Luis Suarez • IBM

Luis Suarez is an internal social computing evangelist at IBM - we discuss here how momentum is building around use of collaborative technologies internally at IBM as people understand the concepts and get used to working this way. The exception is the mobile workforce.The challenge of the shift to knowledge sharing is an issue in europe, says Luis, who working worldwide is able to see cultural differences emerge. Where the US internal workforce have a well developed culture of sharing, the european perception of 'knowledge is power' can leads to protecting of perceived individual ip assets in some cases. This is particularly the case with sales staff.People worldwide are definitely starting to see the benefits and are increasingly aware of reputation management - becoming recognised thought leaders by posting valuable information into knowledge centers. Luis is a well known advocate of controlling your inbox as this New York Times story from last June describes and which Luis writes about at 'Thinking outside the inbox' his personal blog, with weekly updates.We have an interesting discussion about one to one versus one to many communication and the challenges of getting people to think before they chose to use email as an appropriate communication device. The team of collaboration evangelists within IBM communicate via Twitter for example.This conversation will be of particular interest to those researching alternatives to email.