The Week in Collaboration, Jan 23-27 2006

Whose Fault Is It When Collaboration Software Sucks?
A vendor see a market opportunity for collaboration software. It builds a product to enable teams to work together, share information, and coordinate action. It signs up business partners who see the promise of the offering. They start offering services to the market based on the product. Organizations embrace it. Some find great success and rave about it. Others think it is the worst thing ever created and do nothing but complain. In either case ... success or failure ... who is to be praised or blamed? The organizations that found success will usually be quick to claim the praise, but those that fail are usually slow to accept blame. Is that fair?

I have been thinking about this question in relation to Lotus Notes and Domino, although it has wider implications. In terms of Notes/Domino, the world is very much divided about it ... you either love it with a passion or hate it with a passion. These two polarized positions are extremely interesting from a market dynamics perspective. Please note that neither IBM nor any individual associated with IBM nor any other vendor requested or suggested that I write this article; it is an independent perspective, and the lessons apply more broadly.

Let's see if we can think about this logically. When Notes and Domino fail in an organization, or where people hate it with a passion, who is at fault?

Is IBM at Fault?
It would be IBM's fault if the product didn't do what it claimed to do, which is messaging and collaboration, or more fully email, task management, calendaring, discussion databases, an application development environment for collaborative applications, workflow routing, and more. IBM releases patches and bug fixes, as do other vendors, as well as ongoing updates to add new and enhanced functionality, again as do other vendors. I conclude that since an appropriately trained individual can install and configure Notes and Domino to achieve "messaging and collaboration" outcomes, that it is not IBM's fault when Notes and Domino fail within an organization.

Net-net: It's not IBM's fault.

Is the IBM Business Partner at Fault?
IBM engages with some organizations directly, but most Notes and Domino business is carried out through the IBM Business Partner channel. In return for paying an annual partnership fee to IBM and training specific people in Notes and Domino skills, these third-party business partners can offer Notes and Domino consulting services. It is normally the business partner who holds the relationship with the customer, sells them on the concept of Notes and Domino, and installs / configures / manages the servers and clients on an ongoing basis. They may also provide training services, to help the organization's people learn the product and how to use it effectively. If ... and many things can hinge on that word ... if the business partner is skilled in what they do, Notes and Domino should technically operate to specification. It will route, receive and deliver email. It will enable people and resource scheduling. It will support threaded discussions. It will do replication of databases for offline access. So, it is probably not the business partner's fault.

Net-net: It's probably not the business partners fault.

Is the Application Developer at Fault?
Being a collaborative applications development platform, Notes and Domino enable a software developer (or power user) to build specific custom applications that meet the collaborative mandates of a team or division. There are Domino Servers all over the world filled with custom work routing applications, expense reporting applications, customer relationship management applications, product literature applications, and many more. People offering services in this area have to be well trained and experienced ... because the product is so flexible, and there are different ways of doing things, you can make a great job or a right royal stuff-up. But that's no different than with any other software development environment; if a developer gets the constructs and underlying logic wrong in a C++ project, it won't work as to specification and the users will be most unhappy. Due to the rapid application development environment, Notes/Domino do have some redeeming factors over say C++, but nonetheless, if the underlying data model is wrong from the word go, it is expensive and time consuming to find redemption. So ... if developers throw together an application without appropriate care and attention to the data model, to data consistency, to user interface design, to system documentation, and to user documentation ... yes, they are to blame for failed projects. If all of those items have been taken care of, and they have built a system that meets the expressed needs of the user, I would be slow to lay blame on them.

Net-net: It could be the application developer's fault.

Is the Organization at Fault?
Some organizations have had great success with Notes and Domino, and I'm thinking now in terms of application development. They've built a collection of custom databases that work well together, enable business teams to coordinate action, and provide the information and reporting that drives business results. These organizations prove that Notes and Domino can work well, and that therefore it is not "IBM's fault". All praise should go to the organization; it has been clear about the results it wanted, engaged appropriate people to make it happen, and then can reap the benefits.

And then there are others.

They dabble in custom applications. They don't demand documentation or show a willingness to pay for it. They are unclear about the results the want. They don't train people how to use Notes and Domino effectively. They don't understand the design intentions of Notes and Domino and so try to put it to inappropriate uses. And they get a mess. In this instance, it is clearly the organization's fault ... and they will not achieve better outcomes with a migration to Microsoft's collaboration platform (or anything else) without a corresponding change in the way they approach development projects. And if they change their approach, they may not get any better outcomes with a Microsoft or other platform compared with starting again with Notes and Domino.

Net-net: Either success or failure is most frequently in the hands of the organization.

Is the User at Fault?
It could be the user's fault. They may have experienced Notes and Domino in a previous organization, may have had a bad experience with it, and so may set their mind to make it not work in the new place. Or they may feel no involvement in the process of scoping out applications, when they actually have really good ideas that should be included. Finally, they may be offered no training or documentation and be expected to "pick it up" themselves. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that they feel less than love toward the product. Other users love what it can do, have a good relationship with the IT people who are making it work, and see the results they are gaining.

Net-net: Users may sabotage the effort, but leaders should lead.

Implications
Here are the implications I see:

1. Choose your application developers carefully. Competence matters. A history of success is important. If you skimp to save a few dollars here and there, you are more likely to reap a disaster downstream.


2. Before you ditch one product in favor of another, ensure you know why the current product failed. Unless you have a clear understanding of why and where it failed, you will repeat the same mistakes the next time.


3. The required software development disciplines are no different from other development environments. Ensure you gain a clear understanding of the desired outcome and business results. Do the requirements definition and collection correctly. Look for similarities to other projects and leverage existing code. Scour the market for off-the-shelf alternatives. Document, document, document. Train, train, train. You get the picture.


4. IBM needs to make a bigger deal about the customers that have experienced outstanding success. I know it is the week of Lotusphere, and so this may not be a representative day to visit, but the home page of www.lotus.com has not one word about a customer that has been successful with Notes and Domino. It's all about IBM Lotus and what they do now and will do in the future. Front-and-center on the Lotus home page should be success stories, with real customers mentioned and quoted, with photos of the people, and with an exploration of the results they are achieving. Everything else is supporting material.

Notes is here to stay. IBM isn't going away. If you have an implementation that isn't working, figure out why. Engage the best help that is available. Until you have a clear understanding as to why Notes and Domino isn't working, then you have no basis on which to embrace an alternative product.

IBM Lotus Sametime Gets Federation
IBM announced Version 7.5 of Lotus Sametime, its instant messaging and presence platform for the enterprise. Although IBM holds the lead in seat count for enterprise instant messaging and presence, it has been severely criticised by users for the lack of progress made in (a) making Sametime look nicer, and (b) releasing support for cross-enterprise federation capabilities. At Lotusphere this week, IBM came through with an answer to both of these complaints.

With respect to the user interface, Sametime finally looks beautiful rather than bland. More details are given to the user about the person or people they are speaking with. Color has been added to help distinguish conversation items from different people. Timestamps have been included to note who said what when. Although other vendors offer similar user interface capabilities already, it is good to see these being adopted in the IBM world.

The federation story is equally good. Microsoft stole the thunder on federation with the public IM networks last year, with announcements about a fee-based interoperability agreement. In other words, if you have Live Communications Server 2005 and the latest service pack, for $13-$16 per user per year you can federate with the public networks. IBM will offer federation with three public IM networks--AOL, Yahoo and GoogleTalk--at a nil price point. There is no incremental cost required for the federation, which is great news for IBM customers. There is also no federation with MSN Messenger, and I posit that this was due to Microsoft being unwilling to do for-free federation. In other words, although I have no direct evidence for this, I assert that IBM approached Microsoft to be included in the for-free federation announcement, and Microsoft said "no". And that is clearly fine; if IBM customers want Microsoft MSN Messenger federation desperately enough, they'll offer to pay and IBM will announce a for-fee agreement with MSN Messenger.

Will Microsoft back away from its for-fee licensing terms? The way I think about it is that the for-free federation announcement from IBM will have little or no impact on the competitive dynamics for instant messaging and presence in the enterprise. In other words, a Microsoft house will not dump its Microsoft collaboration platform or plans in favor of IBM's collaboration platform in order to save $13-$16 per user per year. And so whilst Microsoft will cop some flack for its licensing costs, I don't think they will back away from it, nor do I think they need to.

In closing, it is worthwhile remembering that it was only 12 months ago that David Marshak resigned his position as an analyst at the Patricia Seybold Group to join IBM as product manager for Sametime and some other things (such as Activity Explorer). The announcement earlier this week is a huge testimony to his vision and the results he has championed within IBM. Of course David hasn't done it alone ... there have been many others within IBM that wrote the code, struck the agreements, gave permission and authority to make it happen ... so I say kudos all round, with an especial call out for David "Microsoft's Worst Enemy in RTC" Marshak.

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The Week in Collaboration is authored by Michael Sampson, who spends his time explaining what's going on in the industry, directing vendors to make better products, and advising organizations on how to best embrace collaboration. You can reach Michael via michael.sampson@shared-spaces.com.

Comments

[Graham Chastney]

Nice post. I agree with you on the way that IBM presents the product set. Users and partners are really confused these days about where to apply which of the tools. This is especially true with Websphere and Workplace, these are themselves distracting from the Notes/Domino story.

I think that perhaps the only bit you didn't bring out (and this is real nit-picking) is the "Notes wasn't the right answer in the first place" piece. We all know that different tools exist because different problems exist.

[Sean Burgess]

Great post. I must agree with you for the most part. In my experience, the abilities of the developers implementing the Domino environment are the ones who are responsible for the success of it. And that doesn't just mean that they have the ability to write good code. In fact, it has more to do with their ability to interact with the business users to guarantee that the application they build actually solves the problem that it is supposed to solve. The greatest code in the world still sucks if it causes more problems than it solves. It is imperative that a good Notes developer be able to steer his user's requirements in the right direction and keep them from making really big mistakes. But in the end, you have to do what the customer wants, even if it is the wrong thing to do.

Since Notes is a "self documenting" environment (try not to laugh too hard), documentation is something that almost never gets created. The best you can hope for is to have an email history or meeting minutes describing the thought process behind the development decisions that were made. I live by the rule that if you can't easily see what my code is doing then I have done something horribly wrong, but that doesn't tell the next developer WHY I chose to write the code the way I did.

@Graham - You mean that you shouldn't do everything in Notes? ;-) The "Notes is a hammer and every problem is a nail" is something that every organization has to work through.

Sean---

[Tim Latta]

Thank you for a very comprehensive summary, especially on Sametime. I really agree on your assessment of David Marshak's vision and traction (including all of those that don't get the visibility in making this happen). Now we wait to see how it works in implementation (and if the MS federation happens....free or fee).

[Jack Dausman]

Michael: very thoughtful. I brought your comments into a discussion on training and IT workers dissatisfaction.

http://www.leadershipbynumbers.com/MS.nsf/d6plinks/JDAN-6LMMYE

[Charles Robinson]

One of the things you fail to establish is how you're defining success or failure. The reasons you mention for Notes failing are certainly valid, but in my environment I don't consider our Notes deployment to be successful. I meet all your criteria for success, though.

Everything works fine and exactly as documented. We've done lots of training and users absolutely love the applications we have developed. They're coming to us now with new application suggestions, which shows that they really "get it" and have embraced the workflow and collaboration paradigm.

The downfall is user acceptance of the Notes UI. My users love the applications, they just think Notes is horribly ugly and difficult to navigate. In my opinion IBM has made a huge mistake overlooking the fact that people do judge an application by the way it looks. When they see Notes is it foreign and perceived to be a hostile environment. That, to me, is not a successful implementation.