Blog

Blog Search

Search this site

Advertisements

Everything Else

Sponsor

Wood Watch Review

Google Custom Searches

Custom Blogger Search
Custom Sametime Search
Custom XPages Search

Subscribe

Subscribe via RSS

Recent Tweets

Hosting by

You are here: Home › Blog

IBM Connect 2014 - Innovation Lab experience


Tags :


I always take time for the Innovation Lab at IBM Connect and this was no different for 2014. However this year I was highly disappointed. The amazing talent and work they do astounds me. The staff was courteous, brilliant and still had things to show.

However, this year it seems they were forced into only working on talent, expert, skills or voice of people from social media. They lab was split into three distinct areas.

  • Social Business Innovation Sprints
  • Smarter Workforce
  • Visual Analytics
While they are doing cool graphs and heuristics, that is not the only place I want innovation. For example, last year I found some amazing tablet calendaring work. Slide scheduling times, easy tap to set appointments, great use of tablet space for group calendaring. I had hoped this would make it into actual offerings.  It is gone.

As I walked through browsing the lab, I saw the same thing. A graphical output finding people or analyzing data to pull some magic out. While finding the people is getting easier this doesn't address the introvert nature of how the majority of people work.

You commonly hear feedback that people are too busy with their own items to keep up with what everyone else is working on. They have a trusted set of people they work with and do not hunt around. There isn't a magical effort to find the most suitable expert.. Worse yet if we used analytics to read sentiment, is that an indicator of how they feel about the project or workplace? Or is it feedback based solely on them knowing you are searching and don't want retribution for being unhappy.

I definitely want to see movement in these areas. I encourage it. But do not forget the innovation in what tool we use daily now. Many need the work that gave us some of the mail and mobile interface changes we have today. Right form this very lab.