Con te partiro

All songs eventually end. So does my internship in IBM. At my last meetings, I discussed the maintenance of my interactive flash forumguide. As all content can be edited in XML this will not be a big problem. For adding extra segments, they have an interactive team that can help them. I also left my email in case of irresolvable problems.

I’m slowly saying goodbye to everyone, thanking them for their effort and for accepting me as a member of the IBM workforce. I made arrangements for giving back my laptop and to check out of IBM.

With less then a week to prepare for my internship congress and my exams, I will need the rest of the time to focus on the end of my school year. This might not be so easy, it turns out that it’s going to be summer after all, with temperatures over 30°C.

I had a good time here, learned a lot about business life and how to work with all kinds of people who all have a different view on their projects. I learned how to script better and more efficient with Flash. I learned how to organize and hold meetings, lead a project and work with another company.
I’ve had a lot of responsibilities and interesting things to do and this all thanks to my wonderful internship coordinator Anne-Marie.

I would recommend everybody who wants a taste of the international business market to work within IBM. But remember that a big company means a bureaucratic process and a lot of guidelines. It really is a challenge to be creative in these kinds of environments.

My Blog will stop, but if you have any questions or remarks, don’t hesitate to send an email to bsteurs@skynet.be

Last meeting with Ogilvy

My last meeting with Ogilvy was this time at IBM. When the representatives of Ogilvy arrived, I guided them from the reception to the meeting room. There I explained in what direction we wanted to go with out movie and how we should combine their 2 scenarios to one solid concept. I also gave some extra information that was needed for them to start working out their first real prototype. Also certain important issues that they didn’t took into account, like the language that should be used, were directed. Furthermore we did a little brainstorming with the support of the 2 marketing representatives of IBM. This briefing will be briefed again by these Ogilvy representatives to their creative team.

On all good stories comes an end. In that spirit stops my cooperation with Ogilvy. If I could, I would finish this project, but unfortunately that is impossible. I really enjoyed my meetings with them and learned many things that you have to take into account while setting up a project like this. My function as project leader will be taken over by the marketing IMC Ann Vanhaeren and the project will continue until August or September. I will still receive information about the progress while I’m back at school during my exams and when I’m relaxing (hopefully without redoing exams) in my vacation. They also promised to invite me on the kick off of the final project so I can see the end of a project that I’ve been part off.

Evaluation

I was invited by my internship coordinator to discuss my evaluation during dinner. She took me to an Italian restaurant and under the afternoon sunshine we mixed business with pleasure. We talked about my 3 months working at IBM and we discussed the good and bad things that happened during my internship. Overall I got a very good evaluation. She was satisfied on almost every segment of my work. We overlooked the evaluation paper and she showed me what my strong points are and on which points I might can do better. These critics are a good luggage to keep in mind for later on.
I’m also satisfied myself of my opportunities and variety of work that I received during my internship.

I would surely recommend students of the 2nd Bachlor to take contact with IBM if you’re interested in working with a large international company. You should ask for Anne-Marie Van Asbroeck, because she did a really nice job during the 3 months I was there.

Last days

As I only got 4 days left, I'm already setting my priorities on what can be done and what can't be finished. I already set up my last meeting with Ogilvy to discuss the feedback on the proposed scenarios and I set up a meeting with the forum responsibles about what I can finish and what the interactive team of IBM must continue. I think that the forumguide will be finished, but the redesigning of the forum site is impossible to do on such a short notice.

On Tuesday I have a meeting with my internship coordinator to discuss my internship and the point that I will receive. This will give me a good view on what I can improve later on in my professional career and what my strong and weak points are.

The public sector project is now on a pause, so I won’t be working on this project anymore. This isn’t such a big problem, because the most interesting part is already over. Only the technical problems and the implementation must still be done.

I think the last days will be hectic, but I’m used to it. Cases on C-MD are even more hectic on the last days :)

Flash Components Scripting

During a meeting with the webdesigner, I got the remark to change a phew things about my Navigation menu. First of all he wanted a hover hand on the menu. For this I had to go inside the component itself to change the cursor style. For an onRollOver event and onRollOut state. I even had to script some functions myself inside the component. The whole actionscript behind 1 simple component amazed me. I know now how you can change different components to my own will and I might make one on my own in the near future. This is a total new way of working with flash for me and it really gave me a new skillpoint to work on.

Meeting with the eID team

I scheduled a meeting with the eID team and a marketing representative to brainstorm about the proposals I received from Ogilvy. I presented the 3 proposals, equipped by the A3 cardboards Ogilvy has given me. With my analysis in my hand I explained the advantages and disadvantages of each concept.

After a brainstorm session we decided to mix 2 concepts together. This blend has both advantages of the concepts and fits more to IBM's strategy and branding then the used concepts. So now I will make a report of it and present our vision to Ogilvy.

Actionscript Animations

The forum guide is getting in shape. The most graphics are final, everything is adjustable in XML, and my own photography is integrated in the design.

To make it look more attractive I started to implement animations like motion tweens and alpha tweens. After a while I thought that making a tween is bad for the total size of the flash file. It also takes a lot of work to implement this in all the movieclips. That's why I switched to animation, totally on actionscript.

I did a lot of research before I started trying it. But with the needed self-study, I learned a bunch of new functions, components and strategies on how to implement them. I also learned to script more organized. I write more global functions that I use in the entire script and I learned how to modify components to my own design.
I feel that my coding is a lot more structured and easier to understand after seeing it a week later. I gained the good habit of commenting so that modifications in the future (when my internship is over) will be made easy.

My whole flash file is adapted to my new style of coding and designing. Now I got only 2 frames for my preloader and 1 for my whole guide. Everything is done dynamically on external XML or actionscript animations.

eID progress

I went back to the Ogilvy Office in Brussels. The creative team has made a presentation with all different potential scenarios’ they made for the eID promotion movie. They came up with 3 ideas which they printed on A3 cardboards. This was an original way of showing, and it is handy to present it to the marketing team at IBM.

We discussed a little bit about the ideas they came up, but now it's up to me to analyze the different scenarios. First of all I will have a meeting with the marketing manager to discuss the ideas, and then I will make a kind of qualitative questionnaire to see which idea is the best for our situation.

I already made a little analyze on the ideas. This together with the analysis of the questionnaire will creative a good overview on what I have to brief to the eID team, who can have the last word in this. If all this is in order, I will have another meeting with Ogilvy, so they can't start developing.

Too bad my stage is almost over so I can't see the final result.

Guide development

After a few meetings with the Forum team, I now have more info on how to change my forum guide. I also got some input on the textual content and about the marketing and communication aspect of the guide. I also saw some functionalities of the previous guide that have to be changed and also the whole site must be adapted and put into a new jacket.

For the images I made a second photo shoot, now with more people visible on the pictures. I brought my tripod to make sharp pictures in the darker area's, where the last time I had trouble getting a good sharp and light photo. I experimented with some techniques and I'm happy with some of the results. I left my tripod here, so I can shoot anytime I want some new photos. As I already got over 500 photos taken, it takes a long time to optimize them all in contrast, brightness, color, levels, etc... So there's more work into it then I thought.

Biotech email

For the biotech event that will take place in June, I had to make a layout for the new email that will be send to a whole list of email of potential participants. I found out that you can use HTML in Lotus Notes, when you import it. So I made a HTML mail with the graphical standards and updated it. I also had to translate some parts of the text to English, which was a good practice for me.

I hope the email will be successful and the event has a high rate of participants.

FlashXML is finaly bowing for me

After a great effort of self-study and trying out, FlashXML & component scripting is finally getting better. Finally some XML generated listboxes and radio buttons and XML-feeded text are actually working like I want it to. The next step will be to atomize everything, so updating in the future will be easy and not so time-consuming.

I learned a great deal of useful methods and implementation skills for my career in the future. This work really feels like a C-MD case all over again.

I also got my status report for this month, and it looks good. This will keep me motivated for the next month. Now I'm going to enjoy the weekend, especially with these weather conditions. So good weekend to all of you!

IBM forum in front of the camera

Yesterday it was the warmest day of the year so far. The sun was shining like it was summer and this was a perfect moment to do a photo session. I took my photo camera with me and went to "work".

My objective was to shoot some pictures that represent the forum. These pictures will then be used for my interactive guide, the website and for publishing material like prints, banners and e-mails.

The first problem was the lightning. Some places where too dark, like the corridor, and some too bright. I normally could solve this by shooting the picture on a longer time span, but I didn't have my tripod with me to keep the camera steady. Another problem is that there were no people walking around. One of the goals was that there should be people on the photos and this was only possible when the participants of the seminars walked to the bar on the pause.

Another problem was that all the rooms where filled with non-IBM people and that I couldn't disturb them or could take pictures of them without personal authorization. I can only shoot IBM people on film and publish it for IBM purposes without authorization.

A solution for these problems is the setting in scene of different actions that happen in the IBM Forum. Next time I will also bring along my tripod, so the quality and sharpness of the pictures can be guaranteed.

The photos I already took are all optimized in Photoshop and a few of them are already used in my forum guide. I'm pretty satisfied with the temporarily result, so when I have permission I might even post a few of them.

The next photo shoot will be on 18/05, so I will keep you up to date later on.

podcast online

The podcast I edited for the Benelux Roadshow has been put online on the intranet site.
It is also issued in the internal news site. Too bad I can't see the clickrate :)

From zero to hero

Yesterday I went to a marketing event, organized by the marketing students of my school, the KHlim. The event took place at my old aula in Diepenbeek, where I hadn't been in 2 years.

The event invited 3 groups of speakers from 3 different companies to tell their success stories, in order to show that marketing is an important aspect of the success of a company.

The first presentation was for Philips Lighting. Birgit Raadschelders explained the campaign that was given for a new product of Philips Lightning: Living Colors. This is a lamp that can change the atmosphere in a room by changing its color. She focused on how the idea came to stand, and how the process evolved, beginning from that idea and ending with the product in the stores. She explained to conceptual process, the prototypes, the testing by an impartial audience, the branding, the marketing and the sales. Also some strategies where explained. This gave a good idea on how a new product is developed and branded into the market. How studies about the product and success of the product are done, and here the key factor lies.

The second presentation will be one I will not forget for a long time. The Belgian marketing team of Innocent drinks actually convinced me to drink a nutrition drink!!! Their brand is one of the most extraordinary examples I have ever seen. The company is only 7 years old, and they have already about 60% of the market share in Smoothies (a nutrition drink). They explained how 3 people quitted there job and began with the company. They did everything possible to get a good product and finally tested in on a large scale. 7 years later they have a great success and won a lot of impressive awards. They did not only brag off about their success, but also explained how that was possible. By having a good product and branding it in the most original ways. They are so driven by their product that they adapted their daily jobs to it. They ride in cow-cars, they phone with banana-phones. They get a breakfast every morning and do a yoga-meeting on Mondays. The whole atmosphere is also brought to the target audience on events and marketing communication, like Fruitstock, a visit to the fruit-towers and the fruit-targeted marketing adverts. The whole concept of doing marketing inspired me and made me thing about marketing in another way. At the end he showed some key strategies that you have to keep in mind, which I found very useful.

The last presentation was given by a communication company called Navajo. They did campaigns for Nike, Nokia, Masterfoods etc... He showed some of their work and gave info about the added value, how they worked on a campaign like that. He gave some interesting examples on how not to focus on doing events, but to focus on the client experience of an event and the product. This gave me a new view of thinking and a lot of new ideas. He also talked about the importance of marketing on the internet, but that I already knew. He actually made some publicity for my career for the future, so that is only good news for my ears.

I'm glad I've been to this event. I learned so much new things and I got a new view on marketing possibilities. I will surely take their advice into account when I'm thinking about projects in the future and in my career later on.

Coding

Today I had a very interesting day. I learned a lot about the implementation of XML into flash. I had some templates of IBM to see how they did it, but unfortunately my old version didn't allow it. So I searched on my own on the wonderful place called internet, and found some resources to help me get what I wanted.

I will learn a lot of useful things for my career later on, on how PHP/ASP, XML, CSS and ActionsScript can work together. This will be a whole bunch of work, but it will be worth it.

Podcasting

For our podcast project I received a program to edit sounds. This I will use to make the long sessions at the CEO seminar available for the web. A lot of editing will be done during the seminar, but the real editing will be done with this program.

Too bad I don't have an iPod myself to test it. I can only test it with my laptop. I guess my Sony NW-HD is not innovating enough.

The white room at the red house

Today I went to the Ogilvy office at Brussels. The first thing you directly notice, are the red windows with the large logo on it. The reception was wrapped in a glow of red by the first sunbeams of the year. Everywhere you looked there were design artifacts: design seats, light journals and plasma screens. After my colleague Karl de Backer came we were invited in the white room. This is the most awesome room I've ever seen. The furniture, the carpet, the lamps ... everything in white and all design made.

With this atmosphere a meeting couldn't go wrong. In the room there was a whole creative team of Ogilvy. The team excited of the creative director, a creative brainstorm team, the responsible for IBM, a sales person and also a marketing student from France who did his internship at Ogilvy. We first got a presentation of the current promotion strategies we are already doing with IBM and while being offered some food and drinks we listened to their interpretation of the eID. After that Karl explained the technical information and I showed my scenarios that I've already made.

We all discussed in which direction we wanted to go with the project and we made some arrangements for what when and who.

I hope that the creative team will soon come up with some ideas, so I can go back to Ogilvy to discuss them and work with them on the project.

IBM Forum flash guide

For the IBM forum project I received a tour trough the building. After the tour we discussed what I have to make to make the site more attractive and more informative for the costumer. Therefore I will make an interactive guide map where the potential clients can travel trough the forum to make their choice.

As there are many different rooms with all kinds of set ups, it will be a hard job to complete this. For each set up there have to be taken pictures, and graphics made.

I hope I will be able to get this done in time.

Next Level designing

Next level is a seminar, organized by IBM. To promote this seminar a flash micro site will be launched. Therefore Ogilvy had made a proposal and we analyzed the good and bad aspect inside it.

It was interesting to see how such a debriefing of a prototype of a flash site is made on paper. Every detail is explained and the whole content placement is put black on white. It gave a good view on how to present your prototypes to your client.

IBM forum goes multimedia

The IBM forum is a place with conference rooms and showrooms that IBM uses for itself and to lend to other companies. As the current site doesn't have a good look and feel and express and explain what the IBM forum is all about, they want to change it and make it more attractive to the potential clients.

We set up a meeting and we discussed that there is a need for a kind of flash tour guide, a new design and a change of content. For this I first will get a tour on Tuesday to the IBM forum. Then I will have to figure out a scenario and design the interface where the tour guide will be in. I also have to take pictures while events and seminars are being held. These pictures I can use in the production of the tour guide.
The tour guide will be made in flash and should make clear to the potential clients what the advantages and possibilities of the IBM forum are.

Intelligent Network Seminar / RFID

By accident I discovered this seminar on the event agenda. I was asked to do a usability test on the subscribe page and I subscribed for the event without knowing what it was. Afterwards I got a mail for confirmation and I saw that it was a seminar about RFID.

The seminar took place in a hangar on the Rijnkaai in Antwerp. It first started with a walking dinner. You could also go outside on the terrace to enjoy the first real sunshine of the year. After having dinner and meeting the executives we started with the real deal.

First we got an intro about what RFID was and more important, why it is more then a technology. RFID already exists since World War 2, but the real applications and the possibilities are changed and now very usable for companies. Also the possibilities what you can do with the data you retrieve from the RFID are very usable in the optimizing of the Supply Chain Management and Transport Management.

After the break we got a real live demo of a transportation truck that used RFID to make sure the right packets are delivered at the right place. They simulated the loading and unloading of a truck and what happens when there are mistakes.

After the break I went to 2 case studies of companies that already used RFID in their business to improve their workflow. The first study was about the company Kraft, which sells and transports a lot of fresh food like Philadelphia cheese and Mayonnaise. As for food it's very important to be delivered on time with a temperature check, it was a very vivid and useful example.

The second case study was about Sernam, a transport & logistics company. This example used RFID to track down all the packets and see where things go wrong, packets get lost, etc... They also used the loading and unloading possibilities of RFID which we saw in the live demo with the transportation truck.

To end the event there was a last presentation about the entire conclusion that could be made. They also showed a movie about a real working process from making an order to delivery at home. With this movie there was also a live demo of

• a computer taking an order
• automatically printing a label with the RFID tag with the information on it
• sticking it on the product
• driving it to the right truck
• loading it on the truck
• unloading it off the truck

Unfortunately because of problems with the internet connection only a part could be shown. Still I got a good picture on how it works and what the possibilities are.

This event has really helped me with understanding what RFID really is, what it does and what the possibilities are to help optimizing a company on different issues.

Preparation Ogilvy

As the eID project is a big project that might be scaled to the rest of the world, it takes a lot of time to get everything in order. The whole process is bureaucratized witch allows interested people from around the world to be well informed.

First I had a meeting with the representative of the eID project. Here we discussed some scenarios I had made and we discussed our objectives and goals and how we are going to transmit the message to the target group.

The second meeting was about the official document I made for the briefing to Ogilvy. For small projects this isn't necessary, but in this case it should be clearly worked out on paper. We made a few changes and send the definite version to Ogilvy.
On 3 May we will have the kick-off meeting where the project will actually start.

E-news

I got another assignment of making an layout for an internal E-news letter. This letter will be send to all the people working inside the public sector in Belgium and the Netherlands. As Lotus Notes has its own way of layouting it's kind of difficult to make something. It doesn't support HTML and CSS on a normal way so I'm trying to make a Notes Layout template that can be re-used and re-edited when needed.

Not only is the design important here, but also the placing of the content on the page.
As there are different segments in the public sector, it should also be segmented in the newsletter. Also the 2 different countries have different content and this should be taken into consideration.

Follow the easter bunny

Now that Easter is gone we are back in business.
I had a meeting with Ogilvy on the budget and how the process works.
As this is the first project around eID, it will be internationally watched by divisions of IBM worldwide. So I had to fill in an official briefing document regarding what we want and how we want to achieve that goal.
As I told earlier, I will be also working from inside the Ogilvy office to make sure everything goes to plan.

With a little delay, I also had the opportunity to spend the day with the webmaster of IBM, Sam Versluys. I followed him the entire day to see what a job as webmaster in a large company exists of. We first had a conference call for the migration of platforms. This is a large operation, so it brings a lot of organizing with it.
Next we had a meeting about with Bruno Mahaux, the internet editor who is currently working on a dynamic e-news project. Here they discussed the statuses of the projects they are working on and round of some projects.

After that we went to the auditorium with a lot of sound material. Our goal is to make a podcast of a roadshow where CEO's will be speaking. We had to make sure that all the material was working and on how to record and edit the sound. We used different kind of microphones to see what the best solution was. There will be live editing during the seminar, but also afterwards there has to be done some editing before putting it online.

Some design work

To improve my graphical skills and to save the company a lot of money I will make the new logo of the follow up of the CPO/E and CPO/+ devices that are being used in the healthcare. For the moment there is still discussion about the definite name, but I already developed some logo's that can be used. I also putted them into a flash logo brochure with live pages which you can turn by hand (mouse).

The logos are hard to develop because I have almost no information to base on. I know it's for healthcare, so I start there to develop the basic forms and ideas. To improve my graphical skills and to save the company a lot of money I will make the new logo of the follow up of the CPO/E and CPO/+ devices that are being used in the healthcare. For the moment there is still discussion about the definite name, but I already developed some logo's that can be used. I also putted them into a flash logo brochure with live pages which you can turn by hand (mouse).

The logos are hard to develop because I have almost no information to base on. I know it's for healthcare, so I start there to develop the basic forms and ideas.

2 stages for the price of 1

Ogilvy, the company that does all the commercials and promotional material for IBM, agreed that I can partially do my internship from inside their company. The goal of this is to be the link between IBM and Ogilvy in the eID project. As I will partially be stationed inside Ogilvy, it will give me the chance to see a full cooperation project between 2 major firms and hopefully guide it to a successful end.

If everything’s goes to plan, I will be working 1 or 2 days inside the Ogilvy building and help develop and consult the eID promotion video. I will also have to get the input from IBM and implement it into the project of Ogilvy and afterwards report it back to IBM. This will increase the creative aspect of my internship and my communication skills.

Busy day

Today I had a lot of things to do.

I started in the morning by giving my presentation of the concurrent analyze I made for the IBM Public sector website. Here I showed the webmaster the strengths and weaknesses of the website. I learned that there are a lot of standard that you can't get out of and that you have to be careful of using logos of other companies and that it's obligated to take visual disabled people into account. With building the website with the access for these visual challenged people there are many options that will be lost.

After that I had a meeting with the webmaster on how we are going to develop the new public sector website. Once again, the universal standards where in the way of some of my suggestions. Some of the parts of the design should be changed for this. The webmaster will give me more information on these standards, so that in the future I can take these standards and rules into account.

My last meeting was with the work force of the eID project. There we brainstormed about the promotion video/graphical animation that we want to make. The problems with the promotion we have, is the target group that is hard to define, and the progress in eID development is rather vague.
To have an idea on the costs, we saw related promotion videos/animations within all different cost-levels. With these examples we get an idea on what you get for what price.

Public Sector website meetings

Yesterday I had the meetings with all different parties of the public sector. I had to meet with the responsibles for the Government, Healthcare and Education. With each of these responsibles I had to present the proposal of the new design of the website. This includes the positioning of all the navigations, banners, images, but also the content.

Meeting with all these different parties was interesting because I saw the same proposal being interpreted different for each target group. Each interest group had its own needs, and drove me into another direction.

After the vacation I will have to brief this information to the webmaster and the content manager.

Actionscripting

To improve my presentation of the concurrent analyze and make it more visual, I made an interactive preview in Flash. With this I could improve my actionscript skills. All animations I made are written in actionscript in stead of doing animation frame by frame. This makes it handy to show the preview during the presentation and meetings. It allows me to switch from different screenshots and options without switching screens or have to look for it.

The rest of my day I will be occupied meeting about the public website with all the different segments. As there are 3 segments with different people, it will take all afternoon.

1st month completed

For the moment I’m occupied with developing the new layout of the public sector website of IBM. As the site will be adapted to the new style, I’m busy with making a preview of the layout in Adobe Photoshop. This with information I gathered in my concurrent analyze that I have made earlier in my internship. An important thing to take into account is the guaranteeing of the usability while I change every aspect of the site.

For this project I will have a lot of meeting tomorrow, with all the different parties in this project. With these meetings it will be clear what they do, what they want and how far they are in the changing of content.

The presentation of my concurrent analyze is also booked. I have to present it on 10 april in a projector room. This is a good practice for presenting to a team and a good test to see if I can communicate well and transfer the information in a understandable way.

I haven't heard anything yet from Ogilvy about the eID project, but I’m sure I will hear about that soon after the vacation.

Infosecurity and Storage Seminar

For 2 days I went to the Infosecurity and Storage Seminar in the Expo in Brussels. They even arranged a shuttle that brought me from the station to the event. As I check in with my card, I started discovering the seminar.

First of all there were a lot of booths of all the different companies. Each had there own promo material and tried to catch your eye with there demos, competitions and readings. I first wandered around and at almost every booth a salesman started to talk to me about his products or services. This was very handy to know all the players in the market. I also saw how the competition is promoting their products and how they communicate trough there demos, flash movies and presentations. This was very interesting for me to see.

In the late morning, the first presentations where starting. I first went to the live hacking session of Belgacom. Here they exposed the security threads in e-banking with SQL injections. With this I realized that my own e-shops might not be as secure as I thought. There was also a presentation of Safeboot about protecting the identity. They talked about eID, what was very interesting for my thesis and my eID project inside IBM. They showed some possibilities and threads that you have to take into account when working with eID.

In the afternoon, there was the presentation of SecurIT, a business partner of IBM. They had a whole presentation about eID, which was very relevant for me to get more technical and theoretical information. The last one I went to was the presentation about securing the mobile devices. This could also be done with an eID, but they didn't talk much about that possibility. They mostly explained the thread and created awareness of the problem. I also saw a piece of IT security, but that wasn't very relevant.

The next day I went again, because I surely wanted to hear about the VOIP solutions.
In the morning I went back the live hacking sessions, hoping that it would be different then the day before. It was slightly different and he showed some other threads and methods, but the idea stayed the same. During the morning I went to presentations which had not much to do with what I was interested in. But in the late afternoon the session of VoIP started. I always wanted to know how VoIP could be implemented into a company or personal use, and what the dangers could be. It learned that there are still many downsides of VoIP that battle against the big advantage of being cheaper.

I also had some talks with different companies and looked at how all the companies are showing there booths and demo material.

It was a very interesting seminar, too bad I didn't won any prizes (there was a PSP, a fingerprint USB and iPOD's to win) but I'm satisfied with what I saw. It's only a shame that not very much people attend this seminar. What a waste of space.

Ogilvy

Today I had a meeting with the people from Ogilvy.
Ogilvy is a marketing communications company that has a contract with IBM. It is the largest company in their field and serve over 500 companies worldwide. They execute marketing campaigns and try to brand the services and products of their clients. They make posters, flyers, interactive CD-ROM's and DVD's, games, demo's etc...

My part in the cooperation between Ogilvy and IBM would be the gathering and "translating" the information from the IBM workforce of eID to useful information for Ogilvy. There is also a chance I will be even more involved in the developing of the eID branding concept and work together with the Ogilvy people in their office.

The target of the project should be an eye-catching branding demo, so that end-users and intermediary companies can visualize the opportunities of the eID in their work environment. This demo should be shown on seminaries, congresses and perhaps on a booth in the IBM forum.

Now I have to wait on the reaction of Ogilvy and I hope I will be posting some good news about this project in the future.

Projects

For really getting involved I needed my own project to work on. My stage coordinator did a very good job to arrange everything so I could be a part of a project.

First of all we had a meeting with the web manager, the web editor and the marketing responsible. The project exists in setting up the new public sector website of IBM. This website has as target group the Governments, Education Industries and Health Care. My job in this part is to be the project manager and give consulting to all the working parties. This is interesting for me because I will be able to see the whole process of putting on a site from all the different views of sectors. As I will be informed from start till end I can have a clear view on how to manage a website. Off course I will get help to accomplish the project.

Another project I might work on has been the result of going to the seminar of eID. The responsible for everything around eID could need my help in making demo material for publicity and for stands on seminars like a movie and posters. After a meeting it became clear I might can cooperate, but that It might be difficult to do some graphical designs, as they have an outsourcing contract with another company.
A meeting on Tuesday with that company might clear some issues of the road.

In the meantime I already got my own phone, my own postbox and an invitation to my next seminar this week. I just can't wait to discover what will happen there.

Kick-off with Seminars and Meetings

As more and more things are getting in order, I start getting more and more involved into the daily working atmosphere of IBM.

For knowing the company's activity's for the web, I had some meetings with a lot of people. First of all my stage coordinator told me some basic information of the activity's of IBM within the business world. Activity like from storage solution to software, from security issues to consulting. She showed me around in the IBM Forum, a presentation place with all the information of what IBM's goals and solutions are.

For e-commerce on the web I talked to the representative of the web sales, Paul-Henri Cerckel. He gave me information about what the main goal and strategy is of selling solutions and product on the web.

To know what all the players are in the market, I went to my first seminar, the eID Seminar in the Kinepolis in Brussels. This was a seminar with presentation of all important company's who where explaining the opportunity’s, risks and their own solutions to use eID in the workflow of the company or an end-user system.
Surrounded by men's in suits, I got mush information on a short time. IBM had also a stand there with an example of an eID application on the web.

It's been already an interesting week, and I hope that more will come.

Getting started

My first impression of IBM was dominated by the large building ahead of me. When I entered an impressive reception was the first thing I saw. After I logged in at the reception I was welcomed and toured by S. Dierckens. He showed me the way and made sure all the paperwork was done.

After signing a lot of documents, I got an access pass witch allows me in the building without supervision. I also got a ThinkPad, a laptop that allows me to connect to the internal network and the internet. First of all I had to learn how to use IBM software like IBM Notes, an organizer for mails, meetings, tasks, etc... They also use a handy communication tool: Sametime, an Instant Messenger that links everybody in the company.

The first task I got is the writing of a concurrent analysis between the IBM public sector website and the concurating websites. These competitors are mainly HP, Accenture, Unisys and also Siemens, the company where I already worked in the marketing and communication section.

The days start early and getting up that early isn’t that easy, but I hope it will be worth it and that I’ll have an interesting experience of doing my stage there.

Stage information

Company :	IBM
Place :	Avenue du Bourget 42, Brussels 1130
Period :	6 march - 8 june
Stagecoördinator :	Anne-Marie Van Asbroeck
	anne-marie_vanasbroeck@be.ibm.com
Section:	IBM Sales & Distribution, Marketing
	Public Sector / IGS - Integrated Marketing