#H2HChat: Reimagining What Employee Communication Should Be with IBM panel

Hi everybody, this is Bryan Kramer. We are at another H2H Chat. I'm very excited to be here with you all again this week, and I've got some very exciting and fun guests. We have been preparing for this since over last week, for many weeks actually, and so we are excited to talk about Reimagining communication, what employee communication should be. And I've got some awesome guests here. I'm going to introduce them and then we are going to get started. Just real quick before we start, for anybody who's new, please make sure that you use the word or the hashtag #H2Hchat in your tweet stream. If you use that, then you'll be participating in a live tweet chat. Suzy is on the tweet chat. She's the one with the red hair. You can't miss her. Suzy MCC, @SuzyMCC, and she's gonna be taking questions over the course of this because the last half of this is when I will be posing questions back to our panelists. So please make sure you pose any questions that you have. She'll save them and then we'll be able to ask those questions of our panelists live. Again, we are very excited. I'm gonna go ahead and move into introductions Right, and we do have— we do actually have another panelist, but we have some technical difficulties with the last panelist, so as soon as she jumps on, we will be able to introduce her. But for now, we have Jacques and Allison. I'm gonna have you guys introduce yourselves. Jacques, why don't you go ahead and go first?

Sure, I'm Jacques Pavleny. I am the Senior Portfolio Marketing Manager for IBM's collaboration software business at the worldwide level. I've been involved in a lot of stuff over the past 8 years in this part of the business. I've been with IBM 18 years, and I have a personal interest in a lot of the great technologies around how we think differently about working, collaborating, and communicating with one another.

Fantastic. And Alison, how about yourself?

Myself, I'm in the same boat as Jacques. We're portfolio marketing. I do content management. So I am promoting Verse and the rest of the social portfolio and collaborative portfolio.

Great. So I'm hearing lots of collaborative, and it's a very collaborative, collaborative time, and we have so many different ways that people are collaborating, new ways that people are collaborating, which is kind of exciting. Things have needed to change for a really long time. And, you know, one of the things that I think is on everyone's minds is how it's going to change and maybe even what companies are adapting to this new digital workforce. So why don't we jump in with that as a first question to both of you. Allison, maybe if you wanted to go first, how do you think companies are adapting to a digital workforce? Uh-oh.

Did we lose Alison?

I think maybe we are down to Jacques, you, and I.

I

can

take that one first. We'll hopefully get Alison back online. So for me, the way that companies are thinking about digital workforce, and what I've been seeing is really around 2 areas and kind of 2 sides of the same coin: structured and unstructured work. I think for most of the digital age, we've seen a lot of transformation around how people do work when it comes to structured work, so automating and digitizing, you know, very structured business processes like finance, accounting, HR, things like benefits. You know, and now we're starting to move into structured processes around healthcare and life sciences, for example. And that leads me to what I think is the real transformation that's happening now. The thing that we're seeing shifting is a move towards a digital transformation of unstructured work, the ad hoc work, the creative work, innovation work, which doesn't necessarily follow a very straightforward path. It's one thing to digitally transform, say, a document creation with a program like a word processing program, or it's another thing to digitally transform a structured work process like, for example, benefits or paychecks, right. We've been doing that for a long time. It's quite another to digitally transform work that doesn't follow a pre— I'm sorry, Bryan, I'm sorry.

Like— Uh-oh, Jacques, it seems that we are switching places on the video stalling. So let's see, Allison, are you able to hear me okay?

I'm able to hear you now, yes.

Oh good, good. Okay, so why don't we move over to you and we'll talk about what companies are moving to a digital workforce.

Well, I can speak to IBM themselves. You know, companies are really looking for that work-life integration and the tools that employees use, especially millennials. You know, they're trying to shift gears for mobile, a mobile experience as our lives are increasingly becoming more on the go. And part of that is making sure that employees understand and use digital tools, content, marketing, and techniques so we can really deliver that customized experience for the audience who is also doing their research and making their decisions digitally.

So how do you see them— let's dive in a little bit deeper. How do you actually see them Moving into— how does that transition? What does the transition look like?

So, you know, you're making your tools move towards more of like an approach that you bring to your workday in general. So it's tools that understand the person and understand how you like to get work done, as opposed to you conforming to a standalone tool. It's learning how you prioritize your items, how you search, how you share. It's becoming more mobile. It's moving to a more cloud environment. And this digital mindset is really happening on all levels of enterprise and consumer, and you just really can't deliver business without thinking in this digital mindset.

Well, that's certainly the case, and so I'm going to keep going with you until we get the others back on. What do you think is the digital mindset? Is that a fair expectation? What makes up the mindset of a digital person?

I think it's, you know, one that's evolving out of an analog approach, so it's mocking how you do things in real life, right, and you're optimizing work. but just in a digital space. So it's bringing those habits and moving them over to the digital space because it gives you greater control over a larger area. So right, you're now connecting across the world, it's more globalized. You and only you are in control of your workday, so basically you're harnessing the digital means and tools as leverage to get that work done, as opposed to the other way around. used to be. You know, there was these old-school tools that were very difficult, clunky, hard to use. And, you know, now we're seeing these platforms, they're complementing how you like to work and your personality, how you like to prioritize, how you like to perform multiple tasks at one time, or if you like to overshare, like for instance. So that's what I see is happening in the digital mindset.

So what is your— like for you, how do you prefer to communicate?

I prefer— I like to do chats. I like to avoid kind of lengthy email. I like to put them in one spot. Organization is key here. A lot of people like to organize their day differently. You know, they'll block out a time slot that doesn't work for them. A lot of people like to get up early and make a list. And like, really, we're looking at tools that help you do that within the digital space and not necessarily like you're not using your planner, you're not getting confused by 1,000 things making so much clutter, right? You're streamlining your experience to one online area, one, one place where you can go and get that, that experience that's mimicking real-life organization.

Yeah, it's certainly interesting. You know, my daughter will— she barely does anything other than Snapchat. Right. Like, that's how I get her down to— for dinner, I'll take a Snapchat of what food we're having, and that's how I get her down. If I call her, she won't hear me. So it's just— it's so interesting how things are changing. Oh yeah, and

it's definitely using more of the mobile tools, right? It's using those apps like Snapchat, like a mobile email client, you're using browsers on the web, so everything has to be optimized for that space.

So let's talk about innovation. What steps are being taken to innovate these channels, like for instance email? And how do we make that— how do we make employees more productive with these tools?

Well, so I think there's an overall organizational shift, so focusing on the person themselves, the me, and then we're moving off over to the we, the collective, right, as we work more collaboratively online. We're moving away from that siloed work experience to more collaborative teams, really enabling employees to cut through their clutter and, you know, evolving their work experience from separate tools to, like I was talking about, that one cohesive experience and tailoring it to that specific employee or that specific person's personality, style, and their needs, right? So that's kind of really what we're doing with innovation and We're looking at the habits of the person and, you know, looking to make that customized experience.

So what it— you obviously, you've been through the process of building these, you know, the values around what it means to be productive. Can you give me some insights on what does productivity look like that we weren't getting out of the last 5 or 10 years?

So I think, you know, we're looking at a more integrated approach. We're looking, you know, the mobility accessible anywhere, anytime. We're looking at top-down actions views that are based on your priorities and behaviors like I was talking about. We're looking at analytics that have smart searching capabilities, and they have a much more useful— you're able to search for your people and find them much more rapidly. You've got that 2-click sharing, sharing on send. You've got cloud, really there's lots of cloud going on, innovation there. You've got innovation with your open API, and really being able to allow developers to plug in things that they create to your platform, right? So there's a lot of innovation going on there. And the end goal here is the fully empowered and engaged employee that are free to focus on What's important to them.

So I've heard a lot about a folderless life, and I can't imagine that. I don't know, I've lived in such a foldered life. Even my computer has folders, my life, you know, even physically we have folders. So when I say that, it's like what's most important rises to the top, right? Is that the thinking here?

Yeah, I mean, you have— with Verse, you have the ability to prioritize your tasks and your to-dos by action items and things that you're waiting for. So it's a little bit smarter than just using folders to organize your things. And you can— it's like a one-click, you can organize it. And yeah, so— they're going to integrate further and there's going to be more of an emphasis on the people versus the work itself. So it'll prioritize by, you know, it shows you the people that you interact with the most. You know, and this helps to increase, increase productivity, reduce the clutter, because you're talking to those people that you're always talking to. It's at, it's right there, it's handy, it's one click, right? So instead of a work-based approach, you know, work first, it's people first.

Yeah, amen to that. I know that it sounds— it all sounds euphoric. How long do you think it would take for an organization, especially an enterprise-level company, to really migrate, to really transfer into this this place that we're all heading towards, the place that I know Verse would like us to be in. How quickly can we get to a point where we're seeing some really nice productivity, do you think?

This is Jacques, I can take that one. I've actually managed to come back through my cell phone, sorry about that.

That's alright.

AT&T died on me, apologies. We're already seeing companies do that today. I think particularly millennial workers are absolutely taking advantage of search technologies of not just Verse and the companies that have started using it, but in companies that have already started using more social communication capabilities, whether enterprise social networks or chat or embedded capabilities I think what we're seeing is already a trend towards what you were calling folderless work, where it's not about where you've stored the material, it's about you storing it once in a place that makes it easy to share. Mm-hmm. And so it's— the paradigm shifts away from you trying to find something through a structured set of folders and just punching it in the search bar in whatever application you have to be using. And we're seeing that today. I mean, we're seeing companies do that when they use connections When they use other products like group chat functions or Lync or Skype at Work or SameTime or any number of vendor offerings out there where people are just searching for stuff using search bars. They're not looking in folders anymore. Is it going to take a while for enterprises to move over? Yeah, any shift takes time I think. But it's already starting to happen.

So let me ask you how, you know, there's so many things. In fact, it's kind of funny because I was just chatting with Susie, who's running the tweet chat earlier, about this exact topic, about accountability and how we view even Something that we use every day, like email. And things get missed. Emails are like stock tickers sometimes. They're just running, running, running, running. And we're all in meetings all day long. And by the time you get around to it, you're trying to answer the important stuff. You don't know what's important versus not. All these things come to mind. I have a system in place, but it's a very manual system for how I do it. I'm curious to hear what you guys think about this. What makes something important? How do you know when to answer? And will a system be able to even solve this, what I think is kind of like a company crisis across the land?

Yeah, I think you're onto something really big, which is That accountability problem is actually huge. And if you just think about, you know, one of the mantras I kind of laughed at for a while was when companies were saying, oh, we're going to replace our email with an activity stream. And my immediate thought was exactly yours, which is how are you going to hold people accountable in a news stream that is flying by so quickly?

Right.

They can't possibly remember everything. And so I think the concept of— there's a couple of concepts that have to come into play in whatever solutions you're trying to build to solve the issue. One of the, one of the, one of the things we have to think about is that, that to-do aspect, right? We all have ways of managing our to-do lists, but how do you work that into your collaborative system so that it's really easy to create— it's really easy to create an action item from a conversation, and then it's really easy to find that action item in the future, either by yourself or whoever you've assigned it to. to then take action on it in the future. I think that we've seen systems like— we've had to-dos and notes in Domino for 20+ years. There's systems now like Evernote, for example, where people can collect their to-do items. We have that today in connections activities. If you don't have it connected to the rest of what you're trying to do, you have the same problem as you had before. which is multiple tools, multiple places, you can't find what you're looking for and so you lose that connectivity. I think the second piece that I'm relating to is it's not only about having an easy way to create and manage your to-dos but making sure it's integrated with the tools that you're already using.

Yeah.

Email was acting actually pretty good for that until it got overloaded. People like myself for example been using my inbox as a to-do list forever. But now I've got over— I've got hundreds of emails in my inbox. And so I kind of started to lose track of those to-dos. And so tools like Verse, like its connection, connected tissue to activities, to project management, are starting to allow me to just get out of that mindset and really start using much more robust task management tools.

Yeah, that's— so a follow-up question for both of you on that. There's lots of tools, and this is kind of like— I mean, there's an economy for everything. There's collaborative economy, the sharing economy. I've actually called it the human economy. There's all kinds of stuff out there. There's different economies, and I think We haven't settled on one and it keeps changing because there are so many different facets, there are so many things that— and when I say that, I mean so many different tools. We have tools for communication, we have tools for asset management, we have tools for intranets, we have tools for so many different things. And I know you said, how do we plug all these things in? How do we make them work together. How do we do that? Like, when is there just one dashboard? When is there one place to go and this is the Mecca, this is the Siri for everything that we need?

I think that's an amazing question, and I think there's several approaches we've tried over the past— many people have tried over the past, say, decade or so to answer that problem. I think one of the things that the knowledge management sort of area tried to do was think about it as sort of this uber dashboard or uber single repository of all information. I think we saw what happened, it didn't work. And I think one of the reasons it didn't work was because information is not just about where you store it, it's about who uses it and in what context. And so having a single repository or a single all your data, or a single place where you go to collaborate, I think is probably not where we might want to head. I think where we might want to head is what I like to call collaboration everywhere. It's a platform approach. It's how do you create all the right tools, and you create them hopefully in a way that they work together, but it's also about surfacing them as APIs, as microservices, as ways that you can embed that capability into something else. So for example, take me as a marketer, right. Ideally I'd like to have one dashboard that where I can go to for all of my work. Is it my collaborative dashboard? Is it my email tools? Let's say I use Silverpop for marketing automation and I'm using Sugar for customer relationship management and Salesforce automation. Well now I've got 3 dashboards. Right, but if I had a single platform and they were all working off of a common set of open APIs, a common language that could connect all the pieces together, then I can have the same chat service, for example, pop up in all 3. So if I started a chat in my collaboration tool, because I'm not necessarily working as a marketer right now, but 10 minutes from now I'm working with my marketing colleagues in my Silverpop tool, and the same chat can pop up in my Silverpop tool, well, to me that's the Holy Grail. That's the ability of getting these microservices, it's the same microservice, but it's supported in multiple ways that we want to

work. God, when

will we have this? Yeah, we're working on it now, I think a lot of people are working on it. Wow, yeah,

God, that is my mecca.

Another element that I wanted to bring up too is The system itself needs to become more intelligent and take some of that grunt work away from us as a user. And so we're working ourselves right now and others as well, some of our competitors too, are working on how do we make the system smarter. Smarter through design, so one is better design so that you're not surfacing everything at the exact same time, you're only surfacing what the user kind of needs at that particular moment. So that's great user design. But also embedded intelligence, machine learning if you will, even to the point of like something like a Watson. You know, remember if you remember Watson Jeopardy, but imagine asking Watson questions about your collaboration environment or Watson at work, right? I think having that capability built into the system so that you're not only just asking it questions, that's level 1. Level 2 is the system can actually take action on your behalf. It learns from you, you teach it to say, hey, this My boss asks me for the same report every week. Couldn't you just like send them the report for me? Wouldn't that be kind of cool, just take that work off of my plate? I think that's part of it too, so it's both making the service available in multiple ways, but also making the service itself more intelligent.

You know, everything that you're describing is this euphoric place And let's look back a little bit. I'm curious, why hasn't email changed until now? I mean, how many years have we— the rest of the industry has changed in so many different ways. I mean, social media has changed, it changes, continues to change every day. Yet you look at email and it really has one functionality. And it has one— and now you're starting, we're starting to redefine it, but how many years has it taken to do that and why? Why is it taking so long to get to this point where people are, where companies like IBM are doing this?

You know, I think it's a function of its success. I think email has been a huge success because it did what it was supposed to do really well, which is connect individuals to each other digitally, right. I think the issues were we were starting to pile on a whole bunch of things onto email that email was never designed for— project management, task management, business process management, right, all these things that email really wasn't designed for. And so has email changed? It's been trying to keep up with it. We've been integrating email with process applications for a long time. So getting to that point of understanding how we can make email more of a shareable service has been around at least for 5 years where we've been integrating email with not just us, but integrating email with social capabilities.

Yeah.

And now we're taking it to the next level. It's a learning process, right. I think email has changed. I would posit that email itself has evolved, and the way it has evolved is by integrating with and not being siloed from other collaboration tools. We've seen this in call centers for a long time where email and chat have been part of call center applications for customer service representatives, right? The problem is not necessarily email hasn't evolved. The problem is all these other tools have come up and we're still using email for a lot of these things. It's, it's a big chunk of it is human behavioral because we're just used to doing it that way. And, and change happens when the pain of change is lower than the pain of staying the same. And I think we've reached a point where the pain of staying the same with email as it is has reached a threshold where we're ready to incorporate these other tools into our lives. And designers at IBM and others are really thinking about how to make that happen.

So I'm interested in— I'm going to just after this question, I'm going to move over. We've got lots of questions coming in from everyone. This is a fascinating discussion, because it's more than just email. Even though we're focused on email, it really just touches every facet of the organization, every thread of every discussion, and every promise that every person makes on every project and every deliverable. I mean, we are talking about something that's much bigger, even though we're using the word email, it's bigger than that. And now I'm going to get really minute now that I just went grandiose. Now I'm going to focus back in on something, and that's just communication unto itself. And I'll give you a good example. My book launched a couple weeks ago, and it's done well, and I'm really excited about that.

Yay, sure.

Awesome.

Woo!

I need to— there we go. So what I ended up doing is I ended up putting an out-of-office message on, even though I was in the office, to tell everybody, I am really interested in your messages, but at this point I can't handle the influx, so I will answer your messages twice a day. I think I had it at one point even at 10 AM and 3 PM, so that the expectations were set. But that's the— that for me is one scenario. For everyone else, there are lots of different scenarios of when can I answer, when should I answer. If I answer now, am I in real time? Are they going to expect a reply right back? Is it within minutes? Is it within seconds? I'll just text message him. It'll be faster, then all of a sudden it becomes unproductive. Or maybe it is more productive. You know, I have people on my team that do that, they know they can get a hold of me faster that way. But is it really faster, is it really more productive? So I'm going to stop there because you can see I'm real passionate about this topic and see what you both think.

I mean, I would love to hear Allison's thought as a millennial. I'm a little older, so I have a different work I think method than Allison's generation does. So I'd love to hear what Allison thinks, but what I've been seeing, what's interesting is it's very much a cultural issue. It's not as much the technology, it's the culture around us that has set expectations on how to use it. An example of that is— I'll use a different example which I always thought was kind of funny. It's a story of mine. When I first started using text messages on my phone, and I was one of the first users of one of the— remember the Treo smartphones?

Yeah.

And around the BlackBerry time, that shows you how old I am. And I would send a chat message to my brother in Montreal, and then he'd send me a message back, and then he would expect an immediate response. And my response to him was, I'm chatting with you, it's in asynchronous mode, I'm not talking to you on the telephone, yet you're expecting me to respond to you like right away. He got mad at me because I didn't respond to him right away with a text message. So I think what— and that's because those of us who grew up in the telephone age, who grew up with telephones and with email, which is somewhat instantaneous, is we sort of expect a certain behavior, in this case instant response. And so I think part of what's really happening with these tools is we're now starting to see changes in behavior based on cultural norms, and by that I mean business cultural norms and expectations on how people should react to one another. And every company is going to be different. In one company, there may be an expectation that if somebody sends you an email with a certain framework, it's from a boss, you better answer within 5 hours or 2 hours, or it doesn't matter, right. That's why the concept that Allison was talking about earlier around Verse being pivoting around what's important to you is so critical, because what's important to you is very unique.

Yeah.

Who's important to you is very unique within the context of your work, your role, your culture at the office. But I'd love to hear from Allison what she thinks.

Yeah, so a lot of the kind of outside on a consumer level, I feel like as a millennial, I'm using a lot of the social networking stuff. So I'm using the Snapchat, I'm using the Facebook, I'm using all sorts of things that are common for other people, you know, in my group to be using. And in some ways it's kind of like we're expecting that instantaneous reaction just that you get with texting and with chatting at a business level too, right? So we're sending each other— we use our company's same-time chat or our chat on connections on Verse. You know, instantaneous chatting, like really, you know, that kind of thing is— we use that a lot. And I think I've noticed that the older generations, they love to talk on the phone. So it's like, hey, can we call you? And then, you know, as a millennial, I'm looking at the call coming in and I'm like, oh, I'm in trouble. I must be doing something wrong. Because it's like really important, right? It seems like you're confronted more directly. So I feel like a lot of the millennials, they're using things where you can really sit and think about it, but you can also reply instantaneously with text. Email and text, you know, those are getting faster for us, for us too. We really like those. But yeah, the instant chat kind of thing, we like that. We prefer that over like the phone call, the teleconferencing. And again, there's this shift back from kind of like— so there's this remote remote working, right? You're working in all different places around the world, but we want to mock that experience, the experience that you get one-on-one with somebody in an in-person meeting, because there's something to be said about that in-person experience, and we want to bring that back, but in a digital way. So it's smarter, and you can like attach files, and it's more shareable, right? And more collaborative. It's smarter within digital. So we want to mock that experience and bring that to digital, right? That experience of being— that experience you can only get in a meeting with person-to-person interaction. So I think that kind of comes into play, and I think there's like a shift going back to that, but on a smarter playing field, a larger playing field, right? A more massive global scale.

Man, I can't wait for the day. As Susie just said on Twitter, I'm drooling right now as you guys are talking. So here are some questions coming in. We've got a good friend, JS Gilbert. He asked, what are the pluses and minuses of a hyper-connected workforce? How does that affect how you approach work?

Yeah, that's a good one. I think there's both sides of the coin. I think the pluses are you can react more quickly to changing market conditions much faster. I think that hyperconnectedness gives you access to information in a way that really wasn't possible even 5, 10 years ago. On the other hand, I think if you're not careful and you don't make good personal choices, it can wreck your work-life balance and work life integration, I think, and ruin your focus. I think there's good evidence out there that people are not nearly as good multitaskers as they think they are. I've seen a couple of quotes. One was from, I think, DIY that said 97% of people think they're good multitaskers and they're not. And another one was it takes the brain anywhere between 12 and 24 minutes to readjust itself after an interruption. So, so I think the corollary of all this hyperconnectedness is we have to learn how to make better choices on helping us focus. It goes back to what you said earlier, Bryan, is, you know, making— an example is making 2 times a day when I'm going to answer my emails, right? Because if you let yourself get constantly interrupted by the next tweet or the next email, your system— let's say you've turned on the notification on your computer that says you get a new email. Well, if you're like me, that notification goes off every 3 seconds. I turned it off. Because it doesn't help me, it interrupts me. So I think the hyperconnectedness can set ourselves up for failure in terms of way too much interruption, and so we have to deal with that through personal choices.

Yeah, I actually heard somewhere that people's attention spans are less than goldfish. So a goldfish's attention span span is about 8 seconds long. And people actually have less than that. So they're going to look at a video really quick. If it's disinteresting to them, they're on to the next. So it's really important that we have some tools and organizational things in place that really help us, like, to minimize that kind of all-over scatterbrain type of thing.

You know, one thing that better tools will not be able to solve, and maybe I'm just stating the obvious, but I would like to hear your thoughts on this. It will not be able to solve someone who can communicate better. Do you agree? Can it help? Can it tell you maybe you shouldn't send an email right now, that might not be the best thing for this conversation? Can it tell you what better to say so that you don't take people off to the left-hand side? What are the things around just human qualities that maybe distracts or disrupts a day that can make us more efficient possible? How can tools—

I love that question. I love it because Because today systems are not smart enough to help you with that. It's all shared knowledge and behaviors about— an example, don't email angry.

Right, exactly.

But right now the tools aren't smart enough to figure that out, but they're getting there. We're starting to see our own work, you know, work with— we've seen other vendors out there starting to think about the same thing, but I think we're ahead of the game with our Watson stuff. The system is learning how to do that for you in some degree, or the system will start to learn how to help you with that. An example is you've got this email that comes in or a chat message that comes in, and the system can read the language and say, how do you want to respond? Here's a possible response to that, right? And help you focus and help you communicate better. Because right now we have to learn how to communicate better by taking classes or working with people who are considered good communicators, good presenters, good writers. I think that talent isn't going to go away, but I think machines are getting smarter now and we're starting to develop tools to help Verse and your other email systems do that grunt work for you.

Yeah, like right now Watson has the capability to analyze a big chunk of your text And you can see, you know, how optimistic it is, how, you know, all these different criteria, how optimistic, how open it is, and it can actually tell your personality by the actual things that you type. That kind of function maybe can help you in creating your emails and your everyday-to-day communication. But that's something that's built in right now.

Okay, so I've got— I'm just going to keep this moving. Sorry, sorry guys. I'm going to keep this moving along because we have a lot of questions coming in. So what you're saying is phenomenal. I could keep going off and onto these little streams that we could keep going on. So that makes me think we need to do one more of these. Bye-bye. Bye. Let's keep talking about that and ask questions. Because Maria— sorry if I say your last name wrong— Celovic. Maria Czelewicz, she said, and that's @mtcelewicz, she said, a lot of platforms are perceived as personal. How do you change the mindset? And I think it's a great question because you talk about our work email, and I know a lot of people carry other addresses, personal addresses, but we all end up migrating onto just one eventually. Maybe. I'm throwing that out there as a possibility. Where is the line between personal and work when it comes to communication and these communication platforms?

I think it's dissolving and disappearing over time. I think it goes back to what I was saying earlier about having that really intelligent platform that can connect these services together, because I see a day where I can use the same services Regardless of whether I'm having a personal communication or work communication. Right now I can't— it's very difficult to fully integrate my work and social life. I have a Facebook Messenger chat or I have a conversation on Sametime for business, right. They don't really integrate that well together. And I think there's very good business reasons for that today. It's around data governance, around policy management, around security. Do you necessarily want certain business conversations to be happening in these tools that were never designed for it? I think as the platforms get more secure, more structured, better, more integrated, as the tools get easier to use and more consistently easy to use across all the different tools, so that when you're experiencing a chat, for example, or an email in one platform, it feels very, very much the same same as another's. Email has gotten pretty close to that, it's pretty universal. When you work in email in one platform, it kind of feels the same as another platform. Messaging, not quite there yet, chat, online meetings even worse, and then you have file sharing even worse. But I think as we develop over time, you're going to start to see these things integrate better with one another. And again, not a single tool, but tools that just work better together.

Awesome. And anything from you, Allison? Any thoughts there?

Yeah, I mean, we're looking at the cohesive experience, right? So they match up, not necessarily one tool, but you have all the things working together and they're integrated in a way that makes sense, right? And, you know, in the past, I think your offline self and your online self were 2 different people, right? You could be like sort of hiding behind this guise of what you are online, but now I think in an enterprise situation it's becoming more personal, so who you are online is becoming the same as who you are offline, and because there's just simply more things that's required supporting that, right? So I think it's important that we recognize that, especially on the enterprise level. And we have really cool stuff that helps us mock that. Again, we have like online communities and things that help us share. You can search for people, you can figure out what they look like before you meet them, that type of thing. And it's really interesting, this parallel that we have going on.

Totally. It's beyond interesting right now. So Christy— sorry Christy if I get your last name wrong, but we talk all the time online so I should know it. Christy Soukhamenu, it's Chrissy— Chrisella Loans, @ChrisellaLoans. She said, how do you prioritize action items and who holds people accountable? Specifically common to-do lists in apps, someone has to own it. If everyone owns it, then no one takes responsibility or there's no finger-pointing, but somebody needs to own it. What do you guys think about that?

I agree. You know, in Connections today, our social offering for example, we have a lightweight to-do manager. And part of that to-do manager is assigning an owner. You have to actually assign somebody an owner and a due date. Then the accountability happens again as a cultural thing. I think there are other tools as you get more robust business processes like case management for example. You have a lot more robust capabilities to help with the time issues, with the accountability issues. But again, that's about case management in a much more structured environment. If you're talking ad hoc work, right, there's still an element of trust that has to build up between the users, between hierarchical organizations, you and your boss, your boss and your boss's boss, their peers, etc., right. We are getting better at figuring out tools that can help with that. We're not quite there yet, but that accountability today happens all the time within very structured processes, whether it's enterprise content management, case management, project management. There are tools today that can do a lot of that. But if you're talking ad hoc day-to-day work that falls out of those processes, there's still some effort that needs to happen at the design level to design that capability, that accountability factor into it. Verse is already starting to do that with the needs action or awaiting action. With a single click, I can take an email and turn it into a reminder for myself that either I owe somebody something or somebody owes me something, with a single click, right. And you can make that shareable at some point. So we're starting to see those capabilities built in for ad hoc work today.

Alright, here's another one from Mike Habermas. No, it is Mike Haberman, I'll get that right. Will AI be able to handle multiple communication platforms and be able to translate to everyone at the same time?

Oh, that's a nice future. I think Watson, technologies like Watson are starting to get there. Every day I'm amazed at just how fast these technologies can learn. It's hard work, don't get me wrong, this is really hard work to get AI like Watson to do, to understand, you know, things in a day-to-day fashion. Just as an example, like if you think about tools today like Siri or Cortana, right, that's less artificial intelligence and much more about People pre-populating a series of questions into the tool. If the tool can't answer the question because it wasn't pre-populated, it defaults to search, right? That's not the best user experience. It's the only one we can deliver. It's the only one many people can deliver today, right? That's a different approach than what Watson is trying to do. What Watson is trying to do is look at these bodies of knowledge and come up with an answer. That has a level of confidence around it. That's a very different thing. We're used to computers either succeeding or failing. It's a 1 or 0 approach, right? And if a computer comes up with an answer that isn't right today, we don't believe the computer at all. We lose all trust in the computer. We think it's broken, right? For AI to work, it's going to be about changing our own mindset That computers are teachable. And for us to get to that point, right, for AI to be to that point, it's not about AI answering the question right, it's about AI answering the question with a level of confidence that you're okay with. And that's what it's going to take to get there.

Man, this is not overnight stuff that we're talking

about. It's hard work. It's a lot of great hard work that's going on right now, very exciting stuff.

Yeah, that's for sure. So let's see, we've got another question here from Shival John at ShevD80. How can companies shift their thinking when pertaining to work and get in the program of engaging with customers?

Alison, do you want to take that one?

Sure, there's a number of things that we're looking towards to engage with customers. We're looking at those platforms that we're talking about, just like, you know, Connections. We're looking at things like that where we can onboard them to be able to interact with us. We're looking at, you know, going to events, the same types of things that we're doing already, and we're pushing out already, but we're looking to communicate with more of that digital mindset that I was talking about way at the beginning, right? So, so because people go online and they're going to research your app— your applications online first, we have to figure out how to reach them digitally, right? Right. So that means we have to learn how to market and we have to learn how to deliver their needs customized. Customize their needs, right? Right. So yeah, so there's different ways that we can reach them and get feedback from them. We also have developers that are highly involved with us, so we look at their feedback. We also have some really great stuff going on in the Office of the CIO. We have feedback from actual people at IBM using our products first, so we can tell What's going wrong and what's going right, right away, right? We have people, people working on it in-house, right? So there's a number of ways that we can reach them. There's a number of ways that we can market to them. There's a number of ways that we can communicate with them, you know, using those same tools that we, that we use right now, you know, on our jobs at FIRST and connections, right? So, so there's a number of things going on here. Keeping us connected with those customers, keeping us constantly, you know, developing and making that that agile shift, right? Really looking at what the customer says, right, including the IBM user.

Yeah, I think related to what Alison was saying, a lot of it is about listening, right. The digital mindset is very much about digital listening, and it's not just about yanking and pulling people into your branded community, although that's a really important thing. It's not just about traditional inbound marketing tactics, right? It is very much about reaching out and understanding where people are communicating today. If you're engaging with a customer, it also means, well, are they in a LinkedIn group? Are they in a Facebook chat group? Are they in some sort of online community that you really need to be listening to? GitHub, for example, for developers, right? And how do you engage with potential customers and prospects where they are, not necessarily where you are? That listening— so that listening is so important. Social media listening is so important to that, so that your communications don't come across as just a big megaphone or 5,000 megaphones. It's a real engagement means real

Man, I could not agree more. That is— I mean, listening is the cliché yet most important thing of the day. And yet, what we're talking about is just smart listening. I mean, finding the needles in the haystacks that really matters the most, and how we lock in on the things that will move that needle even faster. So, you know, I know that's a bigger topic on just listening alone, so we probably should probably stay away from that for now. But one question that I thought— Chase McMichael has a great question about video. How is video impacting decisions around these collaborative systems, you know, the new ways of communicating, email. Video is— obviously we're using video right now as a function to get across the context around what we're saying. We talked before about how communication is hard for people to do and sometimes better to pick up the phone and talk to someone or get on video. What are your thoughts on that?

As long as you don't mind me seeing a t-shirt, seeing me in a t-shirt. I mean, all kidding aside, I think video is critical, right? I was trying to remember a stat I read somewhere, I think 70% of communication actually happens through visual cues and body language, and it's much— very subtle. I don't know if that's the right number, but a very large percentage of—

It's actually 93%.

Is it 93%? Wow, so even higher than I thought. And so having real video, I think, is absolutely critical. I think we lose a lot of the emotional nuance and the cues when we do email. When we do chat, text chat. I think that explains why what we're doing today is working so popular. I think that explains why YouTube has exploded the way it has. We're visual. Human beings are visual to a great degree. Mm-hmm. And, you know, obviously there's issues around accessibility, and if you're seeing impaired in any way, how do you handle that? Taking those issues aside, I think The reality is that video is super important, becoming more important. We see that today in the capabilities that we're delivering at IBM, but that many others are delivering for the business, because in the days of having everyone in the same office, it's easy. You just pop your head in the window and say, hey, I'm over here today, can I grab you for a second, right? Those kind of moments are very dependent upon visual cues. Is the person crossing their arms? I'm not ready to talk to you right now.

Mm-hmm.

kind of thing, right? You lose that. I think gaining that back in an environment where we're all digitally connected to people that are across time zones and across geographies is where things are going to happen. There's a lot of technological challenges to that. You know, video takes up huge bandwidth, there's quality issues. Just today, for example, the technical issues we had just connecting through a very simple tool. Luckily I was able to connect back, and I know we've had had some other issues, but that just gives you an example of the technical difficulties involved with business video. But I think I agree with the statement that video is really important.

Yeah, I actually have a background in design and a master's in animation, so I actually know how to build those tools that we market for, and they are really important too. Most people respond to that type of content as opposed to just that static reading so much text. And again, with this huge amount of information that we're trying to streamline and organize, I think it's really important to deliver people something that's really great and dynamic. And you're allowed to have that, you know, anything that you want to show them, you can compose it into a video. That's really nice. You can make it an animation, you can make it really cinematic, you can have it live-action with actors, that type of thing, and you can convey really cool stuff. And again, then there's that collaborative video aspect where you're sharing like we are now, and it's more personable than if you're going to be misunderstood in an email.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, it's really easy for people to look at an email and not understand the tone of voice, not understand exactly what you're saying. There's lots of miscommunication there. Mm-hmm. So it's important to have your, your, your video, you know, readily accessible, and not necessarily in the same tool, but in the same sort of package as your email, right? So in the future, those tools are, are one and the same, right? But yeah, that's just my thought.

So guys, I have a lot more questions and we're at the top of the hour, which is a shame, and at the same time it shows how important this topic is and what's going on and what people are thinking. We've had some awesome questions, but maybe we can all jump back on Twitter and start answering some of them if you guys don't mind. That'd probably be the best way to make sure that everyone has Some answers out there. But I can't thank you guys enough for doing this. This has been great, and it's obviously a topic that everyone is passionate about. So thank you to everyone out there for taking part today and for throwing out your questions and your comments. And to you both, really appreciate Jacques and Allison for joining in. Of course, we missed our friend Denise, but we We will have her on again with Working Technology, and other than that, we wish you well. We'll be again here next week, Monday at noon at H2H Chat, but thank you to IBM, IBM Verse, to you two, and to everyone out there. We'll see you again soon. Cheers.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.