Congratulations on selecting an excellent publication! IBM Lotus Connections: Planning and Implementing Social Software for Your Enterprise begins by covering the foundational concepts of social software such as positioning social software vis-à-vis other software approaches in the market today. It then facilitates effective organizational planning by documenting key organizational considerations for business adoption and exploitation of the social software.

In my experience in working with clients globally, developing a business adoption plan that is strongly linked to corporate priorities and imperatives is key to achieving success and to maximizing the return on investment in the platform. In the planning phase, it is critical to understand your specific use cases for the software, because (although some use cases will be common across installations) it is likely that you will have some specialized use cases tied to your business processes and/or industry. To help guide you through this planning process, the authors of this book highlight key considerations that will accelerate or impede adoption of a new software platform. Another critical consideration for the adoption of social software is organizational culture. The book explores this subject through a discussion of enablers, behaviors, values, and assumptions. The questions that the authors include provide a solid planning foundation for your organization. I have found this to be an important (but often overlooked) phase by clients.

After providing the planning foundation, the authors provide details on the Lotus Connections software itself. Lotus Connections is the first social software product to market that is designed specifically for the enterprise. IBM Lotus shipped the initial Lotus Connections product in 2007. Since its inception, Lotus Connections has won numerous awards and has earned the distinction of being the fastest-growing new software product introduced by IBM Lotus.

Lotus Connections provides a set of core services: Profiles, Communities, Blogs, social bookmarks (Dogear), and Activities. Additionally, a user-customizable home page is provided so that users can tailor the social software environment for their specific use. Each of the Lotus Connections services has been developed for businesses. For example, the Profiles service provides rich profiles with social context that makes expertise location much simpler. You can view an employee’s background, status, published files, tags, and colleagues. Additionally, you can post updates and comments. A key benefit to the rich social profiles is that they facilitate stronger networks, thus enabling your employees to tap into expertise across your firm. This is no longer a “nice to have” feature but a core requirement for the majority of businesses today; in 2007, 83% of IT executives considered their company to be a virtual workplace—up from 57% in 2006. Moreover, the number of virtual workers has increased by 800% in the first part of this decade.

The Communities service allows users to create, find, join, and work with groups of people who share a common interest, responsibility, or area of expertise. Blogs facilitate the use of a weblog to present ideas and get feedback from others. Common uses of blogs are executive communications and blogging by subject matter experts for consumption by the masses. Dogear provides the capabilities to save, organize, and share bookmarks. You can discover bookmarks that have been qualified by others with similar interests and expertise. I personally use this feature regularly in my work. I have also “watchlisted” individuals whom I view as experts. By reviewing what they bookmark, I can more effectively stay current on the IT industry. Their bookmarks effectively allow me to focus on those articles on the Internet that are most relevant to me, thus filtering out the noise in the market. Lastly, the Activities feature allows you to organize your work, plan your next steps, and easily tap into your expanding professional network to help execute your everyday deliverables faster. A benefit here is that today’s work involves dynamic processes that are being delivered by dispersed groups of people. This work involves email, IM chats, forms, team discussions, documents, presentations, spreadsheets, files, and so on. The Activities feature facilitates this new way of working across the firm by structuring these ad hoc activities and providing a way to harvest best-practice templates for the future.

Inside IBM, Lotus Connections provides a core set of collaboration capabilities that bridges people and information. IBM has more than 320,000 employees across 165 countries and several divisions, including Systems and Technology Group, Software Group, Sales and Distribution, Global Business Services, Global Technology Services, and more. IBM’s employees are highly mobile and increasingly global as we continue to expand in the emerging markets. IBM Lotus Connections has addressed some key challenges inside IBM, including the following:

IBM introduced Profiles as an online corporate directory of personas, providing more context than the traditional contact information—skills background, reporting structure, photos, and audio files. Profiles holds more than 515,000 profiles and serves more than 1.2 million searches per week. It is also the hub of both user requests and all application authentication. Since so many IBMers have common interests, Communities was adopted to bring these groups of people together to share and exchange information, post events, and meet with others of similar interests. IBM Community Map lists more than 1,800 communities with 147,000 members. Blogs were introduced as a way for employees to have a voice, share their work experience, discuss the projects they work on, and find each other. With blogs, the entire organization now has a way to discuss their work with no organizational boundaries. IBM hosts 52,000 individual weblogs and 400 group weblogs. IBMers use Dogear to have bookmarks centrally located, making management of bookmarks much easier. IBM’s Dogear system has more than 580,000 bookmarks, of which a third are intranet links and less than 3% are private. The Activities feature facilitates cross-functional teams and the ability to use templates as a way to document and execute best processes. IBM’s Activities service has more than 50,000 activities with more than 425,000 entries.

I would like to thank the authors for creating this book. I hope that you find the book to be as informative as I do and that it facilitates a deeper understanding of IBM Lotus Connections and how it can provide both business and technology benefits to your organization.