Pattern Finder

Gilbane Conference, Day 1

I attended and spoke on an analyst panel today at the Gilbane Conference. The conference started out with a panel discussion among:

• Jim Howard (CEO, CrownPeak)
• Jared Spataro (Senior Product Manager, Office Servers, Microsoft)
• Detlef Kamps (President, RedDot)
• David Nelson-Gal (Senior VP, Engineering, Interwoven)

The question that Frank Gilbane posed was, "What are the top 3 technologies that companies should look at over the next 12-24 months?" The one everybody mentioned was "integration," with "improving the customer experience" and "search" as runners up. Jared Spataro from Microsoft said, "SharePoint 2007," which elicited a large laugh from the audience.

Other interesting items were Jack Jia (formerly CTO of Interwoven, now CEO of Baynote), demonstrating how  Baynote can improve search results and modify web site navigation by reacting to user behavior on the web site. Another way to put it is web analytics instantly fed back into the content management system.

There was also a session with CEOs/CTOs from enterprise wiki companies (Socialtext, CustomerVision, eTouch Systems, and Traction Software). Competitive intelligence and project management still seem to be the most popular applications.

Work Habits, They Are a'Changing

Mike Gotta had a post on his blog yesterday where he talked about a serious vendor/user mismatch brewing: IBM and Microsoft continue to be e-mail-centric in their messaging offerings while young workers live in a real-time communications world.

This work habit mismatch is on its way to becoming a huge problem. In the past, vendors and enterprises told workers, "Here's the system -- here's its UI -- get used to it." However, that form of systems imperiousness no longer works. There are now many ways to gather information and communicate in this digital world, and people are picking what they're most comfortable with. To give one small example, yesterday the Collaboration and Content Strategies team had a briefing with Microsoft, so we were all taking notes. I looked around, and I was typing into a Word document on my laptop, Karen Hobert was typing into Lotus Notes, and Mike was writing notes on paper. (And, interestingly enough, one of the young Microsoft product managers -- in an offhand way -- commented on Mike's use of that old paper technology). We're all analysts, all working in the same practice, but using three different ways to capture the same information.