Máximo 1.400 Caracteres – Entrevista a Luis Suarez

A couple of weeks back, just before I took that long weekend holiday break to Tenerife, my good friend Marco Cimino (Marketing Sales manager at Sowre, one of IBM’s Business Partners in Spain) pinged me on Twitter to ask me whether I would be available to conduct an online interview by answering a few questions. Of course, you can imagine how I just couldn’t ignore, nor reject, such kind offer. So I accepted it.

After a couple of tweets and Direct Messages through Twitter itself, we established the best method to answers those online questions was Google Wave (No, not the usual way, I am afraid, no email in this house, remember? :-D). So he went ahead and created a Wave where he dumped all of the interview questions and I would head over there and try to answer each and every one of them. As simple as that. That’s what Wave is supposed to be good at, right?

I should probably talk a bit more in length about my overall user experience with Wave itself, specially since plenty of people keep asking me how it compares to email and whether it would replace email altogether as a communication and / or collaboration tool. However, I am not going to do it on this blog post. Yet, suffice to say that I do see plenty of great value in making use of it, specially within a very powerful scenario: task centric computing for a small reduced number of known collaborators (Basically, executing on the closure of a particular task where all participants know each other very well). But more on that perception at a later time…

For now I thought I would take this opportunity to point you directly to the online interview we conducted so you could have a look into it and perhaps chime in as well in some of the various topics we discussed. The interview itself is available in multiple places, and it’s written in Spanish, so it may also be a good opportunity for those folks who want to polish some of their Spanish skills.

To give you a taster of what the interview was all about, here you have got the questions that Marco sent across and for which I shared my ¢2 accordingly for each of them:

• "Desde hace algunos años te dedicas a impulsar la filosofía 2.0 en una multinacional como IBM; nos puedes explicar en qué consiste tu trabajo?
• IBM redactó en 2005 un documento de Guidelines (http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html) con respecto al uso de los Social Media. Hay 2 puntos que me llaman la atención: intenta añadir valor y sé tú mismo (habla con tu propia personalidad). Son declaraciones en el más puro estilo 2.0! crees que muchas empresas hoy en día están preparadas para salir al descubierto de esta forma?
• Nos podrías resumir las ventajas de la adopción de la filosofía 2.0 en la empresa?
• Muchas veces asociamos el mundo internet con el concepto de “gratuito”, “software libre”, etc. Como conviven, en el mayor fabricante de software comercial como IBM, estos 2 mundos, el software libre y el software comercial? En Internet todo es necesariamente gratuito?
• Sigo con interés y mucha curiosidad tu “experiencia” sin correo electrónico. Donde nace la necesidad de este experimento?
• Y después de más de 2 años cuáles son tus conclusiones al respecto? Es posible vivir son correo electrónico? Qué ganaríamos con ello?
• En un reciente post en tu blog nos hablas de un momento histórico en IBM. El momento en que Lotus Connections 2.5 se ha convertido en la plataforma estratégica de colaboración y gestión del conocimiento que será utilizada por los 500ks empleados de la compañía. De qué forma cambiarán los hábitos y la manera de relacionarse de las personas?
• Porqué es tan revolucionaria una solución como Lotus Connections? En que ámbitos las empresas deberían prestarle atención?
• Unas lecturas (libros, artículos, blogs) que sugieres para quien quiera iniciarse a la filosofía 2.0?
• Un lugar para visitar (real o virtual)?"

Lots of meat in there, I know! For those folks out there who may want to check out an English version of the interview you may want to have a look into this link (Google Translate did a pretty decent job at it, I must confess) to get a good glimpse of what we discussed… Hope you enjoy it just as much as we did going through it.

From here, I just want to take this opportunity to send across a very special thanks! to Marco for inviting me to take part of the interview and share some, hopefully, interesting insights on how the 2.0 philosophy is changing not just the way we do business, within the corporate environment, but also how we behave ourselves as knowledge workers, and humans!, in this brave new world of Social Computing versus the traditional Personal Computing we have been doing for a couple of decades already.

Thanks ever so much, Marco! It was a great pleasure and plenty of good fun going through it! And surely look forward to further interactions! 😉

Tags: Interviews, Marco Cimino, Sowre, Business Partners, BPs, Google Wave, Wave, Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Conversations, Dialogue, Communication, Connections, Relationships, email, Productivity, Re-purposing Email, No-Email, Challenge Your Inbox, Progress Reports, Thinking Outside the Inbox, Information Overload, A World Without Email, Empresa 2.0, Colaboración 2.0, Colaboración