IBM – A New Shade of Blue
For many analysts in our industry last week’s IBMConnect in Orlando marked the beginning of another year of vendor conferences filled with enthusiastic (sometimes overly) announcements of technological innovation, new services, and/or strategic acquisition(s) that in tow mean new technology and/or service offerings for the host company. And for the big guns, it also starts the game of who can get the biggest name/most popular/best up-and-coming band to play the event, and key note speaker to impress the crowd. IBM hit the mark on all these fronts.
Shiny and New
Day 1 had IBM making a plethora of announcements (15 by my count), many of which clearly show their investment and momentum in the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) playground. Most notable was the news of IBM Mail Next – their next generation online communication tool that looks to blend the best email, meetings, chat, content management and office productivity capabilities into one efficiency-enhancing, collaboration-enabling, priority-managing tool. Well done IBM.
Does this mean the end of Lotus Notes you ask? Definitely not according to IBM big-wigs.
Mail Next is part of the new, lighter, more compatible shade of blue that IBM has been working on. While obvious that it will easily plug into a Domino server architecture, it is meant to offer prospective and existing clients flexibility of choice in mail delivery options from IBM – meaning it plays well with others, in non-IBM-centric environments. This is a big, and necessary, step forward for Big Blue into new, smaller market opportunities. Optimized for mobile, and delivered in the cloud or on prem, its dashboard aims to allow users to manage their communications and content logically, and prioritize related content from multiple channels in one tool. FAST search and powerful analytics, along with what seems to be a fairly intuitive UI (hover & click, inline viewing of attachments, customizable layout, drag & drop set up) and integration of social networks sees IBM Mail Next consolidating the best of traditional email and more modern social networks together in a tool that could actually help build a smarter workforce. Huh, imagine that. While email isn’t going anywhere, particularly in the workplace, Mail Next takes into consideration the idiosyncrasy that comes with having four generations within the workforce and their varied approach, preferences, and use of communications channels. Well done IBM.
Mail Next is already in beta, and will be officially released later this year. First impressions are good, but with other, similar, and likely less expensive options out there, adoption, particularly outside the core IBM client base, will, as usual, be the determining factor in its success. If it is adopted, its ability to integrate conversations from multiple channels based on topic or trend, and empower the user to prioritize one cluster over another, could have a positive impact on a company’s customer experience management (CEM) initiatives by facilitating getting the right information in the right hands at the right time to meet customers’ needs.
Looking in all the right places to help build a smarter workforce
We see a lot of consolidation happening in our industry. It is much less often that we see integration of those acquired capabilities into the solutions and services offered by the acquiring company. Happily, that was not the case of Kenexa’s adoption into the IBM family. While the ink on those acquisition papers was still drying while IBMConnect 2013 was taking place, we were being woo’d by Rudy Karsan’s (CEO of Kenexa) passion for getting the right people in the right roles and helping them, and their company, succeed. A year later, that passion has clearly helped shape IBM’s Smarter Workforce initiatives, and the launch of the IBM Kenexa Talent Suite.
Seth Meyers, who keynoted this year’s opening session (game on in the big name entertainment challenge), spoke about how finding talent has changed over the years; how it is no longer just about the resumé; how you have to look at the big picture to find the right talent for the role. The IBM Kenexa Talent Suite is meant to do just that; it leverages big data – work experience, social engagement, training and education, and individual traits – to help identify the qualities that make top performers, in their particular role, successful. All in the aim of supporting employers to proactively find employees (internal and net-new candidates) to fill the gaps in their talent pool. Case in point, while Mr. Meyers was not using IBM’s Talent Suite at the time, he hired the third of three comedy writers for his new gig as the host of Late Night by trolling Twitter and YouTube. The “right” person for him turned out to be a IT guy from at an insurance company in Peoria, Illinois. Seriously, what hiring practice or recruitment tool today could have predicted that.
The Talent Suite supports the complete lifecycle of an employee, from first interaction, through on-boarding, advancement, and off-boarding, with the intent to provide employees with one platform that they can use throughout their tenure to connect them with others that will help them learn, grow, and where applicable, manage their teams. Employee engagement is being recognized more and more as a direct contributor to the bottom line. The Corporate Leadership Council study of the engagement level of 50,000 employees around the world found that engaged companies grow profits as much as three times faster than their competitors. And conversely, according to a McLean & Company study, disengaged employees can cost an organization approximately $3,400 for every $10,000 in annual salary. This concern with employee engagement is a trend we see in all our client intranet engagements. The IBM Kenexa Talent Suite was built with the goal of maintaining that new gig enthusiasm we all feel on day of one, throughout the employee’s career stages.
The platform includes three main modules:
Talent Acquisition: for recruitment, skill and behavioral science-based assessments and onboarding; designed to provide a deep understanding of what the best talent looks like and then how to attract, hire and engage them.
Talent Optimization: for performance management, succession planning and compensation planning to empower and get the most out of employees.
Social Networking: aimed at increasing productivity with expertise identification and knowledge discovery – connecting employees and accelerating the time to productivity.
Securing and maintaining employee engagement takes a lot more than an intelligent platform, so hopefully IBM is packaging this suite up with consulting teams that have communication and engagement chops as strong as their technical skills.
An interactive consulting experience
Last, but certainly not least, of the big-deal announcements – although buried on Day 2 – was the official unveiling of IBM’s new global consulting practice, IBM Interactive Experience – the marriage of their design and UI expertise from IBM Interactive to their innovation and data focused engineers from their Customer Experience Lab. This union is in direct response to the increasing demand for, and focus on, customer experience management by its clients. This new practice will look to tackle CEM from the outside-in and vise versa. Unlike many other self-proclaimed CEM focused agencies, IBM Interactive Experience will look leverage data and analytics driven from within the organization to help the organization gain insights and advantage in building a better customer experience.
Bringing these two established aspects of IBM together in the quest to serve the growing interest/demand in CEM makes sense. Getting clients, existing or potential, to understand that CEM is not just about their external customers/clients/prospect, will be a challenge this new agency will have to work hard to overcome.
A new, lighter shade of Blue
With regard to the one-upmanship on talent that will unfold in 2014, besides Seth Meyers (score 1 for Big Blue), IBM kicked the event off with great energy and tunes with American Authors welcoming the crowd to Orlando. Now anyone without kids in the 9 to 16 age group many not have known who these up-and-comers were, and may have been quick to point out “how good can they be if they are here playing at 8 am and the Grammy parties are still going on back in LA”. Mark my works that this foursome will not be available for a repeat performance at IBMConnect 2015 if it happens to start the morning after the Grammy’s as it did this year. And in keeping with the less formal, more laid back atmosphere, day two welcomed Scott Adams, of Dilbert comic fame, to the stage. Fun, insightful, and easy to relate to, Mr. Adams definitely helped me see a new shade of Blue when looking at IBM.