WSJ: Play well with others - How IBM’s employees have taken social networking to an unusual level... 

Ed has linked to this new article at the Wall Street Journal describing how IBM is using many of the tools and technologies in the new Connections product as part of their W3 Intranet.

It is worth taking time out to read the whole article, but in the meantime, here are some snippets that relate directly to the Lotus Connections product:

Big Blue is big on social networking. Some 26,000 IBM workers have registered blogs on the company's internal computer network where they opine on technology and their work. Employees starting a new project routinely create information-storing Web sites called wikis for sharing memos as they build their teams. Thousands of IBM workers swap lists of useful Web sites and corporate resources, using an IBM-developed program for "social bookmarking" called DogEar. Similarly, when an employee calls an IBM expert for assistance with something, he or she may be invited to rate the value of the help. Bosses see those ratings at review time.
...
At IBM, the key to the social network is BluePages (aka Profiles), the employee-edited corporate directory. When an employee wants to know who tagged a particular story, he or she can see the name, click on it and get directly to the person's Blue-Pages entry. Clicking on the person's name in their BluePages entry allows the user to send an IM to that person or view other tags the person has created.
...
Two years ago, when blogging became popular on the Internet, IBM invited employees to co-author guidelines for blogging using a community forum that attracted some 100 people. The guidelines were approved by IBM's legal, human-resources and public-relations departments, and now they serve as IBM policy.

As a reminder, Connections also includes Communities and Activities which weren't mentioned in the article.

Lastly, I think the following quote should serve as a reminder to those considering Connections (or other Web2.0 social networking solutions) for their organisations just why these technologies are so important:

John Rooney, manager of innovation programs for IBM's chief information officer, says IBM decided it needed to adopt social-networking technology in part because "five years ago there was a concern that IBM wasn't attracting the best technical talent" from colleges and grad schools.

When I was researching my new job, one of the key questions I asked at interview was regarding what systems they used in-house for collaboration, and how the executives at the company viewed the future in this regard.  I believe that these are questions that many of the students and school-leavers will be asking in the next few years, and we all need to have answers that prove to them that our organisations are embracing the social computing wave...



By: Connections Blog (Stuart McIntyre) | 1 Comments | On: 19 June 2007 09:15:46 | Tags:  connections lotus wsj ibm 





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