Sep 17th, 2008 |
As we all know, Web 2.0 tools are allowing for a complete different level of collaboration. Online information overload impacts individual productivity. At the individual level, people ask, “How do I find the right information to make decisions on?” When you magnify that out to your organization, and then your partners and suppliers, that question and answer becomes far more profound. As we’ve seen, people spend an inordinate amount of time looking for information, said Bob Picciano General Manager Lotus Software and WebSphere Portal.
Bring collaboration into the enterprise application
The map of collaboration is a constant series of questions where people ask who knows what, and who approves others’ knowledge? Enterprise 2.0 applications are delivering capabilities that support the collaboration agenda. For example, user profiles are available anywhere, even through mobile devices. What IBM is doing now, said Picciano, is embedding collaboration features directly into a line of business applications. This makes collaboration a contextual part of the workflow. Within the application, find key people, connect that with user account information and enable click to call or click to presence.
For example, Picciano demo’ed a healthcare site can include all these features built into it. No need to leave and go to a social networking application. The social networking is built underneath.
This is IBM’s collaboration strategy - connect the platform (access to services anywhere anytime), application, and people. Lotus connections is a family of social computing software. Profile lookup, community capabilities, activities, and social bookmarking. All basic customizations that you would see on any standard social network.
In another example, Picciano demo’ed a mashup example that Boeing did that was designed to let users make better decisions in the face of disasters. When a situation happens, how can Boeing get planes to destinations faster with the needed supplies. The solution for Boeing was to create a mashup that included airports and an aiport’s meta data (e.g. runway length, hours of operation, weather, etc.)
Using InfoSphere MashupHub Picciano showed how you were able to create feeds from any database format, allowing you to mashup the data with anything else. In the example, he showed a quick example of a dynamic Web page that would change automatically depending on what information you selected.
The point is to provide easy to access information in a way the end user can make better decisions. By enhancing functionality through collaboration, you connect people and data to drive better business outcomes.
Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from Interop NY.
In my job as a CIO, I’ve been working on tackling information overload with mixed results. My company, a professional services firm, suffers more than most because of a couple of infrastructure problems that arose from a couple of mergers.
I’ve been trying to get my colleagues to acknowledge that attacking our information overload problem will improve our overall knowledge sharing collaboration efforts and also contribute to our bottom line. But some people here just don’t understand the extent of the problem.
I just read about information overload awarenesss day and I’ve signed up our company as a participant and designated site - I hope this will get my point across to my colleagues and help them understand what we can do to improve our overall position relative to information overload. For others in my position (and I’m sure there are many of you) I encourage you to do the same, Information is available at http://www.informationoverloadday.com