Well, sort of a disclaimer – the wifi down here is spotty (pretty much binary, ie. switches from 0 to 1 to 0 ad infinitum), thus I am hastily posting some notes on the learnings of day 2 morning. I will add more notes on day 1 and its executive meetings and interviews tomorrow when I’m back on a high speed internet access. Then I can also check out the video footage of both days’ keynotes, so I might embed and highlight the interesting stuff.
These minor hassles aside the conference prooves to be interesting and inspiring – and while this event focuses on big data, big customers, big machines, big accounts et al. (you get the idea …), cute research and ideas aren’t absent, the social web and the Lotus ballpark are present too, so there’s enough in it for me. And it’s interesting to meet and talk to people from the EMEA region during the socializing parts (informally talked to customers, partners and IBMers from as exotic places as the Netherlands and Jordania ;). Officially, ie. organized and scheduled I had the opportunity to talk with people like Jeff Schick (yes, collaboration issues, Lotus, Project Vulcan et al.) and a round of other executives. Caught some notes in a mindmap which may get turned into a blogpost.
For now I share some of my combined notes from this mornings main event and a subsequent blogger’s meeting with IBMers (SPSS and Consulting). Aspirations, plans and business muscles were shown, my takes on things:
– I think that it’s showing that IBM is trying very hard to leverage it’s power and widespread expertise and labs
– Mike Rhodin focussed on the frameworks IBM has and is developing for catering for a range of industries (I think these are ranging from stories and “rationales” to blueprints to implementation patterns to out-of-the-box cookie-cutter standard approach and solutions)
– sounds more like strategy consulting – the seek patterns, understand patterns and adapt to those patterns cycle that Gartners Casonato talked is yet an image to simple (adaptiveness and agility are hard to sustain in light of information overload). But yes, making sense of the avalanche and being able to move still is the art that IBM is pushing to be better at (and aims to help customers with)
– I perfectly understand why Cognos and SPSS got acquired – good fit with both Global Business Services and the industry specific teams, a lot of overlapping space with ilog (business rules), Lotus (yesyesyes) – yep, even with Websphere et al.
– Cognos and Business Intelligence are not only for finding a needle in a haystack but also for fundamentals like “How are we doing? Why? and What should we be doing?”
– SPSS and its predictive analysis stuff is aimed at all industry lines, 80/20 rules apply here as does the rationale that innovative ideas can be imported from “foreign” and separated industries. Generic stuff and expertise gets integrated into the Software Group
– Software Group is “vice-presidenting” not only products but also solutions
– Partners got a place in building a solution portfolio, may even be a big slice of the cake. But it depends on what IBM can do inhouse first. Not sure if the priorities are right. Partners I’ve talked to outside and off-protocol were telling stories.
– Talking to “line of business persons” about “technology enabled business model innovation” is much easier when numbers are available, there seems to be a hunger for predictive analysis and derived insight. People seem to be aware that gut-based decision making is coming to an end in times of profound change
That’s it for now, see disclaimer above …
