I was listening to the podcast of Steve Mills being interviewed by DeveloperWorks. The nice thing about these podcasts is that they are transcribed, so you can read along.

There were a few bits of information that were interesting to me. I was listening to the podcast passively, so I may have missed some even better points.

A quote from Steve Mills regarding the number of hands that touch IBM software:

“In fact, the total IBM software development community for commercial products is about 33,000 people. That’s inclusive of all of the programmers in STG, as well as the programming communities within IBM Research that are involved with building software in conjunction with the laboratories”

And a quote from Michael O’Connell:

“…from a developerWorks standpoint our traffic — the majority of our visitors — come from outside North America”

I see the same effect from this blog, most of my traffic arrives before I even wake up in the morning. India and the UK are the two primary countries that read this blog.

Also, towards the beginning of the podcast, Steve talks about the development process found with customers and how they may require updating:

Frankly, I think one of the biggest challenges customers have around the development of applications is that they far too often over-scope their projects. My view is that you’re better off in an iterative approach — time boxing the effort, minimizing team size and recognizing that the best software products or the best software implementations are created over a period of time through iterative approaches that keep refining the underlying functionality, scalability, usability.

I’m a fan of iterative development and in the field I see far too many companies staying with the ’single project in isolation’ mentality that creates a lot of one-off services and Frankensteins that haunt the business for years after the project is completed. I’m happy to hear IBM pushing customers to improve their development process.

At the bottom 1/3 of the transcript, Steve goes into what IBM does to foster a community internally. This includes technology like DogEar or Bluepages. Of course, there is no mention of creating and maintaining an external community by leveraging these resources.

Where I begin to disagree with Steve is when he mentioned DeveloperWorks as a driver of features and capabilities into the products that come out of software group. This is something that I have practically never witnessed. DeveloperWorks is a one-way fire hose of information. As far as I can tell, I can’t even recommend topics. I also have never see discourse open up between IBM and the users. Just because you include a comment text box and a rating at the bottom of the page doesn’t mean that it’s now an interactive experience.

I also monitor the DeveloperWorks forums and I never see the complaints of today addressed in the products of tomorrow. Users are left stumbling in the dark together towards what is either the light of a solution or an oncoming train.

Maybe the future direction of DeveloperWorks is to become the external interactive focal point between IBM and the community at large. To say that it is already that today is incorrect.

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• My Contributions To The IBM External Community - The 24/7 Answer Man

I think some of my readers need a refresher course on exactly what I’m doing here and everything that I’ve contributed to the external IBM community (aka, the community that IBM does next to nothing to help thrive).

1. I constantly post and answer questions of all levels in the two external newsgroups for WebSphere Integration Developer and WebSphere Process Server. The groups get about 10 posts a day and between myself and Neil Kolban, we’re the primary responders. If neither of us runs with an issue, it doesn’t get solved. Where do the unsolved questions go? A straight negative to IBMs bottom-line with a PMR. Or better yet, just another unsatisfied practitioner.
2. I constantly post to this blog outlining my personal experiences with the two products. I try to tackle the problems that I encounter along with their resolutions. The hope is that through my trials and tribulations, the external community can learn and avoid the productivity waste associated with running into insane exceptions.
3. I also try to post about my honest assessments of the product stack at the point in time. Sometimes I’m happy with the way everything works, and sometimes I’m extremely disappointed in the solutions. I think it’s completely fair to air these in the blog. I’m not here to be another marketing slide for IBM. Are the products good 90% of the time? Sure. Are they crap in the other 10%? You bet. Competing products either fail 60% of the time or just don’t provide the feature in the first place.
4. I’ve written articles for DeveloperWorks on WID.
5. I’ve completed redbook residencies on WebSphere Process Server.
6. I attempt to provide feedback back to IBM through the various IBMers who may swing by. I’ve found that since I left IBM my voice carries more weight than it ever did internally. I’m hoping the right people can stumble around here to make the future software revisions even better.
7. I’ve also worked with numerous people who email me with problems. I prefer it when they’re posted to the newsgroup but I can accept someone needed a critical answer quickly.
8. I’m pretty much open 24/7 for YOU the Business Integrator. I solicit comments/topics/questions as much as I can  in the hope that it doesn’t take you three years to skill up on the product set like it did for me.
9. Oh yeah, my actual job. Implementing SOA solutions with WID/WPS. Spreading skill to the field by working hands on with customers.

Anyway, I’ve hit a very big crossroads with respect to the external IBM community and my role in it. Over the next few weeks there will likely be some large changes that can range from status quo daily blogging to ceasing my newsgroup activities to flat out deleting danZrobok.com and forwarding it to icanhascheezburger.com forever.

If you read between the lines, I’m at a very VERY low point in my blogging career. If you have any kind of pick me up, I can use it right now.

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In a case of the worst marketing for an event ever, I just received an email informing me that the Global WebSphere Community is holding an “Ask The Experts” event online from 10am Eastern to 10pm Eastern. You can join the conversation right now. The event is free, you just need to sign up with the users group.

Experts Include:

• Gini Agee
• Edward Angelovich
• Jai Arun
• Jorli Baker
• Terry Bleizeffer
• Grace Burton
• Andrew Coleman
• Jerry Cuomo
• Dana Duffield
• Matthew Golby-Kirk
• Dan Griffin
• Dan Griffin   <– This guy must really be good, he’s listed twice in the manifest.
• Matt Hogstrom
• Richard Johnson
• Jimmy Jones
• Matt Lucas
• Aaron Miller
• Alasdair Nottingham
• Anthony O’Dowd
• Gerhard Pfau
• Jennifer Smith
• Andrew Thomas
• Greg Truty
• Chris Vignola

An all-star cast of people I don’t know.

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Just a quick note that I plan on virtually attending the ESB-CON VI where some people are going to talk about ESB for four hours. This is my first time attending a virtual conference, so I’m interested to see how it all plays out. It starts Today at Noon Eastern Time (ie one minute).

It’s free, so feel free to click the link and see what’s going on.

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My thanks go out to Twitter’s SamLawrence for pointing out what Nike is doing in the Social Community Space and the success they are having.

You guys sell apparel, what does an online community have to do with that?

For Nike, you are no longer just buying a sneaker. You are joining the largest global running club. We offer you shoes and apparel that helps you run longer and faster. This is our “hardware.” We now offer you cool “software”: ways to track your progress, tools to find people to challenge. We want to keep you active and motivated.

Yet again, Nike is able to redefine their marketing of a commodity product in unique ways that continue to drive revenue. What they’ve done is taken their shoes and by working with various companies, created a vibrant online community of runners who then evangelize the products to their friends. This leverages the exponential growth of online communities with the revenue of a physical product.

This is a very sound business case as compared to the ROFLCon meme guys who generate the million page views but are unable to do anything with it. If a company as large as Nike can ‘get it’ so quickly, what is stopping a company like IBM from doing it? Nike isn’t even a technology company.

I think it’s likely due to Nike understanding that they are a consumer goods company that needs to constantly differentiate itself from it’s similar competitors. Consumers are fickle. Nike spends huge sums of money on trying to understand them. Now, with a social community, they can data-mine it to gain data even cheaper. Let’s not forget that the Nike+ shoes are easy to use and integrate with devices that users already own. That’s a large reason for quick adoption.

I think that IBM really hasn’t ‘got it’ as to the power of a social community. They’re still stuck in the long release cycle, long purchase cycle, long implementation cycle view of the world. SLOW. These traits would substantially hurt a consumer-focused company like Nike in the long run, but it seems like IBMs customers are content to not push for change.

IBM has a reactive relationship and Nike has a proactive one. IBM customers react to new product releases, fixpacks, articles, features but don’t have a voice. Nike’s customers rapidly vote with their wallets and therefore, have a voice that can’t be ignored.

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In case you are out of the loop, ROFLCon 2008 is a day long conference out in Boston where they bring together the owners of the current internet meme phenomenons to talk about the state of internet culture.

It’s a very interesting topic and I think, relevant to understanding how you can build a community around something. IBM is talking about building a ‘Smart SOA Community’ and through ROFLCon, we can try to get an understanding of what makes something popular and even more interesting what makes a user want to contribute content.

Getting hits to a site isn’t too hard with the proper marketing campaign, but how can you inspire those visitors to use their own resources for your benefit. That’s the secret that we are seeing unfold in this domain with sites like ICanHasCheezBurger or lolcats.

Unfortunately, I think we are in the very early stages of this phenominon to be able to describe the traits in an accurate “Check the boxes off a list and win” manner. Theres a lot of very similar competitors to the cheezburger guys, yet people prefer to stick with that brand. Why is that?

Well, they all share a simplicity in their user interfaces and the ability to rapidly response and shift to the demands of the user base. They are all extremely interactive and encourage participation from their users, but they don’t demand it. They all started out extremely small with a core-following and we able to encourage word-of-mouth growth. This is likely because the element of humor allows for simple passing from person to person.

In addition, the owners themselves had a clear vision of what they were trying to accomplish and didn’t waver from that goal. They all seem to have worked in the IT industry in boring day jobs that led to the creation of the idea. They were also very passionate about their site, largely because they knew they had to be able to generate most of the content themselves.

They are also very good at providing a single purpose to their users. If you go to lolcats, you get lolcats. You don’t get overwhelmed with features that are never used. They don’t fragment their communities over a ton of options. You’ve got a few specialized tasks and that’s it.

Anyway, I thought ROFLCon was just going to be guys laughing over the latest Chuck Norris quote but if you dig a little deeper, you’ll see its an interesting experiment on internet communities and includes some very good discussions on emerging topics that the Web 2.0 enterprise community will be having soon.

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• The lack of a non-IBM WebSphere Community

Previously, I talked about what steps I think IBM could take in order to foster an external WebSphere Community with the goal that one day it would become self-sufficient. In the previous posts in the series:

1. I talked about the benefits to IBM
2. I talked about the holding an external conference call for practitioners

I think that IBM should hold a weekly rotating chat between the developers and the users.

My reasoning for this request is that the developers hold the intimate knowledge of how pieces of the product work. They would be able to comment on design decisions and allow the end users to understand the reasons behind why the software works in the way it does. It would be a quick ’short-circuit’ of the lengthy PMR process where a developer could quickly resolve a potential PMR issue before it is opened. End users would be able to build relationships with the developers and put a ‘human face’ to the products. This personification would help reduce the general angst that exists towards the product stack.

It will also allow the developers to gain feedback over their piece of the product. This would allow the developer to better understand if the users are interacting with the software in the way that the developer envisioned. Many times in software, there is a disconnect between what the developer thinks the user wants and what the user actually wants. This should lower that division significantly. It can also be a point of encouragement for developers. A “good job” or “works great” from the people you wrote the software for is worth more than some IBM Thanks! award trinket. Most developers that I’ve spoken to enjoy dialogues with their users. Currently at IBM, they are sheltered by the rest of the organization too deeply. Let’s open it up.

My idea is that the chat would be held once a week at a specific time with a rotating cast of developers. It would last for about an hour and the transcripts would be made available. The rotation would be structured in a way that a developer would participate around once a quarter. DeveloperWorks has alrady held events that are similar to this as one-offs. I would like to see it the program expanded.

I think this idea would allow developers and practitioners to connect in order to raise quality and reduce support costs.

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I’ve now been part of the Twitter community for about two weeks so I think it’s about time that I give my impressions of the medium.

Tweet Styles

So far, I’ve seen a few different styles of twittering:

1. One one extreme end are people that treat it like a blog entry. They make good use of the 140 characters, they remain on topic and they tweet a few times a day.
2. On the extreme, there are people who tweet constantly on various topics, some mundane, some insightful. You may get 25-50 tweets a day from these people.

Within those extremes there are also divisions between personal and professional tweets. I consider a personal tweet to be a message that deals with their personal life, or what they ate for breakfast. Of course, (like blogs) there’s a large contingent that mingles these two types.

Twitter Pros

I think that the 140 character limit is a good thing, it makes you choose your words in order to convey your point succinctly. I spent a good 3-4 minutes rearranging my points to be clearer due to this limit.

I also like being to quickly browse the people I’m following and get an idea of what they are up at at a ‘grassroots’ level. There’s a personal level of interaction you can feel when you read tweets. They’re less polished and more real.

I’m going to call twitter the great internet icebreaker. I can now start to forge relationships with the people that I follow that I likely would never have had the chance to meet via other channels.

Lots of bots out there expanding the functionality of twitter. You’ve got TweetScan that will let you search the universe of tweets for keywords. TweetClouds if you are into the whole blog tag-cloud thing. HashTags to allow you to mark your tweets to an overall topic that anyone can contribute to.

Twitter Cons

The clients for twitter are pretty rudimentary so far, just presenting your following tweets as an ordered list. This means you have to beware the volume twitter friends, they can land up pushing interesting contents right out of your view.

Twitter can also become a distraction if you allow the client to push notifications in front of other windows. There’s been numerous studies about the effect of context switching and the time that is wasted attempting to resume ‘where you left off’.

There’s too many people that are unfocused as to their purpose for being on twitter. Is it to spark ideas in your social community or to laugh at the latest faildog? When you land up combining both in the same account, you dilute your insightful posts.

If I do want to get into a discussion with someone from Twitter, I have to move to another channel. It would be interesting to add a layer of direct messaging that removed the 140 char limitation but kept us on the twitter network.

‘danZrobok‘ twittering style

I guess you can say that ‘danZrobok‘ is the brand that I’m trying to establish with the blog and the twitter account. I prefer following accounts that attempt to stick to a certain topic that deals with Business Intergration, SOA and Web 2.0. The tweets that I write for this account will attempt to stay on this topic as well. I shoot for around 2-3 focused updates a day and to keep the ’social’ type twitters to a minimum.

Overall, I’m impressed with it and I think it’s another great tool for building your social network. If you are reading this and not a part of twitter, you may be missing out of most of the value that occurs before mass adoption when the people who tweet become more jaded to the network.

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Previously, I talked about what steps I think IBM could take in order to foster an external WebSphere Community with the goal that one day it would become self-sufficient. In that first post, I outlined what I thought were the benefits for IBM to make it happen.

In these next series of posts, I’m going to give my thoughts on concrete items that I believe IBM could implement to grow the community. There’s a lot of talk about the possible future, dynamic communities, social networks etc. They all sound great until you realize that it will take a long time for them to grow. I’m going to try to keep my focus on practical solutions that are implementable today and could generate immediate returns on investment.

My first solution is for IBM to hold a weekly conference call for the practitioners in the field. The idea being that we are in need a place to hold an interactive conversation. Currently, the only tools available are search engines, forums or the Problem Reporting process. None of these can give me direction in a timely fashion. The call would be formatted primarily as a Question and Answer with questions ranging the gamut from beginner to advanced. Like any mechanism, there’s no requirement placed on IBM to give definite resolutions. Even so, there is a ton of value in dialogue that is as simple as “Have you ever seen this before?” “Nope, Sorry”. I can then use that information to judge that I really am in a unique PMR situation and not just missing the obvious. If I get a resolution, thats a major success. My customer is happy with both myself and IBM for getting the problem solved quickly and efficiently. IBM saved a PMR and potential angry customer escalation situation. Win-Win.

IBM needs to begin to understand that articles, info centers and education courses are insufficient to properly skilling the external community. Those formats of information delivery are only good when I am in the exact same scenario. If I stray from the ‘best practice’ due to a business requirement, I have to lean on my personal social network which does not include IBM. Again, IBM has all the information. When they aren’t involved, it makes my problem resolution extremely difficult.

Conference calls are very non-web 2.0 but they are also very effective if moderated well and transcribed. The long term goal is not to require IBM to moderate these calls forever but eventually rotate the job around the community that has been built. But as it stands right now, we need IBM to provide that spark that will enable us to succeed.

Providing a few resources in a call once a week would be a nice step in the right direction.

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I’m going to use this post to record the discussion that generated during the Impact 2008 SOA Jam for my idea about “How IBM can foster an external community”. Now that Impact is over, I’d like to keep a copy of it’s point in time, and also allow any future readers to add comments.

Foster an external community for non-IBM practitioners
Dan Zrobok 10 Apr 2008

Abstract

As a non-IBMer who works within the product stack, I find it next to impossible to get the information that I need to make the products a success. The goal is to have IBM create a vibrant external community that is equivalent to the internal one.

Read the rest of this entry »

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I’m going to use this post to record the discussion that generated during the Impact 2008 SOA Jam for my idea about “Too ManyESBs, Skill Spread too thin”. Now that Impact is over, I’d like to keep a copy of it’s point in time, and also allow any future readers to add comments.

ESB: Too many products, Skill spread too thin
Dan Zrobok 10 Apr 2008

Abstract

If you want an ESB you can use: WAS, WPS, WESB, DataPower, Message Broker. Based on my selection, I have to find deeply skilled resources on that specific product. Is IBM spreading the community too thin?

Read the rest of this entry »

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So today is apparently the final day of the SOA Jam at Impact 2008. Overall I saw a few overall themes in the ideas:

• Ideas on how to engage the business with SOA
• Tons of Ideas on How to create a “Smart SOA” community
• Ideas for needed case studies mostly from a generic non-provider viewpoint.

The one I’m most enthusiastic about is creating a community, so it was nice to see the largest proportion of ideas occur around it. I guess the ball is now in IBM’s court to begin the next steps towards resolution. I’d sure like to know (and be involved) in as much as possible but I’m going to assume these things will occur behind closed-confidential doors.

Overall, the SOA Jam turned in 73 ideas with 289 comments. We started off with 22 ideas and 70 comments, then 44 ideas and 146 comments. There was a real explosion of activity yesterday with double the usual 70 comments. I don’t know why IBM decided to end the jam a day early. I’m hoping it’s because there’s some kind of aggregation session they want to do on Friday.

As for my own ideas, “Too Many ESBs” turned in 152 views and 24 comments of it’s own. It broke down to most people agreeing with the premise and I think that ‘neilwd’ summarized the solution the best:

If we can start to build more standardized ways of engaging with technologies that fulfill common functions, that will really help companies find people from broader skill bases.

Along that line, I realized something. IBM has spent a considerable amount of time to embrace open standards on the transport level, data modeling level etc but we’ve never really seen any standard emerge on the user interface side other than the usability. Is that the result of a lack of focus, that the job is too hard to implement or what it would reduce branding opportunities amongst vendors?

Anyway I’m happy with the road this idea took during the Jam. It’s 2nd in most views and 2nd in most comments.

I’m also satisfied with my plight for an external community (8 comments, 72 views). I picked up a few email addresses of people who are also interested in the topic so I’ll try and see what I can do from that avenue. Again, unless theres some IBM buy-in though, it will be extremely difficult.

All-in-all, I feel like the Jam was just starting to gain momentum and was cut short but it remains to be seen when the doors will actually close.

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Over a twitter yesterday, James Governor lamented about the lack of official web 2.0 happenings a conference where we’re all talking about mash-ups, integrating communities and mass enablement. IBM’s youTube Channel has a single 1 minute video from day one, theres a twitter account created of the name “Impact2008“* which has no activity. Heck, even IBM’s official blog hasn’t been updated past day one.

(*unknown who it was created by, but as far as I know there is no official twitter).

It would have been cool to say, allow participants to ask questions in keynote Q&A over twitter as well as the microphone. Maybe presenters could offer informal times to talk to eager listeners once the session is over. How about if IBM aggregated the Impact ‘blogosphere’ and gave us a single place to look for what people are saying about the conference? What if I’d like to try and track down Steve Mills for a two minute interview. Where is he? There’s six thousand people walking around. If I want any of those things, it’s completely dependent on my own social network to make it happen. If I don’t happen to have a person in my list then it’s left to fate and circumstance if we’ll ever meet. Once again, we need IBM to take the first steps to make this happen. It’s great that I now follow the guys from RedMonk and various people who tagged #impact2008, but it’s still just the voices of the people ‘in the dark’ (non-IBM). Without IBM, we can talk all we want about changes that are needed but there’s no buy in from the sole required enabler. The idea that IBM can show up at predetermined times on the calendar, fire-hose the community with information and then disappear are long dead.

It seems like the conference itself is actually an accurate reflection of the state of the SOA community as a whole. You’ve got a large mass of people who would do a great job collaborating with each other and networking, but no catalyst to make it happen. Instead of being energized as part of a broader community, you get isolated and bored. I think I see that effect in how the number of articles/twitters/blogs about Impact 2008 has dropped off significantly from the first day to the third. Even the #impact2008 tag has one message on it over the last 13 hours.

In the SOA Jam, about 80% of the ideas relate to social networks and how to build communities but we’re already failing on a very small scale with people in the same physical location! How can we expect to snap our fingers and create a vibrant self-sustaining community on the large if we can’t do it on the small?

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Well I must say I was taken aback when I saw that that my SOA Jam ESB question was responded to by Steve Mills:

Steve Mills is a senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group. In this capacity he is responsible for directing the development, marketing, sales and support of IBM’s software portfolio. Mr. Mills is a member of IBM’s Operating Team, Performance Team, Values & Integration Team and the Asian Task Force.

It’s not everyday that you get someone at Steve’s level to respond to something you say. Of course, I’ll be right back in there with my rebuttal but this definitely made my day.

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It’s now day two of SOA Jam and it’s has been running for about 48 hours now. While the overall rate remains the same as yesterday, it feels like there’s more going on in the Jam.

As of today, we have 44 ideas and 146 comments. It look like the Jam will produce about 20 ideas and 70 comments a day. I still think this number is low for a conference with attendance this large. I wonder if IBM could have done a better job quantifying exactly what they are going to do with the ideas once the 72 hours are complete.

Also ThinkPlace itself isn’t exactly easy to understand. We have ideas in the first “Peer Review” stage. I don’t understand what exactly is required for someone to claim themselves as a catalyst in order to get to to stage 2 “Accepted by a Catalyst”. It’s even more unclear what the elusive stage 3 is as no ideas have made it that far. It’s great that IBM wants to solicit ideas from the field, it’s bad if they’re just shuffled into a database to die.

As for my own ideas, the momentum that they generated originally has fallen off. The external community idea has 6 comments, 58 views (top 15% in views) and has been accepted by a catalyst. What I’m supposed to do with it now is unknown. I’d love to have the ability to work with IBM and see what can/can’t be done in this space and I plan on maintaining contact with the catalysts (from IBM and Wells Fargo), but I’m uncertain of what real change will be brought.

The “Too many ESB product” idea originally began as “No really, theres too many ESBs, simplify them down to one” but as the comments came in I realized that it’s not the runtimes that need to be ‘immediately’ normalized but rather the tools. There’s little logical reason why mapping messages is a different tooling construct for all five products. This idea is currently languishing on page 2 with 9 comments but 90 views (2nd or 3rd most views in the Jam). But it’s still stuck in the “Peer Review” state with no catalyst. This issue isn’t quite something a non-IBMer can pick up and run with.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, head over to the Impact 2008 SOA Jam and go vote for my ideas participate in the community. The Jam ends Thursday at 10am pacific.

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