Social networks, to most, are about fun and games. To IBM, social networking has serious potential for the workplace.
The latest version of IBM's Lotus Connections 3.0, announced last month, is IBM's most earnest attempt yet to bring Facebook- and Twitter-style networking to large companies. Small firms can adopt other companies' tools, such as Yammer or Present.ly, to let employees tweet internally within the company, but Lotus Connections aims to serve companies with 10,000 or more employees.
A social network of this type lets workers in large, geographically spread out companies find one another—and one another's work—through serendipitous discovery, rather than through a deliberate search. "We had a customer with two teams, one in the U.S., and one in Australia," says Heidi Ambler, IBM's director of social software. "Neither knew that they were working on the same project, trying to solve the same problem." Ambler thinks a social networking tool like Lotus Connections could eliminate such redundancies.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Facebook for Work - Technology Review
Author: Paul Boutin
