Six months ago, I changed roles at Fujitsu and moved to the Office of the CTO, as a Strategy Consultant. It’s been a good move and I’m really enjoying my work, in a team that’s focused on driving innovation, thought leadership and governance.

Aside from my technology background and propensity to share information (whether people ask for it or not!), one of the reasons I was brought into the team was my experience with social media – particularly blogging but other channels too – and I’m really pleased to say that I’ve been involved in Fujitsu’s move to embrace social media, not just here in the UK, but as part of a global community too.

Whilst some IT service organisations have been using social media for a while, it’s typically in a business to consumer (B2C) rather than business to business (B2B) context but it’s equally important to ensure that any social media activities are part of an overall integrated strategy. At the same time, it’s important to pick the appropriate channels (not necessarily every platform that’s out there) not least because, as any company starts to use new methods of communicating with customers and partners, it’s important that they’re able to respond in the manner that the audience expects: it’s no good launching a Twitter account (for example) and then not having the resources in place to respond to customer dialogue.

Today, I took the wraps off the first of Fujitsu’s corporate blogs for the UK and Ireland, kicking off with our CTO blog, written by David Smith, who is Chief Information Officer (CIO), Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Chief Security Officer (CSO) for our region.  Because of the combination of roles that he performs, David has a unique insight on a variety of technology developments, drawing on a combination of external go-to-market and internal IT capability knowledge and this enables him to be a thought leader in both business and technology, translating IT trends into potential business value. I believe that’s pretty unusual and, just as importantly, I want to stress that he writes the content himself (it’s not ghost written) – if the author is shown as David Smith, that means that it’s David’s views and opinions you read, not something formed by my team (although we do also also provide some content, for which the author is clearly shown as Office of the CTO).

Whilst the site went live today, we’ve included content that’s been written throughout the site’s development as I wanted it to add value from day one, rather than starting out with a “Hello World” post!

In addition to what I intend to be a growing number of Fujitsu blogs, we’re highlighting some Fujitsu bloggers – people like me, but also Amit Apte (Enterprise Architecture and strategic IT management), Debra Lilley (Oracle) and Jeremy Worrell (innovation). The Fujitsu bloggers all have established blogs which are not hosted by Fujitsu, but still provide some insight into the talent that we have available within the organisation.

It’s not just blogging though: Twitter is another of the channels that we’re using now – with @Fujitsu_UK providing the latest news and developments from our region, as part of a globally co-ordinated social media community which embodies our “think global, act local” approach.

This has been a really exciting few months for me – I don’t normally talk about my work on this blog but all of the activities I mentioned here are externally facing, so they’re not exactly secret and I really want to shout from the rooftops that we are doing this. Shouting from the rooftops is not really our style though, so broadcasting to a smaller community of people who’ve supported my personal activities over the years seems like a decent compromise. Please do visit the Fujitsu UK and Ireland blogs, and let me know what you think.