[NOTE: BlurNotes are interview notes for my new book Blurring Boundaries which reports on Enterprise Online Communities. Your feedback helps me decide what to use in the book.]
Adam Christensen is part of IBM's corporate communications team, based in Armonk, NY. His job is overwhelmingly focused on the company's considerable social media activities. I interviewed him for Twitterville, where I learned IBM has more employees tweeting than any other company. I also learned back then, that much of IBM's social media focus is to tighten communications between it's 400,000 employees in over 200 countries as well as with existing partners and customers.
IBM's online communities continues along those lines as well, I've learned. I turned to Adam mostly to get a sense of how its numerous communities got started.
In 1993, Lou Gerstner, career executive took over at IBM, then the world’s largest technology company. The place was a mess. IBM had made mistakes that backfired including an attempt to slow the migration of large businesses from mainframes to personal computers. When IBM got serious about the new, smaller PCs, they tried to make them behave like little mainframes. This opened a huge window of opportunity for smaller, more agile competitors such as Microsoft on the software side and Dell Computer on the hardware side.
This was during an era of corporate takeovers. Investors and analysts both expected--almost demanded-- that Gerstner downsize: Sell off huge chunks of the the company, slash employees and every possible cost and make amputated-consolidated nee entity profitable above all things.
Gerstner listened to the conventional wisdom. Then he ignored it. He made minor cutbacks but kept most of IBM's diverse components intact. He worked to keep the most talented people. He declared the IBM's whole had greater value than the sum of it's parts.
IBM has still had a stormy road.And over the last 17 years it has sold or shut down many of its diverse components as it has moved more into consulting services and out of software applications and hardware.
Had Gerstner listened to conventional wisdom, it would have wound up being a mainframe company, and about as relevant as Honeywell, DEC and other companies that clung to big iron strategies.
By 1997, it was clear he had called the right shot. But IBM remained a lumbering giant. It had cut down to from 400,000 to 200,000 employees but they were strewn all over the world. Some employees had never met their bosses face-to-face. These employees were serving partners and customers in over 200 countries with combined employees of over 10 million people.
Gerstner mandated the company, "Go to the edge," Christensen told me. Decision making, information and collaboration stop flowing into a bottle neck at corporate headquarters.
This mandate drove the company out of manufacturing and application software and into services where it is now the world leader. It also made IBM, the first company to build a social media- based enterprise online community back in 1999.
Called DeveloperWorks, as the name implies it is for IBM's software developer community. IBM is among the leading enterprise platform providers. Any third-party developers wishing to build on the platform belongs to DeveloperWorks. Every company seems to have started with a focus on developers and like others, it was an outgrowth of online forums which went all the way back to the middle 1980s.
There are about 187,000 members to DeveloperWorks, about two-thirds are from outside the company. It's growing evenly at the rate of about 10,000 more developers every calendar quarter.
IBM has an extensive community of networks, some for partners, other for customers, university affiliates and a few just for employees. They've all learned from the success of DeveloperWorks.
Among the key lessons: self management, make it easy to find the experts and make it easy for members to identify and communicate with the individual that they find most important, Adam told me.
I asked Adam about the business value. He noted that IBM stopped building software applications for its own platform in 2002. "We are more dependent than our competitors on independent developers and DeveloperWorks is at the very center of its strategy.
Another issue is community connection with IBM's ecosystem. I'm learning that this loosely defined term to described the interaction between companies, customers and partners are inextricably connected with communities.
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