IBM Launches Services to Help Businesses Go Social

Many companies are using or considering social-networking-based solutions for customer support, internal teams, knowledge base management, and other functions. This week, IBM said it will help organizations develop the skills they need for using social networking through new programs, services and partnerships.

The key goals of IBM’s efforts are to educate companies on the benefits of social enterprise techniques, and to assess ways to overcome barriers to adoption. IBM’s offering includes new technical workshops to improve skills, consulting to help foster a business culture for open collaboration and sharing, interactive online courses, live support, and one-on-one guidance from social business experts.

Investing in Social Networking

In June, the IDC Group ranked IBM as first in market share for social platform software in 2009 and 2010, which was the second year the company received that distinction.

IBM social software includes IBM Connections, either on-site or hosted, to provide communities, forums, wikis, blogs, and social analytics, as well as adaptations of Lotus Notes for the Web or mobile devices.

In a survey conducted by IBM last year among more than 3,000 CIOs in 71 countries, 55 percent of respondents said they planned to invest in social networking and collaboration-based software, as a way to increase their competitiveness. Seventy-seven percent said they wanted to change internal collaboration processes over the next three to five years.

The offered consulting services, through the company’s Global Business Services, are intended to help businesses understand how the use of social business tools can help them meet their goals, as well as the resulting challenges. As an example, the company created in 2005 a set of guidelines for employees who wanted to blog. The guidelines were revised in 2008 and 2010, and IBM is including the development of internal guidelines for social business as one of the areas where…

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Tags: businesses, help, Launches, Services, Social

This entry was posted on Friday, January 13th, 2012 at 11:17 pm and is filed under More Science/Tech News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.