[MUSIC] Let's begin with the obvious question for the two of you, but let me start with you, Jon. You have 430,000 employees, the size of many cities, spread across 170 countries. What's your approach to communicating effectively with them? And how's it changed over time? >> It's changed a lot. When I started in this company quite a few years ago, the tools of communication, the channels of communication were traditional. A lot of print, we published a lot of magazines and newsletters. We actually put up news announcements on bulletin boards on paper. And of course, that quickly included video, initially closed circuit television networks inside of the company. The distribution of tapes when VHS came about. And of course, things rapidly began to change with the internet because inside of the company we built what is today, we believe, the world's largest intranet. And that became the platform for communication to the employees, employees to each other, the development of applications, a lot of self-service capability. And so for the past probably 15, 20 years we have really been moving to digital communications as a method of reaching our employees and all of these different countries, as you've described. >> So can you tell us how you've made it more effective? I mean if, I assume it's blogs and it's tweets and it's all the things that we hear about outside, but in your applications. Are there things there that aren't listed yet in public that we would benefit by understanding? And how do you make it effective? >> Well, part of that is to understand what each medium does uniquely well. For example, a television is sight, sound, motion. And so if you try to take a print editorial mentality and stuff it into television, it makes for awful video and television. Now that we've got things like Twitter, you are constrained to very short bursts of information, and if you try to take a long piece of copy and simply make it shorter, it doesn't really maximize what Twitter is used for. Tumblr is a very different kind of medium. And we have a version of Tumblr called IBMblr, and we've had to conform to that medium. Live stream is not quite the same thing as watching a film or a video, or a three second TV spot. So as these channels of communication have proliferated, most of them, almost all of the ones that I can think of digital in some way, we've had to understand and adjust ourselves to the terms and conditions, if you will, of each channel and medium. And that way the employ and other audiences you're trying to reach get effective communications. But the other part of your question is engaging them. And probably the biggest thing in my career, and I've been in this field for, you know, several decades now, is that we thought of content and communication as, what message do I need to get to you? But the phenomenon of the internet and digital tools is that everyone is a publisher. Everyone has a recording studio and a broadcast studio. And so, my role and the role of my organization, and Mike builds products and software to enable this for everybody, I'm just a user of it inside of IBM. The phenomenon is this. Not only am I communicating, is my team helping IBM communicate to employees, we are providing the environment and the tools so they can create communications themselves. They can publish, they can broadcast, they can network themselves. And that's a very, very different dynamic of organizational communication. >> So, it's perfect seque. You're helping clients build and manage communications. You have tools for that. Can you tell us about that? I'm a client. What do you provide to me? >> Well, I think, and John started down this path, is one of the key technologies that I think have really revolutionized how people collaborate with each other is this idea of social networking. We've seen it in the consumer world with Facebook and Twitter and all the things John mentioned, but inside IBM, we've been dealing with those kind of tools for a long time. And we've extended our intranet to deal with these social capabilities. We probably have, we believe, the largest collection of what are known as dark blogs in the world. >> So, how many? >> Tens of thousands of dark blogs that are within our firewalls that are just IBMers communicating with other IBMers. But the thing that is fundamentally changing about these social networks when applied inside a large organization, is they fundamentally connect everybody to everybody else. They flatten the organization, they change the management hierarchy that existed for decades in organization so that anybody can have an opinion, but when they share their opinion, they have to be willing to deal with the consequences of those opinions, right? So the responsibility and accountability of communications goes from just management pushing down, to everybody communicating with each other. So social norms start to come into effect. John and his team we're very quick to jump on this when the social networking phenomena happened in the extranet and we put out blog policies on what we should and shouldn't say in external blogs. But those norms have kind of transferred into how we talk to each other more than the organization as well. >> Can you give me an example of that, either one of you, and also what do you do about privacy when I'm- >> Well, let me give you an example of one of the most powerful examples I saw in the very early usage of technologies. And this was an engineer we had in one of our German laboratories that was working on a customer problem. The customer system was failing, something was going wrong, and they couldn't' figure out what the root cause was. So they got frustrated, they posted their frustrations into their blog. Including elements of code, technology, in the blog, and they went home. Someone on the other side of the world, in China, picked up that blog entry, figured out the problem, posted the answer, and when the engineer came in, in Germany, the next day, >> There it was. >> The answer was there. Right. That was kind of a light bulb going off for me on the power of what these social networks could be to an organization like IBM where we are spread out across 170 countries around the world. It's the democratization of information sharing with a purpose, not just for communication, but for collaboration, for help to solve problems. That, I think, was one of the key features in starting to evolve. >> And part of the tools that you provide clients, if I were a client, is that knowledge behind the actual software. >> Well, we have a platform called IBM Connections that has been rated the number one enterprise social network platform for the last number of years. And what it does is take, not just blogs, but blogs and micro-blogging and wikis and activity management systems and a whole bunch of different elements of social networking tools built into a single, integrated platform. So you can jump between tools, so if you're communicating in a blog, and you need to go see a video or you need to go check on a particular task that's being managed as part of a community, you can jump very quickly between these, right? So we've started to interconnect all of these different information threads across all of these different tools, so that it becomes a very seamless way of communicating. Using the right tool for the right type of communication as you perform. [MUSIC]
