I just finished reading The Social Factor: Innovate, Ignite, and Win through Mass Collaboration and Social Networks, by Maria Azua. She served as IBM’s vice president of Technology and Innovation, where she helped implement social networking tool across IBM’s 125,000 global workforce. While not exactly a book about IBM’s practices, it does draw heavily on them. Overall I found the book a little long on generalities, and thin on specific examples. This might be exactly the book for an upper-level executive with little-to-no experience with social media. But anyone with an active Twitter or Facebook account will find much of it too basic.
That said there are some great ideas. For instance the chapter on Tagging and Social Clouds covers IBM’s effective use of tags and taxonomies across the enterprise. And using techniques such as keyword indexing of email and other communication to help build automated employee profiles. With the goal to make it easier for their distributed workforce to find people with specific expertise. This keyword indexing is also use for the communications during their JAM innovation events, to map idea trends in real time. There are cautions about the obvious privacy issues this type of thing raises.
But as a concept it is a powerful idea. We’re in an age generating EXABYTES of information (and baby, that’s one big number!) This is exactly how technology should be used to help us make sense of it, and start to glean some wisdom from the crowd. Why should advertisers be the only smart ones? We knowledge-driven companies need the same kind of information.
So the book is worth a quick skim, to catch the good bits (chap. 5, 9 & 10 for me). I suggest your local college library.
IBM’s Jams and other Web 2.0 collaborative mediums are opening up tremendous possibilities for collaborative innovation — ways of working across industries, disciplines, and national borders.
IBM Innovation Jam: Experiences and Techniques
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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