Oh my. I am (comparatively) speechless about the the things I'm seeing this week at Lotusphere. Speechless. In the best sense.

And it's still just Tuesday morning.

I just left a session where Ray Ozzie, Mike Rhodin, and Irene Greif were having a panel discussion along with a couple of clients about the past and future of collaborative software. My head is spinning with ideas. It was absolutely fascinating. Really. If you weren't there, get the video. Innovators Panel: Lotus Notes from 1984 - 2005 and Beyond (it doesn't have a number).

While you're at it, get the opening session. Ray was in that, too. As always, Ray was great. Mike Zisman (former Lotus President) was here and was brilliant, too. In all meanings of the word. The current Lotus folks paled a bit in their speaking skills next to these two but they made up for it and more with the technology.

Last year we saw version 2 of Workplace and it was a toy. It would have been hard to find a place where people doing real work could use it without immense frustration. In yesterday's opening session they showed the new rich client (version 2.5, I think) and let me just go on the record right now: It is the Real Deal.

Your company needs it. Hell, MY company needs it. In subtle but pervasive and important ways, Lotus and IBM are redefining collaboration. Really. I'm talking about jaw-dropping I-can-use-this-right-now innovations. It's brilliant.

Yesterday afternoon I went to another great session (STR115 Glimpsing the Future: Report from IBM Research in Cambridge). This was Irene Greif, again, who is great. Lotus, Iris and now IBM have been combining software developers, anthropologists and social scientists for something like 20 years now to study how people work. What they have and are learning is being built into the tools.

For instance, no matter how organized you make a process, there are big parts of it that happen outside the defined system. This is no big surprise. We all know that an awful lot of work gets done in the coffee room, at the bar, over the phone, via instant messaging, etc. But how do you get that into the process?

Traditionally, in many cases, the approach has been to try to formalize, quantify, document and lock down the process to the point there's no wiggle room and, in the process, get rid of these niggling informal interactions. Problem is, that's how people work. So, highly-defined formal processes, as important as they are, miss a lot of the interactions.

Part of what they're building into the new versions of Notes and into Workplace are mechanisms for starting to collect some of the informal bits. Like, for instance, threaded chat sessions associated with a work object. Yeah. I'm working on an RFP and have a chat with you about some technical detail. That chat can be retained as a thread of the RFP so my boss can come back later and see how we decided whatever we decided.

That's pretty cool.

Another thing I keep hearing GIVE ME A HALLELUJAH PEOPLE is users can create simple forms and applications in Workplace. I'm sure there are buildings filled with IT folks quaking at the thought (and I'm sure they can find a way to disable it) but let me just say right here, this--that is, people with the ability to make their own however-lame applications easily, for free, without having to deal with the Nazis in IT--this is what made Notes great.

Yeah, it resulted in lots of databases on servers with Default access set to Manager, and lots of wasted disc space, and lots of lame, ugly, forms even a mother couldn't love but who cares? It let people solve business problems. Yes, of course, I could have built them better. You could have built them better. IT DOESN'T MATTER.

What matters is they built 'em. They innovated. They tried new things.

Some worked. Some sucked. But let me review: Some worked. They solved problems. They improved processes. They did SOMETHING. And, it didn't require an RFP or an IT Justification or a Process Flow Diagram or an Analyst or an Architect or...or anything. Just somebody with an idea of how something could be made better.

That's been missing since R4 came along. Some of it, it sounds like, is coming back. And, not a second too soon, if you want my opinion.

Anyway, this is a great Lotusphere with exciting technologies and exciting ideas flowing everywhere. If you're not here, I'm sorry. Buy the videos. Buy ALL the videos. It may change the way you do business.

No documents found