Tech Update: As a leader of a technology company, you have to have your own IT roadmap, as well as a roadmap for your customers. So, knowing what you know about the future of technology, what should be the top five priorities for business and technology executives?

Zollar's Top 5 IT Priorities
		Lotus' general manager says IT and business managers should focus on solutions that address these top five challenges: 1. Information overload 2. Total cost of ownership (TCO) of technology 3. Return on investment 4. Locating and retaining tech expertise 5. Ongoing training to keep up with the rate of change

Zollar: The five priorities, I think, are tied to challenges that they're dealing with--that organizations deal with. I'll tell you one that I hear about all the time from people is information overload. There was a study recently by the University of California, Berkeley, which said that in the next three years, the world will generate as much information as has been generated in the preceding 300,000 years of the entire course of human history. And, I think most of us feel like it's headed toward our inbox. So, how do I deal with this massive onslaught of data? I've got too many e-mails. It's all in the area of information overload. I think that there's also great concern--especially in this economy--about return on investment and total cost of ownership--really getting the most out of what I'm spending on these technology investments that I make. Organizations are very concerned about retention of expertise. I hear that all the time.

The retirement-eligible population inside of many organizations is starting to frighten them. The U.S. Government is probably the best example. And, just consider the rapid rate of change that we're living in. Going back as far as five years, I think, all of us believe that the world moved a little slower. Now that it seems to be moving faster and faster, the question is: Are the organizations and teams that are critical to our success keeping up with it?

Tech Update: So, what is Lotus doing to help businesses address those priorities and do you practice what you preach?

Zollar: That set of problems--that set of priorities--are many of the things that we focus on in providing solutions for Lotus. We like to think of ourselves as being the people part of e-business. We enable the minds of e-business by focusing on tools that help people communicate and collaborate with each other, tools that help people really deal with information overload, knowledge gaps, and all these other challenges that organizations face. As for how we are using it here at Lotus, we have a mantra around here of "we eat what we sell." Some call it eating your own dog food. We have members of our staff who rail at the thought of eating dog food. But we certainly use our products very heavily. Everybody at Lotus is a Notes user and a SameTime user. We've got some tremendous use of e-learning to deal with this rate of change since we've increased the rate as which we're introducing new products. If we have a new salesperson that comes on board, their sales training experience is an e-learning experience as well as their overall training as a part of IBM. We're using our knowledge-management tools to help filtrate the right information to our sales specialists. We called it the KNAC. Knowledge Architecture Center is what I believe KNAC stands for. It is our portal that allows our sales people to get information on competitors' products, our latest wins and all the great news about our current product set. We believe very, very strongly in implementing this stuff for our own folks. The end result is getting more productivity out of your people, getting more out of less. That's what all of us are faced with. And, again, I think that's what Lotus software helps customers do.

Tech Update: Lotus' annual love-fest--Lotusphere--is coming up. What's going to be the big takeaway for your attendees?

Zollar: We're going to talk a lot about our vision. We're going to talk about the way that we see our collaborative technologies evolving. Lotus invented collaboration. A lot of people have given us credit for that. And, we certainly have been very successful in providing collaborative solutions to customers in 80 countries around the world--all over different industries. It's been a real tremendous thing to be a part of. But, people want to know what's happening next with collaboration. They see a lot of small start-ups, and they think--maybe these guys have some interesting ideas. The world wants to hear from Lotus in terms of our vision of collaboration; that collaboration moves from being a separate application to being a feature in every application that people use. So, stated another way--you don't want to have to jump into your e-mail program to send an e-mail. You want to be able to do it in-line with the work processes that you are involved with. So, suppose you've got a portal that aggregates the kinds of things that you are interested in. If you're working with a CRM application or a supply chain application, you want to be able to deal with the collaborative capabilities in that context. So, we are introducing a technology vision that will support this evolution to the next generation of collaboration.

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