New ventures, back to CICS...

Well in a traditional complete change to my IBM career I have moved once again. This time out of the recruitment / talent / innovation space, into the world of product management for CICS.

For those of you that don't know about CICS, this is a family of software products supporting transaction processing, mainly on mainframes. I have taken on product management responsibility for CICS Transaction Gateway (connector between CICS and J2EE Application Servers, such as WebSphere) and TX Series (transaction processing for distributed platforms).

So a lot to learn, but very exciting as I'm working with a great team. So expect blog posts to have a very different flavour for a while, if indeed my writing motivation picks back up.

Management Institute, Business Voice, Extreme Blue

No blogging for a while now, so just wanted to do a very quick update which I'll expand on more over the next few days

1) Just back from Management Institute. Verdict - Some good education, and most importantly a great opportunity to network with other IBM managers and find out more about the challenges fancing them, along with solutions.

2) Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Editors' Dinner for Business Voice Magazine, to debate the subject "Social networking or flexible working: what’s changing organisations more?" Was certainly an interesting discussion, although the debate topic seemed to be a little contrived for the sake of being confrontational! But some really interesting discussion. More on that when the article comes out

and finally...

3) Extreme Blue 2008 is underway! Much more to come on that when I get the time.

OnRec Tour Signup

Following on from my talk at OnRec, I'd be very happy to meet people in world to to discuss Virtual Worlds as a recruitment platform and give a guided tour of some of IBM's projects. If you are interested in participating, simply add a comment to this post and we can schedule a time to meet.

Virtual Interviews

A quick blog post to highlight some of the excellent work done by our colleagues in France for using virtual worlds as a platform for conducting interviews.

The event was for Global E-Business Masters students, and involved running a string of successive interviews on the IBM University Relations island in Second Life. In this instance speech was supported through skype, rather than using in world chat but the event was very successful in improving the interview process from simply conducting telephone interviews.

This was the first event of its kind on the Uni Relations island, and certainly gave lots of food for thought about how to run future events.

Many thanks to Olivier Sirven for organising and running this excellent event.

Ghostbusters for hire...

Sorry for the lack of blogging activity recently, as the previous post suggests a lot of my time has been spent doing "housy-type things". However this weekend saw the culmination of numerous weeks of effort leading to completion of the famed Ghosbusters car for my friend Allan's stag do.

Highlights of the car include:

• Working LED Message Board on rear.


• Flashing lights, powered by re-directed sun-roof.


• External speakers (meant for boat), capable of playing siren and theme tune.


• Giant satelite dish / fly swat.

Unfortunately they would not let us drive round the Nurburgring, but all in all a cracking weekend.

Moving house...

Apologies for the lack of blogging lately, but as some of you know I've been moving house lately which is know mean feat! Did give me a little bit of time to reflect how the quality of service could have been improved from the vendor, estate agent, solicitor and especially the mortgage company(!) using a few web 2.0 methodologies.

The amount of time I had to contact people to say "What's the latest..." was ridiculous, and could have been made so much easier if I simply had access to all the relevant data.

Of course if that was possible, there probably would be little need for an estate agent. Hmmm, a plan with no draw backs?

(picture courtesy of http://www.rics.org/)

Blog a big hit in Alaska!

Ok, so that is not entirely true as Alaska just shows up as part of the US for people viewing my blog but it did make me smile for a minute.

I was however very impressed by the volume of data that Google Analytics has to offer, and whilst I'm not exactly setting the blogging community on fire with the number of hits I get, it is at least pleasing to see that every now and again someone reads what I have to say.