Gave a short presentation earlier this week, at New Blue – the internal course our HR dept. gives to new IBMers, couple of months on the job. I lecture every course, about 3-4 months apart, and I always updated my slides couple of days before.. The title of my lecture is ‘Internal Communications at IBM’, which was chosen when I was still responsible for internal comms at IBM, and discussed about IBM’s strategy and how we (as a company) convey our message internally, parallel to the external path.
With each lecture, as I update the slides, I notice that our evolution, in terms of communicating what IBM is, internally, has really matured and grown over the years, as we (IBM) are starting to adopt web 2.0 tools and technologies, and make them available to the general public. IBM is a strong believer of ‘use what you sell’ lifestyle, and our 350,000 employees worldwide serve as a pretty good test group. We have internal technology adoption programs, that provides evangelist employees (such as myself) to explore new tools and technologies at an early Alpha and Beta stages. But it doesn’t stop there – each evangelist provides valuable feedback on the tool/technology/solution, enabling the developers to perfect the product even more, before it’s ‘matured’, and available for the rest of the company, or released to the public.
As I was building the presentation, I started creating a slide that shows what web 2.0 tools/solutions we’re using internally.. After 20 text boxes or so, I stopped. I don’t know of any other company in the industry that enables its workforce to such an abundance of web 2.0 tools, aiming at making their work enjoyable, effective and in context. And most of the stuff we’re using internally is available to our customers, so it’s really a win-win situation.
