The Naked Chief Blog

If you are a CIO or a CEO then there is a very serious question that you must answer this year. Will you be an analytically or a collaboratively-driven organisation? The answer to that simple question will not only frame the future employee desktop and next generation business application strategies for your organisation, but will also dictate the competitive achievements of your company during the next economic cycle.  

Sometimes the problem with being as big as IBM is simply that. At some point there are simply not enough marketing messages to go around. Back in October last year at the Information on Demand event in Las Vegas IBM's execs would have had us believe that next generation business applications will unequivocally be BI led with some analytics thrown in to boot. This was an obvious retort to a similar line of messaging from Larry Ellison at Open World earlier in the year.

Now today at Lotusphere 2010 in Orlando we are being asked by other IBM execs to accept that Lotus Notes (the enterprise collaborative suite-platform) is the window to the corporate soul (the entry point for corporate information platform). Now while it is a compelling argument, in all seriousness what is the story and how must a CIO or CEO choose?

The national curriculum for technology subjects within Australia's secondary education sector makes for very interesting reading. As guidelines for an educational framework it is comprehensive and structured in its approach to outlining the fundamental achievements and milestones that students must reach to graduate in senior ICT subjects. As a guidance framework it does not stipulate specific technologies that should be studied but rather themes and concepts that in and of themselves require technologies to deliver. As a result the use of open source as an approach (a model) or as a platform (a tool) within the education curriculum has escaped inclusion to-date due to the sporadic revision of such "documents". 

In our hypothetical series back in March, Andrew Eddie raised the issue of teaching about open source as a platform for ICT software development in schools.  One of the examples he offered was to move away from teaching proprietary Visual Basic (Microsoft) to something that doesn't invoke potential downstream costs such as the LAMP open-source development stack.

Over the last few years we've made a few statements about the requirement for ICT to make it onto the national agenda as a foreign policy issue. Two clear areas stand-out worth exploring.

Firstly,  as the world becomes increasingly digital the source code of the major software used to enable the world will become the new fossil fuel. It will become as precious a resource as oil and consideration should be given by today's governments as to how national investments are made in the infrastructure to support this "natural resource". They will happily build a coal port or terminal to prop up exports but what about building campuses  to support the evolution of application development lanaguages, whether it be .NET or Java (increasingly manageable should IBM buy Sun), or should investments be made in a national flavour and brand of emerging open source languages?

I used to take cameras to conferences just to capture some memories for the photo albums but it seems that you’re no longer a professional analyst, twitterer, journalist or blogger (or anatwitterblogalist if you do them all) unless you have a camera. Preferably digital. With both video and still capture functions. And if you are to attend a convention such as Lotusphere, then a landscape or telescopic lens wouldn’t be out of place either. Apparently.

 

• How should collaboration strategies be different today than 2-years ago? 
• What is officially in and out of the collaboration stack in 2009 and what are the hand-offs to CRM, ERP and other corporate platforms?
• Outside of advertising, where are the examples of monetization, or other value creation measures from collaborative human networks?
• How will IBM address OpenID and other SSO and identity management mechanisms in the collaboration suite/platform
• What are the mobility and SME options for Enterprise and SMEs in Australia and Asia Pacific?
  

These are just some of the questions I’ve set out to answer in Orlando this week at IBMs annual Lotusphere conference. In 2009 it has attracted over 7,000 attendees making it the single largest collaboration conference on the planet. To put that in context that’s about 1,000 more than are expected in Spain this year for the Linux User Group conference. With all the yellow and black swarming around Walt Disney World it is akin to being in the jostle at the turnstiles of a Richmond home game in finals week.

Such is the zealousness of a Lotus and Domino devotee that I’m sure there will be people attending Lotusphere this week that won’t even realise there is a presidential inauguration on Tuesday (Wednesday Australian time). So I might have to watch what I say this week or just remove my picture from the blog until Thursday. I am looking forward to the fervour of a big American conference. They are quite unlike anything we see in Australia. How many Australian ICT events are opened by Dan Ackroyd?

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