How Adobe uses Adobe: Developing new ways to collaborate

The secret to being a successful Chief Information Officer is simple: 

1. Always know what your people are working on, and...
2. Eat your own dogfood.

As a management and development team, Adobe is creating new ways to collaborate, both in terms of internal projects and in the products they are offering the world.  

In this video interview, Gerri Martin-Flickinger, CIO of Adobe, speaks to ZDNet Editor in Chief, Larry Dignan about her top priorities at the graphics software maker. 

She describes an emerging world of collaboration that graphic recorders and facilitators need to understand and adapt their services to...quickly!

Martin-Flickinger shares her views on new ways the company is collaborating internally and the future of Rich Internet Applications for businesses.

One of the things that we’ve been noticing is our enterprise customers are coming to us more and more and asking things like how can they make their internal business applications look better and be easier to use. 

Gerri describes how teams at Adobe use AdobeConnect to work differently. 

What’s interesting is it really has changed the culture. It’s changed the way people share documents. They don’t do all that email, you know, email the PowerPoint deck, or email the PDF file, or email the 16 documents for the presentation. They all join a connect session and have the opportunity collaboratively to engage in that conversation. That kind of brings me to what I think the kernel is: you need to do collaboration around some event or activity. It’s more than just hold a meeting, it’s more than: "Let’s just throw up a site and let people throw content at it." It’s about, "What is the work product and the activity you’re trying to accomplish?"

She also describes a promising future for Rich Internet Applications (RIA) which uses tools like Flash, Flex, Air and FlashCatalyst, design tool for rapidly creating application interfaces and interactive content without coding. 

This suite of apps are used to build custom applications that pull content from databases and the web, without having a large application running on your PC.

"People are now reclaiming the ability to build their own application UI, and that’s something we haven’t seen since before the Windows days."

VIEW VIDEO | FULL TRANSCRIPT