IBM Expands Social Business Initiative

Becoming a social business has enabled leading edge companies to gain competitive edge and realize transformative impacts

Kuala Lumpur, 10 April 2012 – IBM (NYSE: IBM) today is emphasizing its commitment to social business as a way for organizations to gain competitive advantage. The industry leader is introducing new programs, services and partnerships to help organizations develop and deepen skills to accelerate business opportunities being driven by the rapid adoption of social networking in the enterprise.

IBM is investing in its clients and business partners to develop the skills, technical support and industry resources that will allow them to effectively adopt social networking capabilities to transform their business operations.Soh Soo Fei, General Manager, IBM Software Group, IBM Malaysia

This includes introducing new technical workshops designed to improve skills and consulting offerings to help develop a business culture that fosters open collaboration and sharing among employees, clients, and business partners. Through the use of interactive online courses, live support and one-on-one guidance with IBM Social Business experts, IBM is working with organizations across the globe to educate them on the benefits of applying social networking technology to their organizations, while at the same time helping to assess the barriers of social business for faster adoption.

“As the industry leader in social business, among the first to embrace social internally and to develop social computing policy and guidelines, IBM is poised to help organizations exploit the transformation into a social business, helping them to build stronger relationships among their employees, customers and business partners and make better decisions, faster,” said Soh Soo Fei, General Manager, IBM Software Group, IBM Malaysia.
Eric Quah, Country Manager, Software Solutions Group, IBM Malaysia

In Indonesia, IBM is helping Bumbu Desa grow its business. Diners are flocking to the restaurant chain, with new locations expanding into Singapore and Malaysia. Growing from three branches five years ago to 38 branches in 2010, the different franchises of Bumbu Desa were having a hard time staying connected with one another. Using IBM LotusLive Engage for essential collaboration tools like Web conferencing, social networking and instant messaging, employees across the franchises can now quickly share information regarding new menus, new ways to greet guests, and other restaurant-related issues.

Each Bumbu Desa franchise can now submit their daily sales reports to franchise headquarters via file sharing in LotusLive Engage, a method that was previously handled using fax or overnight mail. Bumbu Desa is also embracing LotusLive's unique “guest account” model, which provides free-of-charge access of LotusLive to customers and other stakeholders such as cooks or food reviewers.

With more and more organizations looking at social media as a way to outpace competition and reap rewards, it is now the era of social business. Social business goes beyond Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. A social business recognizes that people do business with people (the value is in people and the interactions that they have) and optimizes how people interact and then leverages those interactions to create business value and gain competitive advantage. A social business also embraces the shifts in the way employees, customers and partners engage.

“Any process that relies on people will be fundamentally changed. And it’s going to change for one simple reason – social business is a competitive differentiator,” she said. “The value lies in transforming core business processes by harnessing the collective intelligence and engaging across your entire business network.”

As barriers are removed across your business network, roles are changed, and behaviors are altered, organizations gain the ability to tap into knowledge, skills, and expertise of people inside or outside an organization to the point where it can be applied to improve business processes in highly precise ways. This is called Collective Intelligence.

“The ability to more effectively tap into and apply Collective Intelligence is today's reality. Harnessing Collective Intelligence can play an important role in generating new ideas, solving age-old problems, disaggregating and distributing work in new and innovative ways, and making better, more informed decisions about the future,” said Eric Quah, Country Manager, Software Solutions Group, IBM Malaysia.

Collective intelligence can help organizations to discover and share new ideas, augment skills and distribute workload, and improve forecasting effectiveness. These benefits could lead to improved product design and introduction process, executive communications and cultural transformation, Improved customer care, real time market segmentation, advocate based marketing, global sales contests, and faster on-boarding of talent and skill development.

Quah added that Integrating business processes and the “world of collaboration” to become a social business requires technologies and skills. “IBM has the right technology and skills to help organizations transform. Forward looking companies are embracing the opportunities and challenges across their entire business network to deliver transformational results.”

IBM is integrating market leading capabilities together to enable social business. The core capabilities include: #1 market share leading social networking tools, robust enterprise content management technology, and comprehensive analytics capabilities, while embracing open standards and incorporating governance, risk, and compliance measures.

Reach/Social Networking & Collaboration – IBM provides a complete set of tools to reach people where they work and live from social collaboration, unified communications and messaging and leading mobile support across all the major mobile device platforms.

Engage/Content – Rich integration with a diversity of content management systems is key. However, most of these systems are designed to store content at rest – it’s nothing more than an expensive burial ground. A social business needs content in Motion. Motion means useful, helpful, findable, shareable, be an accelerant to the business. So, we need a new generation of social content systems. IBM is leveraging its market leading enterprise content management (ECM) capabilities to be a seamless extension of the platform.

Discover/Analytics – The evolution of social business will go hand in hand with a movement to being an insight driven culture -- that means deep and pervasive analytics: Analytics around social networks, content, processes, the market, and sentiment of your organization. Analytics as a service to be exploited in business processes. IBM is integrating its unmatched analytics technology to be a central component of the Social Business platform.

Act/Process & Information/Open Standards – All of this needs to be connected to the infrastructure that drives your systems of record so actions can be completed while open standards facilitate integration of your business processes with the social platform. IBM has a deep set of middleware capabilities such as IBM Business Process Management, CastIron to connect to virtually anything, Tivoli Directory Integrator, and complete set of compliance and governance capabilities from Q1 Labs and Atlas.

For more information about IBM's social business initiative visit http://www.ibm.com/press/socialbusiness or follow #IBMSocialBiz on Twitter.

For more information on Collective Intelligence, please go to http://www.ibm.com/gbs/collectiveintelligence.