2010 Update on IBM Social Software Efforts: Part Two

This is the second in a series on an IBM social media press event I attended last week following part one posted yesterday. I covered a similar one in 2005 so I was pleased to see their new directions. Jeff Schick, VP social software, mentioned that IBM Research has done a study on the implications of using social and infusing collaboration into commerce experience. They are connecting social with IBM commerce software. One lesson learned for this effort was a requirement for moderation. The need emerged to drop non-constructive comments. Also there is a need for approval to share in some cultures and it can be addressed through the moderation function.

IBM’s own social media guidelines have been developed over time and they publically available are online (see: Social Media Policy Outside and Inside the Enterprise)

Jeff now sees the social concept everywhere. For example: How can collaboration be infused into product development? Into help desks? They are now working with many areas of IBM so each one does not have to create their own social capabilities.

Jeff also spoke on social analytics. It is an exciting part of the business for IBM.  Information in the river of news is growing. So how to create information and attention management to do your job in this context?  How can you be alert to what is useful? So IBM is focused on bringing analytics into collaboration process.  For example, you can use analytics to find both good and poor functioning. Your services division revenue may be down in relation to product revenue and you can see that products people are not talking to services on leads. You can find who to offer a retention bonus in merger of two banks since he or she is a hub in connections. Atlas is the commercial name for IBM’s monitoring tool.

Joan DiMarco next spoke on IBM Research. There are eight labs with over 3,000 researchers.  IBM has been granted more patents than any other company for past 17 years. The Center for Social Software started in 2008 with strong Lotus ties. It looks to customers and academics for ideas and uses a wisdom of crowds approach.

Joan mentioned some past examples of ideas to products:

In 2004 dogear – the social bookmarking tool or enterprise – was developed and its capabilities have been added to Connections. (see my post - Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise – IBM’s Internal Tagging Tool – Dogear).

In 2006 SaND and Fringe were developed and they provide connection recommendations,

In 2007 Social Blue was developed as Beehive. It provides informal workplace sharing and status messages.

The Center for Social Software does what they call venture research. They design, build, deploy large-scale systems and seed a crowd of users. Then they watch how the system evolves with usage and apply lessons to the IBM product pipeline.

There are five themes: Analytics, visualization, harnessing the network, aggregation, and social updates. Social analytics is a big push in IBM now. 

Here are six projects that occur at the intersection of visualization and analytics.

Private Internal:

Banter provides machine-learning analysis of blogs and tweets. It looks at emerging themes and tells you what tweets require action and by whom.

Twitter Backchannel provides visualization of major streams as word clouds and topic streams.

Social Lens filters your update stream to focus on your areas of interest.  

Public External:

Many Eyes allows you to upload data for visualization. I have used this tool and there are a variety of interesting visualizations available.

Many Bills offers text analytics applied to US Congressional legislation to make it more accessible and understandable.

SaNDVis provides visualizations of aggregated social network data.

Three projects are combinations of the themes of harnessing the network and aggregation

Answers supports enterprise question and answer sessions.

Blue Spruce supports the Radiology Theater medical research project that Francine Jacobson described.

Audrey is a personalized news service that recommends news stories and blog posts to intranet users by leveraging their social network.

This is a diverse and impressive collection of applications. In 2005 some of the social media efforts looked at supporting collaboration across business processes. This was a great goal then and remains one but it has matured a bit. Now they are looking at how to better understand and use the massive amounts of unstructured data and conversations that have emerged through social media. I think this is the next great opportunity for social media innovation so I agree completely with their direction.  

IBM provided demos of these tools mentioned above, along with the latest versions of Lotus Connections and Unified Communications. Connections has added some interesting analytical capabilities since I last covered it in 2008 (see Looking Closely at Lotus Connections). You can see the social networks of participants and manipulate these visualizations to uncover patterns. In future posts in this series I will explore Social Lens, Many Bills, Audrey, and Connections in more detail.  

 

Comments

[Stéphane]

This is an interesting post and it gives a great picture of IBM's social endeavours.
I am still looking for information about their Vulcan project though ?

[Lbenitez]

Bill, thanks again for sharing your thoughts over here! Isn't it exciting all the cool things that we are doing internally ? I hope your readers agree. These are exciting times and I'm glad to be part of it :-D. I'm looking forward to your future posts in these series ;)

[bill Ives]

You are welcome. I agree about the interesting efforts at IBM. Bill