Bill Ives, covering IBM's Lotusphere as a blogger covers the opening of the conference.
I thought the excerpt below was a great way to capture how a "social" business can add value to organizations.
Don't miss the ways how IBM uses social technologies in HR
A social business allows people to get engaged and provides analytics on this engagement. There is increased transparency and a new nimbleness. He quoted the recent McKinsey study on the business value of networked businesses. He noted that Lotus has always been about social connections. Having an open architecture is the way to be social. They have introduced a new depth of capability to the Lotus product line, along with increased analytics and simplicity to drive adoption. This built on the extensive experience in collaboration of Lotus. Now it is time ot draw on this experience.
AT&T needs to have employees understand granular information about their products and communicate it to customers. They use social networks to speed the communication around these needs and find the right expert to match customer needs. They have been doing this approach for some time. I was involved in building a knowledge management system for their call centers 15 years ago that enabled employees to be smarter with their customers.
Sandy Carter VP of Sales came out next. She saw the social transformation of IBM into a social business. In HR they use social capabilities for recruitment through to rewards. They use games for collaboration. They measure return on everything. For every 1 percent improvement in HR processes they save $50 million. They have a social media aggregator. They were also one of the first to have social media employee guidelines in 2005. They also use social media for product development through a Jam for brainstorming. Latest CIO study found the successful companies are 57% more likely to use social business.
