Andrew Ferrier

I find it entertaining when people state ‘Walmart wants…’, ‘Ford thinks…’, or ‘BT needs…’. It’s quite painfully obvious that corporations don’t have feelings or thoughts. What is true is that people within them do. I’ve thought for some time that one of greatest contributors to a corporation’s success is when the thoughts of its people are aligned. Unaligned thoughts are unlikely to be useful. Aligned thoughts can happen by accident (less likely) or because of good quality leadership (more likely), but in either case it’s important to recognise that they are still individual thoughts.

One of the reasons I like working for IBM is that it’s happy to allow me and my IBM colleagues to blog externally. Of course there are guidelines – obviously I can’t give away confidential information. It’s still a brave act for a company like IBM, however, and many others of equivalent size are rightly nervous about allowing the same – what happens if the PR and marketing folks lose control over companies’ images? This may or may not be a good thing, depending on your opinion of PR and marketing as disciplines, but it’s clear that there’s a risk of exposing non-alignment – people have different opinions, after all, right? Sure, yes, there’s that risk. However, although I hope our customers can see that IBMers are working together to produce good quality products and services for them, at least we have the reassurance that we’re being judged on our merits.

I’d encourage any other IBMers who aren’t already doing so to blog externally. You can find more information internally in the usual place (how’s that for keeping a secret, huh?).

Business Week recently pointed out, in an article linked from Sandy Carter’s SOA blog, that IBM now makes more profit from software than services, which had been our mainstay for a number of years now. I’m not 100% clear on the details (it’s not often I get to look at the big book o’ accounts), but it’s good to know that we in IBM Software Group are doing good for the company’s bottom line.

This is significant as IBM gets ready for our big SOA announcement on 3rd October. Whether you believe the hype or are cynical about SOA being the next big thing, you can find out more details on the IBM website here and register for the webcast.

One of the things I’ve felt IBM‘s been strong at in recent years is the way we embrace open-source as a development model, and as a model for providing software to our customers. Eclipse, which has a lot of support from IBM, is a well-known example, but there are plenty of others. I honestly believe that the provision of open-source software gives us a competitive edge over IT organisations of comparable size. Sure, we don’t do it for all our products, but for toolchains like Eclipse it has delivered real benefits – the number of plugins developed for it is testament to that.

Greg at IBM Eye has provided a brief recap of the many software domains in which IBM supports open-source. I think Greg’s analysis is too narrow – there are other benefits to open-source software apart from savings on purchase cost – some of them bogus and some not – but quality and maintainability are certainly side-effects of open-source software, and are worth having even if they’re hard to quantify.

IBM has just announced that it has acquired Webify, a provider of ‘Service-oriented Business Applications’, which are SOA assets designed specifically for certain markets, such as insurance and healthcare. It will become part of the IBM WebSphere organisation. It remains to be seen exactly how Webify’s products will integrate into the IBM product line, but they sound like they will be a useful addition to IBM’s SOA vision, and I look forward to working with our new colleagues from Webify.

Edward Tufte’s excellent essay ‘The Cognitive Value of Powerpoint‘ contains an excerpt from Lou Gerstner‘s autobiography, an anecdote from when he first joined IBM in the 1990s, when the typical method of making presentations was to use PowerPoint (or similar software of the period), often producing results with a low signal/noise ratio. Lou was less familiar with this, and after enduring a short part of a presentation from one of his senior executives using this method, Lou asked him if we could ‘just talk about your business’. This was famous within and without IBM at the time. Nevertheless, it seems to have been rapidly forgotten. IBM presentations still often have a low signal/noise ratio, with slide ‘decks’ used as a general method of information exchange (sent round in emails, used as substitutes for essays and documents). Tufte explains in detail why this isn’t an optimum method of communication.

This isn’t really a dig at IBM – it’s far from the only guilty party – in fact, at least today, these types of presentation are pretty much standard, with varying levels of quality from organisation to organisation, and also presenter to presenter. But is this an indication of how ingrained certain techniques and practices can be? Many people (including myself) realise the value of what Tufte says (and on the odd occasion I get, I try to practice it). But suggesting change is hard – people always have something else more urgent to be worrying about. This just doesn’t seem important to many – although in the long-term I feel it’s a key part of an organisation’s level of success.

It’s times like this I realise just how hard it must be being CEO – persuasion is so tough.