Termite hills, cement, social business, and open government

I had the opportunity to sit with Doug Heintzman, Director of Lotus Strategy, during a press/analyst briefing here at LotusSphere and the interesting thing is we actually did cover all of these topics.

IBM has heavily invested in social business and the entire focus of this year’s event is on social business and open government solutions that enable the power of enterprise level collaboration within all types of businesses.  Many of the product announcements are focused upon:

• Social solutions that provide support for a variety of mobile devices and tablets ranging from RIM’s Blackberry and PlayBook, the iPhone and the iPad, Android, and Nokia devices.
• Moving to the cloud.  IBM’s LotusLive Symphony application (office productivity) will soon have a cloud-based version. 
• Countless other upgrades to its Lotus Connections application which will include rich ideation capabilities, Google-Wave like real-time interfaces, and much more.

Doug, however, did not focus heavily upon the product changes.  Instead, he focused on organizational and cultural changes that organizations need to make, that these offerings help enable.  As an example, he spoke about a cement company he was working with that pushed back on the concepts of social business with the simple complaint that these tools would not be embraced by the existing organizational culture, they were not techies.  The response Doug gave was that the company should focus upon the culture they need to have in order to succeed today, the culture that these types of tools could enable.  I mostly agree with Doug, I might say it differently, however:

Focus on building the culture you need to win today as well as ensuring that this culture is open to ongoing change.  Organizational culture must keep up with the ever-changing goals of the organization.  You then layer on the tools that support your goals, and the desired culture.

Those termite hills…..  Well, you had to be there….