Improving Customer Communications: The Tivoli User Group Site

Technology guru Paul Graham—best known for selling Viaweb to Yahoo in the late nineties—says the mission statement of all businesses can be abstracted into something quite simple: You make something people need, and you refine it over time to meet that need more perfectly.

If you accept that premise, it follows that business success is a function of strong customer communications. If a business loses touch with its customer base, the consequences can range from the subtle to the catastrophic. At best, the business will be perceived as aloof and unresponsive by customers. At worst, problems in service or solutions will go unaddressed, and core products will be abandoned by customers in favor of competitive offerings.

Furthermore, customers get an improved product experience if they can communicate with each other also. Many times, a solution is available from technical peers faster than it is from conventional resources, such as the solutions vendor. For these reasons, improving customer communications is a mission-critical challenge for virtually any business.

Benefiting Customers Globally
The Tivoli User Group Site (TUG), sponsored by IBM, is specifically designed to meet that challenge, leveraging the Internet’s ubiquity and convenience to the benefit of Tivoli customers worldwide. Comprised of some 127 different user groups covering topics from storage to security, these groups serve as a potent means for Tivoli customers to get the information they need and accelerate time-to-solution, translating directly into a more productive, more profitable business process.

How successful is the User Group site? The numbers speak for themselves. TUG has passed the 17,000 member milestone, and year-over-year growth is remarkable; in July 2008, year-to-date growth was already at 47%. Furthermore, IBM is as committed to participation in the site as to customers themselves. Of the total site membership, 2,078 members are IBM employees, approaching a one-in-eight ratio.

Tivoli solutions are deployed worldwide, of course, and this means the Tivoli User Group has a strong global profile. While 67 – more than half – of the User Groups are based in the U.S., there are another 24 with a European focus, and 27 Asian User Groups also participate. This international participation means emerging challenges in different markets get the optimized responses their customers demand. It also means IBM is continually in a position to evaluate user satisfaction and consolidate user requests from every corner of the world, leading in short order to new technical features and the refinement of old ones.

Communicating Beyond the User Group
Of course, user groups are only one form of customer communications featured on the site. Another primary resource used by Tivoli customers, for instance, is the TME 10 Tivoli Technical Mailing List, which is hosted by IBM and archived automatically to the Web for future reference. On this list, customers can ask questions in remarkable technical depth on any and all topics pertaining to the performance, availability, configuration, and operations of the Tivoli product suite.

As an illustration of the power of leveraged customer communications in such a list, consider a recent query from a user member who had several questions concerning universal agent implementation with metafiles. Was it possible to support multiple metafiles with one agent? Or would it be better, from a performance standpoint, to implement multiple agents and assign each of them a single metafile? Several responses were volunteered by fellow Tivoli customers inside the same day, answering these questions by pointing out that both configurations would be possible and discussing different scenarios that would be suited to each, along with a pointer to more specific information at a different source.

In this way, a common configuration question was addressed and the original system administrator's problem was solved. Naturally, since particular questions often come up multiple times, users would ideally be able to search the accrued archive of all such questions in the history of the list. For this reason, IBM maintains a subsite dedicated to the list for this purpose, along with specific information about subscribing and formatting questions in a manner likely to elicit a timely, helpful response.

Furthering Education
For those looking for education on broad topics, rather than answers to specific questions, TUG webcasts are available. These informative seminars are tailored to meet customer needs in a variety of different technical areas, ranging from the optimization of best IT practices through Tivoli Unified Process to the convergence and integration of Tivoli and Netcool system management solutions. The webcasts, new instances of which become available on a roughly quarterly basis, are also archived to the site, so if you miss the initial show, a rerun is always available.

The Tivoli Information Exchange offers a wiki-like opportunity for users to create, share, and download articles directly relevant to Tivoli products and best practices. Primary management categories include Server, Storage, Security, Business Application, and z/OS.

For the complete interactive experience, of course, technology is no substitute for face-to-face meetings; toward this end, TUG keeps track of Tivoli User Events, scheduled at different times and places for the convenience of the user base.

Added up, the Tivoli User Group site is a powerful, evolving resource optimized to give customers instant access to relevant information, whether it's the broadest abstractions of 64-bit compatibility or the finest detail of Universal Agent configuration. And in a world where optimized business process leads directly to increased market share, that translates into considerable business value for IBM customers, since they, like IBM, are ultimately driven by customer needs.