Everything is Just in Time (JIT), well almost everything

Have you ever been working at home, or the office, when you get a phone call from a sales person who is just dying to send you their latest white paper?

Ever hang up directly, if you even took the call? I normally talk to the people and try to understand the logic of what they are doing. Obviously this is their job, however, if they could open the mind of the company they work for, they might get further in their efforts.

Usually I point out to them that calling me, when I certainly did not ask them to do so, is not likely to be helpful to their cause. That aside, I then ask, if you were going to email it to me anyway, why not just email it to start and not waste your time calling? Either way, my spam solution will probably block it because it should know by now, I do not like emails with the words found that include "free white paper".

Decades ago when I was in college and hating my economics classes, JIT was discussed and technology has truly brought us to a world where everything is JIT. Outside of customization for something, or having a baby, everything else could be done JIT. Education could be, but that is a whole other post. We all want that Matrix like power to just know how to do something we never did before.

A friend of mine had questioned about the benefits of a newsletter or even blogging in general over some other formats. My feeling is the former is like blogging and I do believe in blogging. Do I expect you to read this blog post or any other when it is posted? Some of you will, but next week or month or year more people will find it. Maybe for a report, maybe for a presentation, or just because I tagged it with something that brought you here. You will find it when you need it. My technical posts are written for long term searching so everyone can benefit from the things I found earlier on in my career. One of my most hit posts is about the iNotes Redirector and is from 2009 which gets viewed daily. That is Just in Time help.

I am not a white paper person. Like many others, I trust my friends recommendations, not some paid for document produced by a company selling something. If I need your white paper for a client, I would hope they already found it but if not I will certainly use Google to find it.

One thing you can not do JIT is create an audience. Got a new app? How will you push out to the world? Have something to say to the world, how will they hear you? Building your audience takes time and then once you reach a critical mass stage, it then becomes a JIT plan. Apple now has millions of devices sold JIT on day one for whatever device is newly available. We all want to be like that, but think about this, it took Apple just under 25 years to get to this level. How long do you have?


JIT tools or data can only be found once someone else has put in the time and effort to create it or create something to provide what you seek. We all need a little JIT but how often do we create information for the next person in line? Collaboration, social business or just plain communication only comes from someone else who went first to clear a path for the rest of us.

My posts are for the JIT person, searchable and helpful when you need it.

Fud Buster Friday #39 - Apple makes everything easier

I preface this with the following caveat:

I do not personally own or use an iPod, iPhone, Mac, Apple or anything else, although I support them some times and really don't mind them. But think about this from a newbie perspective while you read.

So iPhone apps are everywhere on TV and I figured, let's see what one can do with an iPhone. Should be easy, right? Like finding Lotus on the IBM website, www.ibm.com/lotus go to www.iphone.com/apps, but you see this instead:



Hmm, ok, lets try the front end. Click on iPhone. That's better.
But wait...where is the app Store?

There is an icon for the App store. Now we are getting somewhere.
Hold on a sec, what's this:

Browse the App Store in iTunes

WHY? I now have to download a 70-80MB file and install it on my machine and it probably invades my startup files too?(it did)

Nice, how friendly.

No way to search or browse the apps from the website, you can see the top 10 items but that's not much of a help really is it when you want to find an app that converts tefachs(old talmudic length of measurement) to feet.

So I download it and install it. Evidently I had to wait for a bunch of updates since my first searches were limited in answers.

So now I can search and find things and found something really interesting so it does work after all. But I am still not very happy about what I had to do to find it.

You may ask, Why would you search for iPhone apps if you don't have an iPhone.

For the same reason why would someone search for a Lotus Domino application if they don't have Domino. And if they wanted to, how would they? Which option from that www.ibm.com/lotus page leads to actual applications which run on Domino?

Competitive purposes? Business ideas? Gift? Helping a business work smarter?

Perhaps because you want to see if there is any interest in a product.

It didn't make me want to be an iPhone, although I may one day, but it showed me a different view of proprietary or as some might say exclusivity.

LotusWorld, the next AppStore?

This showed up in my email box sometime in the last few days.

Coming soon! Find tons of great applications designed for your BlackBerry smartphone in one convenient place - BlackBerry App World.

So now RIM is doing it too. Makes sense for them.
Imagine, if you will, What a Lotus or Domino World would be like.
Openntf could be one way to do it and I am sure IBM has some other view on this as well.
or do they? Or have I forgotten someone's site and if so, please let me know.

Imagine if every little app you or I offer for free, instead charge a nominal amount of money, say $1-$5 per template or programming effort. Could we micropay our way to riches as some have on the Apple AppStore? Lotusworld.com by the way is some Lotus car site, but the name sounded good to me.

An interesting idea which maybe is worth it for those not quite an application but more a nice to have idea. Maybe I am being a capitalist.

Then again what if every organization needed your little app?

EDIT Update 3/12/2009 Lotus911 I believe showed an app like store and was trying to expand that idea, as was I think Planetlotus at some point. But I could be wrong in this memory.

La La La La ...Lemon

From my Partner connections blog since not everyone can read it there.

Yes, it's Berts favorite song from Sesame Street! Why? I think out of the box sometimes.
A bit off evangelism, although not entirely (see my public blog for the latest on that one by clicking the logo) today.
I have a theory, which I espoused with Ian White who was blogging here for a while.
Why is it all great smartphones so to speak, come from companies that are named after or for a fruit? Apple, Blackberry(RIM) and probably many more.
Then there is Motorola that just names phones like a bad personallzed license plate!
So the next phone to bring joy to the world should be called strawberry (although RIM probably bought the rights to it) or maybe a Melon (if you ever saw the Back to School movie you might get the reference.
But I think the world is ready for the Lemon phone. Smells good thanks to the citrus bark used to line the inner casing. Can always be found in the dark thanks to a yellow hue that glows(it is NOT radiation), a pebble grain casing(like the skin of a lemon) to give it good gripping power on your dashboard or hand.
Inside it would only work with Lotus, well because you can do these things, just ask RIM or PALM about exclusive clients. And it would run all your notes apps without havng to rewrite them since it actually runs an eclipse version of R8.
So why a Lemon, because no one would ever expect it to work and think of all the fun the press would have with it.
BUT THE THING WOULD WORK! Just not for Exchange.
So why not do it? IBM surely can get someone (Nokia preferably because they grok UI) to work it out.
Stranger things have occurred in life and maybe, just maybe, the mass commercial world, not just business, would also want it. Get Connectria or Prominic and all the other Domino hosters to help set up the network for it.
Would it be so bad to obtain a few million Lotus clients.
After all it's a fruit and everyone likes to turn lemons into lemonade.

Politics and IT don't mix

YEs, it's true, fire and water don't mix. IT and politics are almost as close.
Many company IT groups are run to just fix the problem, rarely creating the solution.
This has changed in the last few years, yet we still hear and read about companies that make a decision, then justify it on the public side.

Why do they do this? Why can't they just come out and say, hey Apple said they would personalize one in gold for me so we are buying 10,000 iPhones for the company.
Who cares if there is no great integration to our email and calendar I only cared about the personalized gold phone!

Now this may be reality for some people(I hope not) but for most ofus the truth is someplace in between.
So how can we play fair or cunningly at least so IT can trounce politics?
Well you could start by shutting the executive BES server down for 5 minutes to get their attention. :-) (just kidding, but you know the next time you need to work on a weekend..)
Now who holds the upper hand?
Should IT hold a company up because of a bad political decision? I don't know, but I would be willing to try it, perhaps in a different way.

In one client I recently finished a project their BES went down, HARD and so did a server of execs email. Bummer for them they were running Exchange and had NO way for the 100's of them at a major corporate event in Las Vegas to connect and they were very upset.

Being the Lotus evangelist that I am, aside from trying to help, I suggested in my report and to a few people that had they kept Domino as their mail server not only could I have rerouted all of them to their backup server (passthru options, cluster backup, many routes would have done it and even load http so they could webmail) in minutes, they might not have ever known there was a problem.
True story, ending was 5 hours later they got back on line. Estimated loss of business functional time in salary alone($45,000+) and lost revenue from the deals going on estimated because it was a 5,000 suppliers meeting to be anout $850,000.
That my friends is lost revenue, accounts, business, time you can add more to this cost.
And a cost which I would not want to be told by my CEO. Does Domino crash? I will not deny it can, but the built in and properly configured redundancy even if you only have 2 servers is excellent.
Did this change their perspectives, yes and no, some IT managers asked me more questions and we discussed possible scenarios, all of which I had covered already because they are BUILT IN TO DOMINO. Few of which had been done on the Exchange side, if at all possible because it required more pieces of the MS puzzle.
The SVPs were not impressed but then why would they, they either never sat in front of a admin screen or if they did it was too long ago to care.
Sadly sometimes it does take an emergency to make people sit up and think about their "corporate solution", politics have no where to go if your IT kills you for 5 hours.