We are only little over a week until take-off! Last minute preparations is almost done and the agenda is published.

So let’s take a look at some highlights!

The ESN Culture
Ross Cavanaugh, Wells Fargo

Digital transformation, Enterprise Social Network and the Future of Work are all labels for similar efforts. The catalyst for success, however, is far less about technology and far more about culture. I’ll share how we quickly shifted from a focus on technology to instead leverage our need for cultural change as the secret to our success as we engage 325,000 employees and contractors on IBM Connections. Our journey started on Yammer, evolved to Jive, and found our sweet spot with IBM Connections as the means to invest in our company’s most important and valuable assets – our team.

Customer Success Stories: IBM Connections Use Cases
Firas Yasin

Have you ever wondered how customers use Connections? This session we will dive deep into use cases. We will walk through many successful customer stories. We will introduce some ideas for success so you can deploy it in your organization. We will also talk about strategies and how to develop objectives to guarantee success. If you are thinking about Connections or looking to get better handle on how to become more successful then this session is not to be missed.

Good Morning Dave, :Ethics in AI
Rob Novak, Snapps

Harvard Law, MIT, Stanford. Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates. IBM, Apple, Google, The World Economic Forum. What do these revered universities, industry leaders and organizations have in common? Each has expressed a deep interest in the ethical complications that we as humans must consider as caretakers of our future in the presence of an exponentially growing population of devices, programs and decisions being made by artificial intelligence. From stories of AI that has made great and poor decisions to the ethics of how we can best solve problems in the future, this session will peek into our future and help attendees guide decision-making today to ensure AI benefits humankind as a whole. What does this have to do with developers and management? We are at the forefront of what is possible – so it’s important for us to step back and take into consideration the ethical implications of our work. This session will teach us how to start thinking about it….

New from Watson Work: Make Resolution Rooms Work for you!
Darren Cacy

Watson Workspace provides an intuitive interface to connect and collaborate with your work groups. It has the ability to easily connect third-party apps to let you work more seamlessly with these everyday tools. But you already know that! 🙂 You may also know that the Workspace team has released an innovative new framework which brings together people and applications so that they work together even better. Imagine a workspace which understands incident information from ITSM solutions like ServiceNow, automatically adds and configures the applications you need to resolve the incident, and adds the right people to the space as well. And best of all, the space can be saved as a template to be reused as needed. In this session, you’ll hear what the Workspace team is doing to allow you to create and share these reusable templates, and you’ll see working code showing a resolution room in action, integrated with ServiceNow.

Workshop: Enterprise Social Networking Strategy Framework
Luis Suarez, panagenda

Back in 2008 and then again in 2013, Gartner stated how between 70% to 80% of Social Business initiatives would fail in the short time frame of a couple of years, mostly due to a lack of purpose and clearly aligned business imperatives. That means that 7 or 8 out of 10 social business programs will eventually fail no matter how hard people may try. What if there was a different way …?

This workshop will cover panagenda’s Enterprise Social Networking Strategy Framework that Luis Suarez has been using effectively with clients and business partners around different social business adaptation techniques to help organizations become successful ‘Socially Integrated Enterprises’. Come and join us to learn what those foundations for success would be like and how you, too, could kick off your own digital transformation initiative in just 6 different steps to start seeing immediate results and real business value, i.e. transform the way we share, learn, collaborate and innovate together to get work done more effectively. Working smarter, not necessarily harder.

Why you should attend:

Digital Transformation Leaders, Managers or Executives tasked with transforming their social collaboration landscape, interested in:

Aligning their key business imperatives with their social business transformation efforts
Creating a solid governance model for their Enterprise Social Networking environment
Building an engaging online community programme (including a community of change agents / champions)
Implementing an effective education & enablement programme around an extensive list of use cases
Measuring and evaluating accordingly due progress through data analytics
Addressing potential barriers and obstacles while evaluating how healthy & mature the overall Social Business programme is

Diving Deep into the Grid
Maureen Leland, IBM

IBM Connections Grid is our new modern app builder for both business users and for partners who want to build practical collaborative applications quickly and easily. This session will begin with building a simple app, and then demonstrate the many ways of adding sophistication to simplicity. We’ll add script coding to document events, compute values, and enforce data validation. We’ll also see how the data in a Grid app can be made available to external applications. You’ll learn about the underlying architecture and we’ll discuss the foreseeable road map. Come join us on this journey!