Five Questions: Brian Truskowski – Emerging Technologies and Jams at IBM

A couple of weeks ago there was one worth while reading news article over at SignOnSanDiego where Brian Truskowski, Vice President and Chief Information Officer for IBM, was interviewed with five different questions where he actually got to talk about what IBM is currently doing around the area of emerging technologies within Web 2.0 and social software in order to enable knowledge workers to share more knowledge and collaborate with one another, along with customers and, perhaps, in a smarter way, and since it seems to be a recurring question that I get every now and then I thought I would link to it so that folks out there, who may be interested in finding out how such a large corporation is making use of all of these emerging technologies, would get a chance to find out some of the latest happenings in this subject.

Thus in Five Questions: Brian Truskowski you would be able to find not only some very interesting facts about the IBM adoption of weblogs, wikis, social bookmarking, etc. etc. but at the same time you would be able to read nice gems like this one:

"These [technologies] are all better ways to connect people to each other."

Yes, indeed, something that I have been mentioning myself all along myself and for which I never get tired of reminding everyone. It is all about people, about making connections, about engaging in different conversations and whoever else says otherwise then I guess they would need to think again and figure out if they get it or not. There is always a good time to get started at some point though, just in case people out there may want to dive in.

In that same article you would be able to read how Brian mentions Jams as a way to engage IBMers and customers alike to drive through further on innovation and if you would remember not long ago I created a couple of weblog posts where I was actually mentioning the InnovationJam and how I actually managed to participate in Phase I of the initiative chiming in submitting ideas and collaborating with other folks.

Unfortunately, there was a second phase for InnovationJam that it actually took place while I was at the workshop in Cincinnati so I couldn’t participate as active as I would have expected. Yet, there have been thousands of conversations going on and at the moment, and as part of the catchup, I am actually reading through the archives of the event so that I can get some idea about what got discussed and where do we go from here. And by the looks of it not everything may be lost, because one of the new capabilities from the second phase of Global InnovationJam is the fact that there is still now one massive InnovationJam Wiki still up and running and which is still collecting, till end of the month, some further input on how to improve the quality of those ideas and make them actually into real opportunities for everyone to expand further on.

How cool is that? So even though I may have missed out on the overall event, Phase II, I still get a chance to participate with hundreds, if not thousands, of other folks expanding further on those ideas and see how things would move further. And yes, indeed, there are several ideas around the topic of Web 2.0 and virtual worlds and the impact they are having in the enterprise, but I guess that would be the subject for another weblog post …

Tags: Web 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Collaboration, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Wikis, Weblogs, Podcasts, InnovationJam, Jams, IBM, Innovation, Emerging Technologies