New IBM Connections Pattern for IBM PureSystems Now Available

A new post on SocializeMe:On December 9, IBM announced an updated PureSystems Pattern for IBM Connections 5.0 as well as a brand new pattern for IBM Connections Content Manager 5.0. Both patterns have been built to reduce the installation and configuration time down to a couple of hours by deploying a pre-configured system into a PureSystems environment. IBM PureSystems combine the flexibility of a general purpose system, the elasticity of cloud and the simplicity of an appliance. Learn more about IBM PureSystems here.

Both patterns are based on the latest versions of IBM Connections and IBM Connections Content Manager and while the IBM Connections Content Manager Pattern is a brand new offering, IBM Connections 5 Pattern is a replacement for the previous IBM Connections Hypervisor Edition 4.0. Customers with entitlement to the Hypervisor pattern will be entitled to an upgrade to the new IBM Connections Pattern 5.0.

For more information on IBM Connections, IBM Connections Content Manager and the new patterns click here.

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#20Questions with Amanda Savitzky

Meet Amanda, UX Designer and Researcher for IBM, who spends her days in the Austin Design Studio re-imagining how we design our products and solutions. Recently Amanda has been focusing on re-thinking something that has essentially remained the same for over 20 years: email! Get ready to learn everything from what Amanda is responsible for with IBM Verse to where she gets her design inspiration from (hint: it may be you!)

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#20Questions with Kare Anderson

Meet Kare , Emmy-Award winning journalist, Forbes and Huffington Post columnist, author of acclaimed books, including Moving from Me to We, co-founder of the Say It Better Center, and newly featured Talk of the Day speaker on TED.com!



Learn how Kare reimagines our world for yourself by viewing her talk on becoming an Opportunity Maker.

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Brad Bird and the Shared Experience at the Heart of Movie Magic

Readers of the Social Business Insights blog already know the power of sharing. Sharing information leads to efficiency; sharing expertise unlocks innovation; sharing data yields insights. In his TED@IBM talk “Dreaming Loves Company: Tomorrow’s Cinema,” Academy Award-winning writer and director Brad Bird explained how the shared experience lies at the heart of the magic of cinema. He was preaching to the choir as far as I, an avid movie-goer, was concerned, but it was fascinating to hear an expert articulate what’s so unique and captivating about seeing a movie on the silver screen, especially when the theater gets it right.

Take Star Wars, for instance. When Bird saw the original on opening day and Darth Vader came on the screen, the entire audience hissed, as if some “dormant villain-hating DNA … had been suddenly awakened” in them.

I had a similar experience during Star Wars Episode II: when Yoda battled Count Dooku and started flying all over the place like a hyper two-year-old on a sugar binge, the crowd went completely nuts. It was a moment of shared exhilaration and joy that is impossible to re-create in a living room. It remains one of my all-time favorite movie-going memories. So somewhat paradoxically, when you have a great, enthusiastic crowd with the members feeding off each other’s energy, it can make the moment more personal.

This is true of any special moment we share with a community, even online, but it is difficult if not impossible to simulate the energy of a live audience in a virtual setting. And movies differ from sports (for example) in the expectations of the audience. As Bird said, "a movie audience enters a theater agreeing to surrender control to the storyteller. It’s a group dream, shared with a ‘one time only’ mix of strangers. Collectively, a single audience has thousands of years of hopes, dreams, hurts, experiences ... a gold mine of emotions waiting to collide in the dark.”

During his riveting talk, Bird had much more to say about what makes the cinema experience magical and how theaters have lost their way. I still love going to the movies at modern theaters, with all their flaws, but Bird’s talk left me with the hope that more establishments will follow the lead of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema and others, and put in the effort to create experiences that are worth leaving the house to share with strangers.

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Lisa Seacat DeLuca: Inventing the Future

Every kid knows it: inventors are cool. It’s one of the things we want to be when we grow up, right up there with firefighter, ballerina or astronaut. But as we get older, we realize the improbability of having “Inventor” on our business card.

Thankfully, Lisa Seacat DeLuca never gave up on that dream. In her TED@IBM talk, “An Inventor’s Vision of the Future,” she told us about her first invention, a full-length umbrella she not only designed but prototyped with a plate and shower curtain when she was just seven years old.

When she created that umbrella, she was identifying and addressing a current need. Another role for an inventor is to gaze into their crystal ball and anticipate future needs. A third is to use that same crystal ball to look not at needs, but at possibilities. Do we need our toilet paper to reorder itself when the roll is running low? Do we need a hanger that glows red when you haven’t worn the shirt in six months, with a suggestion that you donate it?

No and no, and those particular inventions might not even be your cup of tea, yet still they are cool, and more to the point, you can imagine what else the technologies behind them might make possible. “The speed of invention in the future,” said DeLuca, “will be as fast as we can dream up ideas.”

DeLuca reminded us that as great as these inventions might prove to be, they won’t fundamentally change who we are as human beings. With all of our faults, some might consider that a bad thing. DeLuca, I believe, sees this as a positive, and I agree. After all, one of the greatest parts of our humanity is creativity, the very thing that allows us to reimagine our world and all it could become.

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Google Hangout Replay: A Social Business, Cloud, Mobile and IBM Connections Conversation

A new post on SocializeMe:Last week I had the opportunity to try out Google Hangout On Air. It's been something that I've wanted to try for a while and with the latest cloud release of IBM Connections last week, it would be a good time to try it out.



Joining me is Luis Suarez (no, not the guy who bites), an independent social business advisor and Simon Vaughan, an IBM Champion and one of the organizers of Social Connections, the IBM Connections User Group.



The whole thing was very informal, and again, it's something that I did to play with the concept and understand what's possible and what's not, while at the same time having a great conversation with subject matter experts on the other side of the ocean.



The result? I have to say I really enjoyed the conversation (it's all about my favorite topics so what's not to like!) and got me wondering if something like this is something that we should try to do on a regular basis (perhaps as a complement to 5 minute tips on IBM Connections).



Check out the replay of the Hangout:







What do you think ? Is this something that we should do more of ? Tell me what you think!

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Changing the World, One Continent at a Time

The TED Institute micro-documentary on Project SyNAPSE gave us a look at the future of cognitive computing, with glimpses at some possible practical applications. Those exciting possibilities become positively exhilarating in the Project Lucy micro-documentary, which gives us an idea of the potential for cognitive computing to transform a continent.

The project is a collaboration between IBM researchers in Africa and the company’s business and academic partners to bring to bear the full power of IBM Watson on the continent’s biggest challenges. The goal is to use Watson to discover insights from big data and develop commercially viable solutions in the areas of energy, healthcare, water and sanitation, agriculture, human mobility and education.

It is this last area that is the particular focus of IBM researcher Dr. Charity Wayua. In the film, the Kenya-based Wayua lays out the ambitions for cognitive computing to give teachers greater ability to deal with crowded classrooms. Armed with data-based insights, teachers can address needs and situations on a student-by-student basis.

While Africa’s challenges are daunting, it is far from the only place where classrooms are overcrowded, teachers are overstretched and children are underserved. The potential impact on Africa’s education systems is awesome to contemplate, and it’s easy to see how the benefits could be replicated around the globe. Add in the other challenges Project Lucy is tackling and the potential for cognitive computing to improve the lives of millions becomes even greater.

“For the African continent,” says Wayua, “I think this is going to be our 'big bet' on transformation.” If that big bet pays off, it won’t just transform Africa, it will transform the world.

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#20Questions with Erick Brethenoux

Meet Erick , Director of Business Analytics and Decision Management Strategy at IBM, curious connectionist, unconventional thinker, and soon-to-be TED speaker!

Get ready to be inspired by Erick as he Reimagines Our World at TED@IBM with his talk on emotional analytics.

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#20Questions with Bryan Kramer

Meet Bryan , CEO of PureMatter, an award winning global digital agency, social strategist, author of the acclaimed book: Human to Human #H2H, and soon-to-be TED speaker!

Get ready to be inspired by Bryan as he Reimagines Our World at TED@IBM with his talk on the importance of sharing.

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Brand Image and Security Concerns – All the More Reason to Become a Social Business

A new post on SocializeMe:To get the full benefit of social business, you must inject it into your key business processes for stronger customer engagement and workforce collaboration. But many enterprises are afraid to fully embrace social business, with 30 percent of them citing security concerns and perceived risk as major adoption barriers, according to IBM's 2014 Business Tech Trends report.

But these fearful enterprises need to realize the true nature of social business. At its core, social business is a grassroots movement. Your customers have already embraced social. They’re online, on multiple channels, multiple platforms, talking about your business and reviewing your products and solutions. In other words, there’s no such thing as ‘opting out’ of social business.



In fact, the real risks of security and brand perception are increased when you don’t engage in social business. If you're struggling to integrate social into the core of your business internally and externally, IBM can help.



For example, IBM Connections can help you reorganize, restructure and transform your enterprise into an effective social business with social guidelines and policies set into place to optimize both customer engagement and your internal workforce communication.



When social business is done right, the possibilities are endless. In fact, Pacesetters engaging in social business have reported an 87 percent stronger competitive advantage in their respective markets.



To read the full IBM 2014 Business Tech Trends report, click here.



To watch the webcast replay of the Business Tech Trends announcement, click here.

After you’ve read the report, join us for a Bluemix app JAM! Simply download the report's data in an IBM Bluemix app and start discovering new insights! Share with us and IBM will highlight our favorites!

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Engaging Employees to Drive the Business: The Smarter Workforce ebook

“The Smarter Workforce story is the story of how we work.” So begins the new ebook “Engaging Employees to Drive the Business: How IBM uses workforce science, analytics and collaboration tools to build its Smarter Workforce” (available here). This story starts with IBM’s recognition that we have entered the era of the empowered individual, and this new era requires a new HR strategy encompassing work, talent and culture.

Core to the strategy and its three tent poles is the need to engage employees. Empowered employees can be a company’s greatest asset, but only if the company puts people at the center. Employees who aren’t engaged will be underutilized and unproductive – until ultimately they leave for greener pastures, typically at a competitor. Organizations which don’t want to suffer this fate must transform their workforce accordingly.

In chapters on work, talent and culture, the ebook explains how IBM implemented its Smarter Workforce initiative to transform its HR operations. The company approached those three core components not as separate but as interdependent, and it brought to bear all of its expertise and experience in the tools and the organization necessary to achieve a robust and meaningful workforce transformation.

IBM’s own HR transformation holds lessons for other companies undertaking a strategic approach to aligning work, talent and culture to put employees at the center. Big data and analytics, for example, are giving companies unprecedented insight into human behavior, including what makes people good at what they do. That insight is absolutely fundamental to finding, attracting and retaining top talent.

Mobile and cloud give people the anywhere, anytime access to the information and expertise that allow them to perform to their fullest potential, while social business lets employees connect and collaborate to achieve a collective impact far greater than that of any individual. Social is also a key to transforming culture, creating the interactions needed for learning, sharing, innovation and much more.

Like all good stories, the Smarter Workforce story is still being written. Business conditions will continue to evolve, and with that will come evolutions in how we work. “Engaging Employees to Drive the Business” presents critical insights on what companies need to consider when designing their workforce strategy, with plenty of food for thought about the road ahead.

You can access the ebook here, and be sure to share it on your social channels!

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Social Business More than Doubles Since 2012 - Pacesetters Are Seeing the Biggest Wins

A new post on SocializeMe:

IBM's Center for Applied Insights has just released their 2014 Business Tech Trends report, which surveyed over 1,400 decision makers across 15 industries around the world to find out how businesses are deploying key technologies. The study found that social business is now being deployed by 70 percent of enterprises! That is more than double the number of enterprises (34 percent) that were deploying social business solutions in 2012.



Pacesetter enterprises, which regard big data and analytics, cloud, mobile and social technologies as critical to their success and adopt them ahead of their competitors, have seen amazing results from integrating social into their DNA:

• Pacesetters are achieving improved customer experience through social at six times the rate of other enterprises.


• Additionally, 72 percent of Pacesetters are seeing enhanced communication and collaboration across the organization and ecosystem through their social initiatives, which is also six times more than other enterprises!


• Furthermore, Pacesetters report that they are expanding into new markets and segments at three times the rate of other enterprises.

It's clearer now than ever that having a social business strategy is imperative. But with 70 percent of enterprises deploying social, how do you get results like the Pacesetters? Stay tuned – I'm working on a post now that will tell you how!



The following graph indicates the deployment gains since 2012:

If you missed the webcast in which Sandy Carter, General Manager of Ecosystem Development, IBM, made the exciting Business Tech Trends announcement, not to fear you can re-watch it here!

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