The Social Factor: Innovate, Ignite, and Win Through Mass Collaboration and Social Networking

Harness the Power of Social Networking to Promote Innovation and Drive Growth 

• A treasure trove of strategic and tactical insights for the business leader
• Provides relevant experience from a host of powerful case studies and compelling business scenarios
• Secrets for avoiding costly mistakes that can cripple a social networking initiative

Millions of people use social networking sites, and companies are increasingly turning to social networking to build relationships with customers. But companies routinely miss the best opportunities to create value and promote innovation–by using social networking to build thriving communities of employees, partners, and customers.

Business leaders and strategists can drive immense value from social networking “inside the firewall.” Drawing on her unsurpassed experience deploying innovative social networking systems within IBM^® and for customers, Maria Azua demonstrates how to establish social networking communities, and then leverage those communities to drive extraordinary levels of innovation. Azua offers specific techniques for promoting mass collaboration in the enterprise and strategies to monetize social networking to generate new business opportunities.

Whatever your industry, you’ll learn how to choose and implement the right social networking solutions for your unique challenges...how to avoid false starts and wasted time...and how to evaluate and make the most of today’s most promising social technologies–from wikis and blogs to knowledge clouds.

Maria Azua is vice president of Cloud Computing Enablement, reporting to the IBM CTO of Enterprise Initiatives. She is responsible for the technical implementation, deployment, and operations of the Common Cloud Platform offering and the external development cloud. Her responsibilities include fostering a vibrant and engaged community of ISVs, business partners, and technical communities to develop cloud computing IT methodologies and applications.

Prior to her current role, Maria was vice president of technology and innovation reporting to the IBM CIO. In this capacity, Maria focused on the development of innovative IT solutions and integration of new technologies, and created and managed the Technology Adoption Program (TAP) at IBM, which consists of more than 120,000 employees actively participating in creative innovations. She created and deployed a wide variety of state-of-the-art social networking tools and programs for the enterprise and is an expert in social networking corporate transformation. Her responsibilities also included the creation of the first IBM Green Data Center, the CIO IT infrastructure, and productivity enhancements through innovation.

Maria earned worldwide recognition for her contribution to technology innovation and her business leadership. She was inducted into the Women in Technology International (WITI) Hall of Fame, and named one of the “100 Most Influential Hispanics” by People en Español magazine in 2006. She holds 50 patents and 39 pending patents that span a wide variety of technologies including telecommunications, web servers, Transcoder technology, Java performance enhancements, and data analytics. Maria developed IT solutions for the largest banks in the world and is well recognized for her technical leadership in home-banking solutions.

Maria is an executive with deep technical skills and extensive experience in software development, large enterprise information technology projects, process transformation, and IT operations. She also has extensive experience managing new missions start-ups, acquisitions, application development, infrastructure transformation projects, and solution delivery and process excellence.

Maria is an active participant in community initiatives and multicultural activities and is a leader in the technical community-at-large. The Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) recognized Maria with The Star Award for her contributions and dedication to the Hispanic community. She has a passion as great for social transformation as she does for IT technology.