Naquada

Great as Walt’s dream of the magical kingdom was, he obviously didn’t really envisage a bunch of techies trying to get onto wireless networks in the land of Micky.. Wireless access at the TLE as been pretty bad, and although I’ve not really needed it, it has meant that I’ve not been able to post as many blog entries as I wanted to from TLE.

The event itself is proving to be very useful, for me personally anyways. I’m not quite so keen on the 6:30am breakfast, but thats a small point. I started my TLE with the first session of the poster program. Mine seemed to go down well, I got alot of interest from people wanting to chat to me about the subject matter, bizarrely most of them seemed to be from GBS, It was nice to start linking up with some other areas of IBM, and trying to get them to understand what the Information Server was, and how it fitted with other aspects of the IBM portfolio

The Tuesday sessions that I attended where, for the most, very useful. I started with Jeremy Cohen’s session on changing your career in IBM. I decided to swap to this at the last minute, because I’d been talking with a few people here aboiut IT architect roles, and having been in the IT Specialist role for almost 10 years, I thought it might be nice to see what other areas I could explore. Jeremys session was great, a confident speaker, and his content was very interesting to me, a newbie in the real world of IBM. In particular he explained how his current role is to aid IBM’ers get to, or change their career through a number of new IBM tools. The first of these is the Careers Index, a portal to help ytou understand the career change requirements, availability and process. Also from the same place, there is the Advance Your Career site, both of these sites provide vital information if you’re thinking of moving in IBM, probably the most interesting of these seemed to be the ability to see statistics on career changes, such as what at the most popular migrations career wise (say IT specialists to IT Architect) and also areas of size, growth and shrinkage, for instance, the IT architect role is growing, and currently quite small compared to the number of IT Specialists. Once I get back next week I think this will be of great use..

The second session of the day was by Luis Suarez, now this was quite a bizarre networking round loop.I booked onto Luis’ session about social computing and improving your socal network through tools, and I then found his blog internally when I was searching for something completely different. I left Luis an email on his blog saying I was looking forward to his session, and he left me a reply, saying that he’d try and find my poster and have a chat with me. His session was very good, and this really proves the point of what he was talking about. I also know Andy Piper (virtually since we’ve never met), and Luis knows Andy (although Andy has never met Luis), after the session I spoke with Luis, and then bumped into Roo Reynolds, metaverse evangelist, who also knows Andy. He was talking to someone, who’d also been looking at some integration requirements, so by a round about route of blogs, and virtual buddies, I got to find a new contact in IBM that I could help out with my knowledge on something he had a need for..

But I digress slightly, Luis’ session was great, he was talking about the social computing aspects of IBM, in simple terms the tools such as Blogs, Wiki’s Media Library, eMeetings and Sametime. I, personally try and update both my internal, and external blogs as often as possible, sometimes with the same content, sometime with different content, but one thing I didnt see before that Luis pointed out, was that social computing is really about building up social capital. That is by sharing, blogging and committing to a socal community, you build interest and credibility in yourself, and allow others to feed you information, relate to you, and ultimately respect you and your opinions. The concept of sharing something via email, is a very limited (unless you’re emailing all of IBM) , publishing the same information on a blog, wiki or other social network can reach a much wider audience, most importantly people that you probably didnt either know existed, or you’d normally not contact. The other important aspect here is that we are talking communities,that is people with similar interests or needs, NOT you local team that you work in, the idea of a community is a free open, growing and dynamic group of people that are far outside your normal sphere of people you’d meet. I’m definitely going to be writing a bit more on this next week as I had quite a few good ideas from Luis’ session.

The last session yesterday was by Mandy Chessell, distinguished engineer and master innovator, her session was very interesting, and I was pleased to see that her recommended reading list consisted of all the books that I had ordered from the IBM Learning bookstore here on site earlier in the day. Mandy talked about how people resisted innovation, and how good ideas could die due to that resistance. She gave a very competent talk on how to help innovation and inventions within the business. This was very interesting as I’m currently in the process of putting forward my first patent for consideration by IBM, she also agreed to help me through that process, which I think will be very useful to me in many aspects.

I’ve also managed to do a fair bit of magic, both for people that know me, and (fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it!) lots of people that I never knew before.. They seemed toi remember me, although I’m hoping thats for all the right reasons