Entries Tagged 'EMC' ↓

Recently, Chuck Hollis wrote about discovering an army of EMC ambassadors on Twitter, and I shared a comment with him about how I really enjoyed the organic growth of passionate people into a new realm.  If you read Chuck’s blog at all you’re aware of EMC’s methodology for encouraging social media use among its employees and the importance of our internal community site in that process.  As I was reading some posts on EMC|ONE this morning I realized that while we spend a lot of time talking about how we’re all ambassadors for our brand to the Internet at large, we really haven’t talked about how we’re all internal ambassadors of our employment brand (our culture) to the rest of our employees.

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I’ve been working on the ControlCenter Online User Community, which I’ve talked about here.  Now it’s time to announce another EMC Community Network, the EMC Proven Professional Community.  My colleague Gina has all the details, and has been involved in working at it for some time now.

I don’t often post about the day-to-day details of my job.  Whether it’s just boring or actually confidential, I don’t often get into specifics.  But today I was faced with an interesting and practical question.

My manager forwarded me some excerpts from Customer Satisfaction Surveys done during December of 2008. These were from ControlCenter customers who had service requests completed during the month and were asked some questions and given the chance to comment. Obviously these were customers who were already unhappy, having been forced to file service requests in the first place.  There were a number of comments which weren’t very flattering — both about issues in the product, and about our field response to those issues.
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I just got word of a new EMC voice out there, blogging, Hans-Jürgen Rau.  His blog, IT Truly Does Matter, is hosted in Germany and is written in German.  I’m not aware of any other non-English EMCer blogs (though I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more – I’ll update the post if I hear of any).

So, if you speak German (or if you want to give the auto-translator a try; there is one on the page) swing by the site and say Guten Tag!

It sounds like the Online User Community is about to graduate from “pilot” as we speak.  A few thousand emails have either been sent or are being sent, inviting licensed ControlCenter users to come join the community.  If you haven’t gotten an email and think you should have, feel free to contact me and I can put you in touch with the right people.  I know some of you had expressed interest before.

As of earlier this morning nearly 300 new registrations had gone through.

I’m excited about where this is going to go next.

I’m not saying SRM software sucks.  But it seems to be what I’m hearing around the web in the couple days following Storagebod’s recent posts.

In followup comments, posts, and tweets, people are talking about why Storage Management software isn’t up to par with what customers want, why vendor support is lacking, and whose fault it all is.  EMC ControlCenter is getting its fair share of bashing along the way, but we’re not just talking about ControlCenter here, we’re talking about the state of the industry.

There are two directions the conversation needs to go from here.  One is talking about standards-based management for heterogeneous environments, how we got to where we are and where we need to go from here.  The other is how we can improve what we have today.  That second half, that’s more where I can hopefully come in.
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I know what you’re thinking.  I’ve created a provocative headline to lure you in, and the actual post that follows is going to be nowhere near as interesting as the title.  Maybe you’re right, in which case I apologize.  But this post came about as an extension to some conversation I’ve had recently with people at EMC, on the subject of change, turmoil, and heightened expectations.  And when I put it like that, maybe there are some comparisons I can draw between Barack Obama and my work environment.
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By now, you’ve seen the press releases and read the entries on my colleagues’ blogs.  EMC Atmos is officially a product, and now all the speculation about Cloud Optimized Storage can end, and the arguing about what the product can and should do can begin.

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I was unable to attend this year’s EMC Innovation Conference, but had a lot of fun reading up on it, and was excited to use it as an excuse to meet up with some EMC folks from near and far who were in the area.

It got me thinking, of course, about the scope of innovation here at EMC, and at other businesses.  What makes an idea innovative?  If you simply take something you’re already doing and execute against it better, are you innovating?  Or are you just trimming fat?  Is innovation something we’ll know when we see?
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ROI is a magic code word in business.  It stands for the ruthless bean-counters who ask one simple question in response to any proposal.  What will I gain if I do it?

As I and others have written, EMC is investing in social media, both externally and internally.  While it’s easy to quantify that investment, defining the return can be a bit harder.  How do you measure the brand perception among decision makers?  Among potential new hires?  Among employees?  Or, from my standpoint, how do you know if your workforce is more engaged, more involved, and more connected?
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