A lesson learned from my time at IBM

As I’ve been running Sumavi, my new company for the last 2 months I’ve been thinking a lot of what types of activities I can do to make it successful for the near term and the long run.  One of the themes that has constantly come to my mind is the “Use what you sell” message.

This is something I first thought of while working at IBM.  I was developing a product called CSM.  I thought it was pretty good, but none of the sales engineers liked it.  They all used xCAT instead.  Its not like they didn’t try it.  Some did.  They tried CSM and they went right back to xCAT.  They would think:  “Why pay for something I don’t like when I can get this software kit that I love for free?”

In addition to this manufacturing started using xCAT to test all their clusters and then even the nascent On-Demand center standardized on xCAT as well.  None used CSM.

After going out into the field and working with customers I saw pretty clearly why CSM wasn’t meeting the needs of our customers.  But at the same time, it was difficult to describe the frustration to my old development team.  They would ask for bullet pointed lists of things that were wrong with it.  I would stay up late at night trying to pinpoint all of my issues, but it just didn’t resonate.  It could be my lack of communication skills or that I just couldn’t describe it.  I found that some people got very defensive.

In a matter of time CSM became end of life and the team was disbanded.  Now some of those people are part of the xCAT development team.  Its been great to continue to work with them.  I’m now outside of the blue curtain, but I’m still an open source contributor to the xCAT project.

I find myself thinking all the time if I’m drinking too much of my own Kool-Aid.

I think the best thing that we could have done back then was send developers out to the customers that use it, or at the very least work with internal customers.  Have a rotation where a developer needs to join support to at least get a first glimpse of how customers use the code.  This is something that I think made xCAT successful.  We would make changes or get feedback right away from our customers.  I hope to do this with Sumavi.  In fact, we’ll have our first beta customer in a week from tomorrow where we’ll get a chance to see what we’re made of.

But you don’t even have to go that far.  Consider for example Lotus Notes at IBM.  They are doing a great job of using what they sell.  However, they’re more ramming it down other people’s throats.  Think of all the nick names I heard for it from IBM employees.  IBM has a gold mine of enterprise users that are smart and know good software when they see it.  All IBM needs to do is send an email to all the employees that reads:

“We’re conducting a manditory brief survey.  Click <yes> if you like Lotus Notes.  Click <here> if you think its ok, and Click <here> if you really dislike it. You may also enter comments below if you like:”

Simple.  Then all the managers just have to make sure the employees fill it out.  Its easy to do, IBM made me do it every year with my BCGs. (Only in this case, they need to make sure its anonymous)

Then, depending on the results, you either give the Senior VP of Lotus Notes a raise, or you fire him.  My guess is that they will probably end up firing them.  The point is, you have all these internal ways and attitudes in your corporation and you need to look at the truth and stop kidding yourself or your project will be dead.

My prediction is that if Notes doesn’t shape up, it won’t be around much longer.  Nobody I have ever talked to about it likes it.  I don’t think it would be too hard to make work either.

Here’s what I would suggest:

– Make it work natively on my iPhone.  (Maybe this is just IBM’s implementation and it works fine everywhere else, don’t know)

– Give me a non-java client, or let it integrate seemlessly with Apple Mail

– Why on earth is there a program called “Zap-Notes” that will allow you to kill the notes processes without restarting your computer?  This is embarresing.

– Start limiting the function of it and focus on core things.  Start innovating.  Stop playing catch up.

Anyway, hopefully others will have the same painful advice for me on the Sumavisor that we’re creating at Sumavi.  But you know what we’re going to do?  We’re not going to ignore it.  We’re going to take it, and do our best to make at least 75% happy.  (Why 75%?  Because some people will never be happy, especially people in IT. (But we’re still going to try!))

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