dadams.co.uk

Over the past couple of years there have been a number of what I call ‘eureka moments’… that moment when the usually-invisible light bulb above your head switches on and you either “get it” or something resonates. One such moment was a couple of years ago when I saw Charlie Hill (now an IBM Distinguished Engineer and the Chief Technology Officer of Lotus software) talking about and demonstrating ‘Activities’, which have since become part of IBM Lotus Connections.

Activities are a simple premise. People work on business activities (duh, yeah) and these business activities are comprised of lots of different pieces of information and content which often derive from and live in different places - for example e-mails, calendar appointments, documents, tasks, web pages, instant messaging chat transcripts, and so on. So an activity is a ‘place’ for bringing the team together and sharing the content. You may ask why that can’t be done in a TeamRoom, Quickr place or some other collaborative solution. Well, it can. The point here is that an activity is something which is quick and easy to set up, to add members to, and is suitable for the smallest of tasks right up to something which is more involved and longer in duration. You might set up an activity just to review a document or plan one meeting. You might set up an activity to plan an entire event (as we have done with Lotusphere Comes To You). If however your project is going to last for a year you might be better off with a Quickr place.

A more recent eureka moment came when the feature set of Lotus Sametime Advanced was announced. Some of the features (i.e. the broadcast suite) were already familiar to IBM folk since they had been available internally as the IBM Community Tools. The big new feature as far as I was concerned was chat rooms. For me to explain this fully, you need some background, and that background concerns e-mail.

Ask anyone what their major issues are where e-mail is concerned and they’ll generally say two things… the first is the sheer volume they receive, and the second is the number of file attachments. Dig a bit deeper and you’ll actually discover a more fundamental set of problems… people are hooked on e-mail, they spend a lot of time watching their inbox, and they are very reactive to what comes in. To quote the Butler Group, the overloaded inbox creates a “false sense of panic”. People forget their business priorities and focus on making sure they keep their inbox in check, even if they’re dealing with trivial, less pressing items to do so. Where companies impose size quotas people have the added worry about their total mail box size going over the limit, so they spend time ensuring the size is kept in check rather than focusing on their job.

Some people on the other hand just give up. I’ve seen people with over 2,000 unread e-mails in their inbox. In a way this could be quite liberating - you’ve lost control, so why not just delete them all… a bit like being £5 million in debt, what does it matter if you blow £10,000 this weekend?

Even more interesting, ask someone what the solution to the overblown mail box problem is. If they say “archiving” that’s the wrong answer. That’s a solution to a symptom, not a cure for the disease. One of my favourite slides at the moment is entitled “What? How can I be over my mail quota again?” - and contains a screenshot, a real screenshot, of my inbox with over 40 mb of file attachments received in one day. How can this happen in IBM? There’s some interesting facts about these e-mails. The attention indicators (Notes 7 and 8 feature) tell me that none of these e-mails were sent to me only or even a list of less than five people including me. None of the e-mails came from the Lotus UK team. We have a very strong practise of sharing information via Quickr or Activities. But clearly there some people with bad habits. It’s not that we don’t have the technology… I actually think we have too much. As well as Quickr and Activities there are various other ways to share documents including some un-productised research projects. This goes to prove what we’ve always known, that collaboration is cultural - you can put the technology in place, but people have to realise the pain and then see the value. Either that or you stand behind them with a large piece of wood with a nail sticking out the end of it.

So, having solutions like Quickr (with it’s Connectors for Notes and now Outlook) and Activities can help to cut down the volume of file attachments. But what about the number of e-mails? Think about this… every e-mail you send has the potential to spawn several more over the next few days and maybe weeks. Reply-with-history seems to be a default (minus file attachments of course), so you get the same e-mail again (and again, and again) with a extra dollop of text each time.

This returns us very nicely to the subject of Sametime Advanced chat rooms. I’m not suggesting for one minute that chat rooms will replace e-mail, but I suggest that they can replace e-mails for selected business activities. Along with all of the other items that you gather, you can associate a chat room (or rooms) with a business activity and define that as the place to communicate. Everyone can see the transcript, no-one has to ask for the history (not even late joiners). No-one has to repeat anything as the transcript exists as one continuous persistent dialogue, even if you step out of the dialogue for several days or perhaps weeks. The chat can be real-time, or can be asynchronous as you can catch up on the discussion later. And through a rather neat capability which plugs into the Sametime client you can be alerted to activity going on inside the chat room so that you join in.

E-mail is here for the duration, but you need to be ready for the day it gets side-lined and overtaken by more effective methods of communication and collaboration. To quote an old marketing campaign, I use Lotus solutions and I AM ready for that day.

What a week… I arrived at Cape Town on Tuesday morning, in the nick of time to present at the launch event for our three new offerings (Notes 8, Connections and Quickr). That evening I flew to Johannesburg with my colleagues (Ross, Uffe and local-boy Hannes) ready for the next event and a meeting with the press on Wednesday. The Joburg event (in the swanky Melrose Arch development) was crammed to capacity with an audience of around 140 attendees. This was followed by dinner at the Butcher Shop in Nelson Mandela Square (I had ostrich - but not a whole one, and not even a leg). An early flight to Durban started the Thursday agenda, and Friday consisted of some customer visits before a late lunch at the Indigo Moon restaurant in Pretoria.

Reaction to the new products was amazing. I’ve already heard that one company in South Africa has already upgraded to Notes / Domino 8, and an attending CEO has taken the decision to move in Notes / Domino 8 in place of Outlook / Exchange in his company. That speaks volumes. And again, just like some recent events in the UK, I had numerous conversations with people very serious about replacing Microsoft Office with the free integrated productivity editors.

I came to one important conclusion while travelling in and out of South Africa… they really need to sort the airports out before the 2010 World Cup. Okay, they have improved the departure gates at Johannesburg, but the check-in area is still absolute bedlam. They seem to think the best way to reduce unemployment is to give everyone a job at the airport (but not assign them any duties… just let them stand around doing nothing).

Cape Town airport isn’t much better - I arrived at 08:20 in the morning and it was the only flight coming in. I got off the plane and got to the luggage carousel within 15 minutes (great)… but it was a further 40 minutes before my case arrived. Acceptable for a large airport with a lot of flights arriving, but not a small airport handling just one flight.

I travelled out in Premium Economy (or ‘World Traveller Plus’ as British Airways call it). Officially I was eligible for Business Class (over 10 hours, overnight, work on arrival) but I find gaining approval too long-winded and tiresome. So I opted for the easy approval option of World Traveller Plus - this worked well as I had the first row with plenty of leg room. However the return journey promised to be a nightmare, in cattle-class shoved in a tiny seat with no leg room or elbow room for 11 hours. Things promised to get worse - even though I checked in fairly early (after battling for 15 minutes to join the end of the queue) there were no aisle seats left (groan). I requested a seat move if at all possible and carried on. After a cuppa and a mooch round the shops I went to the gate to find that they’d found me an aisle seat, 28J. Economy, but an aisle seat, so an improvement. What I didn’t know until I got to 28J was that this newly-allocated seat was in World Traveller Plus… and, double bonus, was on it’s own next to the emergency exit so I had 7 feet of leg room (more than enough) and no-one beside me. Thank you British Airways.

Lotus Quickr, the collaboration solution for serious grown-up business people, is now shipping. But we need to get a couple of things straight.

Firstly, it’s Quickr with a small ‘r’. Quickr, and not QuickR. Check out the Quickr web site for proof.

Secondly, it’s pronounced “Quicker”. The name just happens to have an ‘e’ missing. It’s not pronounced “Quick-Arr”. Think about that popular photo-sharing web site. No-one calls it “Flick-Arr”. Not unless they’re from Devon or Cornwall. Or a they’re a pirate.