How can social technologies and analytics empower your workforce? Find out at the IBM Innovation Lab.

IBM Connect 2013 asks you to imagine the power of a workforce where people are in the 'best fit' jobs, fully engaged, empowered and highly productive. Picture a workforce as a network of communities where employees can instantly find the right colleagues, inside or outside the immediate work group, to fill gaps in their expertise, and tap knowledge across departments, across languages, across oceans. These images are no longer just visions of the future; today smarter workforces are driving innovation to bring products and services to market faster, resolving problems before they arise to improve customer service, and increasing sales by building new skills.

Being a social business is not only about new interactions with your customers. It is also about new interactions with your employees. A social business measures its employee engagement, acts in real-time to resolve workforce issues, and leverages social technologies and analytics to unlock the potential in its workforce. 

So, how do you unlock this potential?  Visit the IBM Innovation Lab at IBM Connect and see some of the new tools our researchers are developing to do just that. Here's a preview...

Steve Dill of the Almaden Research Lab asks "What if you could not only exchange information and ideas with colleagues, but share “work” with anyone in your “crowd” of colleagues?" The Work Marketplace provides a work exchange where people can post requests for work and find people to do it. Requests can be shared within a small community or across the enterprise. Colleagues can select, bid, or compete to do the work, and earn points as currency for the work they've completed. The Work Marketplace connects people and work in new ways to improve productivity and spur innovation. 

Werner Geyer of the Cambridge Research Lab will be demoing an enterprise crowdfunding project called 1x5. Inspired by the crowdfunding phenomenon on the Internet (such as Kickstarter), IBM Research has brought crowdfunding to the enterprise. In this demo, we will show you an internal crowdfunding prototype and results from a 30-day trial at IBM that demonstrates how tapping into the collective intelligence of your social workforce can spur innovation, lead to more engaged employees, foster better decision-making about investments, and increase cross-departmental collaboration. 

Casey Dugan, also from the Cambridge lab, will demo two related projects. Social Pulse offers enterprises a deep look at what their employees are saying on internal and external social media by augmenting social media content with enterprise personnel data. It presents sentiment and topic analysis aggregated by this demographic information through interactive visualizations, offering marketing and HR professionals valuable, real-time insights. IBMersWhoTweet is a crowdsourced solution that invites employees to match Twitter accounts to the employees who own them. Over 500 IBMers have helped classify 7,000 Twitter accounts, and we have studied different ways to increase participation. See them in action. 

Hiro Takagi, of the Tokyo Research Lab, wants to know if your company has  knowledge sources hidden away. Of course! We all have valuable data frozen in archived documents or sitting in an old team room on a server somewhere. Our new Social Knowledge Management tools will help you rediscover that knowledge and give it new life. We analyze several information sources and use employee interests and work contexts to make recommendations. Users can easily “like,” “mention,” or “bookmark” the information to reactivate the lost knowledge. And, to get people started, we use gamifcation to help that knowledge go viral.

If you are at IBM Connect, please stop by the lab. Talk firsthand to researchers from all over the world who are envisioning how the workplace will look in 5 years. 

We're located in the Dolphin Hotel in Asia 3.