I first wrote about IBM’s activity centered computing in 2005 in the post, IBM’s Social Software Initiatives: Blogs, Wikis, Tagging, and More – Part Three- Internal Applications where I covered their Unified Activity Management. Tomoaki Sawada recently posted an update on their work in this space linking to Connections 2.0 at Synch.rono.us blog. In Connections 2.0 IBM has re-focused on their enabling Activity Centric Collaboration. As David Brooks wrote, “the high level goal is to organize work around the activities people do rather than the tools they use.”

David went on to write, “Activities enables line of business workers to plan their tasks and create high level structure in the collaborative nature of an Activity while still using all your existing tools (email, instant messaging, word processing, spreadsheets, etc.). Activity templates allow your business to captures best practices and repeated tasks for easy discovery.” Their Connections 2.0 brings introduces the concept of flexible entry types, eliminating the need to stay within predefined entry types in a task. This allows the flexibility to adapt to the things that come up in the process of completing an activity. The article has a series of screen shots that illustrate the concept.

I first got involved with this concept in my initial knowledge management efforts in the early 90s supporting insurance underwriting. The old IT system required underwriters and claim agents to upgrade the core application for the benefit of central office. Few bothered. When the new system was designed with underwriters and claims agents and was built to support their work process it received rave reviews form the users.

There are now many new enterprise 2.0 products that are designed to enable the tools to fit the work, rather than the reverse. Here is another approach to the same goal. It is nice to see this approach mature.

IBM has also added a visualization tool — Atlas — to their Lotus Mail & Connections platform. The IBM Atlas site said: “Atlas for Lotus Connections is a social networking application that allows users to visualize their current network of contacts and see how they can extend that network to tap into valuable resources and trusted experts across an entire organization. By mining information from the different components of Lotus Connections, Atlas compiles and displays information that will help people better understand professional networks and who they can reach out to for information.”

Mike Gotta said that Atlas may only be available as part of an IBM consulting engagement and not a standalone tool so you should check if you are interested. Regardless, it is step in the right direction.