Forrester’s “Groundswell” awarded to IBM developerWorks. Big Win for Connections!

This past week, I had the pleasure and an honour to give a keynote at Toronto’s CIO Forum on the “Social” Organization — internally and externally. With that being said, it was interesting to note the reaction from the CIO’s on letting go of the control and instead fostering a a leadership culture that not only ensures efficiency within the firewall but also self-governs itself through trust, respect and positive outside the firewall.

Some believed in it, some were hesitant but everyone knew that social is the way to go.

Our latest award from Forrester will further provide proof that social organization is the ideal vision for the organizational structure of tomorrow (if not today).

With over 400K employees focused on building a Smarter Planet, and majority of the collaboration and networking happening within our intranet on social computing platforms like Lotus Connections, it furthers proves that vision of Enterprise 2.0 is real, is working and will be working in the future.

Without much further ado, I would like to highlight our latest award from Forrester for IBM DeveloperWorks. As part of the developerWorks team now, this is truly a humbling moment for me.

This morning, Forrester honored 16 Forrester Groundswell Award winners for excellence in effective use of social technologies to advance an organizational or business goal.

“Once again, the entrants and winners for this year’s Forrester Groundswell Awards amazed us,” said Josh Bernoff, senior vice president – idea development at Forrester.“We were particularly impressed with the diverse and effective social and mobile strategies that organizations are now using to reach consumers, business companies, and their own employees.”

With total of 120 entries, IBM developerWorks came out on top in the best use of supporting B2B. This is Huge. It provides further credibility to our open, social and collaborative vision for the organization of the tomorrow. Our Lotus Connections platform was even utilized at the infrastructure level for another winner — IBM customer, CEMEX, also won in the Collaboration System (Management) Category for their CEMEX Shift application.

The awards are broken down by what stage of the social cycle the winners best exemplify: Listening, Talking, Energizing, Spreading, Supporting, Embracing.  IBM developerWorks won in the “Supporting” category, and here’s what Forrester had to say:

IBM developerWorks is a free community and social network for 8 million developers and IT professionals worldwide. It includes content and discussions on open standards, open source, and IBM technical resources in English, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Korean, Vietnamese, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish. It includes 30,000 articles, forums that attract 1 million visitors a month, 400,000 active profiles, 800 bloggers, and 450 wikis. IBM saves $100 million annually from people who use this resource instead of contacting IBM support.

This is great news not just for developerWorks team but also for our Lotus Connections team – the IBM dW exceptional experience is built on IBM Lotus Connections.

And IBM dW wasn’t the only winner built on Connections.  IBM customer CEMEX also won in the Collaboration System (Management) Category for their CEMEX Shift application.  Again, in Forrester’s words:

Shift is an internal collaboration platform at CEMEX, a company that makes building materials. Shift includes messaging, team collaboration tools such as forums and a wiki, real-time collaboration through instant messaging and conferencing, and social tools. Employees have used it to create 200 communities across all operating units to share best practices. It also enables people in 20 countries to share ideas — a recent ideajam generated 132 ideas that are now in the process of being implemented. CEMEX credits Shift with reshaping the corporate culture toward more openness and authenticity in employee interactions.

You can read the full press release from Forrester on BusinessWire here.  Additional details about IBM DeveloperWorks’ submission for the Groundswell Award can be found on IBM developerWorks.

Excellent example of Superb Foundations support!

Was just browsing through and came across Graham’s post on his experience with dealing with Nitix/Lotus Foundations support network.

Graham writes, 
This is a public thank you to Robert on the Foundations Support Line in Canada and to Matt Webb at IBM in Australia for helping me with my current support issue. Matt has been researching this problem in his own time (and I’ve got the time-stamped emails to prove it!) and together with long distance support from Robert we have almost beaten the problem.

He is also impressed by the Autonomics of the platform and how the server was able to ‘self-heal’ itself after a mail route error.  Would love to hear more examples — both sides of the fence IBM and Microsoft. Complicated problem, simple automated fix – only with Lotus Foundations.

 
On a side note, I have added link to Official Lotus Foundations Technical Wiki on the blogroll. Kudos to Robert and Matt on the Canadian and Australian Support

Disclosure: In the past, I’ve done work at Tech Data Canada for Microsoft related projects.