The Wall Street Journal's report that Whirlpool is ditching IBM Notes in favor of Google Apps is a big deal, but not in the narrow market-competitive sense. Sure, it's a big win for Google, a big loss for IBM, and a big miss for Microsoft. But it's just one deal. I've always been reluctant to make too much out of a single company's decision to make a particular change, whether of vendors or technologies--no matter how big the enterprise or seemingly tectonic the shift. It is, after all, only one company, and unless the move exemplifies a verifiable trend backed up by solid market data, what it is, is an anecdote.
So to me, this Whirlpool news is not significant because IBM lost a collaboration account and Google, not Microsoft, won that account. What's significant is why Whirlpool made the choice it made.
The Journal says Whirlpool CIO Michael Heim told them "the company wants employees to be able to use the same apps that they favor in their personal lives.
“'We’re trying to shift the whole culture to be consumer-focused,'” Mr. Heim said.
That's about the most succinct description I've seen of the biggest change for IT in this generation of technology, and I think Whirlpool's response to it is going to become the standard operating procedure for IT shops.
Heim is saying that Whirlpool IT's job is not to tell users what to use, but give users what they want. Lots of enterprises are saying that--but Whirlpool's choice of Google Apps over two more "enterprise grade" candidates shows that the company is actually going to act on this philosophy.
The other thing worth noting is Heims's quote. When he talks about being "consumer-focused," he's not using "consumer" in the marketer's sense of consumer vs. enterprise--which role are you in as a user? He means that he's treating his end users as the consumers of a product/service that he, as CIO, is charged with providing them. Again, he's not the first person to talk this way, and he may not be the first person to act this way, but he's probably articulated it better than anyone I've seen in a long time.
So what does this mean for the enterprise? First and foremost, it means knowing how your users work and what they prefer. Heims praised the fact that Google Apps, being Web-based, is ubiquitously accessible, and offers better spontaneous collaboration than meeting-invite-oriented systems like Notes.
That's good news for WebRTC advocates. It suggests that a Web portal model for collaboration, even one subject to the vicissitudes of an unmanaged Internet, could wind up being preferred over a "better" communications experience if that "enterprise-grade" system isn't as flexible. And it suggests that, if Google really does plan to use Hangouts as the communications piece of its collaboration strategy, coupled with Apps, that this could be a powerful combination.
This is not about the inmates running the asylum. Note that Whirlpool isn't just telling end users: Hey, sign up for Google, go nuts, call us if you have any problems. Or: Don't call us if you have any problems.
Instead, IT is contracting for Google Apps and taking responsibility for making sure that users continue to get the good things that drew them to the system in the first place, while hopefully mitigating the problems that tend to plague pure consumer-grade products.
That's pretty much a parallel to what IT has always done, going back to the time when people started using PCs on their own, and even earlier I'm sure, though I'm too young to go back any further than that.
I think this is a significant moment for enterprise IT leaders, and the vendors that supply them: Give customers what they want, provide an enterprise grade of support for it--or risk circling the drain.
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