Posts Tagged: ‘rebecca_swindell’

IBM Collaboration Solutions buzz at the Gartner PCC Conference

24. September 2012 Posted by Rebecca Swindell

 

Last week IBM was a platinum sponsor of the Gartner Portal, Content & Collaboration Summit in London, where we had the opportunity to join in lively debates with some of our customers, prospective new clients, Gartner analysts and even some of our competitors! Below are just a few of my highlights from the opening keynote session, the IBM session and the IBM customer’s session from LeasePlan.

The keynote session was opened by Gartner analyst, Nikos Drakos, who spoke about the Nexus of Forces – Social, Mobile, Cloud and Information – meaning we can communicate to anyone, anytime, about anything on multiple platforms through the Cloud. This Nexus is resulting in an internal shift from email to an internal communication system for many companies. 

Chris Howard the continued the Always on, Anything, Anytime, Everyone theme, and took the audience through some of the findings from a recent CIO study they had conducted.  He began by highlighting the CIO’s business priorities - increasing enterprise growth, attracting & retaining new customers and decreasing costs.  He talked about their top IT Strategies – delivering business solution & having a flexible infrastructure. Whereas, the technical priorities reported included analytics & business influence, mobile, c loud, collaboration & virtualisation.  The comment I felt really resonated with IBM’s offerings is when one CIO said that “innovation comes from the customer experience”. 

Chris continued by speaking to speak about the importance of integrating IT with the rest of the business, so that they understand the BUSINESS more. Furthermore, if this is not possible given physical location limitations, this can be done through collaboration (I was thinking exactly – through products such as IBM Connections!). Social is driving everything to happen, and Chris even gave a very illustrative example of how he used crowd sourcing with his friends and colleagues to redesign his back yard – which I thought was a great way to help the audience understand the way collaboration is able to bring benefit to everything we do.  Using hundreds of applications, through a variety of devices, people are able to connect with one other, across the globe and share a plethora of information.  Chris empathised that people expect this prolific interactivity & information access in all their roles.

The IBM session was presented by Mike Spradbery (@spradders) and Jon Mell (@jonmell)– on “Making Your Business Exceptional”.  Mike started the session by talking about how different groups are using Social Collaboration – customers are using it to be vocal and influential, that employees have an overwhelming desire to share & innovate and partners are using social and mobile to access experts & reduce costs.

Mike then shared the below slide with some interesting stats from Comscore.

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Mike continued to explain how in today’s social world, customers have multiple experiences of a company – which can be costly for a company if it is marketed with a dozen different voices.  He then spoke about the value of a engaging & motivating PEOPLE – inside & outside the organisation – which can really help drive real business change.

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Jon Mell then took the floor and spoke about how important it is to integrate people with applications & processes – in the correct context, and about how targeted communications keep people engaged.  Social platforms should not just be another place to go though; they should be embedded into the context of business processes.  He took the audience through some of our customer success stories including TD Bank & Wimbledon.

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The following day Wim de Gier (@skywim) gave a great session on their Social platform “LinkedPeople” – for which they have used IBM Connections – for which they implemented the full package of micro-blogs, blogs, activities, wiki, & communities. Wim talked about how the success of the project is NOT about IT, but 95% is about a culture change & adoption – it’s all about the human connection.  He explained how LinkedPeople leverages the LeasePlan corporate brain!  It helps find people, communication effectively, innovate, develop products & save time. Wim showed a video where employees were talking about how much they loved working with LinkedPeople saying it meant they could collaborate, ask questions, keep informed, share knowledge & best practices, exchange ideas and discover expertise.

Wim continued the session by explaining that he thought companies that block social media are blind to the benefits it can bring. He explained that they already have over 800 communities, and more and more it is becoming a business critical tool, not just seen as a “social” platform. LinkedPeople is making the corporate brain grow on a daily basis, and again emphasised that his is about a cultural change, not IT.

Just for fun – here is the condiments bar for the ice-cream machine we had on the first evening during the networking session.

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Thanks for reading! Please follow me on Twitter for more Social Business updates etc @RSwindell