Lotusphere Opening Session – Initial Highlights

I’m at Lotusphere and IBM threw a great opening session with a great band, Kevin Spacey to speak, and a look at what they are releasing and where they are going.  The theme is, “Get Social, Do Business”.   The key terms of this include:

• Social Business
• Web Experience
• Work Experience

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It’s actually a pretty unified theme and it makes a lot of sense given the value these tools can bring. (and yes, I really buy into the fact that a social network can bring a pretty large ROI)  Anyway, here’s the notes on what Lotus is doing:

Kevin Spacey Words of Wisdom

Kevin Spacey of Actor, stage actor, and producer fame was on hand to kick it off.  I believe IBM finally found a relevant speaker.  He’s relevant because Kevin actually launched a site called www.triggerstreet.com that is a community for screenwriters and directors to publish their ideas.  It was started as a channel to get better quality talent out there and allow them to get past the, “you don’t know anyone” problem.  Kevin was also the executive producer for the recent facebook movie, “Social Network”.  Best quote (ok, paraphrased quote)

Send the elevator back down.  If you have received benefit then help someone else who hasn’t had the opportunities you have had.

Key Themes

• A social business is an engaged, transparent and nimble business. That’s really the purpose of the whole thing.
• A social business helps people interact. It’s NOT focused on people interacting with documents
• McKinsey Studies prove that those who employ social technologies outperform their competitors
• BASF, the worlds largest chemical company,  is a great example of value provided by a social network.  A fungus threatened crops in China and a researcher in Germany found colleagues in Germany, Brazil, and India to find a chemical to control it. They then found a logistics specialist in Singapore to transport the chemical from India to China.  It call happened quickly because they were able to find the right people who had the knowledge to solve the problem and get the solution where it was needed.
• IBM uses social tools throughout their business ranging from HR to Marketing, to Product Development.
• There is a social business jam next week for those interested.  This is the chance to post your ideas and see where they go.

Summary

If Lotus is all about Social Business, then the end result is that their product suite has to inter-operate. It has to work with internal and external tools. It has to pull information and events from multiple sources and let you act on them with other people.  That’s the entire theme of what they term “Next”.  That includes Notes Next, Portal Next, Connections Next, etcv.