Lotusphere Opening General Session

So I, Mark Polly, and Jonathan are at Lotusphere.  The opening session always provides an interesting set of news.  Here’s the key highlights

To start OK GO played three songs to kick it off.  They have some interesting internet music videos worth checking out.

Opening

As anyone who follows should expect, the theme is social, social, social. Alistair Rennie kicked it off by introducing Michael J Fox.  He’s as humorous as ever even as he talk the lighter side of life and Parkinsons Disease.

IBM defined social business as the applications of social tools and culture to a business, processes, and transactions.  It includes the transactions themselves and the insights you can gain from them.  It leads to an idea called collective intelligence.    Collective intelligence enables you to

1. augment skills and improve workload
2. Discover insights into your business
3. Improve the process

It’s a competitive differentiator. It brings about new platforms, cultures, skills, and insights.  It’s rethinking.  It’s like Moneyball.  Alistair makes the point that technology does matter, it’s just not the only part of the equation.

Key themes in the technology

1. Social networking
2. Content in motion (e.g social content)
3. Analytics
4. Process and information
5. All based on open standards so integration can occur to the social platform above

“Social Business is not an IT project. It cannot be a management edict.”  It’s Business made Social

Emerging roles will include Community Managers.

Demos

IBM Connections Next will include

• Improved Activity stream which is a single intelligent place that includes apps, external services, mails, feeds, etc.
• access to a wide variety of apps that let you act on transactions and content from the stream itself.  (really cool)
• Showed ProjExec from Trilog in the activity stream
• Showed a New Service Order from SAP in the stream that lets you act on it immediately
• Viewed a file, shared it, etc.  Even showed the ability to edit a document from the stream directly in the browser.
• created an Activity and assigned sections of the document to other people
• Read mail from your stream
• Quick view of calendar (like Exchange and Domino)
• Share always available
• Community
• New activity stream
• Ability to post community status updates
• Community owners have access to community metrics on people, participation, etc.
• Real time group video (via Polycom technology although I’m sure others can do it)
• Integration to ECM like Filenet
• includes checkin and checkout, editing of metadata
• Now shows related communities and allows you to associate your community to others. This would include internal and external communities
• Example: question on facebook can be transferred to an internal community forum
• Mobile experience for Connections looks really good
• Newspaper like approach makes it easily readable
• IBM Connections Mail
• as noted before, can connect to Outlook and Notes
• Pushes it all Connections in the stream
• IBM docs can be in the cloud or on your computer
• It’s part of a desire to unlock the content wherever it may reside
• “SharePoint is a document coffin“

New Mobile Capabilities

• Using Notes Traveler to do quick demo
• New Symphony (IBM version of OpenOffice) viewers
• Can upload from a connections app (he was using a tablet)
• Showed the next release of the Connections app on Android
• Has tighter integration with the hardware
• make call, send email, share business card all from the Connections app
• Sametime client can remain suspended in the background to save battery life
• Uses Apple notification service when message comes in
• Allows voip calls for voice and video
• Polycom, Aruba, and other partners enable this
• Also was using a Plantronics headset
• Just added support for Windows phones on Nokia devices

Client Story

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Bayer Material Science CIO, Kurt Derow spoke.  Bayer Material sicence researches a lot of materials innovations like using CO2 as material input and making nanofoam.  They decided to use IBM Connections and deployed small but quickly.  Connections use grew virally to several thousand users and is now rolling out to over 125,000 users.  Existing content will be migrated to Connections from other systems.

Operating a social business is changing a culture. Rather than use lists in excel to track users in a launch, they used tags in profiles to find for example key user and Melbourne.  It’s much more than just technology.  Psychology is involved as well. However, without easy to use technology they can’t make that next step.

Exceptional web Experience

Needs to be mobile, scalability, provide rich content, access to social communities, and access to analytics.  IBM created the Customer Experience Suite to provide all of these items.  New news.  IBM Experience Suite next is now open.  That includes PortalNext, WCMNext, and Web Experience Factory Next.

Demo

• Started with a tablet as main input device
• Mobile themes make it easier to take existing site and “mobilize it.
• Includes resize as real estate change and as landscape or portait mode changes
• Showed in context page management systems with access to authoring and analytics
• Edited a content article in the iPad
• Noted all of the out of the box features with themes, templates, etc.
• Key takeaway is that you don’t need to start from scratch
• Made changes to a video (that’s new in Next)
• Then dragged a new article onto a slide bar
• Showed new comments with highlights on content. That’s an interesting approach to using comments with more than just typing in a box
• Showed dashboards with data coming from a variety of systems
• Mashed with data coming from analytics, sentiment analysis, etc.
• Was able to drill down into sentiment on a specific piece of content
• Showed sentiment tracking on LS12 tweet. (It was positive)
• Showed comments in the sentiment analysis
• Highlighted that the site changes as the channel changes (move from table to laptop and it changes)
• Includes the ability to incorporate comments etc.
• Can turn on web analytics and show graphs inline for each piece of content.  (looks really cool)
• Shows survey results inline
• Bryan notes that it will easiliy integrate to smarter commerce (I’m somewhat skeptical of this but probably need to dive deeper before final judgement)
• Built a new page
• Used a number of page templates
• Like community
• made it externally facing and includes a number of portlets like activity stream, members, blogs, discussions, voting, etc.

Key stats

• Lufthansa processes 72,000 online transactions in 60 seconds
• Adding social into customer service process improves satisfaction by 18%
• See a 15% boost in revenue when implementing social
• 68% of people now access a social network through a mobile device
• 38% of mobile users make purchases via their device

Sandy Carter, “Websphere Portal plans to be THE social portal”

Denise Hatzidakis, CTO of Premier

Denise Hatzidakis, former Perficient rock star, spoke about what Premier is doing.  Their key challenge is about health reform.

“My first grader doesn’t think twice about seeing online assignment, grabbing a tablet and talking with cousins oversees.”

• A doctor may only have access to a limited amount of information.
• Knowledge and numbers may not be the end all be all.
• Once they have the intelligence, they need to find the triggers. “Shape the plume of data and define the world”
• It requires collaboration across the industry.  Today, healthcare sees a huge number of mistakes causing $18 billion on unnecessary expenses
• Connected care is becoming the new normal
• Premier wants to create an effective model for care and innovation

Notes and Domino Demos

• Enhancing Notes and Domino incorporates activity stream mentioned previously
• Lets in context content into your inbox
• Other applications that support open social standard can send it into your inbox
• Trilog
• Lombardi business process
• XPage apps can be emdedded
• change content in the app
• send the notification to mail
• Interact with the content in your email
• embed social services in your applications
• this includes a number of objects available from xpage designer
• Enhancing webmail and inotes
• Putting Sametime client into iNotes
• All the open social supported transactions are also supported in iNotes
• Notes doc links which usually need the Notes client are now available as web pages.  (Lots of excitement on this one)
• Note: it needs a browser plugin to do this
• Notes Social Edition coming soon
• All notes users now entitled to Connections Profile and Files.
• Xpages now uses Open Social
• Can now run Notes DB’s on the web.  Again, you get this via a browser plugin
• New XWork Server

Winner of the Social Business Application Development: Trilog Group

•  Building open social gadgets for almost all their services like profiles, etc.
• This seems like a very interesting way to extend those services outside of the IBM world

SmartCloud

Mike Rhodin, Senior VP in the IBM Software Group, spoke about the cloud. Cloud technologies represent opportunity to not only advance but reinvent IT.  IBM has been investing in cloud capabilities for the past decade.  This past fall, IBM launched IBM SmartCloud which is one location for all the Cloud offerings.

The newest addition to SmartCloud is LotusLive. LotusLive will join the SmartCloud as, “IBM SmartCloud for Social Business”  (say that ten times fast).

Client GAD talks about his company and how they reach and connect with customers.

• Banks rely on GAD to stay at the forefront of consumer changes
• GAD noticed consumers using iphones, ipads and other devices.
• GAD introduced WAVE.
• first goals was to have banks become social businesses
• enable banks to become independent of local client server environment
• create new service models
• cut expenses
• Launched Bank 21 web is a browser based solution in a private banking cloud
• solved the connectivity problem between a browser and all banking services
• can be inside the bank and between client and banks.  introduces new social capabilities
• Shows customers new service
• Introduces ECM capabilities
• Based on WebSphere, IMS, and DB2
• All in the cloud

Partner Award: Best Social Business Solution in the Cloud: Applicable Limited from the UK

Best of Lotusphere: Ascendant Technology

Guest Speaker

Dr. Jeffrey Burns, Chief of Critical Car at Children’s Hospital Boston.

• Medicine 100 years ago became more scientific.  Medical school and mentoring took off
• We have doubled our life expectancy
• Not much has changed.  It’s the same school and mentoring.
• But it doesn’t allow to scale this training and transactions
• Dr. Burns has done consults all over the globe
• Girl in Boston was critically ill with blood stream infection
• was not responding to treatments
• tried a few interventions and she lived
• Girl in Guatemala City
• Had same blood stream infection
• Opened up a video to Dr. Burns but had a bad video link
• Was able to give advice to help
• three months later he saw a father, mother and little girl. this was the girl from Guatemala city.
• This girl was saved using the internet
• Sometimes technology provides a window into saving lives
• Saw his son playing in teams with kids across the globe (Call of Duty of course)
• There are serious eduational principles involved
• form hypothesis, test it, get immediate feedback
• Then saw the adult learning cycle on the Masters Website
• Brought IBM Interactive in after seeing it.
• Rational things to improve kids health
• Immunize
• Infrastructure
• Need a solution for a resource limited environment
• built a collaborative site
• exists connected and disconnected
• worked with IBM, MIT online courses, and Dr. Burns team
• Provides information on demand for a reliable platform
• Provides a social network to connect doctors around the world
• Dr Burns for his expertise
• Malaria experts on Pacific Rim
• etc
• Provides training to show others how to “do”