Stu Downes

Well its time to go home.  I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the conference.  I’ll blog some more on what I’ve learned when I get some time.  I’m looking forward to sharing much more information with my collegues over the next few weeks.

Collaboration

I had a great opportunity to talk with several people from IBM.  They demonstrated activities, dog ear, malibu, tagging, folksonomies, rss and more from IBM.  This is the first time I’ve seen and heard this message.  Why?  As I discussed with several people from IBM get a megaphone and start talking about this now.  The solutions these new tools open to the enterprise are very exciting.  It obviously isn’t vapour-ware as I saw it in action, ok some of it may not make it into the commercial product set but please open up some information into the public forum so that some excitement and forward thinking can be examined by people like myself who need to start thinking further than the next release.

Dog ear is IBM’s internal social bookmarking system but designed for the enterprise.

Malibu is a “surf board” on the desktop which allows activities, folksonomies etc to be linked in a context driven way.

Activities are very exciting and the integration of activities with sametime 7.5 and the hannover version of notes as well as its own web interface is very very cool.

Collaboration

The collaborative technologies conference was an interesting place to sit and listen to purveyors of software and purveyors of services.  The vendors stalls are selling technologies and solutions which will require all the traditional implementation (data room, hardware, OS, software, configuration, etc).  At the same time the web2.0 players are showing usable services.  While the enterprise may be shy of these services I do feel that within the life-cycle of the next release of the traditional vendor products we will observe these services taking a chunk out of their markets.  Why should I wait 9 months for a collaborative solution to be deployed when I can get the service in 9 hours.  This for people who like me work in IT is the challenge!  So do people really get the new technology?  Well it is coming.  Look at this interesting slide showing that wiki has overtaken excel in searches on google!

 

Collaboration

One of the most interesting talks at the Collaborative Technologies Conference was Rod’s talk and discussion on a potential Web 2.0 architecture suitable for the Enterprise.  I was lucky enough to discuss this further with Rod that evening.  Here it is:

 

Rod proposes that all content can be hosted externally and encrypted.  All you need in the enterprise is the gateway though which the users are authenticated in order to decrypt the content.  His case is that you purchase everything as a service, the service providors use a common standards based approach so migration between providors and integration between different suppliers should be simple and seamless.  I think that many enterprises will be concerned about opening their data to the internet rather than keeping it within the enterprise, this balanced against the fact that services will be an increasing challenge to us as traditional information technology departments.

Collaboration

Ask a room of about 70 people:

a) How many of you have an IT function? 75%
b) How many of you have recently introduced new collaboration technology? 75%
c) How many of you have acheived over 80% adoption? 0%

Interesting results. The audience were more geared towards managing change than specific technologies, but all the same an interesting adoption rate!

Collaboration

In this ArCast Ron Jacobs talks to Simon Guest about putting the user back into the picture when building an architecture.  They discuss what happens when a user gets a new tool.  They put this down as Discovery > Learning > Mastering.  I like the analogy from project management where a team will Form > Storm > Norm > and finally Mourn.  So from my perspective Simon’s model of Discovery > Learning > Mastering has a step missing.  I think the last step with all software is Frustrating.  Once a user has mastered software they then become frustrated by its limitations, no matter how good the software is.  Dealing with frustration is difficult, all you can do is feed information about next releases (unless the client is extensible).

I have seen at close hand what IBM and Lotus have done over previous years since the release 4 days of Notes in the late 90s.  In all their previous releases they have jumped on the infrastructure model to market their software.  “hey this new release is xx% less CPU intensive”.  It is nice to see that with Hannover, the next release of Notes, and Sametime 7.5 we have heard virtually nothing about the back end servers.  We are however starting to see a steady stream of data about the client both from blogs and from ibm.com (Hannover, Sametime).  Mary Beth has told us about the personae they are utilising, and this can only be good news for us and our Lotus software users.  I’m excited about the extensible nature of both these clients as I hope this can be utilised to build a better user experience and avoid the frustration step in the process.

This focus on the end user is gaining supporters.  Look at these posts from Graham and Steve (Sametime, Hannover), both picking up on user experience and not worrying too much about the back end infrastructure.

Collaboration

In the age of the web service almost everything will soon be available online from a service provider.  How does that impact those of us who work for organisations that deliver IT services to users at their desktops?  My mind scribbles are that traditional IT vendors will need to switch their skill sets and concentrate on:

• Understanding what can be served from a service provider.
• How do the organisations, and more importantly individuals, actually get the value and see the benefit of services.
• Integrating external services with internal systems.
• What are the barriers to allow users to self provision the software that will be needed to make the services successful?
• How to become a service provider.

Are we all going to lose our jobs in IT?  Well I hope not! The services themselves will need the engineering and technical skill to make them work.  The traditional architect of the IT system will have less to do with the tin and much more to understand customer needs and hence the best option from the available services.  This will lead to a blurring of the traditional system analyst roles and technical architect roles.  It will also lead to a reduction in the requirement for highly skilled engineers in a particular product, as services are by nature larger scale more efficient environments requiring less “local” labour. 

I think the best way to describe the new breed of IT professional will be the “integrators”.  Organisations will need people we need to develop into these roles.  What are the integrators, Steve described the requirements for what I call “integrators” in a conversation with me recently – he described the requirement to know a moderate amount about a lot of areas rather than a huge amount about a single area.  I think the importance of this will be applying this knowledge in such a way that customers can understand you and the solutions and services you develop have value.  I don’t think these people are quite the “mile wide inch deep” people, more likely to be covering one solution area.

This reflects my personal professional transition at the moment.  For many years I have specialised in Lotus Notes and Domino (and the ancillary products which build on that platform).  Now I’m about to engage on a new role which I hope will allow me to look at collaboration from a solution perspective.  I hope to concentrate on the solution rather than solely on the product and that delivers the service.  I expect this will result in some “friction” in my brain as I have to re-align some thought processes, deal with emotions (particularly towards the product I have worked with for many years), form new relationships with colleagues, and importantly re-align existing colleagues understanding of what I do.

 

Collaboration

I’m attending the Collaborative Technologies Conference.  I’ll try and blog some while I am there.  I’m looking forward to the event, my main aims are to broaden my focus and understand more about non-IBM collaborative technologies.  I’m keen personally to hear differing views on Web 2.0 and the enterprise.

Collaboration

 

Well it isn’t going to be long before subscription, aggregators and RSS feeds hit the enterprise.  Microsoft will produce feeds frm Sharepoint, IBM will through varoius mechanisms including Domino later this year, Newsgator have announced their enterprise offering.  The area where I see little information at the moment is how the users will get best value from RSS, how they will interact and use them?

At the moment I don’t know of anyone in my organisation, except for disrupters, who have installed RSS readers independently (or for that matter use web based readers).

From the big players Outlook 2007 has shown its hand, and to be honest it isn’t rich enough for me, but will possibly meet the needs of the average user.  The integration with Internet Explorer 7 makes it a simple process to subscribe to feeds.  I think they need to work on making management of feeds simple.  From IBM Notes will include RSS reading capabilities in the next release.  In fact the Notes client through some community development does have some RSS readers now, but to be honest they aren’t integrated into the client rather than individual notes applications.  I look forward to seeing more of the Hannover plans and how RSS integrates with the client, how users will be able to subscribe to feeds, manage feeds etc.

You’ll notice I’ve not discussed standalone clients here.  My view is that RSS for the enterprise must combine closely with email and team workspaces.  “Hey read this great blog post” emails will become more common and great for collaboration and stimulating ideas.

I’ll leave on a question.  How do we as IT people ensure the user understands the power of RSS, has simple access to it, and gets value from it?

Collaboration

This 5 minute video gives an interesting overview of the Notes Hannover client (link).  Via Lotus Insider Blog.

Collaboration