Technology Today #13: Ed Brill on Evolving Technologies

Posted on 03. Feb, 2010
Categories: Enterprise 2.0, Social Media, Technology Today, Vendors

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post entitled When it’s Time to Abandon Ship. You can read the post and the comments yourself, but I was merely trying to convey the very real belief that many people have that a certain application is not terribly user-friendly for a pretty key function these days: email.

As it turns out, I irked a few people who have much deeper knowledge of IBM’s Lotus Notes than I do. One of them was Ed Brill, the Director of Product Management of Lotus Notes at IBM. But let me take a step back…

Yes, I actually ticked a few people off. Shocker, eh?

All kidding aside, Ed sent me some information on the enhancements made to the newest version of Lotus Notes. I must admit, I was pretty impressed. I started thinking broadly about some of the challenges that many–if not most–large organizations face in integrating new technologies (such as social media and other collaborative tools) into existing products. I would argue that introducing a new application is fundamentally easier than modifying existing ones.

Ed and I exchanged a few emails and decided that this topic would make for an interesting podcast.

In this episode of Technology Today, Ed answers questions as:

• Applications such as Lotus Notes are used in many different ways by many different types of organizations. How do you ensure that the product has the most requested bells and whistles while still operating as a stable application?
• How have you and your team responded to user feedback on Lotus Notes?
• In my years as a consultant, I have spent a great deal of time working with software vendors whose products do many things pretty well, as opposed to “best of breed applications” that only do one thing. Of course, there are pros and cons to each approach. How do you try to strike this balance with each release of LN?
• Clearly IBM has improved the functionality within the product over the last decade. Since there’s no forced upgrade to a particular version, how do you deal with the perception by some that it could stand some tweaking?
• Talk to me about Project Vulcan.

To listen to the podcast, click here or visit iTunes.

Related posts:

1. Chris Brogan’s iPad Struggles and Simon’s Second Law of Technology
2. Technology Today #19: Julian Schwarzenbach on Implementation Challenges
3. Technology Today #17: Jill Dyche on Business Intelligence
4. Technology Today: Now on iTunes
5. When It’s Time to Abandon Ship

Tags: Collaboration, Email, IBM