An idea to drive Adoption of IBM Social Collaboration Tools

A growing number of companies are finding that Social Software complement and extend conventional collaboration and communication platforms focused on e-mail, custom tools, and intranets by providing new, flexible, and informal ways for employees to interact and share information. Social Software fosters networks that drive COLLABORATION and therefore INNOVATION.

IBM Social Software :

• Facilitate increased communication across organizations and geographies
• Stimulate innovation of new ideas for products, services and go-to-market strategies
• Improve ability to more rapidly respond to customer needs and inquiries
• Reduce rework and improve quality of people's delivery materials
• Decrease the learning curve of new employees
• Make better decisions, knowing they were vetted by experts across the organization and reflect past experience

How to drive adoption of IBM Connections ?

How to enable people to connect with people ?

The value of social software increases exponentially when people can connect to their social networks at anytime, from anywhere and easily....

Social Networking is mainly based on the network you have created inside your organization. The question is : How could you easily build your network ? Your network must have be important in order to spread your ideas and be inform about your colleagues' publications.

Repeated studies have shown that the longer a project team stays together without significant changes in its composition, the less likely it is to come up with ideas that lead to innovations. So, it's important to have your direct colleagues in your social network, but someone in a different specialty is also important (« Weak ties are strong »). You can meet him in a meeting or at the coffee machine.. 
Imagine you could use your mobile or a specific device ? Simply by shaking your phones or a specific device you can add him to your network, in order to keep a track of him...
Using your mobile : 
Via an app, you could imagine to connect with someone. By leveraging geolocation capabilities of mobile, we can recognize someone near you and send him an invitation.

Screenshot of a mockup : 
Initial screen of the application :

 After shaking near someone : 

Introduction of the architectural concept :

To validate the feasibility, we have designed a mockup based on a J2EE Application. The web application send your location (longitude & latitude) to the server. If two location are received at the same time, the app will send an "IBM Connections" invitation to both, using the IBM Connections invitation APIs. In that mockup, the Web App uses HTML5 Geolocation API.

Using specific device : Poken 
During an event, I met someone from the company Poken. Poken has developped a small device which allow you share your social business card. I have instantly imagined the use of that technology for internal social platform in conjunction with IBM Connections. 

An example of Poken Spark : 

High level overview of the architecture :  

Imagine that technology during a event to leverage IBM Connections during a two-day customer event...

The success of an event can be measured by the number of significant connections established between participants; new professional contacts, new business partnerships, new leads.That device are also ice breakers and conversation starters. You could even imagine to brand your poken. IBM has already used that technology during customer's events. 

NFC Technology :  
Near field communication, or NFC, will allow for simplified transactions, data exchange, and wireless connections between two devices in close proximity to each other, usually by no more than a few centimeters. t is expected to become a widely used system for making payments by smartphone, but I'm sure we will see a democratization of that technology to support social networking platform.