| Latest 7 Posts |
IBM Verse Takes Center Stage at ConnectED
Mon, Jan 26th 2015  122
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What you need to know to prep for IBM ConnectED 2015
Thu, Jan 22nd 2015 149
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Social Business Unboxed (Ep12): Relationship Analytics & Data Privacy with Manish Goel
Thu, Jan 22nd 2015 58
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You Are Sitting on a Volcano That Is Ready to Blow
Wed, Jan 21st 2015 171
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#20Questions with Shane Snow
Tue, Jan 20th 2015 134
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Open Letter of Feedback to NRF’s Retail BIG Show 2015
Tue, Jan 20th 2015 66
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The Best of Both Worlds
Thu, Jan 15th 2015 25
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You Are Sitting on a Volcano That Is Ready to Blow
Wed, Jan 21st 2015 171
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What you need to know to prep for IBM ConnectED 2015
Thu, Jan 22nd 2015 149
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#20Questions with Shane Snow
Tue, Jan 20th 2015 134
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IBM Verse Takes Center Stage at ConnectED
Mon, Jan 26th 2015 122
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Open Letter of Feedback to NRF’s Retail BIG Show 2015
Tue, Jan 20th 2015 66
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Social Business Unboxed (Ep12): Relationship Analytics & Data Privacy with Manish Goel
Thu, Jan 22nd 2015 58
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#20Questions with Leah Lawrence
Thu, Nov 13th 2014 25
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The Best of Both Worlds
Thu, Jan 15th 2015 25
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The Value of Collaboration to the Future of Work
Wed, Jan 14th 2015 23
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Social Business Unboxed (Ep11): Leadership Insights from the WeFirst Summit
Wed, Jan 14th 2015 23
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| Recent Blog Posts |
122
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IBM Verse Takes Center Stage at ConnectED
Mon, Jan 26th 2015 5:57p Colleen Burns
As IBM ConnectED 2015 got underway today in Orlando, FL, IBM Verse was again in the spotlight, this time during Jeff Schick’s general session on A New Way to Engage. Schick, IBM General Manager of Enterprise Social Solutions, spoke about improving the way we work and collaborate, which is precisely what IBM Verse was designed to do.
The operative word here is designed, as IBM Verse was created in a very deliberate, thoughtful manner that re-imagines the inbox to surface the thing |
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What you need to know to prep for IBM ConnectED 2015
Thu, Jan 22nd 2015 5:14p Colleen Burns
What you need to know for IBM ConnectED
Special AskJim Podcast Episode
The AskJim Podcast Providing 5-minute answers to user questions about IBM Connections
This is the exclusive podcast focused on IBM Connections – the #1 ranked business collaboration platform.
With IBM ConnectED 2015 coming up, now is the time to begin planning your agenda and participation with intention. The event will be jam-packed with many sessions running in parallel tracks. My experience is that p |
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Social Business Unboxed (Ep12): Relationship Analytics & Data Privacy with Manish Goel
Thu, Jan 22nd 2015 12:13p Colleen Burns
Social Business Unboxed
Stories of Insight & Success in Digital Engagement
Unboxing Insights
In this episode of Social Business Unboxed, Manish Goel, CEO of TrustSphere (An IBM Social Business Partner) and Vice-Chairman of the Online Trust Alliance Board of Directors, unboxes relationship analytics in social business. Manish explains this growing field of analytics, why it’s important, examples across areas of business, what kinds of insights organizations can uncover, how to |
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You Are Sitting on a Volcano That Is Ready to Blow
Wed, Jan 21st 2015 12:10p Colleen Burns
The changes coming to the workplace are huge and can't be overstated. They remind me of Joe’s journey from one of my favorite films of all time, Joe Versus the Volcano.
In the movie, Tom Hanks’s character Joe Banks works in a comic rendition of a traditional 20th century workplace where the office workers are treated like cogs in a machine, not human beings with ideas and creative input to help reach objectives. In this dysfunctional setting, communication is only t |
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#20Questions with Shane Snow
Tue, Jan 20th 2015 6:12p Colleen Burns
Meet Shane, an award-winning entrepreneur and journalist, the bestselling author of Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success, and the Chief Creative Officer of Contently, a technology company he co-founded in 2010 with the mission to create a better media world.
Shane recently presented at the launch of IBM Verse where his belief in lateral thinking and his idea of scrapping conventional wisdom dovetailed perfectly with the new offering -- mail reimagined for a new way |
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Open Letter of Feedback to NRF’s Retail BIG Show 2015
Tue, Jan 20th 2015 1:13p Colleen Burns
I just received an email from NRF asking me to please provide my feedback on its 2015 Annual Convention. Rather than fill out an anonymous automated survey I thought I would take the social business mentality to heart and share my thoughts on this blog.
I walked the many floors of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center over the past four days and have spent the last few hours rubbing my feet (see my prior post on NRF 2015), thinking about the recurring themes I heard during the many presentatio |
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The Best of Both Worlds
Thu, Jan 15th 2015 8:13a Colleen Burns
After spending three days at the enormous Jacob Javits Center in NYC attending NRF’s 2015 Annual Convention, there’s one thing I can say for certain: My feet hurt!
After walking through the maze of exhibitors (from the latest in RIFD development to the world’s smartest checkout scanner) and sitting in back-to-back-to-back presentations from some of the most successful retailers in the world, what I can’t say for certain is what the future of retail holds |
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Social Business Unboxed (Ep11): Leadership Insights from the WeFirst Summit
Wed, Jan 14th 2015 2:15p Colleen Burns
Social Business Unboxed
Stories of Insight & Success in Digital Engagement
Unboxing Insights
In this episode of Social Business Unboxed, Simon Mainwaring (Founder & Chief Creative Officer, We First Branding) and Maria Huntalas (Sr. Marketing Manager of Social Business, IBM), unbox insights on the WeFirst Summit, how organizations can spark relationships with their employees and customers, build authentic brands, create a shared sense of purpose, co-create new innovation and more. |
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The Value of Collaboration to the Future of Work
Wed, Jan 14th 2015 11:12a Colleen Burns
It turns out that collaboration is in our biology. Since tribal days to modern corporate life, we are hardwired to act cooperatively. What brings about collaboration is the context. Let’s look at this from a work perspective. If the work environment supports a “beat or be beat” mentality, we’re not likely to collaborate; we look out for our own interest, our safety. However, in an environment where the team is made more important than any one person, colla |
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The ConnectED 2015 Chalktalks Have Been Selected!
Tue, Jan 13th 2015 1:12p Colleen Burns
IBM ConnectED is less than three weeks away! In order to make sure we covered the topics our customers and business partners want to hear about, we used an IBM Connections ideation blog in the Social Business User Group as a way to guide our selection of topics. Below are the selected sessions based on that valuable input!
These chalktalk sessions are now available for attendees to consider adding to their personal agendas. These gatherings will be very informal and interactive discussion |
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Sports Teams Show the Way to Customer Engagement
Tue, Jan 13th 2015 9:11a Colleen Burns
Sports are big business. That’s not anything new or surprising—it’s been a fact of the sports world for decades. From ticket sales to merchandise to premium TV and streaming subscriptions, pro (in particular, but not exclusively) sports teams have many ways of extracting billions of dollars and euros and yen etc. from the pockets of eager fans around the world. Rather than balk at the thought of their favorite franchise being a large corporation raking in record rev |
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#20Questions with Maya Penn
Tue, Jan 13th 2015 5:12a Colleen Burns
Meet Maya, an entrepreneur, technologist, philanthropist, artist, author, animator, and coder. Oh, and did I mention she's only 14 years old?!
She is the CEO of Maya's Ideas, which she founded when she was 8 years old, and she wants to change the world with her art and her business by getting girls involved in tech.
Get ready to learn everything from the best advice she's ever received to what emoji she uses the most. Maya proves that there is truly a new way to work! |
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Great Endings Start at the Beginning – Special Series on Collaborative Planning for 2015
Thu, Jan 8th 2015 10:20p Colleen Burns
Special Series on Collaborative Planning
The AskJim Podcast Providing 5-minute answers to user questions about IBM Connections.
This is the exclusive podcast focused on IBM Connections – the #1 ranked business collaboration platform.
Great endings start at the beginning
Great outcomes start with good planning. Good planning comes from an intentional approach. Collaborative planning produces plans with more buy-in and greater consideration. Plans co-created centrally and acc |
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My Relationship with Email
Thu, Jan 8th 2015 5:04p Colleen Burns
My relationship with email? Well, as they say, it’s complicated. I love
it—easy updates from my team, quick check-ins with colleagues
around the world, confirmations that lunch is on the way. But it
also drives me crazy. We’re in a dysfunctional relationship.
I’m attentive. I always clean out my inbox and
return all my messages before I leave the office.
We get along pretty well for most of the day.
I leave work, but |
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The Future Is the Connected Organization
Wed, Jan 7th 2015 2:01p Colleen Burns
In the Industrial Age, knowledge was power. Today, the ubiquity of information has made knowledge a commodity. In today’s Social Age, connection is power.
So, how connected is your organization to its network?
The Social Age is the age of OPEN: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Network. Yes, we’re all ordinary (non-expert) in many ways essential to our success. But through our networks – the people we’re connected to, some of them highly expert in |
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Break the Social Business Mold with Smartcuts
Tue, Jan 6th 2015 1:46p Colleen Burns
I grew up repairing cars and building houses; as far back as I can remember, my dad contracted my brothers and me as unpaid laborers every Saturday once we were old enough to swing a hammer. For the most part, I’m convinced that he was just in it for the free labor. But every once in a while, the old man slipped an object lesson in between hauling loads of old sheetrock to the dump.
One I remember vividly:
“Come over here, boys,” he called, as he usually d |
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Smarter Education through Collaboration
Mon, Jan 5th 2015 9:11a Colleen Burns
Today’s college students are a collaborative bunch by nature, but on many campuses there’s a gap between students’ desire to collaborate and the resources available to let them do so. Many colleges are currently lacking robust solutions that would allow students to link up and advance their education collectively. The result can be disconnected and under-supported students, many of whom underachieve or even ultimately drop out.
One institution of higher learning t |
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Put Your Talent First and the Future Will Work Itself Out
Wed, Dec 17th 2014 8:15a Colleen Burns
There’s a reason why 71 percent of the workforce is unhappy and tuned out. It’s that companies treat their talent like they are an afterthought, a means to an end. A lack of meaningful work and recognition coupled with rigid work structures have basically turned today’s workforce into The Walking Dead.
When we focus on the professional and personal needs of our talent, we can better align our people with the work that satisfies their aspirations while driving |
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What Do Monty Python and Social Business Have in Common?
Thu, Dec 11th 2014 4:12p Colleen Burns
Remember Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Some of you won't be old enough to remember the comedic look at the grim circumstances of the Middle Ages as told through the story of King Arthur framed around modern times. (If you haven’t seen it, watch it on Netflix. It's worth it.) When the mythical king of the Britons leads his knights on a quest for the Holy Grail, they face a wide array of horrors, including a persistent Black Knight, a three-headed giant, a cadre of shrubbery-c |
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Dead Eyes See No Future (of Talent)
Thu, Dec 11th 2014 4:12p Colleen Burns
"The real issue is not talent as an independent element, but talent in relationship to will, desire, and persistence. Talent without these things vanishes. Even modest talent with those characteristics grows."
- Milton Glaser
The future of work is such a wide-open issue. With so many perspectives, ideas, and "guaranteed" predictions out there one might assume the next few chapters of the world of work have already been written.
But one important piece has been left out of the story.
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What Is an Email Box Worth Today?
Mon, Dec 8th 2014 10:11a Colleen Burns
Digital social business activities are taking over every moment of our personal and professional lives. Whenever I get into a discussion about email, I find that many people think it has become a useless and obsolete thing, even though we still routinely check and manage our mail flow daily.
Is email truly becoming obsolete? At the end of 2013, Extreme Networks conducted a survey, “Is email dying,” that sought to determine the reality of the situation. It pointed to emai |
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Collab Isn’t Just for YouTube Video Artists
Thu, Dec 4th 2014 9:16a Colleen Burns
My teenage daughter is under 18, which means that she is a ”digital native.” While I may have learned how to use and am now an avid user of social technologies, my daughter never had to learn—her generation, often referred to as ”Generation Z,” is growing up immersed in them. So I usually learn something new from her every time she shows me what’s on her iPod.
This past weekend she showed me a video that really caught my attention |
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Beyond the Everyday
Wed, Dec 3rd 2014 11:17a Colleen Burns
This year IBM ConnectED sees an exciting new track with "Beyond the Everyday.” The concept behind the track is to showcase great ideas that set the pace for what can be done when extending IBM's technology. What differentiates this track is the inclusion of other technologies, leaving standard deployments behind and really seeing what people are achieving when they think broader than an IBM-only world.
Of course, we are looking at a wide range of topics in these sessions, suc |
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5 Reasons People Get Swamped by Their Email
Wed, Dec 3rd 2014 6:11a Colleen Burns
Ah, email. From subject line to signoff to send, it makes our work lives infinitely easier. Right? Not necessarily. Our inboxes taunt us with their growing counts of unread messages. One misstep on the keyboard and we’ve shared a Mardi Gras invitation with the global team. And our most important files have a way of falling into the Bermuda Triangle.
I have the same relationship with email that most people do. Fortunately, our developers have found a way to ease everyone&rsqu |
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#20Questions with Amanda Savitzky
Tue, Dec 2nd 2014 2:15p Colleen Burns
Meet Amanda, UX Designer and Researcher for IBM, who spends her days in the Austin Design Studio re-imagining how we design our products and solutions. Recently Amanda has been focusing on re-thinking something that has essentially remained the same for over 20 years: email! Get ready to learn everything from what Amanda is responsible for with IBM Verse to where she gets her design inspiration from (hint: it may be you!) |
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Reciprocity Is Now Possible—for the First Time—on a Massive Scale
Tue, Dec 2nd 2014 7:11a Colleen Burns
Reciprocity Advantage is a strategy for embracing disruption with the right partners to make your company a far better leader than if you try it alone. Reciprocity and advantage are words that are not normally seen together, but reciprocity—giving now in order to get later—will become a normal part of winning in the future.
In our book, we outline the future forces that will disrupt the next decade and show you how to harness them to grow your business. The book is divi |
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Make Coding Social to Get Kids Hooked
Mon, Dec 1st 2014 7:12a Colleen Burns
In the push to get kids interested in computer science, a lot of ideas are getting thrown against the wall to see what sticks. Online courses have their place, but many efforts miss one critical element, particularly when it comes to attracting girls and underrepresented minorities. And this critical element is pretty simple: peer collaboration. Kids are much more likely to succeed at programming if they do it with their friends.
A great way to make this happen is by joining groups like Cod |
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Building & Nurturing Relationships in Social with Jon Ferrara
Wed, Nov 26th 2014 8:12a Colleen Burns
Social Business Unboxed
Stories of Insight & Success in Digital Engagement
In this episode of Social Business Unboxed, Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble, unboxes insights on the importance of networks, building a personal brand, the value of helping others through digital engagement and what this practice looks like day to day.
Digital engagement is about turning relationships into mutually beneficial business outcomes. We often talk about these themes in terms of social selling and social |
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Why Social Engagement Isn’t Enough
Tue, Nov 25th 2014 9:12a Colleen Burns
Having a large Twitter following doesn’t constitute success in social business, a truth we all know but may be reluctant to admit. In fact, even celebrity status on social media doesn’t necessarily count as successful engagement with large communities of like-minded people. In this age of bots and paid followers and payola deals for broadcast tweets, genuine social engagement is hard to attain or even decipher.
What constitutes social engagement?
As social business ma |
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Jumpstarts and MasterClasses – The Sunday Cocktail of ConnectED
Mon, Nov 24th 2014 11:12a Colleen Burns
Before you're getting settled for the Meat and Potatoes of ConnectED, we'd like to offer a cocktail on Sunday to get you in the right mood for the week.
Many of you know the Jumpstarts and MasterClasses as two-hour technical deep dives into specific product areas. This time, with the new format of the conference, we'll change things up a little bit.
The sessions in this track will last one hour, just as in the other tracks, and will give you an update and overview of our main pro |
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Reimagine work in the cloud
Fri, Nov 21st 2014 6:12a Colleen Burns
This week you heard about IBM Verse – a new cloud solution to help you re-imagine the way you work. We’re excited to be at the forefront of delivering these capabilities first in the IBM Cloud.
It’s easy to get started today, taking advantage of the latest capabilities from our social and collaboration cloud offerings.
We have some great new capabilities coming this month, designed to help you:
collaborate more effectively and securely with storage |
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Social Business Unboxed (Ep8): Millennial Expectations - as Employees and as Consumers
Thu, Nov 20th 2014 12:12p Colleen Burns
Social Business Unboxed
Stories of Insight & Success in Digital Engagement
In this episode of Social Business Unboxed, we talk with Mark Babbitt, CEO of YouTern, and Samantha Klein, Marketing Manager and Millennial Blogger with IBM, about the expectations of millennials as emerging employees and consumers. As digital natives raised on an ethos of teamwork, millennials are leading a reshaping of business culture and consumer experience, favoring brands that put people at the center, where |
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Designing a Better Experience for a New Way to Work
Thu, Nov 20th 2014 9:12a Colleen Burns
Designing a Better User Experience
Put the user first. It’s such a simple idea, but to come up with a truly user-friendly product is no simple feat. We all know this intuitively, based on all of the frustrating interfaces we deal with on a daily basis. It happens so rarely that it seems like some sort of alchemy when it does happen.
A big part of the problem is that too many tech companies in particular think that the more features they can pack into a product, the better. They don |
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KISS: Keep It Small, Stupid
Wed, Nov 19th 2014 9:12a Colleen Burns
We are all accustomed to reading books and articles that reference history, be it in the form of mythology, old wives tales, ancient civilizations or breakthroughs of the past two centuries. So when I read Shane Snow’s book, Smartcuts, and heard him speak at the IBM Verse event in New York City, it was startling to hear him refer to transient, specific events from the past two years. For example, with an entire chapter of his book devoted to the fast rise of YouTube phenom Michelle Pha |
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Now We Really Can Work Smarter, Not Harder
Tue, Nov 18th 2014 10:18a Colleen Burns
At today’s New Way to Work event in New York City, IBM’s Bob Picciano, Senior Vice President, Information and Analytics Group, spoke of a new class of enterprises that are data-rich and analytically driven. These organizations are combining data and analytics with cloud, social and mobile technologies to transform the very way we work. This combination of technologies and the work of these organizations is leading to a new transformational moment, creating what Picciano calle |
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Our Ecosystem Speaks: Spotlight on Business Partners
Mon, Nov 17th 2014 12:19p Colleen Burns
As in previous years, we are thrilled to highlight partner solutions in the Spotlight on Business Partners track. These sessions are some of the best examples of integration and interesting use cases from trusted, savvy partners.
Attendees to these sessions will:
learn about partner solutions that you could use; and
get inspired and learn how to integrate your own solutions to products within the IBM portfolio
A few examples of this innovation include Trilog’s |
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Mail, Reimagined for the Future of Work
Mon, Nov 17th 2014 8:18a Colleen Burns
IBM brings together cloud, mobile and analytics to help you organize and prioritize work.
By Jeff Schick, General Manager, Enterprise Social Solutions
Every day I come into work and open my email. By the end of the day there are 20 or 30 emails left open on my desktop. Each email represents a unique challenge or action that requires my attention. Either someone is waiting on me to respond or I am waiting on them. Mail itself has become a daily challenge to get through and I struggle |
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Excellence is never an accident: Building a smarter workforce
Fri, Nov 14th 2014 9:18a Colleen Burns
Posting on behalf of Megan McNamee
Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort. -- Paul J. Meyer
In this incredible time of competing pressures—demand for profitable growth, financial market volatility, political uncertainty—finding and engaging the right employees in the right behaviors in the right job remains a critical component of how companies thrive. Business leaders a |
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Which email confession hits home for you?
Fri, Nov 14th 2014 8:18a Colleen Burns
You know you're guilty. Hit reply all for no good reason. Emailed something to the wrong person. Not included the primary recipient. Missed an important email. Forgotten what you were working on because you have so many windows open. We've all done it. We need a new way to communicate. IBM is going to help you find a #newwaytowork. Codename: IBM Mail Next is mail like you have never imagined. Join us for this epic event at 11am ET on November 18. You will be among the first to learn how |
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#20Questions with Leah Lawrence
Thu, Nov 13th 2014 8:19a Colleen Burns
Meet Leah, User Experience and Visual Designer for IBM, who spends her days in the Austin Design Lab re-imagining how we design and experience our products and solutions. Recently Leah has been focusing on re-thinking something that has essentially remained the same for over 20 years: email! Get ready to learn how she sums up the Codename: IBM Mail Next experience to why the "Container Store" is her design inspiration. |
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It’s Not What You Know; It’s What You Share
Wed, Nov 12th 2014 6:29a Colleen Burns
IBM CEO Ginni Rometty has said it once, and she’ll say it again: “In a social enterprise, your value will not be what you know; it will be what you share.” She also believes that “the social network will be the new production line in a company.”
In an atmosphere where your value is defined by your ability to share your expertise rather than safeguard it, collaboration is crucial. In our recent Center for Applied Insights study, Charting the |
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#20Questions with Mary Elizabeth Miller
Tue, Nov 11th 2014 7:21a Colleen Burns
Meet Mary, UX Designer and Design Researcher for IBM, who spends her days in the Austin Design Lab re-imagining how we design our products and solutions. Recently Mary has been focusing on re-thinking something that has essentially remained the same for over 20 years: email! Get ready to learn everything from why Mary thinks Codename: IBM Mail Next will change the way people view their inbox to who she dreams about receiving an email from (the best answer I've ever heard!).
For |
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Social Business Unboxed (Ep7): Inside IBM's Social Business Transformation
Mon, Nov 10th 2014 1:18p Colleen Burns
Social Business Unboxed
Stories of Insight & Success in Digital Engagement
In this episode of Social Business Unboxed, we talk with Ed Brill, VP of IBM Social Business Transformation, about how IBM works - providing an inside view into IBM’s social business journey. To help us put these key lessons into context, we are rejoined by Alison Fetherstonhaugh, Associate Consultant, IBM Center for Applied Insights, principal researcher for the IBM Social Business Study. Ed shares a un |
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Bringing "Meat and Potatoes" to ConnectED: Infrastructure and Best Practices Sessions
Mon, Nov 10th 2014 9:19a Colleen Burns
Most industry conferences present attendees a mixture of strategy, demonstrations and hard-core technical content. I've always compared conferences to restaurants; you look at the menu, get started with an appetizer, and then dig into the main course, right? Well, for the "down in the trenches" folks who build/maintain servers and put these technologies into production, the Infrastructure and Best Practices tracks are the "main course" at ConnectED; you'll hear hours' worth of ha |
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Social Business Unboxed (Ep6): IBM Study - Learning from Social Business Pioneers
Thu, Nov 6th 2014 12:12p Colleen Burns
Social Business Unboxed
Stories of Insight & Success in Digital Engagement
In this episode of Social Business Unboxed, we talk with Alison Fetherstonhaugh, Associate Consultant, IBM Center for Applied Insights, and Cynthya Paranadam, Sr. Marketing Manager IBM Social Business, about the recent IBM Study on Social Business. The Study, "Charting the Social Universe: Social Ambitions Drive Business Impact," uncovers how organizations pioneering social business are succeeding. In this |
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#20Questions with Katie Parsons
Thu, Nov 6th 2014 9:12a Colleen Burns
Meet Katie, Design Developer for IBM, who spends her days in the Austin Design Lab re-imagining how we design our products and solutions. Recently Katie has been focusing on re-thinking something that has essentially remained the same for over 20 years: email! Get ready to learn everything from where Katie gets her design inspiration to what her very first email address and screen name was back in the day.
For even more with Katie, be sure to check out her video interview:
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#20Questions with Kare Anderson
Wed, Nov 5th 2014 2:15p Colleen Burns
Meet Kare, Emmy-Award winning journalist, Forbes and Huffington Post columnist, author of acclaimed books, including Moving from Me to We, co-founder of the Say It Better Center, and newly featured Talk of the Day speaker on TED.com!
Learn how Kare reimagines our world for yourself by viewing her talk on becoming an Opportunity Maker. |
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A Fresh, Outside-In Perspective on App Dev at ConnectED 2015
Wed, Nov 5th 2014 8:12a Colleen Burns
This year's App Dev track at IBM ConnectED will provide some new and exciting perspectives on IBM's vision and direction for application development. There will be, of course, foundational sessions like "Domino App Dev Futures," and you'll hear about XPages and Connections and WebSphere. But what makes me really like the content in this year's track is that we've started thinking about application development from the outside in. Sessions will cover strategies like Agile De |
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#20Questions with Allison Hwang
Tue, Nov 4th 2014 12:12p Colleen Burns
Meet Allison, UX Designer/Researcher for IBM, who spends her days in the Austin Design Lab re-imagining how we design our products and solutions. Recently Allison has been focusing on re-thinking something that has essentially remained the same for over 20 years: email! Get ready to learn everything from Allison's three-word summary of IBM's future social and collaboration product to which celebrity Allison would want to receive a personal email from.
For even more with Alli |
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We Are All Cogs Working for Slave-drivers as We Go about Our Daily Drudgery
Tue, Nov 4th 2014 10:11a Colleen Burns
Sounds pretty depressing right? Yet if you look up synonyms for employee you will find “cog” and “slave.” Synonyms for manager include “slave-driver” and “zookeeper.” Finally, synonyms for “work” include “drudgery” and “daily grind.” I often tell people that “work as we know it is dead” and this is exactly what I’m talking about |
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Insights on Engagement with Social, Mobile and Analytics
Mon, Nov 3rd 2014 11:20a Colleen Burns
“The true potential of mobile and social in the enterprise is realized only when these technologies are combined with analytics to deliver relevant insights to the right people, at the right time, in the right place.”
- Maria Winans, IBM Insight 2014
The potential Winans spoke of in her keynote address at IBM Insight 2014 is not just for enterprises, but for customers and employees as well. All stand to gain from the convergence of these technologies, as analytic |
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Securing the Social World
Thu, Oct 30th 2014 10:12a Colleen Burns
Social technologies are challenging old behaviors in organizations. It's no longer a question of if employees interact with customers and the outside world using emerging media, it's how.
Highlighted at Jason Keenaghan's IBM Insight session, "Security Tips for Protecting Your Business in the Social World," the challenge is to manage this new form of distributed openness -- to protect employee customer engagement against innumerable dangers, from brand contamination to information |
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Creating a successful system of engagement
Wed, Oct 29th 2014 2:12p Colleen Burns
We all saw the power of social/mobile this past summer when the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge swept not only the nation, but the world. Playful in its nature, the Challenge goaded millions to accept and post their videos – more than 6M videos on YouTube alone. Hand-in-hand with those posts was more than $100,000,000 in donations, in less than 60 days! Playful? Yes. Powerful? Absolutely. Why? One reason was because it was a very personal engagement.
What if you could bring that type of |
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Analyzing the power of employee engagement
Wed, Oct 29th 2014 11:15a Colleen Burns
A resounding theme at IBM Insight this year is the growing desire of companies to evolve into customer-centric organizations. Much of the discussion understandably revolves around using analytics to collect, understand and make decisions about customer acquisition and retention.
However, a critical foundation for customer engagement is something much closer to home -- specifically, the employees that interact with customers. And, just as importantly, the way employees engage within the orga |
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To Reach Customers, Think Like a Customer
Tue, Oct 28th 2014 12:12p Colleen Burns
By now we’ve all heard the story of the retailer that got into a bit of hot water by targeting pregnant women with specific ads that in one case in particular ended up revealing to a father that his daughter was pregnant. Way back in 2002, according to an article in the New York Times, marketers were already working on how to “figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know.”
This of course raised all sorts of concerns over priva |
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Is analytics the key to digital engagement?
Mon, Oct 27th 2014 2:12p Colleen Burns
It’s a question many companies are asking right now – how do you transform enterprise culture to increase employee engagement and foster relationships with customers? According to a Social Business session at IBM Insight today, the answer is to build on analytics as the foundation of your engagement strategy.
As the use of social technology increases dramatically, organizations are finding a need to create an enterprise-wide strategy for social implementation and adoption. |
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HIPAA in the IBM Cloud!
Wed, Oct 22nd 2014 8:15a Colleen Burns
Cloud computing has matured dramatically in the years since IBM initially introduced social, mobile, meetings and mail cloud offerings.
Within the past two years alone, customers have reconciled many privacy and security concerns, and cloud adoption has soared. For IBM customers, this has been in part due to IBM’s cloud governance and controls at the center of our service delivery.
This is a true tipping point—where even companies in regulated industries are adop |
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Concrete Sunflowers May Bring Energy to Millions
Tue, Oct 21st 2014 9:12a Colleen Burns
Did you know that concrete was invented by the Romans roughly 2,000 years ago? Think of the Pantheon, one of the most beautiful (at least to my mind) monuments in a city overflowing with stunning architecture. It was commissioned during the reign of the Emperor Augustus by Marcus Agrippa and its dome still holds the record as the largest ever built of unreinforced concrete. Yes, concrete.
I was thinking about concrete’s ancient origins when Gianluca Ambrosetti, head of research f |
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Susan Etlinger and Time-Tested Thinking Skills for Today’s Data Profusion
Mon, Oct 20th 2014 10:12a Colleen Burns
or, Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Data?
At work not too long ago I was looking for a particular statistic for a presentation. I found several relevant stats and perhaps not surprisingly, some of them contradicted each other. I was tempted to cherry-pick the stat that would fit best in the presentation, but my conscience wouldn’t let me take that easy way out. So I hunkered down for what I knew would be the arduous job of trying to determine which stat was considered the most |
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Social Business Unboxed: A World Gone Social with Mark Babbitt and Ted Coiné
Thu, Oct 16th 2014 11:12a Colleen Burns
Social Business Unboxed
Stories of Insight & Success in Digital Engagement
In this episode of Social Business Unboxed, we talk with Mark Babbitt and Ted Coiné about their new book, "A World Gone Social: How Companies Must Adapt to Survive." An IBM Social Business Reading Club selection for September, I thought you might find this discussion valuable.
We discussed some of the key topics in the book, including: - How leaders can engage their workforce and customers in so |
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Mission Possible
Thu, Oct 16th 2014 8:12a Colleen Burns
Good afternoon, Bosses,
On today’s 56th anniversary of Boss’s Day I have a challenge for all you fearless leaders. Let’s call it: “Mission: Take Your Employees to Lunch.”
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, involves the reworking of an effective workplace. You must select two of your team members to take to lunch – one of whom must be a millennial.
Once you have been seated at the café or restaura |
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Chef Watson Commemorates World Food Day
Wed, Oct 15th 2014 12:15p Colleen Burns
The United Nations has declared October 16 to be World Food Day, and the theme for 2014 is "Feeding the World and Caring for the Earth." To help with the UN’s goal to raise awareness of issues such as food security and malnutrition, the Chef Watson team issued a food challenge to our beta user Facebook group: with the help of Chef Watson, create a tasty recipe using some of the most commonly wasted food items in your kitchen.
We’ve already received some inspiring entries, |
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Define Your Social Ambition, Integrate with Cloud, Mobile and Analytics, and Break Away from Your Competition!
Wed, Oct 15th 2014 8:12a Colleen Burns
In my role as social business evangelist, I spend a lot of time helping businesses adopt social across the organization.
It was great to recently see that some of this has been paying off! According to the 2014 Business Tech Trends report, organizations have increased social deployment by 106 percent since 2012! (Watch full replay here to learn more about the study.)
Integrating social technologies is a marathon not a sprint, but if you want to be number 1, then think of the number |
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Brad Bird and the Shared Experience at the Heart of Movie Magic
Tue, Oct 14th 2014 9:18a Colleen Burns
Readers of the Social Business Insights blog already know the power of sharing. Sharing information leads to efficiency; sharing expertise unlocks innovation; sharing data yields insights. In his TED@IBM talk “Dreaming Loves Company: Tomorrow’s Cinema,” Academy Award-winning writer and director Brad Bird explained how the shared experience lies at the heart of the magic of cinema. He was preaching to the choir as far as I, an avid movie-goer, was concerned, but it w |
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Trust in Transparency
Mon, Oct 13th 2014 8:11a Colleen Burns
I did my luddite dad a favor and downloaded the latest weather app to his iPhone as he looked over my shoulder. I couldn’t believe his reaction when he saw me click “OK” to the following prompt: “Weather Would Like to Use Your Current Location.” It was as though I had just committed the most offensive crime known to man by exposing his whereabouts and intruding upon his privacy.
My dad immediately had me google how to disable the invasive l |
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Re-imagining Your Work Space with IBM Connections
Thu, Oct 9th 2014 2:12p Colleen Burns
In today’s workplace, distractions are everywhere. It is increasingly difficult to juggle the many devices, communication channels, and the flood of information in order to focus on work at hand.
So reducing the “noise” is a prominent theme across the enhancements and offerings that are new to IBM’s collaboration solutions.
The latest advances in our cloud offerings simplify how to get work done, creating new ways to help focus on what’s impo |
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Lisa Seacat DeLuca: Inventing the Future
Thu, Oct 9th 2014 12:15p Colleen Burns
Every kid knows it: inventors are cool. It’s one of the things we want to be when we grow up, right up there with firefighter, ballerina or astronaut. But as we get older, we realize the improbability of having “Inventor” on our business card.
Thankfully, Lisa Seacat DeLuca never gave up on that dream. In her TED@IBM talk, “An Inventor’s Vision of the Future,” she told us about her first invention, a full-length umbrella she not o |
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Triangulating Your Direction in the Social Universe
Wed, Oct 8th 2014 9:12a Colleen Burns
What the Cheshire Cat Can Teach Us about Social Business Strategy
Alice in Wonderland: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
How do today’s enterprises chart their journey to become a social business? There are modern methods but perhaps we should also look at one of the tools we have used to find our way to a specific point for millennia: Triangulation.
Triangulation is the process of figuring a distance with angles to kn |
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Plan Your Social Agenda for IBM Insight 2014
Tue, Oct 7th 2014 2:12p Colleen Burns
This year at IBM Insight—IBM’s premier event for all things data—we’ll host an Engagement track with key topics from IBM Social Business that put the focus on driving people-centric engagement and creating meaningful relationships with customers. If you’re attending Insight in Las Vegas, October 26-30, be sure to add these sessions to your agenda to learn how you can use Social technologies to meet your business goals, and visit us in the Expo Ce |
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The Foundation of Social Business Is the Employee Relationship
Tue, Oct 7th 2014 10:12a Colleen Burns
In all the (justified) excitement about social business, it's all too easy to overlook the employee relationship, which is the foundation for nearly everything you do.
Whether you're trying to make your business social inside the enterprise, or to better engage the outside world, you're depending on your individual employees to build, maintain and leverage their social bonds.
Remember the saying, "It's not personal, it's just business?" Today, the saying would be, "If |
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Deeper Healing through Quiet…and Big Data Analytics
Tue, Oct 7th 2014 6:10a Colleen Burns
Every hospital drama I’ve ever watched, from “Grey’s Anatomy” to “ER” to “St. Elsewhere,” at some point trots out the familiar trope of the patient with the arcane illness. It’s misdiagnosed at first and maybe it’s even partially ignored until eventually a lone doctor somewhere has a flash of insight and saves the patient’s life with a brilliant diagnosis.
It’s a trope fo |
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Brainstorming 2.0 - How to Get Better Ideas Faster
Tue, Oct 7th 2014 6:10a Colleen Burns
We continue to experience an amazing outpouring of “disruptive technologies.” Consider how digital camera technology turned the whole film industry inside-out and think about what’s on the horizon – wearable computers, intelligent assistants, anticipatory computing. And all of this is tied into a growing network of social activities. To stay ahead of the curve, businesses are going to have to do better at innovation and ideation. How do we come up with new |
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