IBM insiders say CEO Arvind Krishna downplayed impact of email troubles, asked for a week to sort things out IBM CEO Arvind Krishna on Wednesday addressed the company's ongoing email woes in his monthly video message to employees. Krishna, we're told, said the email disruption only lost the company one deal worth about $10,000 and he said the situation would be fully fixed in a week. The chief exec's comments appear to address The …
Indeed, when I was blue I regularly got cascaded emails,through many layers of manager, usually saying something along the lines of someone I'd never met doing a job I didn't know existed has moved to a new role that sounds made up, and someone from a department that sounds utterly superfluous is now taking over. It really was moving the chairs around on the Titanic.
Maintaining your inbox is "work" for a lot of IBM staff. I was once contacted by a customer to report that my task manager had just opened then responded to an email she had sent him 3 months perviously. I requested help for him from his line manager who later told me he had had 70k unread emails in his in box. His was instructed to delete the oldest 60k of them and sort out the other 10k by the end of the week.
Sounds about right, I am sent 80 emails a day of which about 80% are utter drivel on some woke initiative or another and why I should care.At the moment the broken system has reduced these to 0 as I have received nothing for 3 weeks. Senior leaders not even acknowledging the issue its a joke, I have to update iphone mail to see if I can synch and get 6 emails a day, no idea if I have missed client emails bar calling them to ask if they have sent anything. Its a total joke.
A lot of e-mails are related to automation and so are never technically read by humans unless something goes wrong or you are checking results. Granted, HR and the executives are rather bad about filling your inbox with drivel, but what company does not have that? [and don't tell me Google or Apple or Microsoft, as I know people at all three, so...]. The are efforts to convert the automation and so forth over to Slack and other methods (Dashboard type things), in effect modernizing some, these mail problems will probably be a "nudge", might be good in the long run.
On one project I was at. The Client blocked internet access to the IBMers on the project when he realised they were spending two or three hours a day on being IBMers. Answering stupid emails, filling in HR forms, doing pointless power point courses so they could be labelled “certified … “ etc. etc,
The move did not end up increasing their productivity as they had to do all the crap at home and were knackered by the time they got to the office.
“ I literally cannot believe that IBM was running off Notes on someone else's kit. It's bad enough they were using Notes (although understandable since it's their crappy product), but why on earth was it cloudified at all?”
Notes does much more than just email.
It’s a bit like sales force. It’s a database that runs a load of business logic. Some of that logic happens to be an email client. Other bits of logic will be mundane things like registering for mandatory training, accessing the network with your MacBook, requesting access to another site, etc etc etc, almost endless possibilities.
No one really works that way anymore but plenty of businesses still running notes hidden in their dc’s for some use case no one remembers what for.
Notes?
Ah yes, I remember struggling with that pile of dog's droppings. It was as far as I was concerned jack of all trades and most definitely master of none. The email side of it was appalling and in comparison with Exchange was an absolute nightmare. The database side was so convoluted that I had to keep a crib sheet near me whenever I was forced to use the bloody thing.
Luckily we only had to use it for those things that came from our employer who had contracted for the support of the call centre we were working at. The call centre's system was, thank God, based on Microsoft stuff and speaking as a committed Linux user I do not say that lightly.
The migration might be a nasty, sticky business for IBM at the moment but providing that they don't just run Notes in-house they may well be grateful in time.
I used Lotus Notes at a previous company.
I remember disliking it...slow and complex compared to Unix mail...but the main thing I remember is that {filters rules scripts} whatever you call automated categorization of incoming messages, was very difficult to set up correctly, and I managed to configure mine badly enough that I got a call from the admin telling me to delete them, as I was impacting the mail server performance!
Rules seem to be one thing that Microsoft got right in Outlook
A company I was at tuped a lot of back office staff over to one of the big banks which used Notes, we were an Exchange company. Funnily enough the office they were moving to was only just up the street.
They all went over 1 day for some Notes email training before moving. They all came back shell-shocked at how bad it was in comparison.
They’d all been asking “can it do this, can it do that” type questions and the answer was pretty much No in all cases.
So, kind of what Microsoft had originally intended Public Folders to be in Exchange pre-2000 days, with custom business automation sucked in from the Mail for workgroups product.
Thankfully, my only experience with Notes was installing the client, for which I am gratefull.
(Also thankfully, [RedactedCo] is only using public folders to hosts shared calendars, and even then we are pushing them to shared mailbox accounts for that functionality, even if it's more of an administrative headache, and once we get exchange connected for full hybrid in the next year or so, that will probably migrate to teams or something.)
So we had a nice round of redundancies, where all the highly experienced staff walked off with nice deal, then the next Qtr we find we cannot bid on anything new as no highly experienced staff available, those who stayed are stuck doing extensions or existing delivery and no one allowed to do unbillable work. Its a farce and they wonder why we cannot win new business that is competitive. The single most poorly lead company I have ever seen. So currently having to no bid deal after deal as we cannot find competent technical staff. But is ok we are on a recruitment drive, anyone want to join we have great IT...
When a contract goes out for tender, rarely is it the most expensive that gets the contract, usually it is amongst the cheapest with a reputation for being slightly less crap than those in a similar price bracket. IT companies know this and also know that after a couple of years the majority of customers will be dissatisfied enough to look for someone new to f...up their IT for them.
End result is a constant merry-go-round of customers moving from one badly run service to another. So sadly there will always be enough people looking to change supplier to ensure that even the worst IT services companies will have no shortage of new customers.
Well, it seems most IT clients have figured they can go directly to Tata, EPAM, IBA, Wipro and Infosys. They dont need to splice IBM or HP in between them and the low cost engineers.
Or they go to Google, Amazon, 1&1, Hetzner and MSFT for cloudy stuff.
And if something is mission critical, there are specialist development consultancies around, with much better engineers than you can ever get from the "computer" companies.
IBM can by now only attract expensive sales reps and cheap engineers.
SLACK is a royal PITA.
Workspace overload, multiple channels, sometimes multiple channels dealing with the same problem but with different members. Direct messages ping up on all workspaces so suddenly there's a raft of message alerts when there really is only one.
Suddenly you are wondering where you saw information from someone. Was it Email? Was it SLACK? If it was SLACK, which channel....
I am not a fan!
So you sell your e-mail system to another company who decide to cut you off. And you roll over and take the hit. What happened to IBM getting its way because it's the 600 lb gorilla? I'm reminded of another incident where a large company (now formerly large thanks to a shift in how people take pictures) got shafted by a supplier of hardware for its new "digital revolution" and said "Oh, OK". Come to think of it, that supplier also went under in a way, being bought by a company that was bought by another company that lost its own way and is now best known for annoying cruft supplied with printers.
All of which tells us that we're in an asylum run by idiots.
Of course it does, firstly you need to submit a 10 page document outlining the reasons for said privileges to your line manager. After which s/he will inform you that that document was superseded by one available on one of their lotus/slack/intranet/cloud/watson/cognos/mainframe resource sites . they cant remember which .
After filling in the new document you must then get sign off from 2 other line managers ( who happen to have nothing to do with the platform at all ), attend a 3 day internal on line course ( only available in 1 months time, seriously WTF????? ) , do a 10 minute 10 question Q&A with 100% pass, Wait another week for HR to issue the certificate of completion.
Once you have said certificate you then need to email it to (oh wait ..... )
The Notes Domino servers were running in HCL SmartCloud Notes, but will now be running on IBM gear in some IBM data centre, right? The irony here is long before either HCL or SmartCloud came into the picture, where do you think all this was being run? Reminds me of Doctor Number 4's time in E-Space (OG Doctor Who, Season 18, series 3 - "Full Circle").
It would probably have been cheaper (and simpler) for them to just buy out the cloud service that was being discontinued and make it 'private' to IBM only.
'We are too busy with customer systems' is a terrible excuse. Why would I trust my data with a company that can't keep its own moving.
But on the other side, I lasted about a few months being TUPE'd to IBM and having to use Lotus Notes was a pretty close tie to the management and culture as being 'the worst thing'. So maybe IBM is now suddenly a lot more efficient...
The failure of the email migration, this person said, is the result of incompetent people.
And why do you have incompetent people? Hmmmm... maybe it has something to do with Manglement wanting to get rid of older, more experienced employees?
Almost pub time, gonna read On Call, then BOFH... then kick back and relax.
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