Having gone through the “My Boss Loves Microsoft – where does that leave Lotus?” presentation from Ed Brill I think it’s only fair to also point out the more reasoned “How to Sell Notes and Domino Inside Your Organisation” session.
It goes some way to talking to the issues I raised. It still only mentions the overall strategy though, but then it is labelled “Sell Notes and Domino” and not “Sell IBM Collaboration”.
Phig responds to my post on Notes selling.
One of the requirements of my role is that I need to be independent in my technology arena – which happens to include the collaboration technology arena. I get involved in all sorts of discussions with people who are assessing their collaborative working environment, mostly with large organisation. Every now and then we have a discussion about the relative merits of the two major players in the arena Microsoft and IBM. As such I try to keep up to date with the individual technology arenas and customers feeling about them.
Today I read through Ed Brill’s presentation on “My Boss Loves Microsoft – where does that leave Lotus?” I have seen most of the arguments before a hundred times and to be honest – they don’t carry any weight with anyone I have ever talked to. I’m assuming that because this session is a popular re-run people are actually using these arguments but it’s not the reality I am living in.
These are the places where my experience contradicts Ed’s.
No if it was me I would focus where this presentation doesn’t. I would focus on resolving these perceptions. I would accept that Notes is not the best client for communicators and say what I was going to do to make it the best client for them. By best I mean that I would focus on the communication management methodologies, like GTD, and ensure that Notes is significantly faster than Outlook when the chosen methodology is being used.
I would set a clear direction for application development so that businesses can understand that the absolutely best development environments are available from IBM and that together these environments make a compelling case. AN example of the issue – I want to develop an application to store some documents – what is the best way to do that today. I could develop in WebSphere, in Notes, in Quickplace, etc..
I would focus on Microsoft’s Achilles heals – scalability, availability and TCO. They haven’t got these issues done by any means. The Domino story is far cleaner.
I would communicate the integrate collaboration story in a much cleaner way. I would talk about the collaboration scenarios and demonstrate how easy they are. I would then work with partners and customers to make sure that they are implemented in the most efficient way removing every single blockage to the initiation of collaboration. Make sure that people understand the importance of each feature in the integrated set and give it the appropriate amount of time. Focus on the end-user much, much more.
Ed Brill has some screen-shots of the upcoming Lotus Notes “Hannover” interface.
So what can we make from them.
First impressions are good, it looks a lot cleaner than the current Notes implementation. They’ll hate me for saying it, but I’m struck by how similar it is to Outlook hen in the Inbox and Calendar. The issues for me with the current Notes interface have only partly been about the way it looks. Most of my frustrations are with the actions that the interface takes, the gestures. If I double-click on an attachment I want it to open, that’s what I expect. Whether these things have been fixed I don’t know because I’m just working from some screen-shots.
Perhaps I should take the time to look at the real thing.
(PS: does anyone else think that Ed Brill has to be a made up name.)
Feel I should say something on Sametime 7.5 because it’s just been announced at Lotussphere – but Stu said it already.
The one comment I would add though is the similarity in the interfaces between Microsoft Live Communicator, Sametime 7.5, MSN Messenger and GoogleTalk. If they get too similar we might all be struggling to work out who we can communicate with where. I suppose we could all dream of communicating with everyone in one interface but I don’t think it’s going to happen any time soon even with the new announcements.
Stu talks about the latest Microsoft release of Lotus Notes to Exchange (and others) migration toolkit. He thinks it’s a good thing, so do I.
The thing that I personally find interesting though is how this huge reaction from the Lotus Notes side of the debate will impact on customer perception. A negative to reaction to something doesn’t always get the reaction you were looking for.
For instance, the only people actively promoting knowledge of the toolkit are people who would rather it was never used. Just by acknowledging it existence they are acknowledging that there is an issue. This will mean that some customers will become uncomfortable and start an assessment process that they never would have previously.
My personal belief is that IBM Lotus have a strong technical story but that they aren’t telling the story. The current round of updates have all been focussed (in their presentation) on stuff that end-users couldn’t care less about. IBM seem to have missed the point that the end-user, particularly in this arena, is king and queen. IBM seem to dismiss continually the issues that end-users raise about usability even though they are fixing them. I’ve even been in a discussion with a customer who has said that they are leaving Notes just because of the end-user experience, they were more concerned that their staff were not enjoying their technology experience than the cost of running the infrastructure. Whether Outlook was really the answer to this customers problems can be debated for ever, but the main point was that they didn’t see anything from IBM that was going to make it any better.
Knowledge workers who use Notes or Outlook spend more than 80% using the products and their experience has to be impeccable. All that you have to do is to add a few minutes to each user each day; project costs for a migration are tiny in comparison. Expand that experience into Instant Messaging and other collaboration tools and the numbers just get bigger and bigger.
That is where IBM needs to take the fight to Microsoft – at the end-user. They are the ones who will make all of the decisions. But don’t do it for Notes, do it for the whole collaboration experience.
(I have no idea why it’s “Red Bull” – how naive of me)
David Goldes continues his article on collaboration at AT, more precisely about teleworking at AT&T. I’ve talked a lot about the process and business change issues with all technology before so it was interesting to see the three pieces of advice from Joseph Roitz, AT&T’s director of telework:
1. Keep in mind that technology is paramount; if the technology doesn’t work and support applications, whether it’s the intranet or connectivity, the initiative is doomed
2. Corporate culture is of paramount importance. It’s necessary to create a culture that embraces telework, or at the very least allows it to exist. Telework is subject to the network effect, where each incremental addition adds value.
3. Telework is a business strategy, not a perk. It’s not a project or a program, it’s an entirely different way of doing business that is more effective, efficient, resilient, and flexible.
Jeffrey Phillips has a great article on Value Multipliers:
The military has a phrase that I like a lot – force multiplier. What they mean by that are conditions,weapons, tactics or other factors that increase the force brought to beat on a particular enemy. This means that because of other conditions and careful planning they get even more firepower or results from a small team.
I think we in business should define some value multipliers. What processes, systems or cultural changes can we make to our business that will add significant value given the same inputs? I think this is especially true in workgroups or teams.
A great example of a value multiplier for an individual is the Getting Things Done methodology. As an individual, I can become more productive as I adopt the process and methodology and put it to good use. But there is a limiting factor – as long as I’m the only one using the methodology and becoming more efficient, there’s an upper level impact to the gains for the work group or team. What can we provide for teams or workgroups to multiply their value and results?
In a sense he is saying that the total value is greater than the sum of the parts. We see this issue in all sorts of places, unfortunately in reverse most of the time. How do we get through to an organisation culture that if everyone works together on something we all get the value, but if some choose to opt out we all loose. I’m yet to see an organisation, for instance, where everyone uses the calendaring capabilities of their infrastructure in a way that makes everyones time management as effective or productive as it could be. There is normally someone who refuses to put all of their appointments in their making everyones free and busy information of low value.
Having said that I have worked in teams where the team came together in a way which provided value that we could never have as individuals. If I could bottle that culture and that feeling I would not be sitting here now, that’s for sure.
eWeek has done a review of Notes 7. Ed Brill has pointed to the bits that he likes.
Not enough detail for my liking, but if you want some basics about the changes then take a look.
Interesting article in Collaboration Loop on AT&T and it’s move to teleworking, particularly interesting is the political change that this change has made. It again promotes the issue of process to the top of the pile.
One of the reasons for the program’s success at AT&T is because there is no differentiation in terms of work habits between employees who work in AT&T offices and those who work remotely. AT&T has rather effectively embedded telework in the way all work is performed. Security policies do not, for example differentiate between “security at home,” “security on the road,” and “security in the office”: there is but one security policy, and it is designed to anticipate all facets of the knowledge worker’s environment, mobile or otherwise. People even work in a remote style when in office: the tools that teleworkers use, such as instant messaging and the telephone, are also frequently used to contact workers in adjoining offices.
Stuart Downes has written an interesting piece on why he believes that collaboration workplaces aren’t working:
However perhaps the least useful and most burdensome technology has been the workspace, in my organisation that takes the form of either a Notes Teamroom database or a browser accessed Quickplace. Am I the only person that finds these areas cumbersome and painful to use, and eventually I find that all they are used for is a document repository. Even where the project is staffed by collaborative engineers we still seem to revert to the more basics of communication (IM, email and telephone – and probably in that order).
If you don’t think Exchange scalability is an issue when compared to Domino look at this set of comments to a post by Ed Brill. In Exchange terms the discussion for most corporate customers isn’t anywhere near the 10,000 users per server mark it’s much lower than that – less than half normally.
The real issue isn’t the capital costs of hardware – it’s the cost of operation of a significantly more complicated infrastructure.
Graham Chastney 