One of the things I’ve learned about the company I work for (particularly as a result of getting involved with social software, networks and communities both internally and externally) is the massive diversity the organisation has and the enormous strength that it delivers. It’s a diversity that is constantly being refreshed as new acquisitions are made and new thinking and innovation joins the existing talent pool. It’s a diversity that’s reflected not only in the global nature of the business, but also in the different areas in which the company is engaged – from hardware, software, services, methodologies, research, all kinds of cool thinking. It seems lately that almost every day I meet someone new who has something different to share with me.
Yesterday I was presenting to a customer about what IBM has been doing internally with social networks, and how we collaborate both internally and externally. That brought me back to the diversity slide – the sweet shop, the candy store. What was really cool about that was that it enabled me to tell the story of how I’d widened my network internally, and began to reach out to people across the organisation – making friends in Boston, Melbourne, Singapore, Delhi, all over the world as well as around the UK, and from all different areas of the business. One of the things that I learned as part of the briefing the IBM team delivered yesterday was about IBM’s green strategy and Project Big Green – I’d heard about it before and been excited, but I learned a lot from one of our VPs about a number of different client stories where value and environmental improvements have been delivered.
It’s just incredibly exciting. That, and that the fact that there’s always something new to learn, coupled with the rich cultural diversity and the enormous amount of trust that I feel that the organisation places in its employees, is really what makes it such an enjoyable place to work, and that I believe makes it a really strong organisation.
This past weekend saw a first for IBM South Bank as it played host to Barcamp London 7, the seventh time a the Barcamp unconference had been held in London (I know this, because I asked @thehodge why it was called Barcamp London 7, and he said it was because it was the seventh one… cunning!). South Bank is not often used for events at the weekend, and certainly not for events of 200 excited techies, creative types and those wanting to run their own talks on subjects as diverse as Failure, the TV series Lost, CSS design, niche bands you should be listening to, a photography project involving a rubber duck, life drawing, and Enterprise Software Patterns.
The IBM side of the event organisation was largely the effort of Zoe Slattery, although a host of us volunteered to help support the external organisers, and several IBM folks attended. Attendance at a Barcamp is free and the event is supported and funded by sponsors. It was great to mingle and chat with people I’d met at similar events, friends, and others I was connecting with for the first time.
The way that a Barcamp is organised is that there is no set agenda – attendees turn up and volunteer to speak for 20 minutes on a topic of their choice (and these topics can be very diverse). We used something like 12 or 13 rooms and I believe we had nearly 200 available session slots spanning the 2 day period from 10am on Saturday through until 5pm on the Sunday. By the end of Saturday almost the entire session “grid” was filled. It is a Barcamp tradition that first timers are expected to give at least one session… in the end, I gave two.
There’s an event on Slideshare where the decks for those that used slides are being collected, but there was a huge range of different topics and styles (including my own favourite, Ben Fletcher’s Fingerspelling lesson, which had us learning the alphabet in British Sign Language at increasingly higher speeds!)
The overnight stay went well – there were a few party games and many, many discussions on Saturday evening. A good time had by all, judging from the tweets and photos.
The staff at South Bank were exceptional, working the weekend and remaining in great spirits, helped by the sunny dispositions of the Barcamp attendees. All in all it was a great success, and I hope that we’ll be able to get involved in more of these kinds of events!
When I wrote that blog entry, I missed an ideal opportunity to mention that IBM has a trial version of WebSphere Message Broker which is available for download. It’s a great way to take a look at the product and start to develop your own skills. The Information Center and Samples Gallery (available from the Message Broker Toolkit once the product is installed) are very effective places to start, too.
A couple of additional resources that might be of interest to newcomers are the articles in the WMB Zone on IBM developerWorks (check out the “latest content” section), and an unofficial user forum called MQSeries.net which has an active discussion group about WebSphere Message Broker.
The very brilliant Martin Gale joined my team at work last week. I’ve known Martin for a few years now and we had a bit of a shared experience last year going through our professional certification at the same time. He’s an unbelievably clever and talented chap, and it’s a privilege to now be sharing an office with him… I’m hoping that some of his Master Inventiveness rubs off on me!
Whilst he gets settled in, I’ve had the opportunity to seed my own technology preferences into his mind… this week, he’s been playing around with my personal favourite, WebSphere Message Broker (WMB), whilst developing his own newly-acquired interest in WebSphere Business Events (WBE). He’ll be an expert in both by, oh, 10am tomorrow…
I was very pleased that Martin has enjoyed his Message Broker experience so far! I’ve been using and consulting with the product for many years now, so I know I’m regarded as a bit of a bigot in this area, but it’s a pleasure to see someone using the product for the first time!
NB @martinjgale stream is private, this screenshot used by permission
The secret of success? I believe that it’s the fact that the programming model and toolkit for Message Broker have seen steady improvement and evolution over a number of years – rather than having large chunks of the model revamped between releases. It really has steadily become a stronger and stronger product.
What’s the big deal? Well, before now IBM hasn’t made WebSphere Application Server (also known as WAS) available for free, you’ve needed a license. Although the Java Enterprise Edition programming model is broadly the same regardless of the choice of vendor, it’s always a good idea to develop, test and deploy on the same version of the runtime you’ll be using in production. Plus, you get the opportunity to learn more about WAS administration and hone skills with the product. It’s well worth a look.
And look, let’s be honest, I don’t post about WebSphere stuff half as much as I “should” – this is newsworthy stuff. Go take a look.
I have just finished talking to a group of university students who were invited to IBM Hursley today. I had about 15 minutes to discuss Enterprise Collaboration, and I used the time to take a quick tour through IBM’s size, diversity and organisation, and talked about how the way I operate has changed since I got engaged in blogging internally four years ago, and how I “broke through” the firewall.
Towards the beginning of the talk, I asked three questions to get some group discussion going, and asked the students to shout out some answers. Here’s a summary of the responses.
1. What kinds of tools do you think enterprises use to communicate internally today?
“Skype”, “online meetings”, “MSN” (email and phone came right at the end of the list)
2. What kinds of tools would you like to use in a work environment?
“Facebook”, “Skype”
3. Is it a good idea, or appropriate, to communicate and share through firewalls?
“It’s important, for networking”, “companies could have their own version of Facebook internally”
I didn’t seed any of these responses! Very interesting… I think I’d expected the answers to question 1 to be email, wiki, blog etc., but those are all old school (and possibly, irrelevant) as far as this group was concerned. I guess the outcome of this entirely unscientific survey will be old news to some people, but I found it fascinating.
Update 17th June:
Thanks for all the interest in this post! I should just reiterate that this is not new news – as @andysc said to me after the talk yesterday, the idea that “email is how I communicate with my parents” is as commonplace as the idea that some of us may have had that “snail mail is how we communicated with our grandparents”. The point here is about the expectation of speed of spread of technology within corporations. I found it a very interesting perspective, although I guess I’d half-expected some of the answers. I just hadn’t expected the “old tech” to be buried so far down in the consciousness. But then, when I left university, web browsers were just emerging and I had a desktop email client at home, but yet I suddenly found myself at work using a green-screen terminal emulator to access what was, to my mind at the time, a hideously hard-to-use mail system called MEMO which required the use of line-editing commands.
One other point, given my own interest in these two technology spaces – Andy C asks below about microblogging, and I certainly mentioned our use of these tools internally and externally, but it didn’t seem to be on the students’ radar; secondly, I spoke about attending meetings in virtual worlds and the relative effectiveness compared to a teleconference, but again that didn’t come up as an idea in the responses to the questions at the start. So it seems (again, based on a highly unscientific study of a limited pool of London MSc Management students) that the technologies that are “expected” in the enterprise are those that have reached widespread consumer adoption outside it.
It seems like just a few short months ago that I discovered Poken – neat little USB keychain devices which you can touch together when you meet someone else with one, in order to electronically exchange social network IDs and contact information. Actually… it was only a few months ago – we talked about them on Dogear Nation episode 88 in February, and in an example of serendipitous discovery, I picked one up a week later at Twestival in London. I immediately thought the idea was cool, but I was disappointed to discover how much they cost, and how few people had them.
I mentioned Poken in my presentation at SOMESSO a couple of weeks ago. Whilst I love the idea, I simply haven’t come across enough people who have a Poken to have made it worth my while. My basic comment at the time was that I felt they needed to make themselves more widespread in order to be useful. Since then, I’ve continued the discussion in comments on a couple of blogs. To quote myself:
However, I think there are a few issues…
[they] cost more than most people are prepared to pay for what is essentially a small capacity but cute looking memory stick, and they are not very readily available;
the cuteness factor can also be off-putting to some people, particularly those with a business purpose in mind and the disposable income to buy them;
too few core connectors and salesmen have them (see Gladwell’s The Tipping Point), IMHO they should seed more;
the value-add of the site (which actually manages the contacts) is low, so the business model is presumably centred on selling the devices.
I had yet another conversation about Poken at a tweetup in London last week, and again heard comment that they were too toy-like for business users, and too few people had them.
This is all great stuff. I engaged with the idea of Poken as soon as I heard about the concept, and I hope that I’ll be able to share and manage my information more easily in future. Maybe Poken won’t be the answer, but I’m glad to see the idea broadening out, and hopefully reaching a wider audience.
One of the coolest things I’ve seen this week at IBM IMPACT is some of the new technology that has just been made available in a WebSphere Feature Pack. The technology is for Communications Enabled Applications (CEA) – yes, it’s another one of those great technology industry TLAs!
I sat down with Savio Rodrigues for a discussion and demo of the Feature Pack. It is very, very clever stuff. What it essentially enables is a simple “click-to-call” button on a web page which can create a secure voice and cobrowsing connection between two users. If you’re familiar with Skype, or voice chatting on Yahoo Messenger or Google Talk, you’ll understand the principle that there’s no need to make calls over the phone all the time – I’m increasingly making use of voice-over-IP technology for my day-to-day tasks, so this is a natural capability to expect in web applications as far as I’m concerned.
The best part? The amount of effort required to build the functionality into a web page is really small. Obviously you need to be running on WebSphere, but the front-end website code is trivial, just a few lines of HTML and some Javascript includes.
The Communications Enabled Applications content was slightly low-key at IMPACT, compared to CloudBurst, BPM BlueWorks, and other big splashes – but don’t overlook this capability.
I’m not going to run down all of the announcements that came out during the first day of IMPACT yesterday – you can take a look at Sandy Carter’s video summary for some of the key ones, like Smart Work, and the new WebSphere CloudBurst appliance (it’s very purple – and I want one!). There is a slew of cool new stuff being announced and coming out over the coming year.
Sitting in the keynote yesterday morning I was feeling as though several of the worlds that I live in / things I’m interested in were really coming together. It’s an exciting time. For example, we had:
throughout the conference, social media at the fore, with YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and blogs all being used to connect and collaborate.
As an “SOA event” it’s easy for me to see it as all to do with IBM’s WebSphere brand of software alone, since that’s what I’ve work been working on for almost a decade now. The truth is that IMPACT spans everything that IBM does, particularly in software. We are talking collaboration and social software (Lotus); monitoring and intelligent management (Tivoli); modelling and productive development (Rational); and sophisticated data analytics (Information Management). It’s a real showcase for the broad reach and range of IBM’s software portfolio.
Highlight of the day for me was absolutely nothing to do with IBM software – it was the opportunity to hear Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester speak on the Future of the Social Web. Jeremiah clearly understands this stuff in all the many facets that have been expressed by other people I follow, like Don Tapscott – I did recommend his book already, right…? I am glad to have made the connection with @jowyang, since I’ve read and followed much of his work in the past couple of years, so it was a bit of a treat to hear him speaking. I tried not to take over the Q&A completely
Oh, and the play part? Billy Crystal was the compere for the morning session and kept us amused despite the early start – and there were plenty of opportunities to catch up with friends and Twitter connections at the networking sessions. I call that a win. Oh, and wait a second, I almost forgot – we had a tweetup yesterday, with a couple more scheduled later in the week. Looking forward to them.
Photos I’m taking at IMPACT 2009 are up on Flickr – this slideshow should auto-update as more are added, since it selects from the tagged images in my account. I’m taking snapshots using my compact Canon camera (often without flash to avoid distracting the presenters) and uploading via Eye-Fi so the results are varied
I spend a lot of my time talking to IBM customers, prospective customers, and, well, anyone who will listen, really, about how social software and social networks have transformed the way I work and connect with others – both in my job, and my daily life. In many ways it’s a disproportionate amount of time – my day job does not strictly focus on social software, and I’m not in our Lotus brand where this kind of thing would be my bread-and-butter. The point is that I’ve gained a lot from my early adopter status, I have compelling examples to share (I hope), and I’ve followed IBM’s trajectory in this space very closely. Best of all, I’m invited to talk about this stuff.
You may be aware that our process around a lot of the social software space has developed from our Technology Adoption Program – after proving that an enterprise blogging platform (BlogCentral), rich user profiles (our Bluepages internal directory), enterprise social bookmarking (Dogear) and other services worked on a large scale inside the company, we released Lotus Connections, an enterprise social software platform built from these innovations.
My two worlds have now come together. I have a lot of interaction with IBM customers and folks who develop using our technology, and I’ve been a long-term advocate of IBM developerWorks, since before I joined the company, in fact. I’m the first to admit that sometimes our product documentation lacks examples or can be a tricky read, but developerWorks consistently delivers great content by developers, for developers, which I always find hugely useful.
Over time we’ve opened up developerWorks to increasing amounts of interaction. There have been forums for a long time. Last year we introduced developerWorks Spaces, which enabled users to form their own interest groups and build customisable portals for sharing data. Last week it was time to put Lotus Connections into developerWorks (or is that the other way around?!), which led to the creation of My developerWorks – now anyone can sign in with their IBM ID, create a profile, make connections with friends or those with similar interests, and track and share their content. ReadWriteWeb describes it as “the world’s geekiest social network”. You know what? I don’t mind if it is…
I am glad to have made the connection with @jowyang, since I’ve read and followed much of his work in the past couple of years, so it was a bit of a treat to hear him speaking. I tried not to take over the Q&A completely 
