Ed Brill

As I announced last month, I am writing a book on social business and the discipline of product management for IBM Press. I've let out an occasional tweet about the effort since then, but thought it might be useful to provide an overall update.

The book is going to be about ten chapters long. The outline covers standard themes like what it means to be a social product manager, what tools to use, and how to work with community, but the book is peppered with "lesssons learned" from the last decade. The examples and case studies should make this book unique from all other social business books, along with contributions. Right now, a half dozen of my friends and colleagues have agreed to contribute one or two-page sidebar observations to the book, and their names and topics will be disclosed as the project moves along.

I am still looking for three or four additional contributors to provide similar observations. If you have a point-of-view to contribute on how you see IBM using social business tools to make better products, I'm interested in talking. For example: How you as a customer or partner view IBM in this context, what we are doing right and perhaps some small room for criticism as well :-)  The deadline is tight, with draft content really due in the next three weeks or so. If you are interested, though, please let me know.

There is a lot more to publishing a book than writing the words. After a few weeks of struggling through it, I moved stuff out of my inbox and local file system into an IBM Connections Activities.
Yes, similar functionality could be accomplished in a fairly simple, hierarchical Notes database. I could run that here on my laptop, but getting it deployed on a production IBM server--for backup if nothing else--would be work (yes even for the head of product management, it's still hard for me to create a file | application | new on a production Domino server). Further, the integration of Activities with Notes means I can do things like assign tasks to others, drag and drop from mail, get notifications from others who contribute, rearrange through drag-and-drop, etc. This took about five minutes to set up. I'm thinking about recommending the SmartCloud version to my publisher :-)



Very grateful for all the input and support my announcement received. I am experiencing the full range of emotions in writing this book that others talk about, but the feeling of accomplishment is the best of them. I can't wait to get this baby out into the real world.

In a few weeks, I'll be ready to share the outline of the book.