This is another in a series of my notes on Lotusphere 2012. I am very pleased to be back again after last year. These notes cover the Monday session at IBM Connect, IBM as Social Business with Carl Sormilic and Mark Heid from the CIO office.

Carol Sormilic, a VP in the CIO office at IBM spoke first. Carol is part of Business Transformation and It within IBM.  She is responsible for HR related tools and the tools for employees to do their jobs, such as collaboration tools. She lived in Southberry CT and worked there but now has been working in China for the past year.  The Connecticut location allowed for a lot of face-to-face meetings with colleagues. She said they saw good adoption of tools and retention in established markets but not in their growth markets.

So last year they picked her to go to China for couple of years to see if the new social tools can be used in emerging markets. IBM has over 500,000 employees in over 120 countries and 57% work remotely outside of a standard IBM office. They have the challenges that Carol set herself up to face as she looked at how they best use social tools.

She got to China on December 31, 2010 after a long flight. They got up to see the Chinese New Year and then shared again the New Year with her family on the east coast of the US a number of hours later. She and her family faced the challenges of not being able to get to standard sites such as Facebook and YouTube.  This especially affected her son. There was also very slow bandwidth and spent lots of time waiting things to download. So she has helped IBM try to overcome these.

She could not do video conferencing that was her favorite method. Also there is the time zone difference so there was a more limited set of time to be able to connect on a live basis. She looked to participate asynchronously.  Especially it was important to avoid the dinner time, as that was important in China.

Even the asynchronous communication presented problems as 12 hour delays often puts updates out of the current flow for receivers. So she timed things differently and also let people know the time at her location.  She also has blog posts on her personal site and has a wiki, as well. She has not sent her team an email in over a year, working through the site. It gives full transparency to what she is doing.

With the new social business strategy these are the results:

87% increase skills

84% access experts quicker

84% share knowledge with others

77% reuse assets

74% increase productivity

65% increase personal reputation

65% increase sense of belonging

59% increase sales

42% increases customer satisfaction

Carol mentioned how the new CEO posted a three-minute video blog to communication her initial vision to employees and within a few minutes over 1800 people had commented on it. This would never happen in email. She said instead of thinking in terms of ROI, think in terms of anew way to get work done.

Carol offered 5 keys to making social work.

1. Change behavior – you must nurture your community
2. Create a robust infrastructure – so things flow in a timely manner
3. Integrate the platform – this is a focus at IBM and a theme at this event
4. Integrate the business units – for a shared platform
5. Evaluate privacy issues – they differ from each countries

Mark Heid then talked about how they are using social analytics to listen to what their employees are doing. He showed a social intelligence dashboard for HR. This type of analytics is being used a lot on the s consumer Web but IBM is one of the first to do this extensively inside the enterprise.

The dashboard includes sentiment analysis. They pull in internal and external data from such sources as Facebook, Twittter, and LinkedIn. It is built of Cognos and can look inside, on the partner community, IBM Developer works, and on the Web. It uses algorithms to decide what is being said from a sentiment perspective. They fell that if they look at sentiment of employees who left to see who might be thinking about leaving and proactively try to keep the ones they want. Banks use the same technology to try to keep customers. They are very concerned about privacy.

They have a Chief Privacy Officer at IBM. They will be no individual outreach. IT just looks at aggregated data to see employee sentiment. They also take corrective actions in the aggregate, and do not undertake individual responses, as that would invade privacy.

They also look at health and wellness issues to help control the rising costs. Mark showed some sample dashboard screens that were pie charts and time lines.  In one example 44% of people felt positive and 14% felt negative. He also showed evolving topics to discover what they do not know. He also showed a table mapping sentiment with topics. There was a positive correlation between positive sentiment and opportunity. You can drill down to see examples of the actual conversation that was put into each bucket.

IBM has a Social Intelligence Competency Center that runs these tools. I am impressed with this look at the voice of the employee.  Here is a complete listing of my notes from last year’s Lotusphere 2011.