Today (April 16th) Ed Brill came to visit the class. Ed is a Business Unit Executive at IBM and is in charge of sales for their Lotus suite.
Ed is obviously a very dynamic speaker. I both liked and disliked Ed’s presentation.
What I liked
I was extremely interested in the first quarter of the presentation. I thought Ed did a great job with an overview of knowledge management and IS management in the first quarter of the presentation. I think the best part of his presentation was his slide that showed the history of IS systems adoption and a look into the future (a future that will apparently include 3D Virtual worlds) This was a fascinating look into where companies have been, what challenges they are facing today, and what challenges they will face in the future.
I also liked many of the practical experiences that Ed shared with us. His stories about Aon and other companies he met with helped to drive home the point of the challenge of knowledge management.
What I didn’t like / made me feel very uncomfortable
While I understand Ed’s background is to be a Lotus guy through and through, I thought his devotion to IBM and Lotus was incredibly off-putting and toed the line of inappropriate for the classroom. I was hoping the rest of Ed’s presentation would be like the first quarter: Leveraging his knowledge and experience to bring insight into the challenges of Knowledge Management. Sadly, it didn’t always take that form. His Microsoft bashing was above and beyond the normal complaints that one might have with Redmond, and were highly inappropriate. They were shots at an opposing vendor, smash talk of a competitor. I think there’s a place to note how Microsoft’s death grip on office and home productivity software has stifled and can stifle innovation and knowledge management, but unfortunately his approach to this issue didn't strike the right chord. There was nothing substantive about his Microsoft bashing. Quite frankly, those kind of Ad Hominem attacks do not belong in the classroom. Also, while Ed promised that the presentation wouldn’t be a sales pitch, it really felt that way toward the end. In all fairness, Ed probably didn’t even intend to make this happen, but Ed’s a salesmen through and through and sometimes it’s easy to do what comes naturally.
Overall I think Ed Brill could be a great speaker to bring into a classroom, but I think that he needs to leverage his experience to bring practical knowledge to students, instead of resorting to proprietary chest thumping.
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2 comments:
Adam, thank you for your comments.
While it is true that we talked about IBM vs. Microsoft a fair bit in the latter 2/3rds of the class, it wasn't entirely at my own direction. Professor Burns queued up a few questions, as did two of the students in the room, related to Lotus/MS battles. It's also an area where content from a speaker will differ from just getting canned presentations off the IBM website.
I don't think anything I said could be considered an ad homonym attack. As I have been giving competitive comparison presentations for ten years, I am trained by IBM's lawyers to stick to facts and experiences.
Still, I can see how it would be off-putting to hear too much of it. As I think I said, I wish I didn't have to spend so much time on defense, but MS defines the landscape this way.
Also, remember that I was asked to give a presentation on Notes/Domino as part of the speaking engagement. The upfront stuff you really liked (which I like presenting) was only a component of what Professor Burns asked me to look at. It makes sense that in a class on knowledge management, Lotus Notes would be an appropriate study topic since it invented the category.
See my post on Ed's blog. I thought his comments were much much closer to critiquing than bashing. And, I don't recall what constituted 'ad hominem'.
Perhaps I should invite Microsoft to be 'fair and balanced'.
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