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Case study: IBM’s Journey to Becoming a Social Business
Rowan Hetherington, IBM, September 2012
Introduction
The corporate world is in the midst of an important transformation: it is witnessing a significant
change in the way business gets done. It is impossible to ignore the rise of social media and the
impact it is having on the enterprise: the implications for business are profound. While this shift
certainly means new challenges or issues to think through, risk or governance to name two, it
also ushers in overwhelming possibilities. Among some of the companies that have started to
embrace this shift, the correlation between social media use and business success is becoming
increasingly clear.
The figures below communicate IBM’s journey to becoming a social business, and some of the
questions that journey raises: what does a social business look like, what are some of the
opportunities we see and what does an organisation need to do to progress on its journey to
becoming a Social Business?
A driver of innovation: Mobile offices and the need for collaboration
IBM’s social presence started well over 15 years ago. Back in the early 90's, prior to the arrival
of Lou Gerstner as chairman of the board and chief executive officer, there were plans to break
up IBM into smaller, supposedly more nimble businesses. Gerstner decided this was not a
good idea and chose other means to get the company into better financial shape. One
approach was to transition from the traditional office to the mobile office. Given teams were no
longer sitting across from one another, remote collaboration was introduced as a means to
ensure dispersed workgroups were up to date on corporate information and able to continue
working as teams, as they would within traditional offices. IBM has always communicated very
closely with its business partners and they too would be included in this collaboration.
Developing tools for social networking
As IBM’s level of collaboration maturity developed and it became successful in leveraging
expertise and knowledge across the company and with business partners worldwide, it began to
see tools being developed that were enabling a different type of dialogue to take place, not just
around doing business but doing business ‘better’. Someone in Boston would post an idea on
how to do something better and it would turn into a global dialogue. Teams would step up and
begin to execute the ideas. That was the introduction of social business within IBM.
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Figure 1: IBM’s journey to becoming a social business
Since 2008, IBM has continued to think of new ways and channels for:
• Connecting people to expertise (whether customers, partners or employees), generating
new sources of innovation, fostering creativity and establishing greater reach and
exposure to new business opportunities.
• Removing any unnecessary boundaries between experts inside the company and
experts in the marketplace. IBM embraces tools and leadership models that support
capturing knowledge and insight from many sources, so that staff can quickly sense
changes in the industry, customer mood, employee sentiment, or process efficiencies.
• Leveraging these social networks to speed up business, gaining real-time insight to
make quicker and better decisions, getting information and services to customers and
partners in new ways - faster.
The journey
Over time, this evolution has progressed IBM to the Social Model, characterised by end-user
driven content and communities of practice that combine social capital with intellectual capital to
enable collective intelligence.
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Figure 2: The phases of progress towards becoming a social business
The Website Model
In the mid 1990’s, the internet browser was developed. It became easier than ever before to
publish content, simply by placing it on a web server. When large numbers of people started to
share content on the web, websites proliferated and it became difficult to know where to find
specific information.
Just like on the Internet outside IBM’s firewall, lots of sites on IBM’s intranet started to compete
for online visitor traffic. Each business unit, department and country had its own website. Most
of these sites tried to offer a wide variety of content.
At the same time, IBM had a “central” site that could be described as a planet with a weak
gravitational pull. In a way, the IBM intranet homepage wasn’t really central at all. Its unique
value was that its intranet editors, who at that time operated much like print editors, created high
quality content, or corporate journalism.
The Audience Model
With the move to a homepage that could serve multiple audiences, IBM started to increase the
gravitational pull of that central homepage and make it a useful tool for IBMers. By 2002 the
intranet homepage could serve up profiled content to a variety of different audiences; however
the links still often pointed to silo sites.
The Roles Model
IBM continued to focus on delivering all the relevant, personalised content (information, tools
and applications) through one central location – the “single point of entry”. Focus on
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personalisation increased, and profiling capabilities delivered the relevant content to specific
employees based upon their country and location, business unit, employee-type, industry and
job role. This centralised model proved effective at creating a common environment for IBMers.
The Social Model
IBM has extended into a new paradigm of digital workplace that places significant focus on user
driven content. In this social model, individuals can contribute to, learn about and find relevant
experts and expertise, based on their interests, networks and connections. In this highly social
environment, the content created through online interactions between individuals (as opposed to
intranet editors) becomes the central experience. IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines were
created in 2005 through collaboration with IBM bloggers and later expanded. They are based on
the view that participation in social media is in both IBMers’ and IBM’s interest, because the
value that IBM creates comes overwhelmingly from the expertise of its people. These guidelines
help IBMers navigate the potential dangers and controversies that come with using social
media, such as concerns about disclosure of confidential information, violation of privacy or
breaches of security. The data created by all of the social interactions between individuals has
fuelled deeper organisational learning and collaboration and a more responsive business.
Social Business at IBM today
IBM’s scale, diversification, nature (a company of ‘experts’) and culture fit with the opportunities
of social business (see Table 1 below).
The organisation Culture Value
• 400,000 employees • Collaborative • Flattening the
organisation
• 170 countries • Progressive • Accelerating learning
• B2B, not consumer • Risk averse • Enabling influence
• Company of ‘experts’
Table 1: IBM today
IBM encourages the use of external social sites including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs
to support their sales, communication, marketing and recruiting efforts. While employee’s social
interactions are not under a microscope, the experiments in using social on a massive scale
continue to be governed by the social computing guidelines, along with the business conduct
guidelines.
Internally, the IBM social laboratory is exploring the use of gamification and crowdsourcing
principles to reduce the cost of projects. IBM was able to significantly reduce the expense and
increase accuracy of language translation and localisation effort for product manuals that
typically cost the company millions by awarding points to employees who helped translate the
documents. Employees with the highest point totals earned money for their charities.
IBM Connections
IBM Connections is social software for business that is widely used within IBM, often
significantly reducing email. The latest version offers eight distinct applications, and provides an
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exceptional social platform that helps enable access to the right people, as well as internal and
external content, through professional networks and communities.
Figure 3: Screenshot of IBM Connections home page
• Home Page: The Home Page application helps provide individuals with a consolidated
view of their social data from across all of the other IBM Connections applications.
• Communities: The Communities application connects individuals with a common
interest, responsibility, or area of expertise to share information, exchange ideas and
collaborate on projects.
• Recommendations: Social analytics provide recommendations about people to connect
with and content to view.
• Forums: The Forums application provides a convenient way to create an online
discussion board where people can ask questions, share their experiences, and discuss
topics of common interest.
• Activities: The Activities application helps individuals create online work areas where
they and their teammates can gather together the emails, Instant Message (IM) chats,
documents, messages, and other information that they need to accomplish a business
objective.
• Bookmarks: The Bookmarks social bookmarking application helps you save, organise,
and share bookmarks as well as discover bookmarks that have been qualified by others.
• Profiles: The Profiles application helps you locate the people you need by searching
across your organisation using keywords that help identify expertise, current projects,
and responsibilities.
• Wikis: The wikis application provides a convenient online method for teams to author
content collaboratively, edit it and then publish it. This is designed to help businesses
create content faster, and also improve its quality by utilising input from a variety of
experts.
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Most of the technologies IBM brings to market are a direct result of the research and testing
performed internally. IBM Connections is now the fastest growth organic software product in
IBM’s long history.
Benefits of IBM Connections:
• Engage instantly and in context to get business done by staying on top of relevant
activity in your professional networks and communities
• Act quickly and be responsive to customers by pivoting rapidly between internal and
external communities
• Create an ideal community experience and anticipate the needs of a community by
monitoring social activity and participation
• Increase personal and organisational effectiveness by creating, connecting, and sharing
in one easy to use social experience
IBMs Social Business statistics (as at September 2012)
Internal External
• 433,000 users of IBM • 304,000 employees on LinkedIn; 692,277 people
Connections follow IBM on LinkedIn - more than any other
• 32,000 individual organisation in the world
blogs • 32,000 IBMers engage via Twitter each month
• 120,000 communities (Methodology: This is an approximation based on a study that
• 775,000 files shared found 93,000k people or accounts tweeted about IBM per month.
Based on the analysis, 35% could be considered IBMers.)
(and 21.1M
• 198,000 IBM employees listed on Facebook
downloads)
• 1000s of individual IBMer blogs
• 1.5M bookmarks
• 343,000 IBM alumni have self-identified on LinkedIn
(4.3M tags)
• 100,000 IBM alumni in Greater IBM Connections
• 75,000 wikis (60.6M
• Almost 4.5M video views on IBM's channel on
views)
YouTube
• 50M instant
• 100,000s of followers on IBM’s Twitter handles
messages/day via
• Nearly 250,000 people follow ‘People for a Smarter
Sametime
Planet’, one of IBM’s many Facebook pages that
• 35,200 IBM experts
regularly stimulates lively debates about smarter
enrolled in the
planet topics through frequent "guest appearances" of
Expertise Locator
IBM subject matter experts
service
• Approximately 50,000 visits in a typical month to
• More than 120,000
asmarterplanet.com - a group blog, popular with
mobile users
visitors to IBM.com and IBM employees
Business impacts (as at July 2011)
• Improved Company agility & responsiveness
• Reduced time to complete projects by 30%
• Increased use of “software assets” by 50%
• Cut component costs by 33%
• Reduction of over $100M/year in help desk support costs
• Increases in Employee Satisfaction
• Increased Employee productivity
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• Dramatic increase in innovation (employee crowd sourcing ideas identified 10 high
potential incubator business which were funded with $100M)
• Improved employee networking and expertise
Figure 4: The growth of social tools and employee-generated content
IBM’s willingness to invest, test, fail and iterate has been key to the journey to becoming a
social business.
The International Data Corporation (IDC) ranked IBM number one in worldwide market share for
enterprise social software for the third year running in 2011: http://bit.ly/OWX7NW
Further information
“As a global technology leader focused on delivering forward-looking technology and solutions,
IBM is no stranger to taking a unique approach in order to generate a stronger end result. To
encourage discussion and foster a cultural affinity for social media across its vast
network of 400,000 employees, countless partners, and global customer base, IBM made
social engagement a key responsibility of every employee. Through a collaborative effort
led by marketing, employees embraced social media to help get the word out about IBM
solutions and events. The result was a measurable increase in awareness and tighter
collaboration among IBM employees to better meet customer needs.” ~ Forrester
Research, January 04, 2011
• Find out more about the capabilities of IBM Connections at: http://ibm.co/UZriEd
• Read IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines: http://ibm.co/QcYxir
• Read more about IBM and Social Business at: http://www.ibm.com/social-business
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