Let's Talk Lotus Connections

I am attending a BarCamp convention in Ottawa, Ontario for September 5th.

barcampOttawaGov is a chance for Government of Canada employees to get together and talk about what they're doing with social media and new technologies.

Great to see we are getting organized and talking about our activities.

Wow.  I got to admit, I like BleedYellow.  Thank you to Nathan and his team for putting up this site.

I have become of a "social collaborative software evangelist" for my workplace.  Slowly Canadian federal government departments have put web 2.0 collaborative and social tools in their roadmaps.   For me, we are assessing various web 2.0 tools such as Lotus Quickr Portal Edition v8 and Lotus Connections v2.  We have both up and running in our proof of concept environment with great success and now we are getting ready to run a pilot of the tools.

One issue that has been hitting me hard is the resistance I am getting from all levels of the organization regarding employee blogs and user profiles.  I heard everything from "lower productivity" to the uncertainty of the business value of information posted by employees.  One person told me that my profile photo with my son is not acceptable in our workplace... sigh...

I am looking for impact studies or post deployment reports from organizations that deployed Lotus Connections.  What were the successes, lessons learned?  Did the sky fall when employees started to blog about anything they wanted (as long as it was according to the internal policies of the company).  I would like to throw these reports back to the "grey-hair" people I meet and say to them unless they have hard evidence to the contrary, embrace the change and the benefits of what social software can bring.

Hope someone out there reading my post can help.