SocialSphere

Lotusphere 2011 is about a thing that is called social business. It is about adopting technologies from social software tools we use in private life every day for business. It is about redesigning our traditional software tools for commmunication and collaboration into a new set of tools that meet the needs of todays employees. Working together the Facebook way.

After several session about social software, Enterprise 2.0 and our fast changing world of communication I try to put together the pieces I learned.

First there are many important buzzwords:

Activity Streams. No, these is not Activity Explorer Next, it the Facebook way of presenting the “river of news”. The news may come from everywhere. Your mail file, your Notes application, your Siebel system, SAP or the feeds of external sources you are subscribed too.

Embedded Experience. You will live in your activity stream of information, to dos, e-mails, videos, documents – and you will stay there. A click on a report will show you the embbed view of the – of course – Cognos charts. Think of the way Twitter presents links or pictures when clicking in the river of news. Its everything right there in your browser window.

To sort this all out, you need Analytics. On facebook you have to deal with all that content that put your friends in your stream. Funny links, new youtube videos – it really doesn´t matter if you miss something. But you should not miss important things that are related to your work. So this is why IBM says “analytics, analytics, analytics”. The system will decide whats important – based on your settings, but also based on some kind central intelligence service in your company. This means: You will only see whats important for your work. And management will analyze all the streams outside (think of brand awareness on twitter, etc) and – if corporate and legal policies let them do – the streams inside the organization.

Sharing. Share everything. With a Facebook like sharebutton. Right within the information flow, from your activity stream. Ad content, no matter what it is. Videos, documents, or just a short twitterific note – in this case with more than 140 chars.

And finally Content Management. The things you share has to be stored somewhere. So this why Content Management from IBM is now social.

Mobile? Well. In my opinion we there will be no separation anymore. Mobile or not? It simply does not matter. IBM will deliver the Activity Stream to every device. Notebook with all kinds of browsers, iPhone, Android, Blackberry or iPad and Playbook. It – does -not – matter.

So this is the vision as far as I understand it. And I think this vision of working together the right way. It is not about building a robust, scalable, secure, IBM version of Facebook. It is about learning from social networks how people want to communicate, collaborate – and to coordinate the business processes.

So the pieces fit together, I can see clearer now, what they tried to explain monday morning.

Where does that leave Lotus products? Thoughts about this a little bit later.