Smooth sailing, and full speed ahead.

I really can't summarize the mood of Lotusphere 2010 and my attitude toward Project Vulcan any better than that.

I'll try to explain, but first a digression: I want to say how fitting a nautical metaphor seems to me in this case.

You see, near the climax of one of my favorite sessions of Lotusphere 2010, Ed Brill put up a slide highlighting a truly dedicated Navy man who is also a true-believer Yellow-Bleeding Lotus man. He is an aviator, not a sailor, but he's Navy through-and-through, and he's my former CEO and a friend. I recommended that Ed contact Mike Griffes because he's a great example of a someone who keeps coming back to Lotus technology to solve difficult information sharing and management problems in different arenas, and I thought stories like his would be a great way to add a personal touch to Ed's oral history presentation.

Mike was a Navy Reserve Captain when I met him, having served through the Gulf War and then continuing in the Reserves after his return to the private sector. When we worked together from 1998 to 2000, Mike was already on his third iteration with Lotus technologies, having previously used it in state government and to manage logistics at a major political convention. After our work together on a collaborative approach to invoice management for the corporate legal sector came to an end, Mike and I were talking about some other exciting opportunities, but after 9-11 Mike returned to active duty in the Navy, taking a position in the Pentagon to work on homeland security issues. After his active tour was up, Mike did some consulting and then returned again to the Pentagon, this time in a civilian role as a special assistant to the Secretary of the Navy.

Shortly after I stopped my consulting practice and took my current job, Mike called me to ask for my help with some of the Navy's collaboration and information technology projects. I had to decline, but I referred him to Rob Novak, and if you've been following Rob's blog these past few years you've seen some hints of that ongoing relationship. Rob also highlit Ed's mention of Mike in his own blog post. Mike's out of the Pentagon now, and I'm not actually sure what he's working on these days, but I know he's still in touch with Rob, and that really brings me back to my point: a guy like Mike, who actively seeks out important and difficult problems in information sharing and management, can continue to be a serial Lotus technology adopter precisely because smooth sailing and full speed ahead is what IBM is offering.

A lot of people come to Lotusphere wanting to be blown away by something new and unexpected. They're looking for IBM to showcase a new technology that delivers a paradigm-shifting Big Bang solution, re-establishing themselves as the leader in innovation in collaboration. They want to get a "this changes everything!" new feature in Notes and Domino that will immediately and permanently convince the whole world once and for all that Notes isn't dead, and that it's cool (and profitable) to be a Notes guy again. There certainly was a time when that was a reasonable (if not wholly rational) expectation going into any year's Lotusphere, but based on my reading of the last two Lotuspheres, of IBM's announced plans for the future, and my own instincts as honed by 17 years of working with people in Lotus and with the technology that they build, I say that's not ever going to happen again.

Smooth sailing was the feeling I got from Lotusphere 2010, but it was the feeling I got from Lotusphere 2009, too. It's not a coincidence. It's a pattern, and it reveals something in IBM's attitude: confidence. They're confident in their technology. They're confident in their strategy. They're confident in their leadership. They're confident in their position in the market. They know that even though they're no longer the sole innovator in their space, that's a good thing for the customer. They're confident that they're well-positioned to integrate good ideas, wherever they come from, add their own new ideas, and deliver results to the market in a way that allows customers to keep on sailing smoothly through adoption of new and improved ways of collaborating.

I think we all know what happened the last time IBM tried to create a Big Bang. They may not have intended Workplace to stir the waters the way it did and be disruptive in the way it was, but that's surely what happened and I think some very serious lessons were learned from that. Still, in the middle of what was otherwise an era that was anything but smooth sailing for IBM, their customers, and the Lotus faithful, there was something that I think foreshadowed well where IBM is going now: activity-centric collaboration.

Back in 2005, I felt that IBM's Activity Explorer was a huge breakthrough, sure to be the next Big Bang paradigm-shifting be-all and end-all of collaboration technology. As far as I was concerned, IBM just had to do it right, get it integrated into the Notes client in the right way, and the result would be the first really significant change in how people manage collaboration in more than a decade. The long-elusive goal of getting real acceptance of the idea that the Inbox is not the place for collaboration, but that it can play its part, would be achieved.

Now, I'm not necessarily sure that IBM did integrate activities into the Notes client in the "right" way as I would define it even today, so it's possible that I was completely right back then... but really I doubt that. IBM did integrate activities into Notes, and they did it in a way that made sense according to the strategy they were following. They made it part of their Lotus Connections offering which has been getting growing acceptance in the market, but no it hasn't changed the way everyone works and collaborates. There was, it turns out, something missing in the activity-centric collaboration model. It was something essential, and this is where Project Vulcan comes in. This is where IBM is going full speed ahead.

I see Vulcan as the logical continutation of what IBM was doing with activities.

A lot of folks have drawn comparisons between Project Vulcan and Google Wave, with some even implying that Vulcan is IBM's "reaction" to Google's innovations. There may be something to the comparison, but I think there's also a great deal of "flavor-of-the-month" thinking in it, and I certainly don't see Vulcan as a reaction to Wave since it seems obvious to me that the roots of Vulcan go back much farther than Wave does.

Five years ago, IBM introduced something with the potential to be quite revolutionary, but they saw that potential could not be realized on its own. They melded activity-centric collaboration into their Connections offering in order to tie a revolutionary concept into a larger framework of social collaboration first and foremost, and only secondarily tied it to Notes and Domino, and I think the reason for this is now quite obvious: IBM realized that the people who really see the value in changing the way collaboration happens in their organization were looking at the wide variety of social software offerings, and at all of the innovation happening in that space, and that's where those key trend-setting customers saw the future. My interpretation of Project Vulcan, based on what I've seen so far, is that it is targeting that advanced vision of the future in away that brings the full Lotus customer base along for the ride.

Vulcan fulfills what IBM wanted to do with activity-centric collaboration by presenting users with a FaceBook-like home page drawing on a full-range of social software technologies, aggregating both the explicit activities and information streams that users already know they need to know about along with the ones that they don't know about yet but probably should be aware of. It's the social analytics-driven aggregation that was the missing element in activity-centric collaboration, so that's where I get the idea that Vulcan is the logical continuation of activity-centric collaboration. It is an evolutionary step toward completion of a revolutionary idea that IBM showed us half a decade ago.

And that's what smooth sailing and full speed ahead are all about: being confident that the course you're on is the right one even in a rapidly changing marketplace, confident enough to embrace others' innovations that have found broad acceptance in the market, while continuing to advance your own revolutionary ideas even when customers need change to be evolutionary.

1. Ian Randall02/07/2010 11:55:50 PM

Perhaps i'mm imagining more into it than it really is, but what I like about project Vulcan is not just the ability to merge all of the trigger events (activities, tasks, messages etc.) into a single Facebook-like page, but also the ability for each person to interact with this information and shared data and files from the same page. This interaction could be to answer a question, get an answer from a previous question, to collaboratively share a single file, and to interact with multiple internal and public systems through a single interface. In Vulcan each person also appears to have multiple pages or tabs, one for each functional perspectives that they have.

Up until not each user has had to operate through multiple user interfaces and often to enter the same or similar information into different systems. With Vulcan they could enter the information once and all the different systems would be updated simultaniously. Likewise they could receive requests from different systems or to perform a similar task, not they only need to perform this task once.

It really has the potential to change the paradigm from a system-centric model to a person-centric model.

2. Henning Heinz02/08/2010 08:35:54 AM

What you write to me read a bit like what people write about the iSeries/AS400/System i. Good technology, steadily improved and here to stay for many years to come but slowly fading away.

3. Curt Stone02/08/2010 09:41:33 AM
Homepage: http://www.onecheekgeek.com

@Richard,
Glad you made this post. It's the first thing I've read that gave me an understanding of what Vulcan is. Just by saying it's a Facebook like home-page did it for me. Thanks for your time.

4. David Bell02/08/2010 02:56:35 PM

@1 - "It really has the potential to change the paradigm from a system-centric model to a person-centric model. "

One might even say from an MS model of collaboration to an IBM model of collaboration.

MS is still, after all these years trying to focus on the tools with a 90's collaboration mentality; to a degree so is Google, why else would anyone need 25GB of Inbox space ? Google is exploring other capabilities too, but at the end of the day email is still the center of their collaboration universe.

IBM is focusing on the user and their work/processes and how to facilitate getting work done outside of the Inbox where the tools support and facilitate but do not define the process. Yes email is a key notification vehicle, but it is not the universal content repository.

@3 - Project Vulcan is an approach to advancing our products, not a product itself, much like SOA is an integration architecture/pattern to which products can align, without being a product itself.

I see the two as quite close parallels; Project Vulcan is about enhancing our various collaboration tools so that they can be decomposed into constituent services and re-assembled into a user experience that makes sense to the person looking at the glass, based on the processes and work that they need to get done.

The Collaboration Agenda then is about defining, for industry segments and user populations, what combinations make most sense to put in front of your users so that they get the right mix of services at the most effective cost to collaborate in the ways that make sense based on their role.

5. Curt Stone02/08/2010 03:38:25 PM
Homepage: http://www.onecheekgeek.com

@4 Isn't that what portals are supposed to do? :)

6. David Bell02/08/2010 06:16:50 PM

Portals are usually implemented to do this across heterogeneous environments; Project Vulcan is about doing it within the tools that IBM owns too so that you can aggregate whether you have a portal or not.

Remember Portals can only consume what is externalized from the provider application(s) as a consumable service or integration point.

So Project Vulcan should ultimately lead to a much more fine grained control over which services can be exposed via portals without mandating the need for a portal to realize the benefits.

7. Curt Stone02/09/2010 09:21:16 AM
Homepage: http://www.onecheekgeek.com

@David,
Sounds like a Portal revolution. Thanks