Hectic Eclectic

To Case Study or not to Case Study

Yours truly has been investigating and I just can't think of a reason not to complete a case study if

A) Everything has gone swimmingly for a client

B) Enough time has elapsed to prove (A) is indeed the case

C) Nothing being implemented is of a particularly sensitive nature

We've done quite a few but it amazes me how (certainly initially) few people are keen to do Case Studies with business partners and/or vendors. This position I've always found surprising as it is a great was to showcase the fact everyone did a good job --  client end user/ IT within client / business partner / vendor  --- and why would any of us want to shy away from that?

Oh - and this made me smile.

Having spent some time at LCTY2010 in Edinburgh...

At times reduced to a Barcode...

I may still just agree that Lotus Knows...

At the event there were some great speakers, for me the Highlights being (I've retitled)

Stuart McRae a Collaboration Evangelist - Connections plus with special sauce

John Schumacher a Director of Development at Lotus - It's the ROI stupid

and

Eliza Manningham-Buller, from the Bond movies - on being in MI5

So there was a lot to see...

Stuart's demo showcased a load of little 10second savers (widgets) being used in concert and in context within Lotus Connections and Domino (yes you could have used outlook for this bit).  Widget shown were either Business Partner e.g. Snapp, Big publically available stuff like linkedin and TrippIt and some internal IBM tools, or publically available stuff from the IBM Lotus Labs.

If you can save people 5mins every day through smarter working.  That is about 1% of a working day.  So with hundred staff you can have 100 staff doing the work of 101.  With a 1000 staff you are getting the work of 1010.  So for a 1000 employee business you save 10 average salaries... Think about you average company salary for a moment....  think you should be considering this stuff?  I do.

For a £20k average salary

1000 staff equates to savings of £200k p.a. 

For a £40k average salary

500 staff equates to savings of £200k p.a.

or

1000 staff equates to savings of £400k p.a.

Powerful stuff ... but who believes the 5mins right?  Well Stuart showed one example after another of how time could be saved.... if you couldn't easily find AT LEAST 5mins you are probably doing something mad.

Stuart McRae also touched on some of the stuff I've mentioned already about Blackberry and the iPhone but it was cool to see some iPad announces too and to hear reinforced that IBM's view is - you choose the device and we'll work with anyone.  Some really cool announces on how people are working well with Alloy by IBM & SAP (wee blog on that), Connections, Quickr and the rest on the Blackberry.

Amongst other things I was reminded by a colleague to check out Ed Brill's blog - where I hadn't been for a while, which led me to some Lotus Protector articles.  Zero false positives at 99% effective... not bad and ICSALabs certified.  If you don't know it much check out these videos with Arthur Fontaine

Some news for you iPhoners out there... though for now I still prefer Berries myself

Another one from Uncle StephenfromIBM - cool

You can see the Blackberry one here...

Finding the best person... by making the right Connections

I've been speaking to a number of folks recently about their concerns of how to connect the right people within their organisations and we currently had a few people looking at Lotus Connections - Lotus' Social software.  I don't think IBM have quite figured out how to sell this stuff fully yet - though there are plenty of refereneces world wide but I think it is highly apposite for organisations going through classic VC acquisition plays where staff don't know who one another are, what they do or what their inherent value may actually be to one another.

 This lack of information or transparancy may be through ignorance, sheer geography, speed of acquisition or any combination thereof and more of the same.  For the guy who has an inbound call for X that he needs to route, for the guy who doesn't know what else he can promote to his exisiting accounts, for the answer to that question you know nothing about ... social software holds the key to making connections (geddit) and delivering the intrinsic value held within the staff to clients of the business.

IBM definitely have the lead in this area and do eat their own dog food to particularly good effect on this one but how they communicate the message to the market ... still not quite there.  That said, for organisations with issues like this - well worth an afternoon's time to find out if there is something in it for them.

 Oh, and for folks with End Point Data capture issues or for folks who want to have their reps dazzle clients with their connections into to the back end skills and knowhow to get those client queries answered in double quick time then recent releases on Blackberry AppWorld may also be of interest as announced recently on ZDNET.  You can find out more and see some flash demos for a number of apps on Blackberry site here.