I promised to post on the IBM Center for Social Software. This is a relatively recent specialisation within IBM's long standing Research Labs, and as the name suggests it is totally focussed on Social Software.Unlike other IBM research labs, this Center uses a methodology called 'Venture Research' which basically means they experiment directly both on the internet and on IBMs internal network - giving them access to huge numbers of users. Google have been doing something similar for a while (although I don't know how they analyse and collect data from their experiments yet), so it is good to see IBM stepping up, and will be interesting to see how they balance consumer vs enterprise social software...
One very interesting offering that I've not heard before is the "residency program" from the IBM Center for Social Software. Basically it would enable specific associates to work with IBM researchers on tough design or strategy problems related to social software. IBM bring their expertise in social software, design and data visualisation - as well as experience and platforms to support the research effort. We provide people that understand the corporation and the problem to be solved.
It's not cheap, but it might be a cost effective way to address some of our 'architecture of participation' strategy questions...
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The Residency Program does indeed sound very interesting. Have their been any customers so far who have tried this and are there any examples of what kinds of projects they have run with IBM?
This concept is somewhat similar to Crowdsourcing. Universities have been doing it for a long time with complex mathematical questions offered to the crowd with a prize for whoever would solve them - but it's interesting to see that IT is now leveraging the same principles.
Walkers recently did a similar activity for their R&D department where they ran a competition in the UK for consumers to send in creative new flavour ideas for crisps and the top 3 ideas were actually developed by Walkers and put on the market, and the winner gets to have his flavour incorporated into the crisps portfolio for good!
Not only does this create a whole "shadow workforce" for free, it also means that as a service or goods provider, we could not get any closer to what the customer really wants.
IBM have been doing this for a long time and have a number of 'crowdsourcing' internal initiatives such as HackDay (where there's a $15,000 cash award for the winning 'hack') and IdeaJam (where the whole company contributes ideas online on a particular topic). I even think we are planning to use an IBM hosted IdeaJam internally this year in one of our business units.
The Venture Research and experiments aren't exactly crowdsourcing though in that you're not having the users of the experiments contribute their ideas/knowledge, you are basically giving them experimental functionality basically in return for being able to track their 'social' habits and learn from them about things like 'what drives product uptake' and 'do incentives really work' etc..
For a long time now I have been saying that IBM is 3+ years ahead of it's rivals with many of it products, especially it's collboration and community software. IBM's problem is it's marketing s**ks!
"Centre for Social Software" just shows how much IBM understands how the enterprise will develop in future. I sometimes wonder if IBM's problem is they want to "make the workplace a better place" while their rivals are soley focused on products that help maintain sales of their office productivity tools.
The office would be more productive if people put their computers down for a while and talked to each other! (I think that might class as a bit of a rant - sorry)
The residency programme has been around for a long time and I 've heard good things about it. I tried to get on a Sametime one many years ago but it was over subscribed.
Hackdays are great for a tech company but won't work in Mars IS. The ideaJam would though and I think is fairly easy to run. The hard part would be supporting it and analysing the data. The idea was abandoned in 2008, I would really like to see it happen this year.
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