Lotus Guru

Category Soap Box

Code Poet Charles Robinson bemoans the lack of sufficient "user perspective" across the Domino Blogosphere in his recent post entitled "A Matter of Perspective". He muses:

What seems missing from most discussions is the voice of the end user and customer. The role of a BP or consultant is inherently different than someone on staff. The BP is brought in for a specific project or problem, and when they're done they move on.

This reminds me of the company where I was first exposed to Notes 10 years ago. At the time you might have called me a "power user", and I was certainly oriented toward the business end of the organization, as opposed to IT. They had just rolled out their first global WAN and standardized desktop with Netscape and Notes 3, and I was just starting to build little databases and having my Notes epiphany. That was the good news.

The bad news was that the Notes implementation was horribly micromanaged and there were all sorts of performance, mail routing, and user interface problems that in retrospect were probably deliberately created just so that I could experience my first "Let's move to Exchange" moment. How thoughtful.

A few months into this situation and I somehow found myself at this big "how do we fix it" meeting that convened around 40 folks from various IT groups, including some from the parent company which was itself a huge IT consulting shop. What struck me about this gathering was that there was NOT ONE PERSON other than myself representing a user perspective in the room. If this had been a purely "back end" problem, I would have understood, but much of the discussion centered around the user experience and what they would find acceptable. The disconnect was amazing, with suggestions being discussed seriously that betrayed a complete ignorance of how the "non-geeks" worked.

In the end, nothing good happened. The "experts" who were told to evaluate the best way forward (i.e. keep Notes or not) recommended a move to Exchange and then ran for the airport. It was my first realization that IT decision making is rarely based on technical merit. It was not my last.

It Could Have Been Different - A Power User's Lament

I can't help wondering how things might have been different if the business leaders had been able to see the whole picture, and not just what the blind men in IT wanted them to see. After all, as we've been reminded repeatedly, the real value of Notes is the power it gives the users to get stuff done. If all they think they're paying for is mail delivery or server uptime, what are the poor bean counters to do?

So how do we avoid these tragic disconnects? Well, for starters, I'd like to see the walls between IT and the rest of the business get a lot shorter. For reasons both good and bad, businesses have made it increasingly difficult to launch (and update) applications on the corporate network. This bureaucratic trend has hit Lotus Notes particularly hard in my view, since it typically takes less time to rollout a new database than it does to fill out the form requesting such a rollout. In many cases there is no real technical reason to disallow database creation privileges from responsible power users, at least on certain servers. Such power users are key to bridging the gap between IT and the rest of the company, but far too often they are denied real power, or a seat at the IT table.

Until the valuable role that power users play in an enterprise is recognized, and institutionalized, expensive misunderstandings between business and IT will continue to be the norm. This would involve cultivating technical expertise *inside* business units, and offering a career path that allows such folks to get technical training and earn higher "IT salaries" without becoming a formal part of IT. Truth be told, really good power users can easily be more valuable than the typical 2-person team of business analyst and developer/programmer, because there is little chance for miscommunication with yourself. I'm sure such an initiative will scare many in IT, but it's still the right thing to do if "aligning IT with the business goals" is anything more than an empty catchphrase.

Since I will be giving a presentation at Lotusphere that touches on some of these issues, I'd love to hear any stories you may have along these same lines. In particular I'd love to hear any success stories where power users have achieved their rightful place of honor. Please email me if you have any thoughts you'd rather not post here .