Internal vs. external interaction

November 7 2007

In the Lotus strategy section of the presentations I've been giving this week, one of the slides that I've been spending a lot of time on is how technology trends are changing.  

Image:Internal vs. external interaction

A specific talking point on there is really interesting -- how "communities are forming both inside and outside the firewall".  This is, I'm sure, no surprise to any of you reading this weblog :-), but then again, not all of the constituents in this market are blog readers.  

Anyway, as evidence of why this is a valuable change in technology dynamics, I give the example of my own personal transformation.  While I've always been active in online communities, the balance of my time has shifted in favor of these external connections.  When I started as the sales executive for Notes/Domino about 3.5 years ago, 85% of my daily interaction was with IBM employees.  Now, as the Lotus community's online presence has increased -- both through blog participation and blogging on your own -- I'd say that fully 1/3rd of my day is spent in interactions with external parties -- customers and partners (and the market at large).  

This kind of feedback loop and interactivity is clearly making a positive difference in how I perform in my job, and in the decisions that my peers and I make.  We know that not everyone is involved in our online community, but we also know that this interaction can be fairly representative and share interesting ideas and views.

A lot of these other trends are signficiant as well,  Alan Lepofsky discussed the point about gaming on this blog back in August, and we've discussed a few of these other points.  I'm learning that doing this up-front positioning really helps set the stage for audiences about why Lotus is doing what we are doing.  Marketing, it seems, really can be done well by Lotus.

Ed Brill | Canberra, ACT Australia and aboard QF483 Category:  Lotus  Add/View Comments [20]

Post a Comment

  1. 1  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 11/7/2007 5:11:34 AM

    I'll attribute this to jet lag, Ed...

    If 85% of your original day was spent dealing with IBM, then 15% was spent dealing with outside parties. After 3.5 years, it's now 30% of your time dealing with outside parties?

    Sure it's double -- but that doesn't sound like a sea change to me. Going from 85% internal to 85% external would be a sea change! But you're saying you went from 85% internal to 66% internal -- a 23% reduction in internal communications.

    That nice, but not transformative.

    HOWEVER, your numbers are suspect. I don't buy the idea that you spend 1/3 of your time communicating externally. I think it's way more than that. Hell, I've known you to spend 1/3 of your time in a day communicating WITH ME!

    So I think you either made a typo, or you're seriously underestimating the amount of external communication you have. Or I'm WAAAAAY more special than I think I am.

    And everybody knows you better tell me THAT isn't true! ;-)

  1. 2  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 11/7/2007 5:16:17 AM

    but Nathan, a significant part of my job as a sales executive is to ensure that the Lotus sales organization's needs are represented back to the product management, development, and marketing organizations... talking to customers is just one way I gather that input. If I didn't have 47 bazillion hours of conference calls that I have the opportunity to participate in, then maybe there'd be room for 85% external. But that's not the primary mission of my job, it's just a component of how I find I can get the information needed to make the right decisions and requests during those 47 bazillion hours.

    Besides, if I'm chatting with you online, there's at least five other chat windows open at the same time, and I'm probably listening to a call :-)

  1. 3  Stuart McIntyre http://collaborationmatters.com | 11/7/2007 5:18:16 AM

    @1 Nathan, sorry mate, just not that special ;-)

  1. 4  Keith Brooks http://lotustech.blogspot.com | 11/7/2007 7:51:53 AM

    @1, You could just have aa VPN with Ed and be one with him all day long.

    :-)

    Then you could say he did his 100% external focus.

  1. 5  Henry Ferlauto http://www.geniusinside.com | 11/7/2007 10:21:20 AM

    @2 - Ed - Don't be another Eric Tipton.

    { Link }

  1. 6  Jess Stratton http://www.lotususergroup.org | 11/7/2007 11:45:54 AM

    Don't forget the other trend - If I want to watch a presentation, or television ad, the first (and usually only) place I'll look is YouTube.

  1. 7  Alan Lepofsky http://www.alanlepofsky.net | 11/7/2007 11:54:31 AM

    Jess, that is the type of thing I cover in point #4.

  1. 8  Jess Stratton http://www.lotususergroup.org | 11/7/2007 12:44:05 PM

    @7, Don't forget to include in your presentation that nowadays we are so busy and fast-paced we read things much too fast and sometimes miss things. ;-)

  1. 9  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 11/7/2007 12:49:04 PM

    @6, that's actually going to be my next "deep thought" topic from this week's conversations. Maybe tomorrow. :)

  1. 10  Alan Lepofsky http://www.alanlepofsky.net | 11/7/2007 1:16:51 PM

    @8 LOL! Don't worry about it. This just proves how silly the use of slides can be to convey a message. It is hard to get the story from looking at a set of bullet points. We (the industry) need a new way to "present".

  1. 11  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 11/7/2007 3:34:26 PM

    @2 - If you have 5 chat windows open, and 2 of them are external, and 3 of them are internal, how do you measure the time you spend talking internal vs. external?

    That's just one of the angles by which I think the metric itself is basically immeasurable.

    Here's another... if you go to a press event, are you speaking externally or internally? 'Cause I know there's a TON of IBMers who show up at those kinds of things to get information. If you're standing on the side of the stage before your presentation, is that internal or external? Are you talking to an IBMer? Are customers watching? What if there's a customer AND an IBMer standing there?

    How do you mark your time reading and writing this blog?

  1. 12  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 11/7/2007 4:06:38 PM

    Nathan, I think Ed's estimates were SWAG's, not something he clocked with a stopwatch. :-)

  1. 13  Bll McCuistion  | 11/7/2007 10:44:40 PM

    WOW! I'm very glad to see that Web 2.0 finally caught up to Notes 2.0.

    If only Ed could use his advanced technology to respond to my long-standing "beyond-the-firewall" query.

  1. 14  NeilT  | 11/8/2007 4:36:13 AM

    I always thought that Collaboration had a lot to give to gaming and especially the premier Collaboration tool. But then I've thought the premier collaboration tool has had way more to offer than mail and a discussion template (powerful as they are) for over a decade.

    I wonder if this slide constitutes a softening of attitudes at IBM? Given that Alan, on this very blog, slapped me around the face with a wet fish with the statement of

    "We are International BUSINESS Machines" and questioned which part of that I did not understand.

    My statement (and I paraphrase), of "Which part of social networking reverse engineering itself into the business world don't you understand?" vis a vis Hotmail, Google et al; seems to have been a little too radical?

    Does this represent a fundamental rethink on the situation within IBM?

  1. 15  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 11/8/2007 5:52:46 AM

    @12 - There's a point I'm driving at that nobody's getting yet. :-) So I guess I'll spell it out...

    It is not that time and attention are moving from inside to outside the company/firewall. It's that the definition of inside vs. outside is changing.

    Public blogs become an internal communication medium. Internal IM systems get public IM gateways. Customers become more involved in the innovation process, and get involved EARLIER -- sometimes as a purely public venture (MBR or Balaban's blogs,) sometimes as a semi-closed partership (PartnerForum,) sometimes as a strict NDA relationship (DP programs, Global Customer Council.)

    I don't think that the level of openness and transparency we see from major corporate innovators today would have been even remotely imaginable 20 years ago. Even 10 years -- it was the bleeding edge of process innovation to tell people what you were working on years in advance. Only universities and a few crazy internet geniuses did it.

    Now the defining blue chip company, IBM, solicits public opinion on changing the text in an export dialog from an email contact list.

    THAT is a change in how businesses work.

    Please note: I am hardly the first person to make this observation, and I'm not claiming to be so. I'm just saying that slide would be a whole lot more interesting if the bullet point said something like...

    "communities are forming inside, outside, and most importantly, THROUGH the firewall."

  1. 16  Alan Lepofsky http://www.alanlepofsky.net | 11/8/2007 8:30:46 AM

    @14, Neil that is quite the visual! I am not sure when I slapped you around (or where I would get a wet fish from), so without the context I still have to stick to the idea that IBM is about helping businesses, we are not delivering software to the public consumer space. I don't think you will see a MSN or Gmail from IBM.

  1. 17  Joe Hildebrand http://arch.jabber.com/ | 11/8/2007 10:50:55 AM

    It seems like if IBM was serious about federation, that at least the Sametime team would be reachable by SIP or XMPP for messaging and presence. Perhaps that has changed recently and I've missed the announcement?

  1. 18  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 11/8/2007 12:06:25 PM

    @17 there is a SIP gateway deployed, and it connects to the public IM networks (AOL, Yahoo, Google Talk). I have those details somewhere here...might check adamgartenberg.com or chrispepin.com, they're both closer to it than I am.

  1. 19  NeilT  | 11/8/2007 1:00:28 PM

    @16 :-) Alan, I have a very DRY sense of humour.... Sometimes it doesn't come over.

    What concerns me more is that MSN, Yahoo and Gmail are clearly trying to "help businesses" on the back of their public successes.

    I see that as the blend of the social being driven into the business on the social cost model.

    When I stick my thinking cap on I see that everyone except IBM has embraced the social (free) model and is trying to blend people's private experiences into the workplace which will then drive corporate revenues which will stabilise their public ventures.

    My theorising revolved around how IBM was going to compete effectively in a market where it had no presence, whilst that marketplace was eroding IBM revenue streams.

    I thought that this slide was a recognition of the position and a starting block for how to deal with a very real competitive threat. I see that I was wrong.

    You see in my book Google and Yahoo are not targeting Microsoft, they are targeting IBM. Microsoft is already in their world and can respond every bit as fast as they can to a new avenue of business.

    I see only 2 major players in the workgroup/collaboration space today. In 2-3 years there will be 4 and only 3 of them will have a Web 2.0 model. Unless, of course, IBM has some products out there which are invisible today?

    Some day I must let you see the mail I wrote to Larry Page and Sergey Brin back in 2004 and the trail of return receipts it generated..... It amuses me every time I read it especially given the comments of one company I know who went to Google to talk to them about outsourced mail services.

    The comment which came back was "Really great ideas, but they don't live on the same planet as us". I recon Google can build a spaceship in the next 2 years or so.....

  1. 20  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 11/8/2007 4:59:54 PM

    @19 - Are you trying to say that IBM doesn't have workgroup/collaboration software that has a web 2.0 model?

    'cause talk about not living on the same planet....