The tech giant is working on a number of different ways to use social networking technologies such as blogs and wikis as collaboration tools, both in-house and for its customers.CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—E-mail applications, instant messaging clients and other traditional workplace collaboration systems have been outdated by more comprehensive social networking tools such as Web logs and wikis, so get used to it.
Well, maybe not yet.
But executives and researchers gathered at IBM Corp.'s Lotus Software division here on Monday endorsed the idea that consumer-oriented social networking technologies are becoming more mature, and finding paths into business.
While Lotus has made its name providing the workplace communication tools widely in use in most organizations today, the company is betting that the office of the future will be laced with more open, widely available workforce automation systems.
Web logs, more commonly known as blogs, have mostly been seen as a nuisance to corporations thus far, reserved primarily as online cauldrons of disenchantment for unhappy customers or cynical employees taking aim at their not-so-favorite companies.
Wikis, or collaborative server programs that ask users to contribute to shared Web sites, have been used mainly by nocturnal software programmers and considered too quirky for many practical business uses.
Why corporate blogs are boring (and how to fix them). Click here to read more.
IBM wants that to change. To do so, the Armonk, N.Y.-based company has been working to build blogs, wikis and many variations of the collaborative tools into a new generation of productivity applications.
By adding industrial-strength search and security capabilities to the systems, experts said that new collaborative tools are being created that could eventually replace the most commonly used forms of communication in the workplace today.
Specifically, researchers for IBM said that advancements in blogging and wiki-type platforms will allow companies to create sophisticated data-sharing, or knowledge management systems allowing workers to better distribute information to make companies run more efficiently.
Another major benefit of the systems will be to help people find topical experts more quickly, a major headache in companies the size of IBM, which had just under 370,000 workers in 2004
"Old knowledge management systems didn't go anywhere because the ability to get tacit knowledge onto paper and distribute that information was too convoluted," said Irving Wladowsky-Berger, vice president of technical strategy and innovation at IBM.
"Now, (social networking systems) can contribute to an organizations' ability to communicate much more intelligently, that's what's revolutionizing this area of technology."
IBM workers have already created over 20,000 internal blogs and the firm is studying ways to take that content and turn it into systems that employees can use to find each other, answer questions and communicate with fellow employees.
From project-oriented applications that allow teammates to keep a closer eye on the progress of their shared work, to Thinkplace, an online "idea marketplace" where IBM employees can suggest answers to many different types of problems, the firm is embracing social networking tools to improve productivity and directly address internal goals.
Outside its own walls, IBM is creating applications that promise to give businesses the ability to make sense of the volumes of information they too can amass by encouraging their workers and customers to use blogs or wikis, such as its Public Image Monitoring System.
The offering is a software framework designed for building analytical applications that businesses can use to study latent meanings and relationships stored in the volumes of content created by their workers and customers.
"New applications using blogs are becoming an innovative way for business leaders to feed information to a broader organization," said Mike Rhodin, general manager of IBM's Workplace, Portal and Collaboration division.
"Companies are flipping the model for knowledge management by using collaborative communications applications in real-time, which inherently removes (information) bottlenecks."
Another example of the sort of applications IBM hopes to support can be found in one of the company's mass collaboration and problem-solving events, known as Jams, where the firm asks workers to suggest solutions to a set of issues or problems with no consideration given to their rank, job or experience.
By creating a centralized online resource where anyone in the company can contribute to the quandaries the firm said it not only finds answers faster, but also allows employees to find out who among them has experience on a particular topic, or which workers they might collaborate with for other projects.
Click here to read about the pros and cons of corporate blogs.
One IBM customer on hand to lend its support to the advancement of new social networking applications was investment bank Morgan Stanley, which said that it is testing tools meant to help its employees communicate more effectively while keeping a record of those interactions on hand in a central location for compliance with government data-management edicts such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
Stephen Sparkes, CIO of the firm's Investment Banking division, admitted that earlier attempts at Morgan Stanley to create internal expertise-tracking systems "failed miserably" because they were too hard to use and promote to workers.
Sparkes said however, that corporate blogs and wikis with rigid controls for editing information and protecting customer confidentiality are showing signs of having much greater success.
"We knew that the ability to better network individuals could provide immediate benefits and help move the company to real time, to shift how people collaborate," Sparkes said.
"For something like Sarbanes-Oxley, we can take all the information we're retaining and turn into a useful archive that can be mined for commercial purposes. Social networking can help us turn that data into a body of best practices expertise as we bring in regulations."
In addition to helping companies organize, retain and share information more intelligently, experts said that social networking tools will also help businesses focus on the quality of individuals' unique contributions to their employers.
By gathering evidence of workers' specific contributions, businesses will be able to give credit to people who come up with truly innovative ideas, rather than hand down praise through levels of corporate hierarchy, said Dr. Bill Ives, an author and independent consultant focused on the arena of social networking.
On the flip side, such top-down scrutiny will make it harder for people to hide behind the work of their colleagues or take individual credit for successes of many, he said.
"Blogs and wikis have the opposite effect of keeping unique ideas down, and may even inspire people to try harder at their jobs based on the (increased visibility) of their work," said Ives.
Editor's Note: This story was updated to include additional product details on IBM's Public Image Monitoring Solution.
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