IBM Software White Paper Executive Summary

Collaboration Solutions

Becoming a Social Business

Why organizations choose IBM solutions
2 Becoming a Social Business

Contents
What is a “Social Business”?
2 Introduction
“Organizations that apply emerging technologies like
2 Social business means opportunity Web 2.0 accompanied by organizational, cultural, and
process changes to improve business performance in an
3 New, social ways of working
increasingly connected global economic environment.”2
5 Cleaning up the document-centric mess

6 Open, modern technologies that adapt to your needs—

not the other way around Social Business means opportunity
Individuals are sources for an incredibly valuable array of infor-
7 Investing heavily in research and development
mation, ranging from content to expert opinion to personal and
8 The right company to help you become a Social Business professional networks. As the rapid growth of social networking
and mobility has erased the boundaries that separated individuals
in the past, people increasingly use their relationships with other
“Standout organizations are 57 percent more people to discover and use this information in order to accom-
likely to allow their people to use social and plish innumerable tasks. New opportunities for growth, innova-
tion, and productivity, therefore, exist for organizations that
collaborative tools.”1 encourage people—employees, customers and partners—across
the business network to engage one another and build trusted
Introduction relationships. To do so, organizations are applying new socially
As global business accelerates ever faster and companies work to collaborative environments that support richer means of
quickly respond to customer demands, competitive threats and interacting. They are transforming the way they work in order
rapidly evolving trends, the richness and efficiency of social col- to become Social Businesses.
laboration plays a key role in enabling future success. The chal-
lenge then is finding the best approach. For more than 20 years, IBM is on the leading edge of helping organizations become
IBM has been a leader in the enterprise collaboration space, with Social Businesses because IBM has social collaboration in its
a successful track record of delivering innovative solutions to DNA. Many vendors, such as Microsoft® and smaller, one-
many of the world’s largest corporations and its most dynamic dimensional players are only recently entering the space in
small businesses. This paper will help you understand IBM’s response to trends, providing only basic social features with
approach to help you become a Social Business and why IBM is their products. IBM, on the other hand, which is recognized
best suited to help organizations apply collaboration across glob- as a social platform marketplace leader by IDC3, delivered its
ally distributed organizations in new ways that will help drive fourth major social collaboration platform release in 2010. Over
long term success. 400,000 IBM employees use IBM software for social collabora-
tion, helping them do their jobs better.
 IBM Software 3

Organizations turn to IBM as a trusted partner with deep experi- Creating “exceptional experiences” for people
ence in the social space and for collaboration software solutions The added efficiency of a people-centric approach can pay big
for three main reasons: dividends when you consider that people can waste significant
amounts of time daily trying to track down information or
● To capitalize on new, more social ways in which people work expertise within their own organization. Some of the products
and interact with one another available in the marketplace may do little to help with finding
● To clean up the mess caused by document-centric approaches expertise because they are not integrated into the way people
to collaboration work. Such solutions need to be accessed through a completely
● To embrace open, modern technology built to evolve with separate interface. As a result, before they can take any
their needs collaboration-related steps, people may need to leave the appli-
cation or process on which they are working for a potentially
confusing user interface. In contrast, IBM solutions help create
an exceptional work experience by embedding social capabilities
“ Individuals who are very technically special- in the applications and business processes people use to do their
jobs. For example, people using Microsoft Word software or a
ized are sharing knowledge using wikis, call center or sales force application can tap directly into their
blogs and communities, and, for the first professional networks from the applications, without losing the
time in our history, we are learning how context of their work. The IBM approach can help increase
worker productivity and accelerate adoption by achieving the
products can be made successful in other following:
marketplaces.”
● Adding new social capabilities to applications that people
already know how to use
—Gilberto Garcia, innovation director, CEMEX
● Enabling search that is not limited to content or subject, but
incorporates social tagging to improve results
● Showcasing subject experts in the context of the business
New, social ways of working process being performed, such as providing customer support
To optimize organizational effectiveness, today’s businesses or preparing a sales proposal
require new means of collaboration. IBM collaboration solutions
create people-centric ways of working by infusing social capabili-
ties into the way they work. A people-centric approach puts the
emphasis on people—their identities, their expertise, their inter-
ests, the content they’ve created—to break down the barriers to
connecting individuals to the right information and expertise
that can help them excel at their jobs.
4 Becoming a Social Business

“ We needed a powerful tool to connect our

people all over the world. We chose Lotus
Connections software because it is a powerful
collaboration platform that goes way beyond
the simple sharing of documents. Further-
more, it is people-centric instead of project- or
document-centric.”

—Michiel Boreel, CTO, Sogeti Group

Keeping people connected, everywhere

Today, people are always on the go. And with the explosive
Figure 1: IBM collaboration solutions help people connect to experts and the
richness of their work, not just their contact details. growth in Smartphone use, people can accomplish more while
on the go than ever before. To optimize their effectiveness,
Providing in-context answers with social analytics people need up-to-date information and access to experts and
To complement social capabilities, IBM solutions provide content at all times and in the most convenient way possible.
embedded marketplace-leading social analytics. These analytical Because IBM recognizes that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all
tools “learn” from interactions and associations among people, mobility answer for all types of people, we support the following:
topics and ideas. The tools capture and aggregate information by
examining content, social relationships and interaction activities
● Scalable platforms that translate to mobile devices with full
to create personalized experiences and recommendations for functionality
each individual. Social analytics takes collaboration to the next
● Interoperability across leading device types, including
level by making the social network intelligent, helping increase BlackBerry, Apple iPhone and iPad, Android, Nokia and
its value over time. Benefits include the following: Windows Phone platforms
● Powerful security to help protect information
● Reducing the “noise” that causes distraction by filtering out
irrelevant information
● Improving work output by recommending relevant content
and expertise
● Enabling expertise discovery by building reputations that iden-
tify subject matter experts
 IBM Software 5

Cleaning up the document-centric mess

The ability to easily share information has never been more
important. At the same time, the use of document-centric tools
(that is, tools that were designed for simplifying how files are
created and exchanged) as collaboration hubs has led to multiple
challenges.

Eliminating silos of overlapping information

Many organizations have large numbers of poorly integrated
silos of information that often pop up like weeds across depart-
ments throughout the organization. Each silo is built for a
specific team, obscuring valuable information from non–team
members. What’s more, over time, this document-centric
approach tends to spawn more and more individual team sites,
ballooning storage and administration costs. IBM solutions can
help organizations overcome the collaboration limitations of
these siloed repositories and reduce costs by achieving the
following:

● Providing an integrated view across team sites to gain visibility

Figure 2: IBM solutions for Social Business translate to practically all popular throughout the organization as a whole, making information
mobile devices.
accessible to everyone
● Offering people-centric solutions that connect people and
Additionally, IBM has created specialized, productivity-boosting information using rich profiles, blogs, wikis and other social
capabilities for on-the-go simplicity, including the following: features, which make those artifacts visible beyond just the
team site
● Easy-to-use quick searches for contact lists and user directories ● Promoting the importance of people and their expertise by
● Click-to-call and click-to-conference features embracing new, creative ways of expression and easier ways to
● Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) enablement find one another and needed resources, rather than locking
● Customized offline applications and access users into rigid sharing and collaboration approaches
● An intuitive interface for multitasking
Controlling the proliferation of duplicate information in
The goal is to optimize productivity and accessibility by creating overlapping team sites
an innovative social environment accessible everywhere, which is The amount of information available within organizations con-
tailored to the needs of each individual user. tinues to grow rapidly. As a result, yesterday’s document-sharing
approaches—which showcase email inboxes and network
6 Becoming a Social Business

drives—often exacerbate challenges related to storage, mainte- Open, modern technologies that adapt to
nance and complexity by creating copies and replicated files. your needs—not the other way around
Alternatively, IBM collaboration tools can help reduce manage- As the document-centric approach loses favor, organizations
ment challenges by enabling users to do the following: need a path forward to help them evolve to a people-centric way
of working. Unfortunately, some vendors would prefer to attach
● Actively manage files among large groups of people from a collaboration capabilities more tightly to the document creation
single, centralized location, helping reduce version-related and management tools of the past to lock organizations into
confusion with strong administrative oversight their document-centric platform. Others can provide only tools
● Provide feedback viewable to all members—who can respond with limited reach that are costly to scale and integrate at an
to and comment on the feedback as well—in centralized loca- enterprise level. IBM believes that open platforms are the pre-
tions outside the confines of email- and file-processing ferred direction for organizations, integrating with the tools of
programs the past but able to evolve readily to the changing demands of
● Rate the usefulness and relevancy of files located in designated the future.
areas—helping make search capabilities more effective
● Tag files for search and discovery by others across an
organization

Easing the governance burden

“ We looked at several providers, such as
Team site proliferation can make infrastructure management BPOS and Google Apps, but finally decided
very costly and difficult. For example, team sites often result in to go with IBM because it gave us the same
duplicate files, sites and site memberships. Additionally, “dead”
team sites can contribute to old and unwanted information that
options and features and everything we
bog down enterprise searches. Not only do these factors create a needed, plus the LotusLive™ solution was
confusing management burden for IT, they can also lead to poor the only one to give us free guest accounts.
user experiences when people need to log in multiple times and
go to different places to access the content they need. The guest account feature is very important
for us, being a small company, because we
The IBM approach to collaboration provides an effective way to
manage and keep control of your collaboration environment and
work with over 700 translators and several
eliminate team site redundancy. By enabling you to access exist- hundred customers all over the world, and so
ing sites from a single location, it gives you a way to contain we just can’t afford to pay for so many
team site proliferation, while simplifying user and login manage-
ment. Ultimately, the IBM approach can help to improve the accounts.”
user experience by enabling people to find help and share infor-
mation through a single central method rather than having to —Sonja Kirschstein, director of projects, aatranslations
search through multiple sites to find what they need.
 IBM Software 7

Building on open platforms to avoid lock-in ● Integrated email, web conferencing, social networking and col-
To increase return on investment (ROI) and keep costs under laboration, which can help simplify and improve daily business
control, organizations need comprehensive technologies that can interactions with customers, partners and colleagues virtually
be easily integrated with their existing systems, while providing anytime and anywhere
flexibility for future changes. IBM solutions are built on an open ● A convenient and cost-effective online delivery model that
architecture that gives you more choice and flexibility over the helps reduce costs and start-up time, eliminating complicated
long term by supporting the following: installations and reducing onsite IT support requirements
● Security-rich features designed to help protect against system
● Vendor choice, to integrate the right capabilities to fit business vulnerabilities and unwanted intrusions
needs ● Comprehensive services for a single, competitive monthly fee
● Avoidance of costly rip-and-replace upgrades ● Complimentary guest access
● Transparent pricing to avoid hidden costs associated with min-
imum requirements and mandatory tie-ins Investing heavily in research and
● Extensive integration to leverage your existing assets development
● The creation of personalized systems designed to support your IBM is going to great lengths to develop next-generation
people’s specific needs technologies that help clients become Social Businesses, while
evolving the existing portfolio. We have invested heavily in
Moving to the cloud to increase competitive advantage
research for advancing mobile services and capabilities and
Given ongoing developments in cloud computing, new money
opened a research development center for developing software
saving opportunities and computing models have arisen. For
for mobile solutions. The newly launched IBM Center for
companies seeking to lower costs and enable better cost struc-
Social Software, opened in 2009, is charged with pushing
tures that can flex according to business fluctuations, or that are
technological boundaries and coming up with new ideas to
making a transition to a less-traditional office workplace, the
help solve the most difficult challenges related to collaborating
cloud is an increasingly popular alternative to standard
across distributed enterprises. Moreover, the award-winning
approaches. Moving to the cloud is advantageous because it lets
IBM developerWorks® website enables social interaction among
you reduce the amount of cumbersome hardware you manage,
eight million developers and IT professionals worldwide. And
while providing improved access to collaboration capabilities for
regular IBM Jam events bring together people beyond our com-
workers distributed beyond the office. Additional benefits of
pany to generate new ideas. As a pioneer in applying Web 2.0
cloud computing include potentially significant cost savings
technology to business, IBM is delivering innovation that mat-
related to maintenance, repair and energy consumption; reduc-
ters to clients the world over.
tion of carbon footprints; faster startups; the near elimination of
complicated installations and upgrades; and potentially fewer IT
support issues. IBM believes that blending capabilities in The IBM developerWorks site won the
hybrid cloud and on-premises solutions provides further options
for companies looking for flexible ways to address their collabo-
2010 Forrester Groundswell award in the
ration needs. IBM cloud capabilities provide essential business business-to-business “supporting” category.4
services in a user-friendly environment, designed with
convenience in mind and able to deliver the following:
The right company to help you become a
Social Business
Leading organizations worldwide have made IBM their enter-
prise software vendor of choice for decades because of its focus
on delivering solutions designed to help people work smarter.
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2010
Today, more than one-third of Fortune Global 100 companies
have purchased social collaboration solutions from IBM Lotus Lotus Software
IBM Software Group
software. IBM stands out by achieving the following: One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
● Being an innovator in ways to channel the power of today’s U.S.A.
social collaboration tools Produced in the United States of America
● Creating intuitive, people-centric approaches to collaboration, December 2010
All Rights Reserved
compared with traditional document-centric collaboration
● Using open, modern technologies that support solutions that IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com and Lotus are trademarks of International
can be tailored to your specific business needs Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other
product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies.
A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the web at “Copyright and
IBM is infusing social capabilities into the way people work, trademark information” at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml
whereas other vendors are simply adding features that miss the Microsoft is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States,
opportunity to transform way business is done. As you continue other countries, or both.
your journey toward becoming a Social Business, look to IBM to References in this publication to IBM products or services do not imply that
help you make it a success. IBM intends to make them available in all countries in which IBM operates.

The information contained in this documentation is provided for

informational purposes only. While efforts were made to verify the
IDC identified IBM as the market share completeness and accuracy of the information contained in this
leader in social software platform providers documentation, it is provided “as is” without warranty of any kind, express
or implied. In addition, this information is based on IBM’s current product
in July 2010.5 plans and strategy, which are subject to change by IBM without notice.
IBM shall not be responsible for any damages arising out of the use of, or
otherwise related to, this documentation or any other documentation.
Nothing contained in this documentation is intended to, nor shall have
For more information the effect of, creating any warranties or representations from IBM (or its
To learn more about IBM solutions for Social Business, contact suppliers or licensors), or altering the terms and conditions of the applicable
your local IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit: license agreement governing the use of IBM software.
ibm.com/social 1
“Working Beyond Borders: Insights from the 2010 IBM Global Chief
Human Resource Officer Study,” IBM Global Business Services,
September 2010 (http://www.ibm.com/services/c-suite/chro/study.html).
Additionally, financing solutions from IBM Global Financing
can enable effective cash management, protection from technol- 2
“Social Business Framework: Using People as a Platform to Enable
ogy obsolescence, improved total cost of ownership and return Transformation,” Michael Fauscette, Erin Traudt and Mary Wardely,
IDC Report No. 223862, July 2010.
on investment. Also, our Global Asset Recovery Services help
3
address environmental concerns with new, more energy-efficient “IDC Worldwide Social Platforms Revenue by Vendor, 2007–2009,”
Erin Traudt and Michael Fauscette, IDC Report No. 223817, June 2010.
solutions. For more information on IBM Global Financing, visit:
4
ibm.com/financing “IBM developerWorks: The Technical Resource Choice for Millions
of Developers” (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aboutdw/
groundswell2010.html).
5
“IBM Named Worldwide Marketshare Leader in Social Platforms
Software,” IBM press release, July 2010 (http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/
pressrelease/32050.wss).

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