,000 people to get to know 17,000 people ... aging workforce and younger worker challenges ... geographic diversity ... conflicting technologies ... standardized on Notes ... then pursued collaboration/community strategy ... benefits are more of a capability achievement rather than ROI ... similar to e-mail (hard to prove ROI) ...
• Client: Colgate-Palmolive ... 36000 employees, worldwide ... need to leverage processes, ideas, best practices to leverage productivity - strong internal culture - very consistent IT - performance and reliability are key when selecting technology ... matrixed organization - operational efficiencies are strong factors that influence efforts ... pilot underway for Quickr and Connections ... believe they now need to be an early adopter. Design partner for IBM. Connections pilot starting with Profiles in 2008 and expanding into other Connections components into 2009. Benefits: decentralized innovation, increase speed to market, improved sharing - talent management.
• Business partner community essential.
• Connections demo: home page (ala Facebook - first shot at implementing news feeds, lists etc), review of new features, demo of Confluence wiki ... discussion forum ... ST Advanced can add chat into Community ...
• Futures: streams of recent updates to files, ratings, tags ... home page will have watch list ... my files view lets you rate and look at download numbers of files ... can add tags or recommend entry or attach activity - media library for podcasts etc - offline Activities
• Closing remarks