My colleague and fellow blogger Luis Suarez is at the heart of this Forbes.com article, IBM’s Webbie World. The article discusses on IBM’s social software adoption – how blogs, wikis, social bookmarking and community networks can improve business processes and even create new products or solutions.
In some ways, IBM’s employees are already out-Webbing even Web-based companies like Google and Facebook. IBM’s spokespeople claim it has 24,000 Facebook users and 155,000 LinkedIn users, giving it one of the biggest corporate representations on both sites.
Luis discusses his much conversed project, saying the next generation worker is looking for quicker communication tools:
… these (collaboration tools) are the ways young employees will communicate in just a few years. “There’s a next-generation of worker, and for them, e-mail is what they use to contact their grandparents,” Suarez says. “They want tools that are more instant and collaborative.”
Karen Wohl, of Wohl Associates discusses the benefits of enterprise social software, such as Lotus Connections:
A large corporation might choose to use Lotus Connections instead of Facebook and Blogger, for instance, because IBM’s software can be hosted within the company’s own firewall, safe from data breaches or subpoenas.
Deutsche Bank and the Federal Aviation Administration are only 2 examples of companies that adopted social software solutions from IBM.
