ROI, ROI, ROI

July 31, 2007 at 5:40 pm · Filed under Barriers, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Mashups, SaaS, Web 2.0

All major technology projects require a Return on Investment calculation that presumably shows the company making more money as a result of the implementation than it put into it. Of course, the “hard-dollar” numbers make for an easier sell to the C-level executives.

The problem with Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, of course, is that the benefits delivered are “soft” benefits; there are few examples of hard numbers to show ROI.

New research out of Forrester says these hard numbers are hard to come by. (InformationWeek report here, InfoWorld report here.)

As I noted in a previous post, the vice president of engineering of Google and the CIO of McKesson both acknowledged at a recent presentation that Web 2.0 is, at this stage, unmeasurable — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t delivering value to the organization.

The Forrester report acknowledges as much, noting that there have been some tangible business benefits seen, such as a drop in support center calls because of rich Internet applications or a database system replaced by a corporate wiki. But the greatest advantages are seen in softer benefits, such as business efficiency and competitive advantage.

Forrester’s survey of 275 executives finds that 63 percent of those surveyed use total cost of ownership, ROI, or internal rate of return to measure the value of Web 2.0 tools.

The executives rank instant messaging as having the most value to their organizations. At the bottom of the list is blogging. IM was rated by 37 percent as delivering “substantial value,” while only 11 percent rated blogging as such.

One potential flaw in the study (at least from what the articles say) is that it limited its area of study to RSS, podcasting, wikis, social networks or blogs. These are the important communication tools of Web 2.0.

However, it would be interesting to see a study of the perceived value of the information processing platforms engendered through Web 2.0 — such as mashups or Software as a Service. Are executives having more success determining hard-dollar ROI from these approaches?

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What is Enterprise 2.0? Fred Cavazza

July 30, 2007 at 6:45 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Here is a comprehensive overview of our topic Fred Cavazza’s blog. I will not attempt to go beyond what Fred wrote and just provide the link in this post with a recommendation to look at it. The quote below will give you a taste of what he said. There is much more good stuff.

“Let’s face it: a file can be lost, does not always fit in messaging systems’ limit and are a real lost of money for internal mailing systems. They are outdated, from a time when Microsoft’s Office was considered as business enhancers. Today’s reality is different: we write in Powerpoint, make tables in Word and draw charts in Excel. It is time to make this change and that’s what blogs and wikis are up to.

Blogs, with their simplified publication engine allow contributors to start posting without reading manual or attending a training ; with their intuitive interface where beginners can “consume” information with more accuracy (by using categories, archives, tags) and efficiency (by using RSS feeds). In some large company (IBM, Microsoft, GE…) one can find thousands of blogs gathered in blog farms: horizontal ones (by job), vertical ones (by business units or countries) and transversal ones. Blogs are a very simple and effective way to extract information from proprietary systems (files, emails…) and to share them on large scale (CEO’s blog) or local scale (team’s blog).

Internal communication gets more simpler: no more lost emails, stacked replies where someone is always missing in CC, doubles and susceptibility management (”I am the project leader, why am I only in CC?“). Everything is handled by the blog engine: publication, comments, archives, categories… Blogs are also a perfect match for new comers in a team which can have access to discussions history. If you are looking for a golden rule, here it is: if more than 5 person are in CC of your mail, than you better write a post.”

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SOA Insights analysts on Web 3.0, Google’s role in semantics, and the future of UDDI

July 30, 2007 at 11:10 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, IBM, Innovator Interviews, Mashups, Open Source, Podcasts, SOA, Web 2.0

Read a full transcript of the discussion.The notion of a world wide web that anticipates a user’s needs, and adds a more human touch to mere surfing and searching, has long been a desire and goal. Yet how closer are we to a more “semantic” web? Will such improvements cross over into how enterprises manage semantic data and content?

Our expert panel digs into this and other recent trends in SOA and enterprise IT architecture in the latest BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition, volume 17. Our group also examines Adobe’s open source moves around Flex, and how UDDI is becoming more about politics than policy.

So join noted IT industry analysts Joe McKendrick, Jim Kobielus, Dave Linthicum and Todd Biske for our latest SOA podcast discussion, hosted and moderated by yours truly.

Here are some excerpts:

I saw one recent article where [the semantic web] was called Web 3.0, and I thought, “Oh, my Lord, we haven’t even decided that we are all in agreement on the notion of Web 2.0.”

[But] there is activity at the World Wide Web Consortium that’s been going on for a few years now to define various underlying standards and specifications, things like OWL and Sparql and the whole RDF and Ontologies, and so forth.

So, what is the Semantic Web? Well, to a great degree, it refers to some super-magical metadata description and policy layer that can somehow enable universal interoperability on a machine-to-machine basis, etc. It more or less makes the meanings manifest throughout the Web through some self-description capability.

You can look at semantic interoperability as being the global oceanic concern. Wouldn’t be great if every single application, data base, or file that was ever posted by anybody anywhere on the Internet somehow, magically is able to declare its full structure, behavior, and expectations?

Then you can look at semantic interoperability in a well-contained way as being specific to a particular application environment within an intranet or within a B2B environment. … The whole notion of a “semantic Web,” to the extent that we can all agree on a definition, won’t really come to the fore until there is substantial deployment inside of enterprises.

Conceivably, the enterprise information integration (EII) vendors are providing a core piece of infrastructure that could be used to realize this notion of a Semantic Web, a way of harmonizing and providing a logical unified view of heterogeneous data sources.

Red Hat, one of the leading open source players, is very geared to SOA and building an SOA suite. Now, they are acquiring an EII vendor, which itself is very SOA focused. So, you’ve got SOA; you’ve got open source; you’ve got this notion of a semantic layer, and so forth. To me, it’s like, you’ve stirred it all together in the broth here.

That sounds like the beginnings of a Semantic Web that conceivably could be universal or “unversalizable,” because as I said, it’s open source first and foremost.

If we build on this, it does solve a lot of key problems. You end up dealing with universal semantics, how that relates to B2B domains, and how that relates to the enterprise domains.

As I’m deploying and building SOAs out there in my client base, semantic mediation ultimately is a key problem we’re looking to solve.

The average developer is still focused on the functionality of the business solution that they’re providing. They know that they may have data in two different formats and they view it in a point-to-point fashion. They do what they have to do to make it work, and then go back to focusing on the functionality, not really seeing the broader semantic issues that come up when you take that approach.

One thing that’s going to happen with the influence of something like Google, which is having a ton of a push in the business right now, is that ultimately these guys are exposing APIs as services. … They’re coming to the realization that the developers that leverage these APIs need to have a shared semantic understanding out on the Web. Once that starts to emerge, you’re going to see a push down on the enterprise, if that becomes the de-facto standard that Google is driving.

In fact, they may be in a unique position to create the first semantic clearing house for all these APIs and applications that are out there, and they are certainly willing to participate in that, as long as they can get the hits, and, therefore, get the advertising revenue that’s driving the model.

[Google] is in the API business and they are in the services business. When you’re in for a penny, you’re in for a pound. … You start providing access to services, and rudimentary on-demand governance systems to account for the services and test for rogue services, and all those sorts of things. Then you ultimately get into semantics, security, and lots of other different areas they probably didn’t anticipate that they’d get into, but will be pushed into, based on the model they are moving into.

… Perhaps Google or others need to come into the market with a gateway appliance that would allow for policy, privilege, and governance. This would allow certain information from inside the organization that has been indexed in an appliance, say from Google, to then be accessed outside. Who is going to be in the best position to manage that gateway of content on a finely-grained basis? Google.

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.

 

 BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition, volume 17 [49:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (3356)

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TIBCO boosts SOA-RIA market with donation of Ajax messaging bus to OpenAjax Alliance

July 30, 2007 at 8:29 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Mashups, Open Source, SOA, SaaS, Web 2.0

TIBCO Software is easing the way for Ajax component interoperability with the donation this week of its core Ajax message bus technology to the OpenAjax Alliance (OAA) Hub project. TIBCO announced the donation today, at the same time as it released its PageBus, a related open source product.

What’s in it for you? Well, besides the technological benefits, developers could walk away with a 50-inch plasma TV or a 30-GB iPod, if they enter — and win — the Ultimate Mashup Ajax Challenge.

PageBus applies “publish and subscribe” message bus programming patterns within the context of a single Web page, allowing communication among multiple Ajax components. This allows developers to create composite applications from reusable parts and services. All of this is designed to reduce development costs, improve interfaces over HTML and increase business agility.

The message-bus approach solves one of the key problems that comes from combining increasingly sophisticated composite applications. As the number of composite applications and mashups increase, the programming — and needed event-driven reliability — required can increase exponentially.

What’s more, creating client-SOA applications becomes easier because the same conceptual architecture — publish and subscribe — is used for both rich Internet client (RIA) activities as well as for compositing backend services. TIBCO says it has large banks and other users delivering mission critical, real-time data through SOA backends to scads of Ajax-enabled components on RIA clients.

Users get a quick, rich experience, while developers and architects gain flexibility and speed-to-deployment. TIBCO gains by riding the wave of increased demand for back-end SOA integration and messaging infrastructure to support the RIA ramp-up.

TIBCO, as a member of the OAA, is working with more than 70 companies to standardize key aspects of Ajax. The OpenAjaxHub 1.0, the group’s first specification implementation, aims to provide Ajax interoperability through the publish/subscribe interface. The specification will formally be out in about six weeks, but the code is now at Sourceforge.net.

PageBus is open source and can be downloaded. It’s also shipped as part of the TIBCO Ajax Message Service.

The above-noted mashup challenge is a developer community project to build the world’s largest mashup using PageBus and TIBCO’s General Interface. The contest runs through September 30, after which TIBCO and co-sponsor Artima will award prizes for the best entries.

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Enterprise 2.0… It Just Feels Right

July 29, 2007 at 11:09 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Web 2.0

Enterprise and Web 2.0 has many ramifications for the way we conduct our work, how value is created and delivered in the organization, and we can debate endlessly about at what point that value will be delivered.

But perhaps the benefits of E/W 2.0 need not be so overstated and complicated. To put it simply, it helps people work together more comfortably.

That’s the message heard at a recent Web 2.0 discussion hosted by ZDNet at San Francisco’s Churchill Club.

Douglass Merrill, vice president of engineering at Google, said its’ difficult, and perhaps not the right time, to attempt to measure the monetization of Web 2.0. “Measuring in terms of big dollars might be the wrong metric. For example, 100,000 companies use Google apps and don’t pay for it.”

Randall Spratt, CIO of McKesson, said that about 1,000 McKesson employees are behind the 1-800-ASK-A-NURSE service, and all work out of their homes, supported by IT and interconnected data centers. “The biggest issue with nurses leaving a hospital and working at home is they lose the social interaction, and lose the connection with their peers, and the ability to talk about their profession.” Spratt added that McKesson found that “by investing in collaboration technologies, whether it’s instant messages or local wikis, we’ve dramatically improved the job satisfaction of work-at-home employees.”

Web 2.0 approaches have also had a direct impact on the bottom line, Spratt added. “At the executive level, for the first time, we’re starting to see real options arrive at an executive collaboration level — telepresence rooms, high-def multi-screens…”

Doug Schwinn, CIO of Hasbro, observed that his companies has project teams that deliver modules all over the world. “They collaborate together — we use instant messaging, we use blogs, instant messaging, and we’re starting to use wikis. It all adds to our ability to delivery a high-quality product in a shorter period of time.”

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