During my last days at IBM, I was very busy writing.  I was fortunate to work on some exciting publications that have recently become available.

The first of these is an article entitled What it takes to drive IBM Lotus Connections Adoption in the Enterprise.  It was published on the IBM developerWorks site on June 30.  For this article, I interviewed 4 different IBM customers who are currently using Lotus Connections at their companies. I wanted to go beyond the generally recommended adoption guidelines and find out what had really worked in motivating the general population of a company to use social software.  I took the most valuable nuggets of information and looked for the common threads to produce a list of recommendations that can be used by anyone planning a rollout of social software in an internal environment. 

The social factor

The Social Factor, by Maria Azua

The next project I worked on was as a contributing author and reviewer of The Social Factor.  I was very excited and honored to be asked by the author, Maria Azua, to work on this project.  I was given a list of twelve points to discuss about the business implications and transformational opportunities that social networking can bring to companies and their employees. 

To tackle this challenge, I wanted to share not just my experiences and knowledge, but that of individuals I felt were using social networking tools for maximum business results.  I interviewed different people both inside and outside of IBM who I found either through their blog, tweets, or LinkedIn profiles.  I also used Twitter for real time research in answering some of the questions.

I handed over my 8,000 word draft to the editor in mid-January.  He did an excellent job of performing an “extreme makeover” on my work, so much so that I couldn’t believe I had actually written those words!  A few months later, I was asked to review two of the chapters before final publication.  I did find a funny error, where a photo of one person was labled with the wrong name.  Fortunately, I  knew both of the individuals in question and I was able to catch the error. 

The editor had told me the book would be ready in October, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it on Amazon last week.  So go ahead and order or download a copy!  I would love to hear your thoughts.