Ibm Learning For Columbia U Grad School Of Business

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© 2012 IBM Corporation

Social Media Accelerate IBMers’ Up-skilling

Sarah Siegel, [email protected], IBM Center for Advanced Learning, for Graduate School of Business, Columbia University

11 June 2012

Professor Ackerman, thank you for inviting me to speak with your class this evening

about IBM as a case study, to show the value of using social media for accelerated

skills development. Before we begin, I am curious. I understand that the majority of

you come from beyond the United States. [Next slide.]

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I want to poll you on your reaction to this message, but first, I just want to put it in

context. Here we’re referring to the use of social media by business leaders like you

and your teams. How many of you agree with this statement?

Can you say why? For those of you who did not raise your hand, why didn’t you?

[Next slide.]

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Deeper Insight Virtual Conference

SimArchitect - Serious game

Informal Learning Exchange (ILX) peer learning application

© 2012 IBM Corporation3

While we’re together, we will:

•See a number of examples of social technologies we’re using for skill development

or up-skilling at IBM, some of which are from vendors and some of which are home-

grown, including discussing their impact so far; three of them are shown here

•Imagine the future a bit

•Return to the present to discuss what to consider prior to introducing social tools to

your companies and teams as well as how to choose the right technology.

How does that sound? [Next slide.]

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SimArchitect is an example of an innovative approach to rapid up-skilling in our

Growth markets. One of the core goals is to accelerate the development of self

efficacy in a risk-free environment. It’s also about growing skills socially because IT

Architects need to be more active in enabling knowledge and skills transfer.

This is just now coming out of pilot mode and it will be rolled out among early

technical leaders in the IT Architect pipeline across the Growth Markets. We worked

with a premier gaming vendor on this, and added what we call a “social wrapper” to

it, built on our IBM Connections technology, to make the game more compelling,

since it is a single-player game. You can see that while players are engaged in the

game, they can be in touch with experts and peers, which makes the learning less

lonely.

So far, pilot results show amazing overall satisfaction and an impressive learning

gain. Now, I’ll show you a virtual conference of today and contrast it with what we

could do in the future. [Next slide.]

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The Deeper Insight global virtual conference for new IBMers took place for the second year just last

week. Many thousands of new IBMers participated. One benefit was that we could accommodate

many thousands of IBMers concurrently, which no physical space, other than perhaps a sports

stadium could do, and another is that it enabled the many new IBMers to feel smarter and at home

quickly while giving them an opportunity to interact with a range of more seasoned IBMers who they

might not have had the opportunity to meet as readily, if travel were involved. This was built on the

Unisfair platform, which is a vendor’s solution and we had nothing at IBM like it, that could

accommodate the number of IBMers that we needed to host. In terms of impact, we were pleased

that booth visitors spent an average of 18 minutes in this booth, which was new this year. And when

we compare another booth that was part of the conference last year, that booth had twice as many

downloads this year as last, so we feel that we had some combination of more compelling content to

download, along with the societal culture being a year more mature and comfortable with learning in

an environment like this.

This booth included:

•Live chat ‘round the clock with leadership development SMEs

•Special discussions for leaders, including one on what’s next for Watson clients and another on how

to become an IBM executive

•[Click on] Information, including:

•The Prize Giveaway of 30 min. 1:1 with a senior IBM leader x 4

•How to have career development discussions with employees.

•External resources for leaders on Twitter, and on Facebook and Linkedin, external aggregator

communities for the internal Connections-based IBM Manager Community. [Next slide.]

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That was pretty cool, but imagine if we made it easier for IBMers to collaborate with

one another after the virtual conference. Let’s say that a new IBMer met someone

more senior at the conference who agreed to mentor her. What if, she could,

through her touch-screen mobile phone…[Next slide.]

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…access her mentor through Sametime Meeting with Video? Increasingly, IBMers

are already accustomed to contacting friends and family through two-way video, say

via Facetime on their iPhones. Why not make it easy for them to use a secure IBM

solution to do so with their IBM colleagues? [Next slide.]

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Mobile learning strategy evolves

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2009

2010

2011

Mobile

QuickViews

Books 24x7

On The Go

New Hire

SMS alerts

Sales Eminence

Success Packs

BAO Success

Stories

ILX Mobile AggregatorImmigration GBS SAP Pre-Hire

We should talk a bit about the current mobile environment and how we’ve made

these performance aids accessible via mobile phones. The main point of the story

here is that we have been working on performance aids for mobile phones for a

relatively long time. We’d like to focus particularly on 2011 because you can see ILX

mobile; I will highlight the Informal Learning Exchange next. [Next slide.]

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Informal Learning Exchange (ILX)

Informal content is now integrated with what the business plans/schedules (class

and self paced) and this expands the boundaries of our classroom walls and online

learning boundaries!!! And makes content more relevant! Many thousands of new

learning items were found and consumed, rated by many, many thousands of

IBMers in 2011, its first full year. [Next slide.]

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Now, also imagine that in the ILX of the future, there is a button that an IBMer can

press to record a brief video to capture knowledge, share and post it, earning

reputation points and increasing social contribution/status/influence…. [Next slide.]

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A vision for the future?A vision for the future?

And what if we measured and rewarded the reputation points, based on impact to

the performance of those touched by his or her contributions? Something to

consider – how to motivate more social business behaviors. Now, let’s return to

today. The future may also be social, but so is today. I want to show you two other

kinds of social learning that are enabled by a vendor and by IBM. [Next slide.]

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This is the only example of formal learning I will show you. The first is delivered via

Cisco’s WebEx Simulcast. We also use Livestream. This is a screenshot from a

recent hybrid version of our New Manager Orientation that we run for the Growth

Markets. PBC stands for Personal Business Commitments and it’s our performance

management system.

Does anyone know what we mean by hybrid? In this case, 100 new managers were

sitting together in a hall in Bangalore. And another 100 were sitting at their desks in

17 countries, participating in a live chat, moderated by a professional leadership

development facilitator. The scores and written comments were very positive, but

the best part was the participation-rate. We had offered this same course face to

face and through Centra Live Virtual Classroom with no video. And very few new

managers were enrolling in either version. How awful. New managers, who needed

training like this were not getting it! Picture the potential dissatisfaction of their

employees, the possible attrition. They came to this version, though, and as you can

see, appeared to be engaged. And then, to keep the learning going... [Next slide.]

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We invited them to opt into the online IBM Manager Community on our IBM

Connections platform. There, they can do much more than post team photos. They

can join virtual watercoolers to trade best practices and lessons learned with their

peers, they can comment on blogs by senior leaders, who are offering leadership

advice from their experience and they can participate in scheduled learning

activities that are all about their leadership on the ground. I want to show you two

other sorts of online IBM communities as well. [Next slide.]

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The Technical Leadership Exchange or TLE Community is also opt-in and is

designed to engage the leaders who are in technical roles at IBM. We run hybrid

sessions for this community, too, although the learning is not informal, as it is

typically 200-300 leaders together in an auditorium around the world, for example,

we’ll be in Brazil later this summer, and then hundreds and hundreds of technical

leaders from 30+ countries logging in and participating in the session via a

professionally-moderated live chat. We also provide what we call Smarter Panels

via Livestream, where everyone is logging on and no one is co-located. Those are

just 60 minutes in length. Tomorrow, for instance, we will feature a panel of top

Watson researchers, talking about what’s next for Watson. Ahead of the session,

we invited technical leaders to submit and vote on questions to the panel and the

top-five most popular ones will be answered during the panel, and they will also take

live questions for the last 15 minutes. More than 3,000 technical leaders have

enrolled. And finally, what about social learning for potentially sensitive topics about

which leaders like you need to become smarter? [Next slide.]

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…potentially sensitive topics like, cultural intelligence, which I think many of you will

relate to, since at IBM, we define cultural intelligence as the ability to work

effectively with people from other countries. Here, you are looking at a pilot we ran

with managers a couple of years ago, and it was ahead of its time. It was in the 3D

virtual world of Second Life. How many of you have heard of Second Life? [Explain

if no one else is able to do so.]

In our anonymous survey afterward, 75% of respondents said that they were more

comfortable asking “stupid” questions as avatars than they would have been if they

had been face to face. Once bandwidth catches up, and all 3D virtual worlds are as

simple as, say, Farmville, I am confident that this will be a viable way to help, for

example, international assignees be more savvy even before Day 1 of their

assignment, by meeting with a peer from the countries where they’re assigned. Can

you imagine that? [Next slide.]

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Here’s an example of an IBM online community that is inclusive of lesbian, gay,

bisexual and transgender clients and colleagues; it is behind our firewall and we

also have one on Facebook called “Friends and Family of GLBT IBMers”. What’s so

powerful about a community like this is that if you work for a global company, and

you lead people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, you can learn

a lot just by following this community and reading Forum postings and more. I’ve

talked with a group of Professor Ackerman’s peers at Columbia about when and if

online communities make sense and I’ve told them that they are most powerful and

active when they are perceived as needed. This community is highly active because

the members need it, since historically, being openly lesbian, gay, bisexual or

transgender has been challenging in society, including in corporate environments.

So think of equivalent minority communities in addition to this one and you can see

how it could work additionally.

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Questions

Thanks to my colleagues for their collaboration on this work:

N. Ahmad, E. Altinpinar, R. Ashmore, A. Groves, C. Hamilton, D. Lang, T. Littlejohn, T. Masaku, M. Masiar, N. Medhi, L. Miller, K. Raza, G. Sabharwal, R. Saluja, R. Satish, L. Sitaram, H. Smith, M. Ticknor, P. Vania, K. Watanabe

I’ll remind us of a couple of questions I promised we would discuss: what to

consider prior to using social media for up-skilling? And also, how do I choose the

technology?.

What to consider prior [First, ask participants what they think and help them if they

are quiet] : a) Appetite of senior leadership; most still meet f2f, Can leaders cede

some control in the short term?; b) Bandwidth; c) Scalability; d) The need to be

perceived as a global player

How to choose the technology [First, ask participants what they think and help them

if they are quiet]: If to be collaborative, then communities; if to be competitive,

gamify the learning activities; if to be immersive, 3D virtual worlds; if to build

networks: Linkedin/Twitter/Online communities – internal & external; if for team-

building and mentoring, 2-way video; if for ideating, an Ideation Blog…..

When you are asking yourself if you, yourself, are ready: Consider that we are all

essentially the same way online as offline and can be effective whether introverted

or extroverted; it’s not about age, but rather about “getting it” and finally, can you

think of the whole realm as an experiment, rather than a risk? If you can, I believe

you can use social media to up-skill your workforce.

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Ibm Learning For Columbia U Grad School Of Business