Last couple of years have seen definitions of social collaboration change at a dizzying speed. From ways to communicate, to peer to peer sharing, Social collaboration is evolving as more and more enterprises adopt and leverage it. Today companies see social collaboration as a mechanism to harvest more innovative products and services, more effective marketing, lower operative costs, rapid knowledge and people discovery, having measurable ROI and much more.
To get a real feel of how important Social Software is to a business lets look into an organization which has pioneered social software and has adopted it on a scale no one else ever thought of, IBM. Social software is central to IBM’s strategy of building a smarter planet.
IDC developed a white paper on what makes social tick in IBM and what they did correct and should be replicated by enterprises across industry.
As per Jeff Shick IBM started 15 years back exploring ways how to better connect people with people and people with information and it was determined to achieve this within and outside IBM. Schick says, “the idea of getting the right person over the right opportunity at the right time to yield the right result was genuinely a business imperative at IBM.”
Social collaboration has been major player in formulating business strategies, connecting experts, grouping people working on similar projects together to share best practices and experiences, sales team leverages social collaboration extensively in collaborating with both external customers and internal managers. Just look at following stats for IBMs internal deployment
- 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 allows employees to share status updates, collaborate on wikis, blogs and activity, share files.
- 20 million minutes of LotusLive meetings every month with people both inside and outside the organization
Because of above IBM has championed what it takes to be a leader in social collaboration and same has been reflected in market space where they have been selling Lotus Connections and Lotus Live ( Cloud offering ). People have been turning to these services for quickly absorbing benefits of going social in their enterprises. Take the example of last year earthquake in Haiti. Colleagues in Care partnered with Lotus live team to build a social network of doctors, where each doctor could highlight their skills. That way doctors could be matched to the needs of a particular situation, thereby getting the most value out of the available resources. Below is the video of same.
Colleagues in Care
IBM has been even helping industries which were not even remotely connected to even software, leave aside social software and making them realize benefits of a connected workforce.
Take example of , a Chicago based, global leader in food technology, which needed an effective collaboration tool to bring its geographically dispersed team together, without the capital expense and staff needed to run an in-house solution. With 27 plants all over the world, including the Philippines, China and Thailand, moving to the cloud made perfect sense. Newly Weds Foods chose IBM’s LotusLive social collaboration cloud services to enable its culinary team to share information and ideas quickly and easily regardless of the time or location.
The result? They are now saving 4-5 days per month in travel time, approximately 10% on airfare and travel expenses and they have sped communication response rate from days to hours. Working in different time zones is no longer a barrier to productivity and LotusLive’s unique “guest account” model provides no cost access to clients so they can collaborate more easily on recipe ideas.
Check out this video
Newly weds food
Gist companies across the spectrum are adopting and leveraging Social collaboration capabilities like ones from IBM and helping in building a smarter planet. Where is yours next innovative idea or product is coming from ?
Social Buzz At Lotus 