Avram ODonovan Blogtalk2008

What’s happening behind the firewall? The emerging role of social software in IBM Gabriela Avram Brian O’Donovan Liam Bannon Interaction Design Centre Centre of Advanced Studies University of Limerick IBM Ireland

Enterprise 2.0
“ Enterprise social software will be the biggest new workplace technology success story of this decade. 30% of enterprises will openly sponsor internal…social sharing spaces to help employees find others with similar interest, skills, backgrounds and experiences. “
Gartner, “ Predicts 2007 – Big Changes Ahead in the High Performance Workplace”, Dec 5, 2006
Several global companies are known to have adopted Enterprise 2.0 tools: Sun, Google, Deloitte, KPMG
IBM/Lotus has a long history of building and using collaboration tools

IBM through the years
IBM was established over 100 years ago
Until 1980s the dominant computer company
Mainframe hardware company
Set own proprietary standards
Formal & Proud/Arrogant
Almost went bankrupt
But elephants can dance
Now a services, software & hardware company
Passionate about Open Standards
Very informal
Interesting Facts
300-350k employees (ambiguity from contract &vendor staff)
40% do not work at an IBM facility
Significant growth in Emerging Countries (e.g. 40K employees in India)
Significant growth through acquisition (e.g. Vallent in Cork)

Building a culture of collaboration
The IBM Values:
Dedication to Every Client's Success
Innovation that Matters - for our company and the world
Trust and Personal Responsibility in all Relationships
The practicalities:
Searching for the place one can fit in best
Job rotation encouraged – go where you can learn the most
Internal IM gives every employee instant access to anyone in the company
Interaction with peers (i.e. anyone) – build your own network
Asking tough questions
sooner the better
Finding innovative solutions in challenging situations
End of the year assessment – based on input from both managers and collaborators
Recognition and acknowledgment of successes
Innovation and creativity are firmly encouraged
Culture and practice are interwoven;
Our research is focusing on social practices built around social software applications - allowing for flexibility, frequent communication and reliable knowledge-sharing mechanisms.
Tools - seen as result of, and support for the collaboration culture

Engaging employees with emerging technology
TAP – Technology Adoption Program
Launched in 2006 to accelerate the adoption of new technology to benefit our internal transformation and productivity
Foster a culture of early adoption to understand the impact of new technology on day-to-day work
Brings together a community of early adopters to try new solutions and provide feedback directly to the creators
Provides methods and infrastructure to support innovation development and deployment
TAP Offerings typically come from product groups, IT teams and IBM Research
End-users are also sharing tools that they’ve build to enhance their own productivity
TAP has reached over 100K employees as early adopters and offers a catalog of over 200 solutions

Collaboration tools - 3 stages of adoption:
For getting the work done
Everyone must use these
Taking off
Used widely in certain sub-communities
but not yet ubiquitous
In an experimental stage
Early adopters only
Research concepts which are likely to change singinifcantly

1. For getting the work done

e-mail, calendar (Lotus Notes)
E-mail – business as usual –more context, keeping track of decisions, delegating tasks
Calendaring and Scheduling – pivotal for time management: “The Notes calendar is king”
Mailing lists for maintaining team awareness
Web 1.0 tools, but content is used in web 2.0 mashups

Instant Messaging (Sametime)
Communication
Contacts list
Awareness mechanism
Location/position in the organisation chart

What makes IM so attractive?
Existing contacts
Team mates
Managers
Support staff
Experts
Knowledgeable peers
Liaisons
New contacts
Following recommendations
Found on the organisation chart
Authors of documents published on the intranet
Indicated by folksonomies
Status visibility, persistent, less intrusive
“ In many ways instant messaging does seem to support the serendipitous kinds of interactions that are lost when employees are not co-located.” (Parker et al)
Part of the IBM culture
IM as an alternative to the break room, coffee meeting, water cooler
Affords getting in touch with:

Solving an urgent situation
Context: translation testing;
Two days before the deadline
Coordinator at the Irish site
Fix provided; tester in France refuses to apply it, because “he got tired of fixes that don’t work”
Extended chat: the coordinator explains the situation
He asks again the tester to apply the fix
3 min
No further comments…
A B C

BluePages
Employee directory/personal pages/profiles
Information on status, location, skills, management chain, languages spoken, picture
Fringe: tag clouds, recent activity, internal&external blogs

Wikis
Collaborative editing:
documentation,
code snippets,
discussion of new ideas
Lotus Notes Team rooms

2. Just taking off…

Blogs http://www.ibm.com/blogs/
Internal blogs:
BlogCentral
External blogs on
ibm.com,
developerWorks,
Alpha Works,
PartnerWorld
Only IBMers can create a blog on ibm.com; anyone can add comments to the thread.
Many IBM Staff have blogs on a variety of platforms
Cross-posting from internal to external blogs is quite common. - In the future BlogCentral might extend beyond firewall

Who is blogging? Why? About what?
Developers, testers, managers, support, sales ~10% of IBMers
Internally: connect to peers; build reputation; spread the word; ask for help; document own work; expose private lives
Externally: get feedback from a broader audience; provide information to customers; connect with other professionals outside; develop own reputation
About: work, challenges, tools, initiatives, personal development, hobbies, families

A selection of posts…
Fighting e-mail: Progress Report - End of Week 3 (Whoooaaahhh!!!)
Well, today is the end of the third week and still going strong.
My team is stopping blogging…
not writing any more entries to a blog might be a sad thing for the interested readers (tolerable), but actively deleting it might be actively destroying created knowledge without need... (not acceptable) (comment from a reader)
A story
Today I was on a prep call with a potential client from a large bank….
All of a sudden the client says, "Do you blog?" I said yes. And she said, "I thought your name sounded familiar, I read your blog!" She knows me...we have a bond!

A random selection of posts…
I'm a new manager and can't blog
Hey all. I've missed ya! I'm now out there in the brave world of management and can't blog. No one said I can't, nobody said I shouldn't, but wow, when do I do it?
Headless chicken impression
Today is not my day.
I wanted to print my handouts on business cards. .. But the printer at home stubbornly refused to feed the Avery business card forms I picked up…
How am I, you ask?
A timeline of recent personal and work-related events.
Friday, 12:15PM. Wife calls, having locked herself out of the house...

Social bookmarking (dogear)

To Dogear or not to Dogear - thoughts please!
“ My "use cases" for dogear:
1. Sometimes, I'll post a bookmark which I think is of general interest - I have to admit I don't do this often, I'm still wedded to "traditional" bookmarks in my browser.
2. I subscribe to the RSS feed to discover what is hot and new.
3. I have the dogear plugin installed in Firefox. When I search W3, I get dogear results at the top of the results page. THIS IS THE KEY for me - I almost always find what I want within seconds, usually via the dogear results.”

“ After thinking about it for about 5 minutes, I decided to go the extra mile and configure my iMac to connect to the IBM network and install the necessary software. I did a Dogear search on "mac remote access" using the Dogear Firefox plugin. Several links came up which led me to the Mac Fans community. That led me exactly to the two pages that I needed: FAQ for Mac users and IBM Downloads for Mac Users. I LOVE DOGEAR!! ”
Going the extra mile…

Fringe – BluePages+1

Media Sharing
Shared repositories:
Podcasts (IBM Media library)
Presentations & other docs (cattail)
Video on demand (IBMTv)

3. In an experimental stage

Metaverse (aka 3D Internet)
IBM Almaden training for emergency situations in SL
Virtual TeamBuilding
Virtual Lotusphere

In Second Life:
"Why do we need walls and ceilings to do a meeting?" "We’ve had meetings under water and up in the air. Meetings are where you want them to be."
“ So last night I logged on for 30mins or so and got a little more adventurous in the exploring department. I cruised over to a large art gallery to check out what virtual art looked like - it looks just like .bmps stuck to walls.”
“ It’s not weird for a brand to expose themselves in a 3D space, and it’s not weird for people to socialize in 3D using a variety of mediums (audio, et al). What’s weird is the unfocused environments and the poor technologies of virtual worlds that are used to engage in very basic, primitive behavior: conversation .”
“ I might try to have an organizational get-together in SL for my team. One of the things I'm grappling with is how to make it "better than" a simple presentation to folks that could be done in 2-D, or even better than a real world meeting! “

Other “bleeding edge” apps
IBMr
reputation management system
integrated with IM
BlueTwit
Micro blogging (like twitter)
SonarBuddies
Detecting implicit social networks

Reputation
People spend a lot of time trying to improve their reputation
It is difficult to measure reputation
But if it matters we must try
Some experiments
Blog rating system – readers award stars
BeeHive gives points for “good work”
Quantity versus quality debate
IBMr – an explicit reputation management system

Mashups / Situational Applications

Facilitating innovation
Inside IBM
IBM Thinkplace
TAP
Innovation Jam
Communities
Around IBM
IBM PartnerJam
developerWorks
DW communities
IBM group on Facebook
Greater IBM
developerWorks Spaces

Illustration: IBM’s first HackDay
Began with a post from Kelly D. to Blog Central
submission to Thinkplace
Quickly embraced by the community
Using existing tools the group took it from idea to event in 2 weeks
Over 50 teams submitted projects or ideas
Voting was held to determine winners in 7 categories
Emphasizing community and culture…not a contest

Opening the doors to the wider community
alphaWorks
Lotus Greenhouse
Open Commercial Development
Jazz is now open to the public: jazz.net

Thank you! Questions? Comments?

Avram ODonovan Blogtalk2008

by coniecto on Mar 05, 2008

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Avram ODonovan Blogtalk2008 — Presentation Transcript

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