 | Level: Introductory Scott Laningham (scottla@us.ibm.com), Podcast Editor, IBM developerWorks
01 Apr 2008 Listen to a chat about a new Rational® RFE community on
developerWorks.
developerWorks: I'm Scott Laningham for developerWorks. We're here to talk
about the new Rational RFE community. Joining me are Beth Friday, vice president of
Rational's Worldwide Client Support, and David Salinas, developerWorks project lead
for this new application. Thank you both for doing this.
Salinas: No problem.
Friday: Thank you, Scott.
developerWorks: Beth, what is the Rational RFE community?
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Guest: Beth Friday
Beth Friday is the vice president of Rational's worldwide client support.
She is responsible for the global technical support, client services, and
product-quality functions for the IBM Software Group, Rational Division.
She joined the IBM Rational team in 1997 and has more than 20 years of
experience in technical, account management, and business operations
management positions. She is dedicated to the pursuit of results and measurable customer success.
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Friday: Scott, the Rational RFE community is an online application delivered
through developerWorks, which is allowing us to collect information for submissions, for
searching and collaboration around requests for enhancements on products that comprise
the Rational portfolio. Our goal here is to really give our customers early exposure to
new ideas and to allow the community to expand on those ideas as they are submitted.
What you would be able to see is individual requests that are submitted through the
portal and the ability to track those, the progress against those requests, and offer
additional information will be available through this online application.
Salinas: So Beth, would you say this is sort of equivalent to Rational's version of Bugzilla?
Friday: Absolutely. And really, the allure of Bugzilla and really where
we've seen some success with these types of applications is the exposure to a broader
audience, to an entire community. And in the past, our model was a very 1:1 model
— meaning we would speak with an individual client or perhaps groups of
clients, but we didn't have the broad exposure to the larger community that has a
very broad set of needs and a very broad set of good ideas that we could take in to incorporate into future products.
developerWorks: Now, what about the "Why should I care?" answer on this? I mean,
those things are all interesting, but, you know, how is this community important to
IBM Rational and developerWorks altogether?
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Guest: David Salinas
David Salinas is a Web application developer and has been on the
developerWorks team for four years. He has been with IBM since 1999 and
has attained numerous patents during that time. He is a project lead who
focuses on providing improvements to the developerWorks site, such as code
search and the Rational RFE community application. He is an avid RTS gamer
who is passionate about delivering results and improving the user experience.
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Friday: Well, "Why should I care?" That's a great question. And I think one of
the things as a service provider that we need to be very aware of and very much more
open on is the notion of what is going to be delivered next. You know, all of us have a
set of business objectives that we need to deliver to our individual communities, and
we need to be able to plan, and this application is going to allow us to have more
transparency on what's coming next. What are the priorities? What types of things can I
plan or can I leverage for my own community or for my own installation within the
confines of the work that I'm doing as an individual customer, as an individual client?
Salinas: And I would add to that in order to care, you first really need to
sort of understand the acronym. So the name RFE community: The "RFE" part is Request
For Enhancement. So I think that's important because that's sort of what our objective
here is. You know, we want to create a sense of community. We want to gather people's
input into the Rational products to get what they feel are issues and discuss them. And
additionally, and probably more importantly, is to get ideas of what they would like to
see in a product — you know, their requests for the enhancements to the
Rational products by ClearCase® and ClearQuest® and so forth.
Friday: Exactly. And businesses change, the industry is evolving, and new
ideas are brought to the table every day. And this is a great way for us to capture
information early and to start sharing these ideas within a broader community and
really distill through, you know, which items and which ideas are the most important
and will bring the most benefit to our client base.
developerWorks: Beth, how did Rational respond to customers' needs before
this? And how have things evolved? I mean, I know there were past efforts, but I'm
assuming that technology has made the way that you all can address this a lot more effective now.
Friday: Yes, absolutely. You know, we're taking advantage of newer technology
to improve our service interface. You know, historically, what we had a very manual
process. It was very much dependent upon conversations between individuals and/or
groups of individuals. This application is going to allow us again to extend that
conversation to a broader community and allow us to really solicit information and
input from a very much more vast set of industries, as well as client base that we
don't always reach and we couldn't reach through our previous more-manual process.
Secondarily, and probably even more importantly, this application is going to allow us
to have more robust closed-loop communication mechanism. It was very difficult in the
more-manual process to have a way to get back to clients in a timely manner to say "This
issue is going to be addressed in this product, in this way." Through this community,
what we're hoping is that we'll have that visibility and as these ideas emerge and, as
they are incorporated into our products, our entire user community will be able to see,
you know, what's happening and how these new features will be implemented into our current product line.
Salinas: And let me add to that. You said closed-loop communication, and I
want to sort of break this down for developers. I don't want people to get scared off.
That, you know, in development from a standpoint of looking at the application,
traditionally, say it's either black box or white box. And what I think what we're
trying to do here is that we're trying to make this more transparent and more
collaborative. And so we're going from a sort of black-box sort of paradigm to a more of
white box, where you can sort of see what's going on, and we're getting back to you and
you don't feel like the communication is going into a black hole. Now, you know, the
first effort here is not going to be a full white box. It's more like a gray box, if
you will. But that's our goal, is to go in that direction. So I think this is what
people have probably been dreaming and hoping for and had on their Christmas list for
the last couple years. And so I think we're moving in that direction. So Santa's been
listening. [LAUGHTER]
Friday: I love that. And you know, that term "gray box" is very accurate
because, again, we're always looking for feedback. And I'd love to hear from all of you
to say, "Is this working? How can we have better communication?" We're not going to be
perfect on day one — and certainly need to work with our extended community to figure
out what types of communication are needed and what types of responses are most
beneficial and most helpful in the context of your business.
developerWorks: Now, I know, Beth, you guys came to developerWorks, and David
here, to help make this happen. Talk about that. Why did you make that decision? What was that relationship about?
Friday: Well, I'll tell you — developerWorks for me was really
the natural place to go. developerWorks is an established community. There's lots of
great information out there. And we're hoping really to have one-stop shopping over
time, you know, having more streamlined sets of applications so clients can come in and
they can not only inquire and look into the requests for enhancement portals, the
Rational RFE community, but certainly can also find all other types of great information
that can help advance their thinking and/or advance understanding around the Rational
and in general, software development practices.
Salinas: Yes, Rational probably wouldn't admit to this, but I'm assuming that
one of the reasons why they came to us is the Jolt Award. You know, in one word,
that, I think, sort of describes what we developerWorks is good at. And we've been
recognized for that. And I'm sure everyone who is listening to this podcast is
familiar with the Jolt Awards. It's sort of like the Oscars for our industry.
And you know, what I believe developerWorks is great at — and Beth sort
of spoke to — is creating that sort of ecosystem, one place to go to get
all the great information you need, the content that you need and additionally, the
tools that you need.
And what developerWorks' general strategy is, moving forward, is to, you know, keep a
pulse of what's going on in the industry. And we're trying to build in those things
that are happening as far as trends out in the world also developerWorks. And so we're
very cognizant of building a community and pulling everything together because I think
one issue that, you know, people have is that being saturated with data or information
overload. And what we want to try and do as developerWorks is pull it all together, to
simplify things, you know, sort of the KISS paradigm — Keep It Simple,
Stupid.
I think what you see with this particular community, the Rational RFE community Web
site, is that in action. And I'm very proud of what we've done so far, and I think
that the road map that we have and where we're going to take it is going to make people very, very happy.
developerWorks: That was great affirmation, wasn't it? The Jolt Hall of Fame
Award is what you're talking about. And, wonderful affirmation for what
developerWorks is all about. Now, David, developerWorks is hosting the Rational RFE
community. Is there something special about that aspect of it that you want to mention?
Salinas: Well, you know, what I would like to add there is that we have other
major projects and efforts on building community. But what we really ...
developerWorks sort of hasn't been focused on is sort of focusing that into relating
directly to brands and to products. And I think the Rational RFE community hopefully
could be the wave of things to come in that particular area where developerWorks hasn't
really focused upon. And I think it was Rational that really saw that and saw the
possibility and came to us, and we agreed and said, "You know what? We should be adding
this to the capabilities that are offered at developerWorks."
developerWorks: So there's a plan really to incorporate it into the overall site experience then?
Salinas: Yes. I don't think we are ready to talk about all those things yet,
but I personally know that they have been discussed because I've been in those
discussions, and we want to pull the Rational RFE community closer into developerWorks
so that it's not so siloed. And I think Rational wants that as well because ultimately,
like what Beth was saying earlier, was that people come to developerWorks to get the
content to get information about Rational and their products and so forth. And it
would be great if we could tie all that content back into this community that we're
creating, Rational RFE, about, you know, what enhancements do we like to see to the
product? Or what problems they're having with the product. And discussions they have
around those things, and understanding and getting responses back from the developers at Rational that are working on this.
developerWorks: Sounds good. Beth, let me go back to you for a closing
thought, if I could. Any closing thoughts that you'd like to share on this?
Friday: OK. Really, I would like to encourage everyone that we need to have
feedback. I would really encourage you to go out and take a look at the
application. And certainly, we have our Rational Development Conference scheduled for
June 1st through the 5th in Orlando, and if you're going to that conference or if you
have not yet registered, please do. We're going to have lots of information and lots
of folks there ready to talk to you about all parts of the portfolio. And certainly,
we're going to be previewing and officially launching the developerWorks site for the
RFE community. So we'd love to hear from you. We'd love to hear your ideas. And
again, we're going to evolve this, we need to mature in our ability to get back to you
all of you with meaningful answers so you can try the results within your
organizations that you need to meet your success criteria. So certainly, please,
stay in touch and go out there and try the application. We'd love to hear from you.
Salinas: I would like to add to that, and Beth did a great job describing.
There's something on the actual site that probably you're not going to know until you
go to the site itself, Rational RFE community. But to show you how important we feel
it is to get feedback from you, the listeners that listen to this podcast right now,
what we've done is, you can go to Rational RFE community, and you can select a product
for enhancement or whatnot. You can select a Web site, Rational RFE community is in
that selection. And so you can then go and say, "Hey, for this Web site, I would like
to see these things." And believe me, we see these incoming requests, and we'll
respond, and we'll listen to what you're saying because it really is sort of like
bounds testifying in the product development. Right now the bounds are very small, but what we want to hear is where you want to push those bounds so we can consider them. I we will extend in that direction if we think it makes sense because, ultimately, the is only going to be successful if you find it useful and important.
Friday: Absolutely, David. Definitely, we want to hear from folks. And
again, we're learning, so we're learning as we go along, and we really rely on all of
you to come back and tell us what's working and what's not.
developerWorks: Very good. Of course, people will want to know how to get to
the Rational RFE community: That link is ibm.com/developerworks/support/rational/RFE.
And you can find it in the show notes for this podcast at ibm.com/developerworks. Beth
Friday, vice president of Rational's Worldwide Client support, and David Salinas,
developerWorks project lead for the new Rational RFE community — thank you both.
Friday: Thanks, Scott. And I really appreciate getting some time to talk to folks. So thank you.
Salinas: Thanks, Scott. And hopefully, we'll get to hear from you soon.
developerWorks: Absolutely, David. Again, find more information on this
topic in the show notes for this podcast at ibm.com/developerworks/podcast. I'm
Scott Laningham. Talk to you next time.
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About the author | 
| | Scott Laningham, host of developerWorks podcasts, was previously editor of developerWorks newsletters. Prior to IBM, he was an award-winning reporter and director for news programming featured on Public Radio International, a freelance writer for the American Communications Foundation and CBS Radio, and a songwriter/musician. |
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