The thing that’s playing on my mind is a situation where we have to get a number of the different teams within our organisation all pulling together to make sure an upcoming launch works really smoothly and has maximum impact for our customers. I realised that on Monday when we have some calls on the subject I need to make sure we start from the position of agreeing that we are doing the right thing. Sounds obvious but I have the feeling that people are just doing their jobs and that their hearts are not really in it. Perhaps they don’t feel appropriately ”consulted” up until this point, or they actually have other more pressing things on their mind but we can’t go forward without support.

The tricky thing is going to be phrasing the question in a non-threatening manner that doesn’t make people defensive but instead drives an honest and productive conversation. I was pleasantly surprised the other day to be complemented by someone further up the “food chain” than me that I’d learnt to think a little longer before opening my mouth! Something I’ve been working hard on, speaking the truth without alienating those who I’ll need to work with for months and years to come (hopefully).

I’m currently in the process of applying for a job internally to become the Principle Regional Product Marketing Manager for Security and a lot of the challenges in this new role if I get it will be ensuring that situations like the one I’ve described don’t happen as often in future. Having a consistent flow of communication around current and future product and solution strategy with the various stakeholders internally and externally is critical to our success.

Listening to: Delphic – Acolyte

Let me answer that by asking you this…

I’ve seem to have a reputation at work for speaking my mind without holding back, whoever the recipient may be, peer or exec. This may get me into trouble one day (and probably already has) but I’d rather deal with occasionally clearing up a mess than sit there in a perfectly clean but static environment. I think especially at senior levels within larger organisation the feeling that the people on the ground who come and quiz you know more than you do about some areas of the business. As mentioned before the fear of saying the wrong thing and looking like an idiot leads to skirting round the question. I believe this stems from a mis-perception that great leaders have all the answers. When I ask someone in a role that has a great span of control than mine their opinion on something, I’d rather have their view based on that span of control they have as it will help me in a few ways. Firstly, it will give me an insight into areas that I don’t have (e.g. I think numbers are up and they may be 300% in my area but that is cancelled out by a 10% drop in a much larger area than mine). Secondly, they teach me about the information flow and any improvements that may need to be made to help people make more informed decisions. Thirdly, people just see things differently based on their background and career. I would rather have the benefit of hearing that and add it into my understanding and experience.

So next time I ask a tough question, don’t reflect it back to me as a question please. I’d rather …

You know what, I don’t know for sure but based on my understanding … 

Pretty please.

The usual corporate-PowerPoint-hell exists at Symantec with 50 slide monsters containing everything you ever wanted say written on the slide itself. I apologise if you’ve ever been subjected to one of ours! Personally I try and use whiteboard wherever possible and I’ve been re-thinking the one I usually give recently in the light of our Vontu acquisition.

Vontu as a standalone entity focused on data loss prevention (DLP .. Another fab TLA) which is fundamentally about discovering where your important data exists within your organisation and keeping in the hands of only the people that need it. I think as I’ve been reviewing their messages and slides that the thing that most jumped out at me was the fact that “policy” was the core of all they do. Describe data. Describe access. Describe retention. Discover. Protect and prevent leakage. All those kinds of words and phrases revolve around policies. If you don’t know what your policy is handed down from a legal body, or an internal body, then how on earth are you going to decide how long to keep that pile of emails from your customers?

I think the biggest relief for me though as I discover more about the Vontu technology is that it’s not some toothless auditing or reporting tool but can actually impact and change user behaviour. You can run it in “Monitor/Discover” mode or “Prevent” or both. It’s not hard to build stories when you can impact the behaviour of thousands or millions of interactions of individuals using “our” information within an organisation!

If you searched on our good friend Google for “Symantec appliances” you’d get the following results as the top two:

Symantec turns off on security appliances | The Register

Symantec is scaling down its hardware offering by pulling the plug on a range of network security appliances. The vendor will stop designing and making the …
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/27/symantec_appliances/

Avoid Symantec appliances, says Gartner – vnunet.com

Analyst firm predicts that Symantec will exit market sector.
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2159677/gartner-advises-avoiding

Oh dear, that doesn’t bode well for me in my new role at Symantec where my two focus products at the moment are Enterprise Vault (formerly KVS, archiving software) and the Mail Security 8300 Series appliance! I’ve only been in the role two weeks and I’ve already overheard colleagues describe themselves loosing business because “.. we don’t do appliances”. I repeat, yes, Symantec still make appliances… and they’re very good! They don’t make the hardware, it’s well spec’d Dell kit, but they do everything else involved in getting an appliance developed and with customers.

The communication problem stems from an exit from making appliance hardware and forming a partnership with Juniper that occurred mid-last year. The releases weren’t particularly clear and the press certainly focused on the “stopping making appliances” part of them. I’m still not fully clear on what has happened/is happening with those “SNS” and “SGS” products but “SMS” (Symantec Mail Security) is going strong. Amusingly the road-map code names for the upcoming releases are mountain names which keep getting higher and higher… I hope they’re pacing themselves on the way to Everest! Though I hear sub-ocean mountains are higher…

It’s going to be a challenge reversing the perception that Symantec don’t make appliances and that they are a worthy and safe investment for customers to make but I’m sure our team is up to the task! The most frustrating thing for me so far is working out what is publicly promotable about the products and what is “secret”. Everything seems to be marked “Internal Only” by default and only gets made “External” if someone asks the right person the right question about the right material and they agree. I’m still trying to discover the best way for me to change that without stepping on too many toes or ruffling too many feathers!

The “Blue Monster” is a little project that Steve Clayton (Microsoftie) and Hugh Macleod (of GapingVoid fame). The back story is here and it centres around this little cartoon:

I’ve followed Steve and Hugh separately for a long time and even had the pleasure of meeting Hugh years ago at a Joi Ito meet-up in London and it’s been funny to watch the two worlds collide. If you’ve not heard of the blue monster then go read the back story and come back before you read my thoughts. Otherwise, read on!

My interpretation of the blue monster runs along some thoughts that I’ve had for years about the concept of “Cow paths”. I can’t remember the source of this story but I think it was told by one of the Gillmor Gang on their weekly podcast. The story goes that one university in the USA decided after building its new campus to not lay any paths around the site, between buildings. Instead they let the students walk whichever way was quickest for them. They then returned a year later, looked around and saw the “cow paths” (worn tracks) and laid paths on those. Now the way I think this fits in with the blue monster is that for a long time now people have created pathways at Microsoft and its time for the next generation to make their own. Abandoning the paved stones for the rough grass. Now I’ve recently started walking a new way to the train station that takes me through a patch of grass which for some bizare reason has a wonky cow path on it that doesn’t take the straightest route and I’ve been pioneering a new one and I think its beginning to take shape. However, I have to be careful because people walk their dogs on the grass and though they wouldn’t let them poop on the path, they do let them in the rough. So my take in a nutshell: Make a new cow path, mind the poo.

Now this story takes on another twist today because you may recall my story of trying to get an evangelist job with Microsoft a short while ago. Well I never got round to writing that I didn’t get the job… rejected! Reasons were “not enough experience with the latest version of SharePoint” and “not enough experience taking to groups of 300 plus”. Which I personally thought were very poor reasons… a good evangelist can get their head round almost anything, it’s a personality type, not tied to a specific piece of software.

However, another large software company who I’ve also worked closely with for the last few years thought I was good enough and offered me an evangelist role. That company is Symantec and I start in a few weeks as a “Sales Development Specialist”. It’s going to be very interesting because if Steve et al think Microsoft have a way to go on their transparency then Symantec are miles behind them. I’m yet to discover the boundaries of my open-ness in the new role but as one of the groups I will be charged with enthusing is the channel (partners by another name), I can’t see that being successful behind closed doors. I’m sure I have many lessons to learn, mistakes to make, and frustrations to overcome but I’m really looking forward to it.

I wonder if Steve Clayton will be good enough to meet me sometime and swap tips… How far does the Blue Monster go? (and how often does he check Technorati to see who’s talking about him!)

technorati tags: symantec, blue monster, microsoft, steve clayton

Whenever I talk to people about working with Symantec they always say “Oh yeah, the ones who make the anti-virus … That ruined my computer” … or something similar. These people often include hardcore IT professionals. Take a look at the comments on this high profile ZDNet blog. How on earth are they going to get past this negativity? If you take a look at the products pages on their site you’ll see they do a huge amount in a number of areas.

You know what they should be doing? Getting out there and on these blogs and forums using the abundance of tools out there for tracking what people are saying and countering negative with positive. Engaging with the issues which are often repeated again and again. The excellent Jon Udell recently interviewed Paul English on his weekly podcast who stuck his entire staff on support so they would fully appreciate customers problems. I know 30 staff are different from 16,000 but there has to be some parrells!

technorati tags: symantec, communication

1. Take a large UK based hosting company which claims to be the biggest in the UK
2. Set-up an email only account with them because they do nice cheap Exchange boxes
3. Decide you’re happy with them so open another one for a related company
4. Decide you’re happy with that too and want to add hosting to the domain too
5. “Sorry sir you can’t do that. You have to create another account, delete the old one, re-set up the old mailboxes on the new one, and apply for a refund because it’ll charge you again for the mailboxes”
6. Decide that seeing as they’ve not started using the mailboxes and won’t loose anything its worth the hassle.
7. Do it.
8. Phone the “Customer Service” team to get the refund
9. “Oh no sir they’re different accounts, we don’t give out refunds for that as a policy”
10. “But the man in sales said you would”
11. “No the person is sales would have said you ‘could try’”
12. “Err no”
13. “I’ll put it through to management as a request and we’ll have to take it from there”
14. “Can I make a friendly request that you can put to whatever person you do internally that you make it possible to upgrade an ‘email only’ account to include hosting?
15. “No we can’t do that because they’re different systems. Different servers do different things. So even if we wanted to we couldn’t”
16. [try and explain that it's not a server problem but a problem with their system]
17. “No sorry you need to understand its not possible”
18. [silence as you contemplate if its worth fighting an idiot]
19. “OK. So you’ll but that request in for me?”
20. “Yes”
21. “OK, thanks. Bye.”

I can so see why the point I mentioned before sits so well:

… some enormous percentage of calls to call centres (or is the correct phrase “contact centres” now) are because something has gone wrong. However, they rarely are logged as “complaints” they are just handled. We have armies of people whose only job is to deal with exceptions that if they were captured in a coherent manner could probably be dealt with to stop everyone else suffering the same fate. Of course if you product or company is so dire that it can’t change in response to issues you might as well just give up now!

technorati tags: fasthosts, hosting, business, incompetent, customer, services