© 2014 IBM Corporation

CUST118: Major League Baseball: Fostering a Collaborative Approach to Conduct Baseball Business.Peter Murphy, Major League Baseball

Smriti Kapuria, Prolifics

Who We Are

Peter Murphy– Project Manager, Major League Baseball, Commissioner's Office– Project Management, Collaborative solutions– peter.murphy@mlb.com

Smriti Kapuria– Technology Manager, Prolifics User Experience Practice– UX designer, Developer, Architect, Ceramicist– skapuria@prolifics.com

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Agenda

About MLB Commissioner’s office

Collaboration Needs of business groups

Adoption of IBM Connections as a social platform

MLB’s own solution : Customize and extend IBM Connections

Key Components of solution architecture

Interesting features and challenges

The road ahead..

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About MLB Commissioner’s office

What is MLB ? • Baseball Office of the Commissioner(BOC)• Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM)• MLB Network

Business of Baseball - About the Commissioner's office – Game Regulations – Player Contracts – Corporate Sponsorships

Role of MLB IT group at the Commissioner’s office– Diverse Group – Supports BOC and clubs – Wide Spectrum of services – security, collaboration, application development

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MLB Commissioner’s OfficeCollaboration Needs of Business Groups

Business GroupsAnd the way they conduct their business

Introduction to a few different business groups – Department Based – Finance, Ticketing, IT, Legal

• Social Collaboration– Event Based – Industry Meetings, World Series

• Content sharing – Baseball Function Based – Official Scorers, Umpires

• Social Collaboration, Content sharing– Program Based – RBI, Urban Youth Academy

• Process Management

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Collaboration Needs of Business Groups Basic Ideas of structure and information sharing

Business groups are structured for information sharing and collaboration– with in each group as a community – with external entities

• Clubs • Vendors• Sponsors, etc.

Different types of social needs– Facilitate collaboration between clubs – Provide centralized information to conduct business – Periodic Notification of content and information – Expose dynamic and historic ticketing data from several systems

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Adoption of IBM ConnectionsAs a Social Collaboration platform

Social Collaboration Eco-system

The solution is implemented as multiple restricted communities

Each with its own unique user group

Users interface with Connection features within their community– Wikis– Files – Blogs – Activities, etc.

Each community has a set of owners that administer their community

Connections administrators– Moderate content – Use Metrics for reporting – Create communities

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Communities, Users and Functions and it all comes together!

Each business group uses their Community as a collaboration platform

Community is the hub for information and resources to run their business effectively

Functions such as blogs, calendar and forums facilitate communication

Community wikis, blogs, files provides centralized access for business artifacts

Community members set-up preferences to receive emailed notifications of updates

Sub Communities are created for sub groups of users for targeting content and communication

– One example is executives of a business group are members of a sub-community – In some cases, regional users/groups also have their own sub-communities

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Platform Snapshot Here’s how it looks! – The Official Scorers Community

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Platform Snapshot BOC – IT Project Management Office

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Platform Snapshot MLB – Collaborative Solutions (Subcommunities)

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MLB’s own solution Customize and extend IBM Connections

How we got to creating custom widgets on IBM Connections?

Custom Widgets, Custom community themes..

Several communities created custom community widgets in addition to out-of-the-box

Some examples are Polls, File Viewer, Ticketing widgets

Communities expose dynamic aggregated data from different systems through such widgets

An interesting scenario of Workflow Management with IBM Connections

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MLB’s own solution Job Request and Workflow Management with IBM Connections

This solutions utilizes Community Activities in IBM Connections to track job requests

New requests are created with a third party tool

Approved requests are added as an activity in IBM Connections using Connections API

Community Owners can quickly view and assign incoming job requests to members

3 custom widgets are created to set-up the Workflow Management dashboard – view new job requests – view schedules of members – view upcoming due dates of tasks

All of these widgets use Community Activities Connections API to maintain a cohesive solution

A mobile view for each of this functions is also provided

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MLB’s own solution Job Request and Workflow Management Snapshot

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Let’s Talk ITIBM Connections, user management and databases

Solution Architecture

Current implementation of IBM Connections uses a medium topology

The environment is configured for high availability

User management scenarios– A TDI script is used for onboarding users in Connections via LDAP – The user is synchronized with the LDAP and Portal implementations

Cognos is configured to run with IBM Connections to provide metrics and reporting

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Interesting Features and Challenges

Notifications – a fine balance between voluntary socialization and business needs of information

sharing

Are Community members following the right content?– For notifications and preferences!

Dynamic user base – Clubs and user’s name change frequently that needs to be maintained regularly

Challenges with content moderation

Files and tagging as information sharing is an important need

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Business Benefits

Better communication– Between the central office and the clubs– Between clubs themselves– Between various support staff such as official scorers

Better notifications– Community members are better informed about new content and changes to existing

content. No longer need to hunt and peck for latest content.

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The road ahead..

Newly deployed Connections 4.5 environment

Connections Content Manager evolution

Enterprise document manager consideration

Forms features(survey, polls etc.) through Feature pack

Happy Marriage between Connections and Portal

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Access Connect Online to complete your session surveys using any:– Web or mobile browser – Connect Online kiosk onsite

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Acknowledgements and Disclaimers

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