David Gurteen: Don’t let the IT department stifle Social Computing as they did Lotus Notes!
December 14 2007
David recognizes what some of the challenges have been over the years with Notes as a collaboration environment:
I saw IT departments effectively emaciate Lotus Notes by insisting that Notes applications be developed by a centralized team and driven by a rigorous functional specification. This was not the way to develop Notes applications - it curtailed its widespread use and ensured the development of unusable applications. ...He recognizes that this is not a technology problem:
[G]iven their way most IT departments will try to kill social computing in the same way they did for Notes.
It reminds me also that the main feature of a Wiki is that documents can be edited online by multiple people. This causes some people a lot of heartache as no one person is "in control". And causes IT departments more heartache than most. Lotus Notes first shipped in 1989, almost 20 years ago and one of its major features was the ability to edit shared documents. The "problem" is not new! In fact its not a problem at all - its the major benefit!Link: David Gurteen: Don't let the IT department stifle Social Computing as they did Lotus Notes! >
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Jaime Bisgrove http://jaimebisgrove.blogspot.com | 12/14/2007 12:40:02 PM
In general, I have seen Lotus Notes excel when the development is centralized AND the development team is allowed to wear all of the hats of the development process. By riding rough-shot over the development team and its users with THE PROCESS, one is sure to kill the very nature of the RAD.
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Keith Brooks http://lotustech.blogspot.com | 12/14/2007 12:49:42 PM
Funny I got a note about a permanent developer position in Tampa, Fl(anyone interested email me) and I had a discussion about developers not wanting to relocate just because you want to see heads working.
They raised, in my mind, one good issue, which is, if you are not based on site, how can you really see/understand what everyone needs to do for workflow or prcoess management.
I suggested distributed developemnt would be cheaper and yield higher productivity(time to deadline) than if they sat in one site.
I guess this is why I do remote admin, because these days, unlike the older 90's, few people get to touch the server physically anyway.
I am all for distributed groups, just always amazed at the companies that do not see it that way.
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Mike Lazar | 12/14/2007 1:19:51 PM
I'm pretty much in agreement with 1 & 2. Centralized development allows you to prioritize, optimize, and most importantly, reuse. If we let anyone develop, there is no standard, no common look and feel, and no continuity among the apps. If a core team develops them, code gets reused, standard looks are implemented, and the actual coding process will be streamlined. The key is that development doesn't happen in a vacuum. As long as the developers collaborate with the business units on what the app needs to accomplish, everyone will benefit. I've been involved in shops where it was either strictly controlled development or Wild West. I have always found for large orgs, the strict controls allow for tighter and better apps that actually get used, as opposed to someone slapping something together that does about 75% of what they need, and is then abandoned 18 months later.
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Volker Weber http://vowe.net | 12/14/2007 1:52:15 PM
Does this also apply to Best Practices Wikis?
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Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 12/14/2007 2:41:46 PM
Sure. I think you'll be quite pleased with the plans for the wikis -- I know the design partners who have actually been briefed on those plans were impressed.
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Gerco Wolfswinkel http://www.domino-weblog.nl | 12/14/2007 3:02:52 PM
@3 Keith, Grady Booch wrote an article referring to online collaborative development environments:
{ Link }
It's really a more general "how to collaborate" article, but he applies it to a dev environment.
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Chris Warner | 12/14/2007 3:08:08 PM
@1,2 & 4 - There are more than the two extremes of IT control or the wild west. In the large health care organization in which I work as a decentralized, non-IT division, Notes/Domino app developer, there are best practices and development standards. I need to follow them to have my apps deployed. Code reuse isn't promoted in this decentralized development model: one reason why one of my applications is a code library. So, its not perfect, but it seems to work for both IT and the business.
@4 - Why does a Notes app need to be used longer than 18 months? Perhaps the project is over. Perhaps that 18 months allowed the organization to gather knowledge about how the project team worked together, about the project itself and about the team members. That knowledge is now gathered in one searchable, extensible location. Pretty good ROI, I'd bet, since it probably didn't take long to build the app.
And this may bring us back to a point David Gurteen is trying to make. Shouldn't the business be allowed to deploy their own QuickR places, for instance, on an IT supported infrastructure? Wide adoption may mean more servers to manage, true, but doesn't that mean more knowledge being captured in one searchable, extensible location. And isn't that good for business? For real value to the business, IT should turn its mind to thinking about ways they can foster the business reusing its knowledge rather than thinking only about how IT application code can be reused.
- 9
Volker Weber http://vowe.net | 12/14/2007 3:45:02 PM
Plans are always impressive. ;-)
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Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 12/14/2007 4:04:43 PM
As a design partner, I wasn't so much briefed on the wikis plans as asked to help define them. Which, frankly, is a very new process at IBM and is much more likely to produce good results. The trick for that team is to balance the needs of support-focused customers, who want to know that every word they read is IBM-backed gospel, and the needs of technology-loyalists, who want to be able to be on the leading edge of everything.
Technologically, it's easy to do. Politically, it'll be a bigger challenge. As long as the engineering "NIH" tendency doesn't spill over into documentation, Info 2.0 will be a smash hit.
Fortunately, we have excellent precedent for this. The devWorks Lotus forums are a treasure trove of crowdsourced documentation that IBM has effectively supported for a decade now.
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Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 12/14/2007 4:10:32 PM
By the way, I think the funny part about the first few responses are that they all focus on the first half of David's concern, "developed by a centralized team" and not the second half of the concern, "driven by a rigorous functional specification."
Notes/Domino development can be well-served by both centralized and departmental teams. But it is never, ever well-served by "a rigorous functional specification." Detailed specs are for projects where a single iteration takes months. N/D development is always more successful with fast, fluid prototyping.
(And before anyone asks, no, I do not think that is in opposition to enterprise-quality reusable code. You can build reusable systems organically.)
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LongLiveLotus | 12/14/2007 4:56:22 PM
Agree with post 4 completely.
To build on my first post we have 3 developers and 3 business units with one physically in each. I actively encourage them to understand the full workings of the business and the role of all that request app's - being in the business works for us. We get together occasionally and collaborate regularly so we are not strictly speaking a centralised function.
The second part is more about content (a wiki is a wiki is a wiki, ie a particlar genre of application) and therefore a knowledge management issue. Definately related to app development because ND is IMHO, the definitive tool for enabling KM in a business, but more of a business than technical issue.
Our developers are encouraged to have -
analysis skills ,business knowledge including an eye for releasing value and solving business issues, km awareness, etc, And - ND programming skills, which we take for granted as a primary skillset.
Point is, the technology is the (powerful) enabler, the real value is the application of the technology. If a wiki or whatever needs some KM or content management capabilities we/ND can do it (It is almost unheard of to say no to a request because ND cant do it).
It is indeed a business issue.
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Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 12/15/2007 11:11:20 AM
@11 - I'm completely with you on this one. :-) You can shove a V8 into a Mini but you destroy what makes a Mini a Mini in the process. At some point you have to stop and ask if it's worth it.
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Axel | 12/15/2007 3:49:56 PM
Maybe a process wiki could help to exchange experience.
In the companies I worked, where notes development where in a dificult position, it allways had to do with inadecuate processes.
There were some highlights. Once I had to finish an app 4 weeks before it was going into production, because it had to pass a professional qm test procedure. I worked 15 hours to keep the deadline. I wondered that the person responsible for the test procedure never talked with me about the application. So I put some code in the database events to log access to the application. 4 weeks later the app triumphantly passed the test, but the logs showed that during that period, nobody happened to access the app.
I advice any junior developer to read something about processes. There are plenty of good books. Books about agile , xtreme programming, head first pmp, the popendieck books. On the java side different technics of testing were heavily discussed and this has real power to provide more iterative development with a safety net. Unfortunatedly in notes this can be used in java development. Its possible to follow a more iterative approach without that anyway.
All this provides insights in the greater picture of our job and can make one really more passionate. Even if you find yourself in a rigid waterfall project with clear quest/clear case wizzards, this knowledge can help, as you know the flaws of the "profesional" process.
Here is a nice and entertaining (quite ranting) presentation of Scott Ambler about agile and iterative processes ({ Link } Scott has been hired by IBM in the meantime, btw.
Not sure I agree with the first part....
Our SMB use Notes purely as an application platform for all functions (except ERP) and and all applications are centrally developed (by 3 people for 1500 users). Dread to think of the anarchy if we didnt centrally develop applications. We dont have rigourous functional specs, we work with users day to day and fully leverage the RAD and easy maintenance capabilities of the product. No emaciation here, far from killing it's use, ND's thriving.