As for hiring excellent developers, we hire for personality. Yeah, certifications and experience count for a lot, but we've found that curiosity and optimism as an individual's traits make stellar developers. And we figured out a long time ago how to compress the learning curve by standing someone new on the shoulders of those around them. Figuratively, of course. Otherwise it would hurt.

David: Okay, you've been very well behaved and have only really snuck one shameless promo into this interview. As your reward, go ahead and give us a quick Teamwork Solutions pitch.

Scott: Okay, but I'm only going to give you the PG-rated version. Since our start 13 years ago, we've made it our mantra to be world class developers of Notes solutions. We're proud to count among our customers the emerging companies of tomorrow and today's global industry leaders. We're fortunate to have assembled a team of the best technical and business-savvy thinkers anywhere -- an important combination for a practice that does so much with workflow.

To us it just seems like a natural part of our maturation, so we're now offering our most successful solutions as products.

David: It's lunchtime here, so I'm hungry. Tell me about what you call "lunch and learn"? Do you find the added incentive of food overcomes the objections of spending the time discussing your products?

Scott: One of the challenges we face with bringing ProcessIt! to market is that it is an incredibly powerful, feature-rich tool. So it's tough to encapsulate its capabilities in a ten-second sound byte. Our lunch and learn session is a painless way to introduce a group of people to ProcessIt!'s potential.

Really, though, once people get a sense for what it does, their thoughts aren't on food. The way we usually do it is that we'll ask someone for an example of a workflow they're currently dealing with, like benefits enrollment, contract management, something like that.

Over the course of half an hour or so (who gets a full hour for lunch anymore?) we'll just build the workflow for them. That gets a lot of attention because it's so obvious this isn't just another demo of the few things that are easy to do in the product like you so often see.

By the time folks are done eating, we've got a fully operational application that works on the Web, too. It's pretty cool to see people's reaction. Just not with their mouths full!

David: Is there anything else you'd like to tell us?

Scott: Actually, yes. The world seems to be getting smaller. Collaboration across divides remains a challenge and an opportunity we can all participate in. Our next product releases will be globalized (supporting multiple languages) to support an ever evolving and far-reaching business community. Stay tuned and hang on for the ride!

Jack Dausman is a Principal Partner at ICI Systems, Inc., the #1 LAEC in North America (at http://TrainingDoneRight.com) and is a Dual-Principal CLI. He has served on the Lotus CLI Advisory Board. He also holds two masters' degrees and is certified as MCT/MCP, CNE, and Linux+. Nothing, though, holds as much challenge and reward as working with his young teens, Will and Anna.