IBM Research Innovation Lab at IBM Connect 2014

It's all about the people...

Every year at the annual IBM Connect Conference (formerly Lotusphere), the IBM Innovation Lab showcases the future. It provides a first-hand glimpse into the cutting-edge technology being developed at IBM Research labs around the world.

If you are attending the conference, make it a point to visit the lab in Asia 3at the Dolphin. Share ideas with IBM researchers and see their work as it unfolds. This year, the lab is focusing on three areas: Smarter Workforce, Visual Analytics, and Co-Inventing with Customers.

Here is our latest thinking about enabling your workforce, by way of four IBM research demos being shown in the lab:

Talent Planning Analytics: Predicting the Skill Needs in a Dynamic Marketplace

Aleksandra Mojsilovic, Predictive Modeling and Optimization

Understanding market demand and client needs, and then translating that into the right skills, is critical to business success. Do we have the right skills to support our projects and service delivery? How can we most effectively support our internal business processes and back office operations? Is our sales force aligned with our clients? Do our sellers have the right skills and expertise to sell our products? Our prototype will demonstrate several predictive analytics capabilities to support a range of tactical and strategic talent planning needs of an organization.

Talent Retention Analytics: Using Predictive Analytic Insights to Improve Employee Engagement

Shubir Kapoor, Business Analytics Software and Services

As difficult as it has become to locate top performers, keeping them on board is proving to be an even greater challenge. How can we proactively identify which employees are at high risk of leaving? Can we determine the characteristics of these employees to better understand the reason for attrition? How can we integrate the predictive results with compensation, learning, succession planning, and performance management systems so that decisions are made with precision? How can we improve employee engagement, retain the best and brightest, ensure compensation is competitive, and let top performers know there is a career path available? It all starts with understanding the patterns that are hidden in the data. See our demo and find out more.

Understanding Employee Voice

Casey Dugan, Cognitive User Experience

Employee feedback is a critical component of successful decision-making in today’s complex business environment. Making sense of that feedback and reacting to it can be challenging. We're showing various technologies and approaches for understanding the voice of your employees, from product offerings to research prototypes. These tools form an employee engagement suite that can provide workforce insights - from traditional surveys to real-time understanding through social media analytics.

Engagement Analytics: Increasing Social Adoption and Business ROI 
Shiri Kremer-Davidson, Social Technologies 
Marie Wallace, Analytics Strategist, IBM Social Business
The trend toward an open, transparent, and collaborative business environment is changing how people interact across the enterprise and beyond. Social collaboration platforms generate large volumes of data about a business. However, little of this data is being leveraged to generate insights that allow a business to drive a new class of analytics-driven decision making. Our demo shows an extensible environment that uses enterprise network data to generate KPIs that measure individual impact with the goal of measuring organizational effectiveness. It also empowers individuals by helping them use social networks to optimize their own social engagement strategies and approaches. Visit the lab to learn more about the Social Dashboard you see below and how it helps employees to better understand their role in the social network.