Recent IBM Initiative Relating to Social Business - Report Example

An Analysis of a Recent IBM Initiative Relating to ‘Social Business’ Introduction The contemporary business world has become more organised, intellectual and instrumented in this present day context. A new business concept has been introduced for the enterprises in this modern business world, which is known as ‘social business.’ There has been a change in the marketplace of businesses through integration of social networking in the organisational design. It has been revealed that the organisations, which are capable of transforming into social business, have the possibility of earning huge profits and attaining superior competitive position. This transformation will also help the organisations to improve their relationship with customers, enhance the performance of entire workforce and ensure efficient operation of business. The companies in the present day context are looking forward towards incorporating the use of social media technologies into their business functions. This social media technology, according to The International Business Machines (IBM) is termed as social business. Social business has provided a shift in the functioning of IBM, wherein the focus has shifted from static content to the energy driven decision-making and creativity aspects. These certainly enabled the business of the company to reach greater heights. It has been perceived by IBM that the business relationships are no longer reliant upon Business-to-Business (B2B) or Business to Customers (B2C). The trend has been changed by following People to People (P2P) business approach, which introduced by the company. This P2P business approach of IBM acts as an effective way to channelize its job functions in an effective manner. Evidences project that there lay three distinct features of social business, which entails engaged, transparent, and nimble (1IBM, 2014; 6IBM, 2012). With this concern, the essay intends to analyse a recent initiative of IBM relating to ‘social business.’ Exploitation of IBM’s ‘Knowledge’ Leading to Enhanced ‘Innovation’ Learning Approach Used By IBM IBM has been using an effective organisational learning approach, which is regarded as the Smarter Educational Framework. This approach helped in discovering and maximising the opportunities that resulted in modernising the educational institutions in the United Kingdom (UK). It has been viewed that the educational institutions faced severe challenges in the context of offering better services and enhancing their respective learning process (2IBM Corporation, 2005). Therefore, IBM understood the challenges that faced by the institutions due to which the organisation took the initiative of developing an innovative learning approach. This approach is called as the IBM Smarter Educational Framework, which comprised three main components such as research storage excellence, exceptional student experience and institutional optimisation. This approach provides a clear demonstration regarding its function with clients that provides assistance and enables better learning experience along with quality. IBM Smarter Educational Framework is an effective tool to enhance performance by providing information, ensuring better decision-making, quick problem solving and utilisation of resources that raises operational efficiency (IBM Corporation, 2012). This can be better understood with the help of the following graphical illustration and detailed explanation of the aforesaid components. Figure 1: Demonstration of IBM’s Smarter Educational Framework (IBM Corporation, 2012). Research Storage Excellence: IBM has realised the strong challenges that often face by the research communities. These challenges include research data curation and long-term retention among others. This particular component includes extensible mechanisms that assimilates with one other to provide solutions, which is required to manage and exploit data in relation to various researches accessing from various sources. This element is quite effective for data curation in long-term and data mining analytics in various disciplines (3IBM, 2014). Exceptional Student Experience: It has been viewed that IBM possesses an in-depth knowledge about the emerging technologies that can provide greater assurance for exceptional student learning experience. IBM through combining students’ information in multiple systems and deriving required data can predict problems very rapidly and accordingly develops better intervention plans. The solutions that are derived eventually encourage the educational institutions to become associated and intellectual in the process of interacting with the students. This framework helps in providing a complete view of every student along with providing assistance for a customised learning experience (4IBM, 2014). Institutional Optimisation: The focus for IBM in the year 2012 has been laid upon institutional optimisation. IBM aims on achieving it through application of optimisation in various infrastructures and foundations. The company believes that in order to develop efficiency in operations, a mixed methodology in the delivery of services is necessary. IBM through service portfolios aims to construct an environment, which is personalised to the requirements of educational clients in transforming the educational system (5IBM, 2014; IBM Corporation, 2012). Social Business Development The development of social media has had an exceptional experience in this modern day context. It is worth mentioning that IBM Social Business Framework is a modular set of abilities that pace up the development of solutions related to advanced social business (Riand, 2011). The exceptional experience of social business at IBM has been illustrated in the form of pictorial representation presented below. Figure 2: Illustration of exceptional experience of social business at IBM (Riand, 2011). The following social business development framework has been created in order to facilitate the customers as well as the business partners of IBM to reap maximum opportunities that are derived from investments made in the field of expertise and technology. This developmental framework has provided exceptional experiences to the users, enhanced social collaboration, improved the ability to integrate industrial capabilities in business analytics, commerce and content management within the organisation. Most significantly, the framework also provided a major contribution in protecting the investments made by the organisations’ stakeholders at large (3IBM Corporation, 2012; Riand, 2011). A graphical representation has been depicted below for better comprehension of the framework. Figure 3: Social Business Framework of IBM (Riand, 2011). With regards to analyse the social media development, it can be viewed that in the year 2000, IBM introduced the notion of developerWorks, which was created to provide information, education and developmental skills to the IT professionals and developers of the organisation. In relation to the procedure of developing social business, IBM introduced a social networking site of My developerWorks, which is related to the process of developerWorks. This social networking site helped various developers of the organisation to communicate and cooperate on several projects. Within a span of two years, 6,00,000 profiles for My developerWorks was created that resembled the most involved members of IBM’s ecosystem. One of the most vital aspects of My developerWorks was that it helped the company, partners and start-ups to collaborate together in a common platform. The biggest valuable factor of IBM is that developerWorks has deflected several support questions that were previously directed to costlier channels of call centres. It is estimated that IBM has been saving more than 100 million US dollars in an average year from this aspect of social business. In addition, there is a belief that IBM through its practice of social business development and transformation has become a model for other organisations (Traudt & Vancil, 2011). IBM’s framework of social business has provided a major contribution in the development of socially enabled solutions (Prager & Graff, 2011). Social media platforms such as social CRM have been used by IBM, which concentrated on forming a cross functional system of unified communities for dealing with the issues relating to customer care and sales support. This unified method holistically treats the customers and enables sharing their insights in an effective manner, resulting in building trust amid them and attracting towards accessing various services of the company (Baird & Parasnis, 2011). Knowledge Management Features In recent years, it can be apparently observed that knowledge management has been a topic for discussion amid the business managers, market analysts and academicians. Knowledge management is the procedure through which companies create value from knowledge based and intellectual assets. It is often regarded as a system of connecting and using intellectual capital in order to get competitive advantage and commitment towards customers’ effectiveness as well as advancement that result in making quick decisions (Smith, 2001). It is also considered as a cross disciplinary base. Library experts have brought knowledge management into practice and converted libraries into a knowledge management centre. Knowledge management relates to managing the knowledge of the organisations effectively through following a systematic approach of knowledge creation and using these knowledge in the competitive market to obtain more advantage and gain profit (Bhattacharya & Chaudhury, 2004). The three essential parts of an efficient infrastructure of knowledge management as determined by Lotus and IBM are people, places and things. According to the model, people are the crucial point of knowledge management wherein they tends to incorporate their knowledge and expertise based on the business functions, thus required places in which they can utilise their knowledge and support in attaining predetermined business targets (Lotus Development Corporation, 2000). This can be better understood with the help of the following pictorial illustration. Figure 4: Knowledge Management Ingredient of IBM (Lotus Development Corporation, 2000). One of the main features of knowledge management in IBM involves application of informal as well as competency networks that are built through common methods and tools. These networks facilitate IBM professionals in generating, determining, storing and appropriately reusing intellectual capital. Another feature of knowledge management in IBM is its implementation procedure, which is related to management of assets that determine, yield and strengthen the organised assets, providing enhanced solutions to the customers (Ahmed & et. al., 2007). Issues Relating to the Exploitation of Social Business Observably, the notion of developing social business is still quite confusing for various business corporations belonging to this modern day context. To be precise, companies are not sure, whether to incorporate social business in their respective organisational systems. One of the major issues that face by an organisation in developing social business is the requirement for providing effective training and educating the employees. In certain cases, employees are not much comfortable in using social media in their job functions due to which there occurs a significant problem in performing operations effectively. It can be affirmed that if the employees are made to use social media in their business functions, there might be a possibility of offering better services to the customers. Moreover, it has been apparently observed that the organisations are not sure about how to collaborate and coordinate the initiatives of social business in their respective organisations. Certain portion of employees of various companies have the tendency that use of social media might increase their responsibility towards the job along with increase in the tasks due to which they resist the usage of the same(Naslund, 2014; Merrill & et. al., 2011). Current and Future Potential in Social Media Exploitation It has been apparently observed that exploitation of social media has had an adverse effect on the companies in several ways. It would be worth mentioning that there are numerous risks associated with the use of social media in an organisation. For instance, there might lay certain pressures in the marketing shift wherein the companies can change their strategy of marketing and develop the most convenient way to use the social media sites. Moreover, if a customer has a bad experience regarding the services provided to them by the companies, the customer might share his/her negative experience through social media sites that would adversely affect the performance of the companies at large. In addition, for various businesses, there exists a huge risk because the confidential information of an organisation might be accidently or intentionally released in the social media sites, affecting them by a considerable degree. It has also been viewed that there are several unauthorised personnel who use social media sites to speak on behalf of the organisations due to which their reputation would be on jeopardised. Thus, these are certain areas that are considered to be developed in order to ensure that there would be a positive impact on the use of social media sites for organisations (Lovering, 2014; Lee, 2013). Social Media Services Achieved Through Knowledge and Innovation Framework In recent years, there are several users of internet medium who have used social media sites extensively. The access of social media sites has become quite famous amid males, females, educated people, uneducated people and many other adults as well as children. As it has been observed that social media provides quality services in communicating people, sharing information, making new friends and meeting people through the services of social media, its usage has been raised at large. Moreover, social media services have provided greater assistance to people in several aspects that include entertainment, education, work and communication. It would be vital to mention in this similar concern that several networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Myspace among others are the main platforms for the people to remain in contact with their loved ones. There are five main features of social media services. These features entail participation, which provides encouragement to people for freely creating and sharing information as required, openness, which inspires people to choose and use the shared subjects, conversation, which provides a platform for communication among people, community that provides the facility for the people to form group as per their interest and connectedness which links people with one another. In fact, social media services can be used wherein it creates interest among people to form as well as develop a common network. In addition, the number of users using the services of social media has been ever increasing due to which the contents provided to these users have significantly improved in various business prospects. Moreover, in order to derive maximum profits, several companies have created company profiles that help in earning revenue from the aforesaid mechanism or service. Social media services provide opportunities to create new business models that assist the companies to sustain their respective businesses in this competitive landscape (Hu, 2011). The various business models along with their respective services relating to social media have been portrayed in the following. Figure 4: Business Models of Social Media Services (Hu, 2011). Conclusion From the above analysis and discussion, it can be ascertained that there has been a huge change in the functioning of corporations due to the introduction of social media for business purpose. It has been apparently observed that IBM is largely using social media networking with a new initiative that refers to ‘social business.’ IBM has incorporated social media networking into its organisation due to which it has been successful in changing into a social business organisation. This change has improved IBM’s relationship with the customers and resulted in obtaining greater profits. Smarter Educational Framework is the learning approach, which has been used by the organisation in reforming its various educational programs. On the other hand, IBM Social Business Framework is a model, which has been used by the organisation in order to develop the functions and provide effective solutions regarding social business. This framework has been developed with the objective of providing active support to IBM partners in reaping significant benefits and providing exceptional services to the users. IBM introduced developerWorks, which helped the users and the partners to collaborate with each other. IBM also uses the notion of knowledge management, which aids in managing organisational knowledge along with obtaining huge profits. The three important components of IBMs initiative linked with social business are people, places and things. Thus, it can be determined that IBM after incorporating a social business has been able to provide innovative solutions and extraordinary experiences to its customers. References Ahmed, P. K. & et. al., 2007. Learning Through Knowledge Management. Taylor & Francis. Baird, C. H. & Parasnis, G., 2011. From Social Media to Social CRM. IBM Corporation, pp. 1-17. Bhattacharya, P. & Chaudhury, P. K., 2004. Knowledge Management and its Utilisation : An Overview. INFLIBNET Centre, pp. 592-599. Hu, X., 2011. Social Media Business Model Analysis - Case Tencent, Facebook, and Myspace. Aalto UniversitySchool of Economics, pp. 1-105. 1IBM, 2014. 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