Finding the best person... by making the right Connections

I've been speaking to a number of folks recently about their concerns of how to connect the right people within their organisations and we currently had a few people looking at Lotus Connections - Lotus' Social software.  I don't think IBM have quite figured out how to sell this stuff fully yet - though there are plenty of refereneces world wide but I think it is highly apposite for organisations going through classic VC acquisition plays where staff don't know who one another are, what they do or what their inherent value may actually be to one another.

 This lack of information or transparancy may be through ignorance, sheer geography, speed of acquisition or any combination thereof and more of the same.  For the guy who has an inbound call for X that he needs to route, for the guy who doesn't know what else he can promote to his exisiting accounts, for the answer to that question you know nothing about ... social software holds the key to making connections (geddit) and delivering the intrinsic value held within the staff to clients of the business.

IBM definitely have the lead in this area and do eat their own dog food to particularly good effect on this one but how they communicate the message to the market ... still not quite there.  That said, for organisations with issues like this - well worth an afternoon's time to find out if there is something in it for them.

 Oh, and for folks with End Point Data capture issues or for folks who want to have their reps dazzle clients with their connections into to the back end skills and knowhow to get those client queries answered in double quick time then recent releases on Blackberry AppWorld may also be of interest as announced recently on ZDNET.  You can find out more and see some flash demos for a number of apps on Blackberry site here.