IBM’s Smart Work Jam Under Way Already – Are You Jamming?

Goodness! Today is going to be one of those days where I could surely do with a day of 36 hours, if not more!, in order to be able to participate in a number of really cool things that will be happening throughout inside and outside IBM. Apart from finishing up a customer presentation on social software adoption for a face to face event in Seville next week, as well as a couple of deadlines from my project team, I plan to attend a virtual (Internal only) conference from IBM’s Academy of Technology on the Future of Collaboration, specially thinking along the lines of "Beyond the Firewall" with quite an impressive agenda put together so far.

However, the rest of my online social interactions will probably very much disappear today as I am starting to get more and more involved with the Smart Work Jam that kicked off last night (On my local time) and which will continue to run for another 55 hours (At the time of writing this blog post). A couple of weeks back, you would remember, I put together a blog post where I was talking about that upcoming Jam. Well, here we are today. Fully immersed in it and with some amazing conversations happening already! Phew, I tell you, I need more physical time today to be everywhere! It’s getting crazy!

Here is a quick recap on the major themes that you would be able to find on the Smart Work Jam and where you may be able to see me here and there, specially on the ones I am marking on bold just below:

• "Government That Works Smarter (Encouraging citizen participation and supporting economic growth)
• Collaborative Business Process Management (Optimizing business processes through collaborative approaches)
• The Future of Team Work (Maximizing possibilities with global, virtual, dynamic teams)
• Work Without Boundaries (Exploring new opportunities made possible by mobile, distributed people inside and outside our organizations)
• Healthcare that Works Smarter (Accessible, affordable, personalized healthcare in an interconnected world)
• Working Smarter with the Next Generation (Maximizing the talents of the next generation workforce)
• Smart Work 2020 (Exploring the future of work)"

Not bad for a provocative, and engaging!, 72 hours of jamming, don’t you think? I have already been navigating through some of the various discussions taking place and I must say that the quality of the ideas shared so far, and the various contributions to each and everyone of them, have been quite an amazing experience! So much hidden talent out there!

And I am only just touching the surface!, as I get to dive in even deeper during the course of this morning. But, goodness! (Again!) there is just so much to go through, learn, share, collaborate and participate that I think I am just going to point you to a couple of additional resources that will give you a very nice background on the purpose of the Smart Work Jam and what it tries to achieve and then leave things there and head over to it right away! No time to waste! heh

One of them is a YouTube video clip and the other one a wonderful presentation put together by a fellow IBMer, and good friend, Sacha Chua, which she blogged about under Brainstorming around Smart Work and that I am sure most of you folks out there doing social software adoption would be able to relate to quite a bit, to say the least!

So without much further ado, here you have got both of them, so that you have an opportunity to get exposed to the themes that the Jam is starting to surface all over the place. The first one. This YouTube video clip under the title "How It Works: The Way We Work", which I think would be rather self explanatory in describing not just the future of the workplace, but also the opportunities and potential we all have, as knowledge workers, in leveraging social software to change the way we work, i.e. of course, towards a smarter work:

It lasts for nearly six minutes, but I can surely tell you it would be worth while watching it through all the way. If you have been involved with Knowledge Sharing, Collaboration, Learning, Communities, Networks, Social Computing and Enterprise 2.0 in the recent past you will see how all of them can be combined together into helping a workforce work smarter, and not necessarily harder.

The second resource I wanted to touch base on is that one slide deck from Sacha I just mentioned above. A wonderfully inspiring presentation she put together in Slideshare under "Smarter Work: Why Social Networks Matter ". If you haven’t seen Sacha’s Slideshare stream of presentations, I would suggest you take some extra time to go through them as well, because they are completely different to anything you may have been exposed to in the past. Not just from her approach to deliver powerful and engaging messages, but also from the perspective of the tools she uses to deliver those messages. Believe me, amazing will fall short!

Either way, in the context of the Smart Work Jam, here you have got her deck I think you would be able to relate to, like I said, if you are one of those folks who is trying to accelerate the adoption rate of social software within your organisation… Major key learning… you are not alone! So get out there and CONNECT!!

Pretty amazing, eh? Like I said, today is going to be one of those days where there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to engage with the various activities happening at work. The good thing is that you, too, can participate in the Smart Work Jam by going over here and registering for it. Still plenty of time to chime in, share your two cents in the multiple conversations and help define, and shape!, the corporate world of the 21st century. Quite an interesting and exciting challenge, don’t you think? … Are you jamming yet?

Come and join us! TODAY! 😀

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