Archive for May, 2007
by Bill Ives
May 30, 2007 at 7:35 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Enterprise 2.0 is about, among other things, transparency, and providing accessible archives of key business interactions. As the McKinsey report, The next revolution in interactions, offered, it is within these interactions that much of the enterprise value is located. With Enterprise 2.0 we want to unlock this value for broader use. But how far can we go with this transparent archiving?
A recent New Yorker article, Remember This?, (May 28.2007) provides a look into where we might be going. Gordon Bell, formerly of DEC and now with Microsoft is exploring the archive genre in depth. Bell is a super smart guy who was the first person from Kirksville, Missouri to go to MIT. He also played a key role in the early days of DEC, the formation of the Internet, and a few other things before ending up doing exploratory research at Microsoft.
Once Gordon learned of the possibilities of scanning documents, he decided to go paperless with his life records. This did not stop with documents but went on to phone calls, IMs., and anything that happen on his computer. And now his archiving includes his in person conversations, and, with the help of a camera around his neck, anything he sees.
His second insight was that storage would be available by 2007 for just about whatever a person wanted to save (and it has). His third epiphany was that by adding contemporary material to his archive he was building a “personal-transaction processing system.” What he meant he was recoding everything he did. It is more a transaction storage system.
But how do you go back and find all the stuff? A colleague at Microsoft, Eric Horvitz is working on a Lifebrowser that uses time as a means of locating information. It learns your preferences through your requests and becomes smarter.
So now we may have no boundaries on our enterprise archive capabilities. The use of blogs and wikis to record the interactions of project teams or field repair teams, for example, for further use has been seen as an improvement over the silos of email and attachments. These may seem primitive first steps into the world that Gordon Bell envisions.
The New Yorker article concludes with some speculations on the consequences of this boundless archiving. We are selective and revisionist in our memory. What will happen if it is possible to fact check everything? What will be the characteristic of the new Enterprise 20.0 when the limits to archiving are gone?
The article concludes with a quote from Bell, “Your aspirations go up with every new tool. You’ve got all this content there and you want to use it, but there’s always this problem of wanting more.”
And more and more…
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by Joe McKendrick
May 29, 2007 at 12:03 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Web 2.0, barriers
My colleague Paula Thornton recently observed that Cisco Systems appears to be not only talking the talk on Web 2.0, but also walking the walk.
Now, NetworkWorld’s Phil Hochmuth provides further analysis of remarks by Cisco CEO John Chambers and other IT executives at the recent Interop confab to conclude that a new phenomenon is shaping enterprises as of late: “Web 2.0 creep.”
Chambers put it this way — getting Web 2.0 [and by extension, Enterprise 2.0] into the enterprise involves an end-run around IT. He observed in his keynote that Web 2.0 software such as blogs, chat, Web video and other tools, have “been a way that people kind of communicated in spite of the IT department” inside large organizations. “Now the IT department has to lead.”
It’s not that IT is unaware of these new tools and methodologies. The networking folks in attendance at Interop certainly are well aware of Web 2.0/E2.0 and the collaborative powers the technologies have to offer. The biggest challenge is attaching hard-dollar business value to the solutions.
As Tom Marcin, director of global telecommunications at DuPont, put it at one panel discussion:
“We’re now being asked to build social networks and self-forming networks to solve business problems. We’re expected to transform businesses. But guess what, we’re expected to reduce costs. Collaboration tools are of value to us. But we can’t sell a project on migrating 60,000 employees, based upon the soft benefits associated with it. I need to show demonstrable savings directly linked to the solution we put in. One month of data on a pilot would not cut it.”
Maybe I’ve been on the planet to long, but these arguments sound awfully familiar. In the 1980s, employees (including IT employees themselves) brought PCs into their departments to get around the process delays associated with Big centralized, heavily regulated IT. In the 1990s, it was the Internet, followed by mobile devices. Lately, its been Web services.
Every generation has its rebellious spirit. Web 2.0/E2.0 is only the latest evolution of rapidly deployable tools and methodologies that can get at business problems faster than the more deliberate and committee-intensive approaches demanded by IT and corporate management.
by Tom Mandel
May 29, 2007 at 11:42 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
In my last post, I reported on JP Rangaswami’s open email system. By opening his email to his staff, he has essentially created a ‘cost-free’ collaboration forum with no learning curve.
I can easily imagine the value of an email server add-on that would allow anyone to turn any email to which she had access into a message thread. Perhaps something like this exists.
Email has always been collaborative in some sense — that’s what “cc:” is for after all. Open email extends this utility. But there is more one could - and should - do with email.
Because email is chock full of tacit knowledge, it’s an ideal content base for tagging and social networking.
Collaborative groups are pre-defined - as in the case of JP’s staff - and leave little headroom for any ‘emergent’ result. People in the group share collective intelligence and add to it too, within the limits of the group.
But, if email could be tagged, we would share collective intelligence in an even more useful way and would allow people to integrate and extend knowledge by mashing up an even larger variety of sources — including, in this case, what must be the largest unstructured knowledge repository in existence: email.
by Tom Mandel
May 29, 2007 at 10:08 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
This morning I read about JP Rangaswami’s open email system in a post by Stowe Boyd. JP has
opened access to his email to his staff. By treating his email as an open forum, he has found that his associates are more involved in his interactions with others. He has found that they can use this — particularly his sent mail — is a great learning opportunity.
Stowe points out “how revolutionary open email could be in a historically closed and secretive corporate context.”
Jimmy Guterman, writing on O’Reilly Radar takes the point a step further — or rather, his fellow Radarite Brady Forrest does; Jimmy quotes him as noting that
Although this is analogous to making email like forums and wikis, the key difference is that you are using email as the entry point. It’s not a separate wiki/forum site.
Good point. “And,” Jimmy adds, “since it’s a tool that everyone uses already, it’s more likely that the non-alphageeks you work with might be more likely to use it.” That’s an even better point.
Jimmy asks whether readers think this would work in their companies — and I’ll ask the same thing.
by Dana Gardner
May 29, 2007 at 9:03 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Sponsored Post, Web 2.0, enterprise software, guest commentary, innovator interviews, podcasts
Reports in The Economist, New York Times, and PC World point to a stunning lurch in the sophistication and reach of recent nefarious online attacks. And the initial sniff test pulls up a whiff of state or large-scale organization sponsorship and support of these events.
They may well be a bellwether of what to expect. These are likely not loosely aligned hackers, but outright strategic aggression designed to influence politics and the behaviors of nations and large corporations.
As many of these articles allude to, the attacks problem will not get any better until the basic architecture and governance of the Internet technologies themselves are addressed. Band-Aids on 1,000 cuts only propels the ongoing Spy vs. Spy gamesmanship — only the stakes are fast escalating.
And so with that I dust off a sponsored conversation I had last year with Akamai Technologies co-founder and chief scientist, Professor Tom Leighton. In it he pretty much predicts — nearly a year ago — what we’re now seeing. His prescriptions are not easy, but they increasingly seem necessary. Read the transcript, or listen to the podcast.
Disclosure: Akamai is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect B2B discussions on the Internet and society.
Akamai's Leighton on cyber security [28:22m]:
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by Dana Gardner
May 29, 2007 at 8:49 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, SOA, enterprise software, innovator interviews, podcasts
Read a full transcript of the discussion.
When the hype curve descends, advocacy takes over. And so it is with the SOA Consortium, formed earlier this year to establish SOA as a business productivity benefit and to glean proven adoption paths and proof-points from primarily end-users and enterprises. The advocacy group’s approach combines input from enterprises and vendors to promote the business strategy value for services oriented architecture (SOA).
Join noted IT analysts Joe McKendrick, Tony Baer, and Jim Kobielus for our podcast discussion on the goals and opportunities for the SOA Consortium with Dr. Richard Soley, the chairman and CEO of the Object Management Group (OMG) and also executive director of the consortium. I’ll be your host.
In June, SOA Consortium will begin holding quarterly CIO Summits with a small number of CIOs and CTOs from government agencies, large corporations, as well as non-governmental organizations.
OMG began the consortium with bevy of heavy-hitting companies — Avis, Bank of America, CellExchange, WebEx, BEA, Cisco, IBM, SAP, HP and Wells Fargo — and has grown already. The consortium, separate from OMG, is tasked with creating a community around SOA, and is not a standards group. “We strongly believe that SOA isn’t a technology at all, but rather an approach to achieve business agility. It’s not a technology, but rather a business strategy, says Soley.
Here are some additional excerpts:
Our SOA group at OMG has been focused on modeling SOA, modeling for software assurance, and modeling for software producibility, and so forth. At the other end of the spectrum, you have organizations like W3C and OASIS that are doing a great job designing the protocols and languages at the pipe level — how do we connect the systems together?
That hasn’t been our primary focus in over a decade. So we are not in that space. The advocacy group is exactly that — it’s an advocacy group. How do we help the CIO? And, we call this “Corner Office SOA.” How do we help the CIO get the news across to the rest of the C-suite that this is not a technology but a business strategy, and a business strategy that can deliver agility and a better bottom line?
[Also] … How do we help the enterprise architect, the domain architect, the data architect get the word across to his alter ego in the line of business that this is a business strategy and not a technology and it’s something he needs to pay attention to?
We are currently running 3-to-1 end-users to vendors, and that’s because the focus is on this advocacy activity. It’s not on whose SOA infrastructure we should buy and “Our Web service is cool,” or any of those questions. I am guessing that we are actually going to be more like 5-to-1 or 10-to-1 end-users to vendors eventually.
IT has traditionally focused in most organizations on what are the right tools to achieve what lines of business are telling us we need to achieve. Sure, there are going to be tools and there are going to be technologies and there are going to be frameworks to help you implement the SOA strategy, but it’s the other way around. It’s “What is it we need to achieve?” And, what we need to achieve is fairly easy to explain, right? What we need to achieve is capturing business processes, so that we can find them, so that we can make them more efficient, and so that we can reuse them — and this is nothing new.
What’s new here is the message that we are not just talking about workflow. We are not just talking about processes that can be automated. We are talking about any of the processes, especially customer-facing, but any value-chain processes within the organization that we might want to reuse.
Listen to the entire podcast, or read the full transcript for more IT analysis and SOA insights. Produced as a courtesy of Interarbor Solutions: analysis, consulting and rich new-media content production.
Analysts examine SOA Consortium [47:35m]:
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by Paula Thornton
May 26, 2007 at 10:56 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I dropped the reference to “Management” here to break the inherent inference to corresponding technologies.
Back in April, Bill Ives addressed the question, “What is the Role of ECM in Enterprise 2.0?” A number of relevant comments were added, including one where I suggested a great piece on Content Management 2.0, which includes a great list of 2.0 principles useful for any 2.0 discussion.
To immerse readers in related conversations going on among content management practitioners, I share my responses to what started out as a usability discussion (limited to membership, the discussion started with an announcement of a related piece, authored by one of the members).
05-07-07 I have no issues with James list other than it’s a list. All of the client situations I’ve run into, even if they’d had the list, they still likely would have not made a purchasing decision based on any of these items. Why? They don’t necessarily really understand what it ‘means’. That is, they’d turn around and ask the vendor if they can address all of these issues and the vendor will invariably say ‘yes’.
A more effective list would effectively be one that begins to break down all of the specific issues with various interfaces and the level of effort required to implement an effective experience.
05-08-07 James said: “While a richer interface does address a number of the issues”
Hold the phone. There seems to be an implied alignment in this statement of 2.0 to ‘richer interface’. Not so. Clearly the piece from the link in my earlier post (which was originally posted via this list but I guessed that many have not read it) suggests otherwise. Let me copy some of it here for your viewing pleasure. Note that ‘rich’ is .5 of the 6 (it’s only half of point 4). [Included a portion of earlier reference here to the list, toward bottom of page. The authors are on the list and had posted the link…but I don’t think many understood its significance as no conversation ensued.]
05-24-07 Walking along the same line of thought that Tim introduced [addressing the correlation between web sites and hierarchical navigation he stated: It’s my observation that the human mind likes to make geographic analogies…when speaking of a web page…the word ”space” creeps into the lingo], I drop the big question: who cares? Step away from the car…
Start with an analogy…say you drove to work this morning. You may not have been able to take the shortest route. All the variables notwithstanding there was one very critical issue: the infrastructure only supported certain routes — you can’t build your own roads. That’s not the case in the digital world and we need to NEVER forget it.
Here’s the short version of my advice: 1) Focus on taxonomies and other ’structure’ for optimizing search. 2) Make sure that whatever is needed to support the primary scenarios are in place (and are featured in weighted relevancy — more important scenario support is more evident and less important scenarios are less evident), 3) Work to improve the relevancy and ‘velocity to understanding/action’ of the content itself, 4) drive directly to content through any and every means possible (ala. direct channel access which circumvents navigation altogether).
Start paying attention to these items which are more important and you’ll forget all about the slow road to yesterday.
05-26-07 As to Yair’s comments I suggest the answer is ‘both’ (hierarchy vs vector) and neither. I just started reading David Weinberger’s new book “Everything is Miscellaneous” last night. It reinforces my earlier comments…remember that we’re talking digital.
We need to structure things in a way that they can be ALL they can be (anything to anyone depending on their perspective).
If I can add a real world situation, this morning I was working on my genealogy. Due to the fabulous nature of all that is going on right now, I was able to tie several of my ‘known’ ancestors altogether into the same family…aligning yet another critical figure in the early 1600 settlement of colonial Canada as my 9th great grandfather. The problem was that I stumbled onto this fact just by my own intuition and deduction because the spelling of the last name has over 15 variations.
The challenge with our ’structures’ today is that we focus on the structures (do not suppose I’m suggesting they’re not important — I’m fighting a battle to get such focus into a current effort). The truly untapped value from a digital perspective is not in the individual units (ala. the content), but in the relationships which can establish ‘different’ structures. This is clearly not a hierarchical problem set — hierarchical is but one dimension for one perspective. Reality is far more dynamic.
Choosing to focus on the hierarchical, leaves a limited view of the possiblities. The current hierarchical structure of the software by which I store information of my relatives plays against my needs. Even though there is a field which captures alternate name spellings, it still took my ‘inference’ to make the necessary connections. What my brain did can be easily replicated. It’s a simple problem, but it continues to be twarted by hierarchical thinking applied to problem sets.
Inference…3.0 thinking.
05-26-07 Tim mentioned saving searches. I’ve thought through this recently. I remember how valuable the tool Copernic was to me in the mid-90’s. I could not only do a search, I could filter out what was not relevant and only save what was relevant. I used these saved collections (which could be generated html pages), to send ‘filtered’ relevant content for managers to review (I was serving as a research librarian in this way…although it was not an intended role).
Today, I do the same thing via my del.icio.us collections. There is key difference here from my former scenario. Often times I had to conduct multiple searches to find all the relevant materials. I would then manually reconstruct a ‘total’ html file that combined the results of the various searches before sending the file. But the results were ‘fixed’ and was a reflection of the results that came forth at that point in time. Data warehousing taught us that sometimes those ’snapshots’ in time, however, are relevant — suggesting the ‘both’ principle again, both ‘fixed’ and ‘dynamic’ (I’ll defer from launching into my perspectives on the fundamental principles of endless groupings of continuums along which the points converge based on the ‘collective’ of the relevant set of continuums, all being influenced by one another and the situations/environments/time, all to arrive at a point in time decision — ala. the new science of economics, including behavioral economics).
Therefore, there is value not only in the searches themselves, but in the references to the content (ala. the relationships). With del.icio.us, tagging inherently creates a variety of relationships — in the earlier scenarios, the content was hardwired to a fixed results set (although, this would not have to have been the case if Copernic had simply stored a ‘template’ of the xml or some other layer which represented the relevancy of my results set — capturing the attributes of the things I excluded and the attributes of the things I included to approximate the search again).
Moral: Rethink the problem from a different perspective.
by Bill Ives
May 24, 2007 at 11:59 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Paula Thorton recently wrote in Experience Design 2.0, “2.0 thinking is more dynamic — it requires deconstructing the ‘barriers’ and identifying the conditions by which the barriers can be removed. The planning for the Rave event embraced this concept.” I would agree. Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 open up greater possibilities for a number of other good design principles.
For example, last November Paul Graham spoke at the Berkman Center. As the notice said, “In a recent essay, “Taste for Makers,” Paul argues that successful design, from math to software to painting, relies on the same aesthetic principles. Taste is therefore not a matter of subjectively appreciating fine works but is a required capability for creating great software or useful events. I tend to judge event design from an aesthetic, as much as a pedagogical, view.
The essay shares some very interesting design principles that apply to software design, as well as art, that can be useful for Enterprise 2.0 initiatives. Paul has experience in both art and software. Here are a few concepts from the piece. Good design is simple. Good design solves the right problem. Good design is suggestive. I have found that the best examples of both software and events follow these criteria. There are many more principles carefully defined with examples.
Wikis are a good example of these concepts. Brian Lamb quoted Charlie Mingus in his essay on wikis. “Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. “ This should be one of the guiding principles in designing enterprise 2.0 applications, using wikis or other tools. Take a look at what Paul wrote. It is full of good reminders.
by Paula Thornton
May 23, 2007 at 2:20 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Forgive the mixing of metaphors…
While there are announcements all the time, occassionally one seems like it might sway a neuron or two. I was struck that way by the proclamation of John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, that Web 2.0 is the future and that Cisco is “moving our company as fast as we can to collaboration and Web 2.0“, at Interop 07 keynote [related video, 6:21 edited]
I think the difference is not just the talk, but the commitment of action, and the correspondingly claimed velocity toward that goal. He also reiterated that this is a people problem, not a technology problem. This latter message was echoed in the panel discussions from the recent RAVE (I’ve got great notes I plan to share and comment on shortly).
John’s been spinning his Web 2.0 religion more recently. See related coverage: CRN, CRN: collaboration, Giga OM, Computerworld.
by Dana Gardner
May 23, 2007 at 6:38 am · Filed under
Social Computing, Sponsored Post, innovator interviews, podcasts
Read a full transcript of the discussion. Sponsor: UPS
Effective information-sharing across the distribution of goods — visibility into transportation supply chains and distribution networks — is a vital part of the information revolution and the knowledge economy.
Global and local players in the total distribution channel are constantly looking for reductions in cost, efficiency improvements, and slashed time to distribution — all of which can substantially reduce the total cost of an overall production and distribution activity, and heighten customer service and satisfaction.
UPS started with tracking on the Web in the early 1990s and today supports online tracking in 63 countries. UPS has extended basic services to cover broad supply chain visibility for shippers, receivers, importers, and exporters — both residential and commercial — through its traditional U.S. small package services, as well as via global UPS Freight, Air, and Ocean Freight Services.
I recently moderated a sponsored podcast that examines the market trends driving the need for greater supply chain technology and efficiency, as well as the visibility services UPS has in place. Joining me was Jim Rice, director of the Integrated Supply Chain Management Program at MIT; Stephanie Callaway, director of customer technology marketing at UPS; Frank Deen is the shipping manager at Rackmount Solutions, and John Schaffer, president of TrueWave.
Here are some excerpts:
… Companies and leaders [are] concerned … about continuity — business continuity. We saw that destructions like Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 caused a lot of companies to start recognizing that their supply chains are genuinely at risk.
A lot of vulnerabilities were always there, but weren’t very apparent or evident. So, there’s a fair amount of recognition about this vulnerability. Right now, there is some work going on in that some companies are planning to make their supply chains more resilient and trying to actively manage risks.
The companies are concerned with optimal supply chain design, and this takes in the aspect of outsourcing. How much outsourcing do we use? How much of that do we even think of putting offshore, trying to reduce cycle time, cost, and uncertainty in the system? That will ultimately enable them to be much more responsive to spikes and drops in demand.
Companies continue to squeeze their supply chain to lean it out, and make it more efficient and more effective. There are a lot of drivers in the industry right now that affect the price of sundry industries differently.
A lot of it comes down to having relationships with customers and suppliers. They would be open and free to share the information that ultimately will help both organizations to make better decisions, reduce uncertainty in the system, and take out some of the cost and uncertainty. That makes the system potentially much more efficient.
Some of these capabilities are becoming more readily available for large companies, and hopefully in the near term, to small- and medium-sized enterprises. The challenges aren’t simple, but I think there are some tools and processes emerging that are going to make this much more possible in the future, and therefore get us a little closer to that Nirvana of the synchronized supply chain.
Initially, when we started doing this, because we were shipping from so many locations, even though it was being shipped on our account, we would have to contact each one of those shipping points, each warehouse, each manufacturer to get tracking numbers to send to our customers. Of course, now we are able to have that information sent directly to the customer when the product ships. They get an email with that information.
Plus, on UPS Quantum View, we are able to pull up a report every day that shows everything that has been shipped out on our account, whether from our local warehouse or any of those other locations. We’re able to have that tracking number and see the exact progress of that package — when it was picked up, where it’s at currently, when it’s expected to be delivered, and the address that it’s expected to be delivered to. When a customer calls and asks a question about it, we are able to go to that and immediately give them an answer that provides a comfort level that we are keeping track of their merchandise that they are waiting to get.
We could get to the markets, but we couldn’t do in a way that allowed our customers to have visibility into the process. There’s a lot of uncertainty when you are shipping internationally. When you have visibility into the process from point A to point B, it really changes the dynamic quite a bit. One of the tools that Stephanie was discussing, Quantum View Manage, allows us to see if there are problems along the way. Then we can communicate with our customers in such a way that we can set the proper expectations.
Read a full transcript of the podcast. Sponsor: UPS
Listeners or readers of this podcast are invited to learn more about sponsored B2B podcasts.
UPS provides greater supply chain technology and efficiency [37:36m]:
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by Dana Gardner
May 23, 2007 at 6:35 am · Filed under
Microsoft, barriers, enterprise software
We all gained some illuminating feedback through the poll I conducted this week in my blog commentary on Microsoft’s escalating aggression through patents-posturing about open source software’s legitimacy.
And while I will assume that the poll is not scientific, with a response tally of around 4,000, it does provide insight into the thinking of those inclined to vote. The ongoing poll, incidentally, was begun last November soon after Microsoft announced it’s alliance with Novell on SuSE Linux, and CEO Steve Ballmer alluded to injurious violations of Microsoft’s intellectual property in other Linux distributions.
The latest poll results remain consistent with the first sets of voting on blog readers’ sentiment: Linux as white satin-clad Princess Leia, Microsoft as imperial strongman Darth Vader.
The highly positive Talkback thumbs up tally from this week’s blog, and the tenor of the 200-odd comments, also give us some inkling into the zeitgeist around Microsoft’s latest salvos against the likes of Linux, JBoss, Geronimo, and MySQL.
Of course we really don’t know who or what Microsoft’s lawyers are referring to when the company’s executives say that more than 200 of their patents are violated. Even Microsoft’s Linux partner, Novell, doesn’t know. And Novell doesn’t even agree with its Redmond benefactor that any patents are in fact violated.
The poll, then, is not so much about substance as perception. The kind of perceptions a good lawyer may count on in patent proceedings, especially if a jury is involved. There’s also the preferences of developers and enterprises buyers to consider. Microsoft knows the “hearts and minds” business well enough to know these things can work for you, or against.
And so our survey provides a strong indicator that Microsoft’s trial balloons on the subject have swiftly taken on a lead veneer. The vast majority of respondents, some 54 percent, indicate that they would prefer to increase their use of Linux — and decrease their use of Windows, as a result of Microsoft’s patent pleadings.
And some 36 percent of voters indicate they prefer to pay no attention to Microsoft’s passive-aggressive position on the subject. That means roughly 90 percent of those responding are not swayed by Microsoft’s arsenal of legal ammunition in terms of their moving away from Linux in favor of Windows, based on Microsoft’s rights.
I was actually hoping that many more of these voters would go for the third choice, which is: “Seek a clear covenant from Microsoft upon your next big purchase contract (Vista?) that protects your company specifically from legal action from Microsoft on Linux use.”
If I were a large enterprise or ISV or service provider or telco I would take Microsoft’s implied threats seriously. And I would seek direct, specific relief … in writing. It could be quite simple, something like, “As I buy these products from Microsoft, it then promises not to sue me for the use of GPL v 1, v 2, or v3 licensed code and goods forever.”
Case closed.
by Joe McKendrick
May 21, 2007 at 11:55 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, SOA, Web 2.0
Are mashups the face of SOA? Recently, as part of the team preparing collateral for the recent InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum in New York, I had the opportunity to speak with some industry leaders about the converging roles of SOA and Web 2.0.
Mighael Botha, technology evangelist at Software AG, put it this way: “I see mashups as being the face of SOA,” he said. “Mashups are something that I can take to a user, and say, ‘Okay, this is a mash-up that shows a single view of a customer within your organization.’ The user might not understand what a mashup is, but when they see that they can get all kinds of data about their customers or products from five or six or seven different systems in the back end.”
My special report on SOA and mashups for InfoWorld can be found here. (PDF format)
Web 2.0 may ultimately even be good for SOA. Ashish Mohindaroo, senior director of Oracle Fusion Middleware, observed that “Web 2.0 is all about increased user productivity, and SOA is increased reuse of existing assets. If I’m able to mix and mash different Web site content, to deliver a new page or a new service to my end user, that’s a great thing,” he explains. “I can assemble new services which in the past would have taken me a longer time because everything had to be built from scratch.”
SOA and Web 2.0 have different constituencies, at least for now — SOA tends to involve enterprise architects and development shops, while Web 2.0 has more of a consumerist element. This is changing as more Web 2.0 is adopted within enterprises, but my colleague over at ZDNet, Dion Hinchliffe, also observes that the two also have different centers of gravity:
Dion has been watching the mashup developing between SOA and Web 2.0 for some time now. He observes in a new post that both categories share a lot of overlap, as both invoke standards-based services that can reside anywhere across the Web.”We’re continuing to see more clearly that Web 2.0 and SOA really are largely (but not 100%) the same concepts that merely lay on different — if fairly different — parts of the software continuum.”
“The O’Reilly concept of Web 2.0 tells us that data is one of the most important parts of our software applications these days… SOA tells us that services are the center of composition. That services in a SOA also transport data is also important, but the focus in traditional SOA tends to be much more on the seams of our IT systems than what makes them the most valuable overall.”
Dion speculates that ultimately, SOA may be effectively addressing the plumbing, but not the value of the water that passes through the system. “SOA provides a more engineered, predefined, and formal view, that satisfies perhaps a larger number of important technical criteria but often seems to miss the very point about what matters; that people are central to software and it’s our data that is irreplaceable and of supreme market advantage. And our software or services — necessary as they are — are like electricity and network bandwidth are to our IT systems; essential but not the primary value.”
Still, many industry leaders say that enterprises need both the structure of an SOA-type approach and the entrepreneurial energy of a Web 2.0 approach. As part of the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum project, I spoke with Miko Matsumura, vice president of product marketing SOA for webMethods, who cautioned against letting mashups run too far amok without governance, as “there is almost a tyranny to structurelessness,” he says. “That kind of model is inherently less agile, flexible, and more expensive, than a model that actually consists of logical constraints.”
Miko added that the constraints SOA governance may impose “should be thought of more as a ‘pivot’ than as a ‘straightjacket.’ If you constrain something along one dimension, it doesn’t mean that it’s not free to move across the other dimension. That’s the balance that SOA represents, which is the IT-business alignment. One side wants to go wild, while the other side wants to buckle down everything.”
Dion pointed out that there are many key elements that SOA and Web 2.0 share, and provided a number of these common points:
- Recombinant software
- Governance
- Software as Services
- Applications as platforms
- Unintended uses
- Openness
- AJAX
- Interoperability
- Monetization
- Security
- Web Oriented Architecture
That last item, Web-Oriented Architecture or WOA, is a key concept, and ultimately may what bring SOA and Web 2.0 together, Dion observes. “One of the biggest arguments against traditional SOA is that there are literally thousands of software platforms and environments that presently exist in the world. And if they don’t speak your unique flavor of SOA (SOAP and WS-*), interoperability with them won’t (and doesn’t) happen.”
Dion explains WOA, or “the SOA with reach,” in more detail here.
However, Dion adds, “with WOA, anyone that can speak HTTP — the fundamental protocol of the Web — and anyone that can process XML, which is to say just about every tool and platform that exists today, can interoperate and work together simply, safely, and easily and build applications on top of one another services. Importantly, mashups are a key outcome of the trend towards WOA and most mashups are based on REST or REST-like services.”
by Jerry Bowles
May 21, 2007 at 10:14 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Web 2.0, enterprise software
With so many blog, wiki, and social networking applications–some authorized and some not–finding their way into enterprises these days, CIOs are under increasing pressure to bring these social computing “rat nests” under some kind of formal IT control by integrating them into the enterprise system. For Jive Software, the most influential software company you may never have heard of, this is the sound of opportunity knocking…again.
Launched in New York in 2001 by a couple of University of Iowa Java wizards named Matt Tucker and Bill Lynch–soon joined by CEO David Hersh–Jive quickly became the group discussion application of choice for large online communities at Sun, Amazon, Apple and many other sites with millions of users.
Tucker and Lynch had realized early on that none of the free PHP forum software had enough cache capacity to handle that kind of traffic so they created their initial application, Jive Forums, as an open source, enterprise solution, using 100% Java, tweaked for maximum caching. That proved to be a key differentiator. Today, Jive Forums powers many of the largest online communities throughout the world, including the SAP Developer Network (SDN) and ships as a standard part of SAP NetWeaver.
In 2004, after their significant others had finished up with grad school in New York, Tucker, Lynch and Hersh packed up the company and moved to Portland, Oregon where labor and overhead was a lot cheaper. The move cost the company a little momentum, but you’d hardly know it–it has been growing like gangbusters ever since. Jive Software ranked 443 on Inc. magazine’s list of 500 fastest growing private companies last year. Jive now has 50 employees, 1,600 customers, and expects to do about $15 million in revenues this year, according to Hersh. And all this without a penny of outside investment.
And things could get even better as the call for order in the collaboration space increases. Jive’s response to the growing enterprise demand to bring all their social software into a unified system is a new collaboration platform called Clearspace, (released in February and already in Version 1.1) that unifies all content tools (whether or not they were made by Jive) using an open, plug-in architecture, that emphasizes real-time communication. For users, Clearspace presents a unified portal-view to content from all over an enterprise. Relationship mapping directs users to content that has changed by topic, not by application. Rather than going through a lot of blogs or wikis to find out if anyone has been discussing something they’re interested in, they can look at a category and see if anyone has written a post, IM, or document on the subject. They don’t even need to know where to look, since communities are defined by categories, not types of applications.
Beyond providing a unified view of the content being created anywhere in the enterprise, Clearspace also contains its own impressive tool kit that allows collaborative document creation in the form of wiki-style pages; activity management; blogs; document management; threaded discussions; and content syndication. Users can also create dynamically configured workspaces, which can be restricted or open for use with partners and customers.
For enterprises that have already invested in other legacy solutions that are working well, Clearspace’s open architecture allows them to hang on to applications that people are already comfortable using. And just last week (May 14), Jive released Clearspace X, an application that allows companies to build communities with customers and partners by pushing out content they want to share.
“Our goal is to bridge the gap between the big, expensive and complex collaboration systems like Sharepoint and the sort of enterprise IT chaos and inefficiency that results from having a bunch of unconnected point-solutions,” Hersh says. “You don’t have to go the Microsoft or Lotus route to achieve the benefits of collaboration. You just need a secure, reliable way to tie all the pieces together and to expose the content and connections to users who need it. Clearspace does exactly that.”
Jive appears to be following the same “bridge the gap” model with Openfire, its XMPP-based (Jabber) communication RTC server which now has more than a million users and is widely considered to be a less expensive, less complicated alternative to Microsoft’s Live Communication Server and Lotus Sametime. Formerly called Wildfire and developed as a cross-platform open source project, the new enterprise edition (introduced in March) adds voice capabilities to the popular IM platform. Users can now talk from one PC to another while sharing screens, participating in discussion threads, and sending instant messages
For all the impressive technology, Hersh says he thinks Jive’s most important asset may be the experience it has developed over the past six years in working with many large organizations and IT departments.
“We’ve been put through the wringer many times,” he says. “There are a lot of companies jumping into the collaboration software space right now but we’ve been out there for a long time now and we have the products and the experience to create real business value.”
by Jim McGee
May 21, 2007 at 9:33 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, Gawande, Atul
I’ve always been troubled by the phrase “best practices” thrown around loosely in business settings. In certain engineering and professional settings, the term can have an important legal meaning. Even then, “best practice” is always a moving target. Better, Atul Gawande’s most recent collection of essays nicely crystallizes my reservations and offers useful insight into how to think about performance and performance improvement in knowledge work environments.
Drawing on his experience as a surgeon, Gawande reflects on the connections between learning and practice; both as an individual practitioner and as a field. His essays provide fascinating insights into how the practice of medicine has evolved over time; ranging over such diverse topics as hand-washing, battlefield injuries, and obstetrics. For that alone, Better is well worth reading. But it offers broader lessons as well.
Rooted in science and medicine, one thread that Gawande examines is quality of evidence. The gold standard is that of the double-blind, controlled laboratory experiment. However, action in the world and the demands of day-to-day practice cannot always wait for that standard to be met. There’s a wonderful quote from Samuel Butler that captures this problem; “Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.” Many of Gawande’s stories shed light on the reality that we often must make decisions on the basis of imperfect information and knowledge. We may not be able always to meet a gold standard of evidence, but we still benefit from a methodological commitment to hypothesis, experiment, and measurement.
Gawande’s observations on measurement and performance evolution in obstetrics provides one good example. He starts with the development of the Apgar score; a simple, concrete, measure of a baby’s condition at one minute and five minutes after birth. I am particularly struck by the insight and cleverness represented by recording the score twice in such a short interval. That creates a connection between measurement and action that drives performance improvement; it creates a feedback loop well matched to the human system it is embedded in.
Moving up a level from an individual delivery to a hospital’s performance, the Apgar score also serves to drive performance improvement at a more systemic level. In addition to informed clinical judgments about performance, we now have some numbers we can compare against one another and over time. Because these numbers tie to clinical judgment and performance, they can be used to evaluate changes in practice. Changes that improve the scores stick; those that don’t are abandoned.
This logic sheds some interesting light on a tension between “evidence-based medicine” and performance improvement more broadly conceived. Careful, clinical studies of problematic deliveries showed that Caesarian-sections had no measurable advantage over forceps assisted deliveries. Yet, no obstetrician uses forceps anymore and C-sections are used more and more routinely to the point where some claim they are over-used.
Understanding why has important lessons for anyone interesting in improving the performance of knowledge work in organizations. The difference comes from whether you are looking at performance at the systems level or the individual practitioner level. Learning to use forceps is a complex skill; difficult to observe, difficult to learn and difficult to teach. A C-section, on the other hand, is straightforward as surgical procedures go, highly observable, and teachable to a wider range of competent OB/GYNs. If you are trying to improve the outcomes and reliability of the system as a whole, your payoff from pushing C-sections over forceps is much higher. This is a classic example of improving a system by reducing variability. It is also an important reminder to be clear about where you are trying to improve performance.
by Dana Gardner
May 21, 2007 at 8:26 am · Filed under
SOA, Web 2.0, enterprise software
IBM’s SOA Impact event this week in Orlando has turned into a much larger gab-fest than I was expecting. This 4,200-attendee-strong, “SOA comes of age” milestone gathering might not be Burning Man for CIOs, but it’s as close as you can get with your clothes on.
And who would have thought that IBM would effectively take stodgy out of the SOA mix? The keynote address began with a wild jungle motif, perhaps to remind CIOs and architects of current state of IT affairs. There are indeed elephants in the room, in the datacenter and in between the operational and discretionary budgets.
The WebSphere brand may still be holding up the rain forest canopy, but the horizon-to-horizon landscape is all SOA in this “unnamed decade” of IT. Indeed, SOA better than any other concept since electricity binds together all that IBM is and does. SOA is the new IBM uber brand.
IBM Senior Vice President and Software Group Executive Steve Mills told the crowd about the “enduring impact” of SOA. It pulls together technology, business and people — and makes change easier, he said. Adopt the SOA “style” to integrate a business as a set of linked services that can map to innovation.
IBM sees itself as the tour guide to this reengineered style of corporate management and agility. IBM has the largest direct sales force in the world, at more than 13,000. Think of them as the ticket punchers along the way.
The past is chaos, the future is modular. And you can get on the journey to SOA from many points, at many paces, and from legacy or greenfield contexts, said Mills. Do know that seeking consistent data is a great entry point. Integration and connectivity is an excellent way to get started. Reuse also poses an attractive rationale for SOA activities, he added.
You can get ROI and deploy around SOA simultaneously. Leading adopters of SOA report cost savings (97%), improved flexibility (100%), reduced risk (71%), increased revenue (51%), said Mills. There are also business alignment benefits.
This decade has no name, said Mills, because it’s a business decade, not an IT decade. We are moving from an IT view to a process view to a business view inside of today’s enterprises. Prebuilt models and components of business functions make this possible, leading to composites of business services from a variety of sources.
This all helps reduce the 70% of IT spent on labor, if you can get it. Automation and reuse cuts wetware and sneakerware. What’s more, CIOs that adopt SOA get higher placement in the corporation. They tend to be chief transformation officers, with seats on the executive committee, said Mills. “CIOs have extraordinary leverage,” he said.
Web 2.0 also brings more people into the process, while creating nice interfaces too. Social networking relates to transformation through “personal impact” on SOA, said Mills.
by Tom Mandel
May 21, 2007 at 8:20 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
In a series of blog posts, Shai Agassi has taken up the subject of enterprise software, the third generation. Shai approaches his subject from a very different angle from what we are talking about here as “Enterprise 2.0,” but obviously there is much to think about in juxtaposing the perspectives. This is essential reading.
In his first post, Shai “looked at the following four layers in the stack: Store, Compute, Messaging, Presentation” and saw the following characteristics for the new generation:
Storage moves to some combination of Network Storage (think S3) in combination with in-memory stores
Compute will be disrupted on the server by cloud computing (which is an evolution to higher level of distributed than C/S) together with local grids as represented by appliances.
Networks will move from packets to events – in a sense sending business objects around, with the network aware of the content and able to route them using local enterprise bus that understand the relationships between roles and resources using rules.
Finally on the client side we will see smarter browsing – able to scale up the experience and fit the experience to the user and the content. At the same time, mobile clients with higher fidelity of experience but lower level of resources (screen and keyboard) will overtake the role of the desktop as the dominant platforms for user interaction.
More interesting, he says, is the question “what meaningful new experiences do you get from these innovations when they come together.”
Comments and his follow-up post make this a very lively and important conversation. Check it out.
by Tom Mandel
May 21, 2007 at 8:11 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Last week I wrote about a Wall Street Journal article chronicling the conflicts that globalization has led to at SAP (full text of the WSJ article here). We can expect more problems of this ilk as companies employ Enterprise 2.0 tools to ease global collaboration and social networking.
Shai Agassi, who left SAP recently, was quoted in the article and has now commented on it in his blog.
by Dana Gardner
May 20, 2007 at 8:42 pm · Filed under
SOA, enterprise software, guest commentary, podcasts
Read a full transcript of the discussion.
IBM helped the Eclipse Foundation score a huge hit with the Eclipse development framework and community. Now the software engineering target is even higher, but the methods and approaches are similar.
IBM will in June will unveil details about its Jazz framework and community for automation and governance of complex, collaborative application development processes. IBM will make elements of the Jazz community open, as well as interlace new Rational, Lotus, WebSphere and Tivoli products with Jazz.
Jazz is an innovation technology project by IBM Rational and IBM Research designed to help globally and organizationally dispersed development teams automate more of the development and deployment lifecycle. The goal is to integrate and automate among many back-end aspects of development to provide real-time information for managing projects, including those for services oriented architecture (SOA).
Not all the details on this major application lifecycle management update are out, but I had an in-depth interview on Jazz with Scott Hebner, the vice president for marketing and strategy for IBM Rational Software, that highlights the importance of Jazz for IBM, as well as a much larger development community and vendor ecosystem.
Here are some excerpts:
Jazz is a major investment by IBM to create an innovative, collaborative software development technology base. It will not only will drive the evolution of our product for future years, but it’s also going to drive the evolution of many elements of the marketplace.
Jazz is being brought to us by the team that helped to lead Eclipse. What they are trying to do now is automate the lessons of this proven, open-collaborative model that Eclipse represents. And so I think we have learned a lot about how to facilitate collaboration.
Eclipse did a lot on the client side, the user side, to integrate the desktop. You can think of Jazz as being a similar approach, but on the back end — or the server side — where the teams need to have the same ability to collaborate more effectively and to gain integration.
I think Tivoli is another important element here, in that, when we talk about lifecycle management in governance, that doesn’t stop at the delivery of the software that flows into your operational state. And many of the change requests that get created actually occur in an operational setting — from a user, for example. Right now there is a lot of labor cost associated with getting that change into the software development process, and to the requirements.
The more we can automate that and create collaboration that extends beyond just this core software development team, the more you can address labor costs and help customers in a broader notion of managing the lifecycle of their projects. And not only in delivering productions, but also in operations. Think of it as one massive lifecycle. This is the way it should be, right?
A part of the value of this technology is going to be greater collaboration and visibility into the process of software delivery. As I said before, you may have people that are part of broader teams in different time zones, different countries. They may be in different organizations in other companies that you are outsourcing to. And you want to be able to manage that as an integrated project, gain a lifecycle view of it. Then you will be able to manage it much more effectively, to get all those geographically distributed people in the projects to actually work together.
There is going to need to be some degree of hosting and Web access around Web 2.0 clients, or Eclipse clients, or whatever it may be. And if you think about that, in many ways it’s almost an internal software-as-a-service model.
The idea here is that you have visibility and gain collaboration into the software development process. And so what are some of the key value points that this technology will provide to customers?
I’ll tell you. The first one is that it will enable development teams to collaborate in real time, in the context of the work they are doing, and especially in globally diverse environments. The second thing is it enables projects to be managed more effectively by providing visibility into accurate, real-time project health information, effectively drawn from the actual work that’s going on. Obviously, there is a lot of reporting that goes around that.
Building on that, it automates traceability and auditibility my managing the artifacts and/or inter-relationships — across the lifecycle, which, as I was saying before, empowers the teams to deliver more value. So you don’t have to worry about managing auditibility issues and traceability.
The system will do it for the development teams. And, finally, I think the final key piece of value here is that Jazz provides a customizable process design enactment, a kind of capability for rules-based process guidance. It becomes a lot easier to automate, to find check points. It allows you to enact processes that take on the unique characteristics of how
