Lotusphere is a good place to step back and look at enterprise communications as seen through the lens of social networking. The theme for this year's Lotusphere, which just completed its opening session, is: "Get Social. Do Business."
The always-splashy Lotusphere opening session drove home the message about social networking with its annual blend of customer stories, demos, and superlatives. And though Social dominated every discussion, communications as an enabler for enterprise social networking was a thread that ran throughout, starting with the first guest brought on stage by Alistair Rennie, GM of Lotus Software and IBM Collaboration Solutions.
That guest was Jim Balsillie, the co-CEO of RIM, who brought on stage the soon-to-be-released BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. Balsillie touted the PlayBook's "superior performance, rich Web experience" and enterprise-grade security and manageability. He and Rennie also announced that RIM would recognize the best Lotus applications developed for the PlayBook when RIM holds its BlackBerry World conference this May.
The customer stories also offered a view of how emerging communications capabilities enable advanced enterprise social networking. Fareed Mohammed, representing BASF, the world’s largest chemical company, described a scenario in which BASF’s agricultural products division established a web of collaboration among research scientists, logistics people and farmers that they serve in China, and managed to solve a critical problem that the farmers were experiencing with a crop blight. The logistical agent was in Singapore and the BASF experts were distributed in other parts of the world, but combining mobility, email, presence, Unified Communications and social software let them work quickly to come up with a solution and get it deployed to the farmers who needed it.
Another customer, Dr. Geert Tilboughs of KBC, a Belgian bank, described how social software was helping his company overcome cultural obstacles as the bank grows into Eastern Europe via acquisitions. Since banks need strong local connections where they operate, corporate management needs to be able to communicate its directions while understanding conditions in the regions where they operate. Tilboughs described how social networking allowed KBC to build a common platform for creating this culture.
Asked for their single most important piece of advice, Mohammed and Tilboughs both emphasized factors outside of technology. "This is about people more than technology," Mohammed said. "Our employees don’t make the distinctions" between technology silos like the Web, telephony, ERP, and the like. "It's all just stuff that helps them do their work."
Likewise, Tilboughs stressed the need to work closely with non-IT departments, and he noted that the currency of the organization is evolving: It’s not just about power or money; recognition is also becoming a factor, he said. Sharing your knowledge, not hoarding it, is what confers real power in the organization, he said: "Share and reuse" is the new mantra.
Product demos emphasized social connections within traditional communications interfaces like email. Appending the word, "Next" to its Notes, Connections, Lotus Live and Sametime product lines, a parade of IBMers showed off soon-to-be-released functionality in these various platforms. This included the addition of activity streams to the Notes email clientthe addition of audio and video to web-based online version of Sametime, allowing browser-based online meetings--with functionality for firewall/NAT traversal and bandwidth management to optimize the experience.
