IBM Labs launched a collaboration initiative on Wednesday designed to help companies speed product development by harnessing social networking.
"Innovation Factory", which IBM is using in its labs, uses social-networking technologies to help companies quickly conceive and test new products and services, promising to reduce product launch process from years to only days, the company said.
"There is a new openness at IBM about what we are doing in our labs," Irene Greif, IBM fellow and director of the collaborative user experience at IBM Research, said at a press conference.
IBM employees have begun using Web 2.0-style tools in Lotus and as standalone applications, to collaborate within the company, share API and create more knowledge about what's going on in research.
Alistair Rennie, vice president, development and technical support for Lotus software, framed the changes as a necessity to keeping up with the next-generation workforce.
"People coming out of school expect to come into the workplace and use modern collaboration tools. Email is for our generation, IM is for college students, and high school students will come in all ready used to Web 2.0-style social networking," Rennie said.
Rennie's sentiment was reflected in many of the Lotus products on display at the event, some of which had been debuted at Lotusphere in January.
- CRAFT (Collaborative Reasoning for Business Intelligence), an automated mash-up creator, makes self-updating queries for gathering information from network databases, RSS feeds and the internet without the user having to know the proper way to formulate an old-fashioned query. CRAFT is capable of sophisticated associations for better searching, as well as suggestions for what other information a person should be tracking.
- Many Eyes, a sharing site for data, enables users to visually see Freakonomics — such as associations within data sets. You can, for example, see Second Life residents by real-life country percentages, or a web showing which Bible characters appear together in the most verses. In public beta since January, IBM Labs is now in the process of adding social-networking components that should be fully in place by summer.
- Malibu, which is currently being used by IBM employees, is similar to Microsoft's Center for Information Work software for harnessing meta data. It searches and pairs RSS feeds, emails, tasks and social bookmarks to easily search and manage the flow of information for an individual or group.
- The IBM OmniFind Content Discovery Edition is a search engine suited to retailers that uses semantic analysis and context clues to cut out the "did you mean?" error step sometimes made in search before getting results. It accepts natural language phrases, misspellings and literal parameters such as "under $100". The user-friendly back-end can be "programmed" by non-IT people to boost certain items, change relevance and create targets.
"Collaborative research that is very applied and very user-facing is in need of being open and close to customers and end users. Because, usually, widely deployed things are always behind what we are seeing in the labs," said Greif.
While some money is allocated to research within the company, most projects are only funded as joint programmes with other groups, Greif said.
Because of this, a lot of things are done "on spec" and then shopped around to product groups within IBM or partner companies to garner funding for further development, Greif said.
The return to open collaboration helps with that process and also serves to showcase software in development to IBM clients.
