I attended an IBM event last week where I had a breakthrough epiphany: IBM struggles to communicate the breadth of their product and service offerings in the same way that IT departments struggle to communicate the tools and applications they’ve deployed to their user community.

This problem is compounded by the following facts:

• New employees are always coming on board - thus you need to find a way to continuously communicate your products/services/applications/etc.
• People are busy - so however/whenever you communicate to them, you need to make it relevant at that moment, or they’ll forget it or ignore it.
• Names change - IBM changes product names frequently. IT shops do the same with applications, or merge applications which essentially has the same effect.

So here’s the question: how do you communicate everything you have to offer in a way that’s memorable, continuous and relevant so no one gets missed.

At this event, a lot of discussion was had around this topic. Lots of suggestions were offered: website listings, application catalogs, company newsletters, printed materials, meetings, training sessions, etc. There’s no shortage of possible solutions - but which one is the right one?

The answer: communicate in as many ways as possible - and as often as possible. That may seem like a no-brainer, but let’s face it: we’re all busy.

As I thought about this topic I realized that one group that really does an exceptional job at addressing this problem is the Lotus group within IBM. Here’s a (short) list of the ways I get info about Lotus products/services/etc.:

• Lotusphere - an excellent event that’s entertaining, fun and broken into lots of sessions & tracks making it easy for me to get into the right type of session for whatever my needs are or whatever my function in an organization is.
• Lotus.com - while I think there’s room for improvement on the site’s navigation, its still a great resources.
• Lotus bloggers - an excellent community of people who share code, ideas, successes, failures and all sorts of candid comments about how they use Lotus software in their daily lives
• Wikis - a great source for best practices, documentation, etc.
• Redbooks
• Greenhouse
• OpenNTF.org - a great place to stop by for some application jump-start action
• Events near you - proof of technology events, Lotusphere comes to you, etc. — all great resources to attend to get more information

… the list goes on and on. However, its a great example of how people within the Lotus community share information in a variety of ways. Perhaps the fact that there are so many ways to get information on what’s going on with Lotus products only makes us all that more passionate and vocal about what we want (need) and fuels debates like “how the iPhone should work with Lotus Notes” but, at the end of the day, I think you can agree that the coverage Lotus provides on their offerings is really impressive.

And… perhaps its a model for distributing information about my own company’s IT systems. Now if I can just get them to spring for a company-wide trip to Disney World, we’ll be all set.