Social Collaboration and the Market Place
Engaging with customers, partners, and employees drive greater productivity, efficiency, and innovation. In today’s time-driven world, companies can no longer be content with extended timelines and drawn out schedules. Employees, customers, and partners demand not only quick turnaround but want to be part of the process. Add to this the fact that more and more people are knowledge workers or spend at least part of their time with knowledge-based tools. All of this drives the need for the next generation of social collaboration tools. . IBM has taken a leadership position in the Social Collaboration space. They offer a strong suite of products that allow your company to be Social and gain entry into new business opportunities, employee satisfaction and better company communication.
IBM Social collaboration can help increase customer satisfaction by including them in your feedback loop and conversations . Social collaboration can help you create vibrant partner communities that decrease your support costs and increase partner retention. IBM Social Collaborative solutions focus on your specific needs, whether you simply want to share documents and calendars, create a feedback forum for your customers, or create topic-specific communities in which members can share everything from their profiles/skills to new content specific to the community. Social networking and collaboration solutions allow businesses to increase employee productivity by allowing users to access the resources necessary to do their jobs and find people faster. In today’s society, inter-connectivity goes beyond connecting computers and smart devices. The advance of Web 2.0 and social networking technologies has now shifted the focus to people networks. People are using social networking in staggering numbers with social blogs, twitter, Facebook, Linked In and many other social tools. Forward thinking companies are seizing the opportunity and dedicating much more resources and funds to Social Collaboration. They are integrating social collaboration capabilities into their strategies, operations, and processes. Whether it’s with customers, partners, or employees, these organizations use collaboration tools to improve efficiency, solve problems, create opportunities, boost productivity, and drive innovation that makes them more competitive and successful. Companies can help employees, partners, clients, and others engage with one another anytime and anywhere, by integrating business-focused collaboration solutions, including blogs, wikis, bookmarking, communities, team spaces, content management tools, enterprise IM, online meetings, audio and video chat, email, calendaring, and other collaborative applications, delivered on premises or in the cloud
IBM Social Collaboration Product Suite
o Connections – Social software for business, letting you access everyone in your professional network
o Connections Content Edition – A bundle that includes IBM Connections with industry-leading IBM FileNet Content Manager
o Connections Suite – IBM social software, unified communications, and robust document management capabilities in a single offering
o Lotus Notes and Domino – Bringing together messaging, social collaboration, and business applications into a unified dashboard
o Sametime – Unified, real-time communication and collaboration services, including enterprise instant messaging, online meetings, telephony, and video conferencing
Business Results
Many companies have found success with social collaboration by:
1) Using portal, social networking software for business, and real-time collaboration solutions to break down traditional communication boundaries and to accelerate the development of higher quality products.
2) Empowering project managers with a social collaboration solution from IBM that contributes to a 40 percent year-over-year increase in new business.
3) Finding efficiencies through a collaborative development solution resulting in large cost containment.
Based on industry studies, top notch companies will focus more on getting closer to the customer over and allow employees to use social and collaborative tools. Top tier companies are using social collaboration to entice customers, drive innovation and bring out the best in their business networks and employees. IBM has the tools and expertise to help you maximize the value of social collaboration in business environments, including profiles, blogs, wikis, bookmarking, tagging, activities, communities, shared files, team spaces with content management tools, enterprise instant messaging, online meetings, audio and video chat, email and calendaring, delivered on premises or in the cloud.
