IBMer's blog

A few months ago, I started collecting feeds from IBM and the various IBMers who are blogging. I wanted to see what was out there, figuring some would be worth subscribing to.

I put off finishing the chore. Procrastination pays off yet again, as someone else does it for me:

• Unofficial List of IBM Bloggers by Elias Torres
• IBM RSS feeds

Next, we need to go from something you can browse (lists) to an interface where you can find specifically what you are looking for.

IBM Almaden Research Center's "invitation-only workshop and networking forum" - New Paradigms in Using Computers 2005 - is today.

The topic: The future of portable computing, or, Why do I carry this thing around?? "ubicomp" is not a focus of mine, but it would be fun to be there. I will have to settle for watching the sessions on DVD-delay - no live webcasts, unfortunately.

Let me try out a Technorati tag for this: NPUC - <a href= "http://www.technorati.com/tags/NPUC" rel="tag">NPUC</a> - this link should get my blog entry added to Steve Portigal's blog entry on the conference, the first item to use the NPUC tag. Excuse me while I test things in public.

Sher Taton has started a blog on how blogging and other Internet tools are changing corporate marketing. Of course, I had to comment on IA and UX there - sorry, just could not resist.

Sher is with IBM's corporate interactive marketing. I have been on a few calls with her regarding solutions and On Demand Business on ibm.com.

August 20, 2005 update: Sher deleted her original blog entry and thus my comment. Now I wish I had saved a copy. If I recall correctly, Sher was wondering about technical issues, like if the corporate blog should be appear to be an internal service (corporate URL) or be clearly associated with an external service (like blogger.com). My comment was to point out this was not really a technical question but a branding one. Do you want your corporate blog to appear "part of the system" or purposely "outside the corporate walls"? Also, there are large information architecture implications. Do you want your blog isolated from the rest of your site, or tightly integrated? What do you want the user experience to be? The answers to those questions should drive your technical decisions. [end update]

IBM Global Managing Partner Bridget van Kralingen (not "von" as her name was originally spelled) is quoted in Inside 1to1 concerning "relationship fidelty": making sure your day-to-day customers' experiences are actually in line with the high-level brand promises.

It is a challenge to have ibm.com deliver on behalf of the IBM brand, that is for sure. An extremely fun and rewarding challenge.

Her call to measure integrity, empathy, and trust (and not just efficiency, speed, relevance) are in sync with the recent user experience movement to pay more attention to emotion in design.

I also like her point about direct customer insight, instead of relying too much on indirect data.

I am a little confused about deciding when marketing and when operations make the final call. Are more than just those 2 groups making decisions? This seems pretty black-and-white: who is in charge of the grey area in between? Let's make the final call based on customer needs, which trump marketing and operations, no?

IBM does customer experience design for clients - looks interesting, I will have to find out more.

Putting my ibm.com navigation hat on, here are 2 challenges for you: (1) Starting here, your task is to find this new "customer experience design service" - without using a search engine. (2) From the web site navigation, can you tell where this group falls within the IBM org chart?

How did you do? How did we do on the navigation? (This is a new group, so I suspect we do pretty poorly.) Did you have to understand our org chart to find it?

PS. This press release might help, but I would consider that cheating.

Yesterday I met Bob Sutor, Vice President of Standards and Open Source for the IBM. He was in Toledo for the CIO Forum (see my recap).

Nice guy. Since he works in a totally different part of the company, we do not have a lot in common. But he does have one of the most famous blogs on ibm.com (which does not exactly follow all of my team's user interface standards, nudge, nudge, wink, wink). And I think we can leverage ibm.com better to showcase our position on open source and open standards - as well as many other non-product-marketing things that make IBM a great company.

I met a few other IBMers at the Forum too. Always nice to talk with my colleagues and hear what they are working on.