IBM Lotus is using its annual Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Fla., to review the software it released in 2003 and to lay out how its platforms – Notes/Domino, Lotus Workplace and WebSphere – all lead to the same destination – a place Lotus calls organizational productivity. Ambuj Goyal, general manager of Lotus Software, sat down with Network World senior editor John Fontana to talk about past, present and future developments.

Last year you said to me that code talks, and I’m wondering what that code said over the past 12 months?

We delivered everything that we talked about at Lotusphere 2003, plus more. We said we would have Workplace components and we delivered everything in November. We didn’t say anything about business value offerings and we now have six business value offerings. So we did a lot of code. But last year, when I did the announcement of Workplace Server, we didn’t have a lot of live code to show. This year, I said that any demo that we will do must be live code. Because when I show code, people believe. When was the most applause that we got [during the keynote]? When we showed a Notes application, unmodified, working in the Workplace Client. So I absolutely believe that code talks. We are working at a very rapid pace onto a model that we really think we got it right. And it is about to change the way the industry will work in the future.

You mentioned the term “organizational productivity” over and over in your keynote address, can you define what that is?

It is a process that is being captured across the enterprise so that whole organizations can think about productivity in a different way rather than just sending e-mail. So you take a look at how auditing is currently done. You attach spreadsheets and documents into e-mail and send them around and there is no process. Today if you want to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, hundreds or thousands of people get together in large organizations and they have to say what is my control risk, workflow happens, the record retention happens, the whole organization can become more productive rather than just doing ad-hoc collaboration that they were doing. As we move from team productivity to organizational productivity we need to think about how to integrate people into the processes across the enterprise. That is why we created the slogan,  “Workplace is about integrating people with business process” because that takes us to the organizational productivity. It’s thinking about business processes within an organization.