Lotusphere 2011 Notes: Opening Session

This is the first in a series of my notes on Lotusphere 2011. I am very pleased to be back after ten years. I first came to co-present a Lotus Notes based KM project with my client. Now I return as a blogger.  I attended the opening general session with Alistair Rennie, General Manager, Collaboration Solutions and many others. It started with a lot of drums, music, and lights. Tim Leary should be here to see this, especially as he got into computers later.

Alistair kicked off the session after the music. He said that attendance is up this year. Kevin Spacey came out next with a Bill Clinton imitation. He next discussed all the people who were past of his success. He started in NYC on Broadway and them moved on to Hollywood. He has now running the Old Vic in London for eight years. He is still doing films and social business has helped to remain open to new ideas. So he has been using a Web-based community for new talent since 2002. There are now over 350,000 members. Many have gone on to success. Jack Lemon was a big mentor in his life. Now he wants to send the elevator back down to help others.

Kevin was also the Executive Producer of the Social Network.  He was first doubtful but then saw the drama there. When they started Facebook was small but we know what has happen. He now plans to have an American ldol style show for whatabe crime bosses. He closed with the thought asking us to think about our vision and how we can work together and listen to others.

Alistar came back. He said that this may the most important Lotusphere ever. We are going through a shift in how business and technology work together under the theme of social business. Social goes beyond the Web to become a new business opportunity in increasing complex market.  It can provide new leadership, speed, and collective intelligence. There are doubters but other technology movements had their doubters also.

A social business allows people to get engaged and provides analytics on this engagement. There is increased transparency and a new nimbleness. He quoted the recent McKinsey study on the business value of networked businesses.  He noted that Lotus has always been about social connections. Having an open architecture is the way to be social. They have introduced a new depth of capability to the Lotus product line, along with increased analytics and simplicity to drive adoption.  This built on the extensive experience in collaboration of Lotus. Now it is time ot draw on this experience.

Jim Balsillie – co-CEO at Research in Motion came out next. He showed us the Playbook, a tablet device that runs many Lotus apps. He showed the multi-tasking capabilities that are strong due to the multi-processing capabilities built on Blackberry platform. They are open tools for developers. You can use Lotus apps natively. They are going to give recognition of the top Lotus developers on Blackberry Playbook.

Jeff Schick came out next to lead a panel from BASF, KBC, CSC, and AT&T. That is a lot of acronyms. BASF offered an example of global collaboration to solve an agriculture issue in China. They were able to solve an issue then deal with the logistics of finding the right materials and getting then to China.  

KBC provides financial services to local communities.  To do this you need to understand issues at the local level.  They are building a social network for this that includes local expertise.  CSC has 100,000 employees that need to work together. Online collaboration as enabled them to close more deals. They have more communication through blogging.

AT&T needs to have employees understand granular information about their products and communicate it to customers. They use social networks to speed the communication around these needs and find the right expert to match customer needs. They have been doing this approach for some time.  I was involved in building a knowledge management system for their call centers 15 years ago that enabled employees to be smarter with their customers.

Sandy Carter VP of Sales came out next. She saw the social transformation of IBM into a social business. In HR they use social capabilities for recruitment through to rewards. They use games for collaboration. They measure return on everything. For every 1 percent improvement in HR processes they save $50 million.  They have a social media aggregator.  They were also one of the first to have social media employee guidelines in 2005.  They also use social media for product development through a Jam for brainstorming. Latest CIO study found the successful companies are 57% more likely to use social business.

Another panel discussed social business. It included Blue Cross of Massachusetts (my insurance carrier), RBC, and Australian Rules Football League.  Larry Bowden led the discussion.  AFL uses a portal a single point of entry that provides a role-based content. They are now going to expand the portal with analytic capabilities and allow each team have more capability.

The Blue Cross speaker noted that in Massachusetts they have had universal health coverage since 2006. There is an online connector to support this that was built with IBM. There are mobile capabilities. At Bkue Cross they try to have a deep understanding of their members. So they needed to change their customer experience and make it more social while allowing for the unique aspects of each customer. They are doing more customer segmentation. The RBC speaker said do not underestimate the complexity of a social program but do not make it too complex at the same time.

Next came the demos. Doug Cox came out to lead this portion. Project North Star is the foundation for their exceptional Web experience work. It is called the IBM Customer Experience Suite.  Brian and others did the demos. He showed work apps first. There is a central activity stream. There is also real time analytics for evidence-based decision making with visualization. There is a shared calendar in Notes Next client. You do not have to be a chair of a team to change a meeting. There are a lot of mobile apps. There are also social aspects to email.  

Lotus Live users can now run Domino apps in the IBM cloud. Connections 3 allows you to work entirely in your browser and it is available now. Suzanne Livingston showed us real time collaboration in the cloud, including email. You can share project aspects and have the team vote on ideas. LotusLive Symphony will be available second half of 2011. 

Lotus Sametine Next will be available soon with audio and video. I was at Lotusphere ten years ago presenting one of the first SameTime implementations at Ryder, along with our Notes based knowledge management system that also used Quickplace that has transformed to be Quickr. Nice to see these tools still around and getting better.

Brian came back to show us some drag and drop Web site editing, including bringing content from Facebook. It appears that IBM is making significant extensions of many aspects of their Lotus product line to make them more social. Part of this is increased integration, even with Exchange. Doug said that IBM's view of social is not anti-social.  I look forward to learning more about this over the next few days. 

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