The story of Lotus Connections

Suzanne O Minassian  December 17 2007 07:00:00 AM

A little known fact about Lotus Connections is that it was developed from applications that have been in use inside IBM for years. When I joined in 2003, the company had been using a profile service where each employee had a page with information about their job, location, background, picture, organization, and more. It provided a place to run searches for people based on those attributes, helping me identify those who might be interested in my work, people who could help with my project, and teams working on similar projects from all across the IBM-sphere. These profiles were popular not only internally; customers asked about how to get them in their own company, and they became a part of Lotus Connections.

Within my first year I saw several projects spring up in different areas within the company. I was working with a research group who wanted to improve the way knowledge workers accomplish their business activities, and thus began the focus on activity-centric computing. The project ultimately became hosted internally for IBMers, and is now part of Lotus Connections as well. Social bookmarking was gaining attention in the consumer space, and another team of researchers wondered what effects an internal social bookmarking service would have in a work environment. They developed and hosted Dogear, which rose in popularity in house and thus also became hosted for the company to use.

In the office of the CIO, blogging was introduced as a way to encourage knowledge sharing within the organization. Many IBMers had external blogs, but an internal blog service gave employees the ability to discuss projects and work at a level of detail that otherwise wouldn’t be suitable externally. Sales, engineers, researchers, product evangelists, and experts use their blogs to share information and promote discussions across boundaries. Finally, an online community hosting service became a central place to find and join communities of interest and get information about meetings, events, resources, and members. Blogs and communities also became part of Lotus Connections.

It doesn’t end there. Many creative and innovative people in the company are constantly coming up with new ideas and new services. Some of these ideas get developed as side projects and shared with the company for others to use and try out. We watch these projects, their adoption, their value, and understand how they can address the needs of our customers. Ultimately, what we provide in the product is what has given us value and what we believe will give our customers value. (reposted by Suzanne from her previous blog)

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