InfoWorld: When Change is Wrong

July 23 2003

Got this link in my lotus.com/weblog feedback...going to take me some time to decide if/what/how to respond to it. But wanted to get it out there for discussion sooner rather than later -- in fact, I'm surprised nobody else has blogged about it already....
Chad Dickerson writes:

[D]eep in every CTO's heart there is at least one technology that elicits a visceral reaction that threatens to drown all reason. For me, that technology is Lotus Notes.
(You can imagine my stomach tightening up and the hair on the back of my neck standing straight as I read those words.)
Recently, I relented in a crusade to replace Lotus Notes at InfoWorld. The migration was going to be too disruptive for our users, a case perhaps of elective open-heart surgery on our organization when it wasn't absolutely necessary.
One lesson I relearned is that IT is not necessarily about being "right" or even offering the best solution. Quite often, IT is about providing a reliable and mostly invisible service to the company. Nothing is less invisible than a massive user migration. One finite resource that many IT managers forget to recognize and manage in their project portfolios is quite simple: change. ...
(I thought: "Migrate from Lotus Notes and if all goes well, no one will particularly care -- no one will be cheering the troops in the streets. If it goes poorly, our business operations will grind to a halt.")
That's for darn sure, Chad. I don't know the inner details of InfoWorld's use of Notes. I imagine, given how long they've been using it, that it's about a lot more than just e-mail (which is borne out by the rant Chad goes on in the last paragraphs about how "incredibly difficult" it would be to migrate from the "proprietary" grasp of Notes). Yet he mentions that he moved away from Notes to an IMAP client a few months ago (thus, demonstrating, perhaps, that maybe it's not as proprietary as he claims!).
The good news here is that someone realized that churn for the sake of churn is no good. I think it would be better, though, if the glass were half-full, and he looked at the real value of the current system vs. its alternatives.

Ed Brill | Highland Park, IL USA Category: Add/View Comments [17]

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  1. 1  Colin Williams  | 7/24/2003 6:33:55 AM

    Isn't InfoWorld part of IDG? - if so then Notes is pretty big - they use it for content management and the workflow around it - pretty hard to rip that without spending plenty on its replacement.

  1. 2  John Roling ("Greyhawk68") http://www.roling.com | 7/23/2003 5:20:51 PM

    I hate stories like this. I cannot imagine him wanting to rip out a system like Notes, especially if its entwined in business processes, document libraries and the like. If it's JUST email, I could maybe understand, but c'mon. Anyway Ed, maybe you should contact him and see what his deficiencies are...

  1. 3  George Chiesa http://dotNSF.com | 7/24/2003 11:47:00 AM

    He says "I would argue that most CTOs have risen to their position by looking at technology choices within the context of their business, which means compromising on technical excellence in favor of business expediency"

    I say "writers should write about what they know. CTOs who chose Notes did that FOR A PURPOSE". What's the Purpose of his migration ? And of the article ???

    :-(

  1. 4  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 7/24/2003 12:01:44 PM

    on Chad's blog There must be some kind of Groove kool-aid being served at InfoWorld...even with Steve Gillmor's departure, they are still crowing about how Groove demarcs the end of the IT world as we know it. Hmmm.

  1. 5  David Price  | 7/23/2003 7:19:35 PM

    To quote Chad "The primary issues that drove me to want to replace Lotus Notes (for example, I would like to have the freedom to leverage best-of-breed, standards-based, commercial and open source products for Notes' various component services)..."

    This sounds like the arguments from Unix bigots in the 90s. It also sounds like companies that purchased WordPerfect and 1-2-3 because they were 'best in breed'. Companies quickly realized that saving money was part equation.

    Yes, Notes was a staff-intensive product at one (or more points) but even in the 5 timeframe there were great improvements to user density and server scalability.

    A CTO should be concerned with TCO and business value, something that appears to be only an afterthought in this case.

  1. 6  Keith Nolen www.yellerdog.net | 7/24/2003 12:54:26 PM

    I know of a former CIO who feels the same way about Notes as Chad. He had a bad experience with it at a former employer and has never gotten the bad taste from his mouth. Unfortunately, as a CIO, his bias becomes policy.

    Ed, maybe you can contact Chad and educate him, as has been suggested. In fact, if InfoWorld (and not just Chad) is having issues, it would probably be a good PR move for IBM to try and help them out. Even if they don't print anything about it, making the good-faith effort would produce some goodwill. I'm not normally an advocate of free services, but in this case it might be worth it.

    Especially since it's not my dollar. ;)

  1. 7  Tony C  | 7/24/2003 1:22:16 PM

    OK for the record. I worked at Lotus for seven and a half years. I love Notes. I now work for MS. Paradoxical maybe but hey if IBM was good employer I'd have stayed. Despite all the "isn't Notes brilliant" retoric I'm hearing, what seems to be forgotten is that Lotus no longer exists, as a brand it's just a place for IBM to hang a bunch of technologies it doesn't really understand whilst the world waits for them to somehow magic NSF into DB2. Lotus Notes customers have to wake up to the fact that at some point IBM is gonna force them to make a decision about whether they want to migrate to Websphere, J2EE or dare I say an alternative like MS. I've heard that life in the Notes dev teams at moment is rather like the final days of Smartsuite. OK you're probably thinking 'what does Tony know he works for the opposition' but hey I drank the Lotus Kool-aid once.

  1. 8  Ben Poole http://www.benpoole.com | 7/24/2003 4:46:50 AM

    Why do people constantly level this charge at Notes: "it's 'proprietary'."

    I don't get it. Lotus came up with something that still no-one directly competes with. That makes it proprietary and therefore BAD?

    Tchcoh!

  1. 9  Chad Dickerson http://weblog.infoworld.com/dickerson/ | 7/25/2003 11:53:50 AM

    I posted a response to Ed's post on my weblog with a more "half full" approach:

    weblog.infoworld.com/dickerson/2003/07/25.html

    I wanted to make one point clear -- I know that Notes is not only e-mail (see my weblog post). We use it for other things at InfoWorld.

    For the record, the response on this column has been more abrasive and downright nasty than anything I've seen ("send him some lithium" in the comments above, Ken Yee saying I should be "shot" in the InfoWorld forums and that working for my company must be "scary" because I'm CTO). I doubt the folks at IBM would appreciate this brand of Notes advocacy and I doubt it's winning any customers.

    I do appreciate the reasonable responses -- thanks for those even if we don't agree.

    - Chad

  1. 10  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 7/24/2003 2:59:59 PM

    Microsoft Exchange customers have to wake up to the fact that at some point Microsoft is gonna force them to make a decision about whether they want to migrate to Yet another version of Windows, SQL Server, SharePoint, BizTalk or dare I say an alternative like IBM. I've heard that life in the Exchange dev teams at moment is rather like the final days of DOS.

    I'm glad to see that the "How to FUD the market" class went so well in New Orleans. :) Cheers mate, I did at least add you to the front page of my blogroll :)

  1. 11  Scott S.  | 7/24/2003 4:14:13 PM

    OOPS! I posted this in the wrong Blog entry.

    I read this posting on Ed's Blog shortly after I received an e-mail from Microsoft asking me to "kick the tires" on a 120-day eval of Exchange 2003.

    MS claims in the e-mail that "After testing, experts (P.J. Connolly was the same 'expert' that rated ND6 a 'DEPLOY' [8 out of 10] on November 22, 2002) at Information World concluded, 'Overall, Exchange Server 2003 looks to be the product to beat for future entries in the collaboration market.'" (I guess Domino 6.5 has it's work cut out for it) See the original article here - http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/01/17/030120pltitanium_1.html

    Chad, P.J. & Co. are drinkin' the kool-aid.

  1. 12  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 7/24/2003 4:29:40 PM

    no prob, Scott, I took it out of the other thread.

  1. 13  Tony C  | 7/24/2003 6:13:33 PM

    ...HTML tags don't see to work. :o)

  1. 14  Tony C  | 7/24/2003 6:12:40 PM

    ...that despite my employer you have put me on yer frontpage/blogrole. Cheers dude. I knew my comments would provoke a reaction and to quote Mega City One's most famous lawman "I knew you'd say that".

    How is the notion of MS trying to get customers to upgrade any different from IBM trying to get them to upgrade <b>Websphere Portal Server</b> and the hotch potch of products that comes bundled with. And lets not forget <b>Connection Manager</b>, <b>Content Manager</b>, <b>WP Everyplace</b>, <b>Commerce</b>, <b>Host Integration</b>, <b>Studio</b>. And then theres the hundreds of different bits and pieces from Tivoli and Data. I'd type them all in but I'd get repetative strain injury. The truth is the IBM model ain't that different from the MS one. As for my comment about the dev teams I'm only repeating a comment from a mutual chum....

  1. 15  Colin Pretorius  | 7/24/2003 6:24:25 PM

    I read two things from the article:

    1) Notes == mail. Yeah... that's getting value per licence. Nothing like a CIO who *understands* their infrastructure.

    2) Notes is hard to replace because it's actually *doing the job*. I mean, if Notes was a dismal failure then there wouldn't be much of a need to sell a migration, the people signing the cheques would be only too glad.

    As Chad says, certain things are purely the result of emotional bias. A GOOD CIO knows when his/her bias is getting in the way of making good business decisions. I have my issues with the direction Notes is taking, and I always keep an eye on the alternatives, but for heavens' sake, that doesn't mean I'm going to jump ship when the product is still delivering a clear competitive advantage.

  1. 16  Richard Schwartz http://smokey.rhs.com/web/blog/rhs.nsf | 7/24/2003 7:45:39 PM

    See "re: the collaboration problem" here http://idiscuss.infoworld.com/webx?13@103.OO4JaT6XhAa.13825@.2cb4e799/15

    Or here http://smokey.rhs.com/web/blog/rhs.nsf/stories/RespondingtoChadDickerson