Interview with Times Online

Last week I was interviewed by Chris Partridge of Times Online on the subject of collaborative solutions that are changing the workplace. You can read the resulting article here. Overall I think it’s a great article – I would have slightly re-worded a couple of things, but journalists don’t have the luxury of infinite column space so Chris did a good job of including all of the main points

• Adoption of instant messaging cuts e-mail by 40% – Gartner stated 40%, internally in IBM we measured 38%… but it’s not guaranteed for everyone.
• “Eventually you get fed up typing so you press a button to go on the phone” – during the interview I said “IF you get fed up with typing”.
• On the subject of web conferencing replacing face-to-face meetings – in our return on investment model we reckon on about 10% of face-to-face meetings being replaced, but that’s something individual businesses need to look at.
• Likewise the return on investment being realised in a couple of months – maybe, it depends on the business… but we have seen situations where it’s possible.
• I didn’t say that instant messaging (IM) could be used to store knowledge – that part of the interview actually referred to a Notes and web application, and also to the culture of asking questions in a place where everyone could benefit from the answer.

Interesting that Erik Larson from Adobe also said what I said during my interview, that collaboration is generational – today’s teenagers use instant messaging and social networking tools and will be expecting those solutions in the workplace. Furthermore I said that some businesses now recognise that they need to have those solutions in place to attract and retain the best talent. Stick with Lotus software, and that’s what they’ll get.