Before we get too ahead of ourselves with Web 2.0-mania…
by Joe McKendrick
Oliver Widder, creator of the Geek & Poke series, has an uncanny knack for keeping things in perspective.
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Archive for September, 2007
Gartner: Semantic Web Doesn’t Deserve its Own Buzzword Yet!
by Joe McKendrick
Word is out that Gartner, Inc., the firm that never met a buzzword it didn’t like, has signaled its disapproval at the “Web 3.0″ moniker that is sometimes applied to the Semantic Web.
According to Network World, Gartner analysts at the consultancy’s latest innovation summit said that new technologies such as virtual worlds and the Semantic Web do not deserve their own new label, since “they’re not providing the same kind of fundamental change as blogs, wikis and social networking tools.” As analyst Gene Phifer put it: “It’s not going to be another era like Web 2.0. However, there will be some very interesting innovative things coming out. If you’re in love with numbering schemes, maybe it’s Web 2.1.”
Fair enough. Web 2.1 it is. But does that mean we have to go to Enterprise 2.1?
Gartner analysts also took some Enterprise 2.0 thinking to task, saying the stock enterprise approaches to technology management won’t work here. Analyst Tom Austin is quoted as saying that “the biggest problem with Enterprise 2.0 is thinking about it as ‘what product do I buy and how many people are using it.’ This isn’t an issue of provisioning telephone service.”
Gartner projects a 42% compound annual growth rate in the Web 2.0 market through 2011. Best of all, much of the stuff is cheap, they said. Phifer pointed out that “mashup technology might cost a few hundred thousand dollars, while blogging and wiki tools could cost a few thousand. But that’s not as expensive as acquiring and managing a traditional software infrastructure. You’re not looking at humongous investments.”
Many Ways to get Enterprise 2.0 Going
by Bill Ives
First, I want to offer thanks to The Shed 2.0 and the Enterprise 2.0 Evangelist blogs for referencing my post on Enterprise Wiki Increases Collaboration and Connections at Janssen-Cilag. They are both worth checking out if you have been to them. I also want to pick on something that the Shed 2.0 writer added. After an initial positive start, he was stalled in growing the readership for his internal blog until a “someone in semi-senior management” got involved. Then readership jumped another 100, including people who knew about it but had not yet picked up on it. He concludes, “So I guess E2 will still suffer some of E1’s problems. Most people will probably still want to be led rather than lead. The learnings from this though…get someone senior on board with you ASAP. Approach things from various different angles, bottom up, top down, side to side and round and round.”
The need for senior support goes way back beyond E1 and is not a bad thing in my view. For example, I have never seen a knowledge management effort succeed that did not have a supporter at the senior level. It was best if this supporter was on the business side rather than IT. Whenever we started an effort we looked for our senior management champion. Now in those days this was also important because more funding was involved. However, the benefit went way beyond securing funding. It was a critical factor in securing participation. Leaders help and if they are participating in discussion forums (a type of old style “blogs”) the quality and level of participation will increase. Moving to the enterprise 2.0 world, I will imagine that the quality and level of participation will also increase if people know that senior management is involved and looking at what is going on, and participating
Crossing the Chasm
by Paula Thornton
In deference to Geoffrey Moore, this isn’t about early adopters, but it is about the ability to adopt. More importantly, it’s about a chasm — a really big one. One much more significant than the reference we’ve been making to ‘barriers’.
Let me first offer thanks to Bill for his reference to the Forrester blog post Web 2.0 Changes The Information Workplace. It spurred a flurry of ideas that grew well beyond posting a comment there.
I’m currently at Gartner’s Web Innovation Summit. And while I am happy to report that Gartner does know a bit more about 2.0 than I might have thought before, I did find that they and Forrester are missing critical issues. I already knew there were gaps — I’ve been very proactive trying to start conversations around the things they’re not talking about. The difference now is that I applied the skills of my craft — experience design — to conversations with attendees. I uncovered new facts that blow the lid off of my former concerns.
The Forrester analyst correctly suggested that 2.0 simplifies the ability to enable Information Workplace strategies (which are equally relevant to the success of Enterprise 2.0). This is conceptually correct but fundamentally flawed. It assumes that three necessary conditions can be met: vision, funding and staffing.
The first is strategic in nature. Most IT groups lack strategic-thinking or strategic-implementing resources. Why? Their funding models. They have operated so long in a ‘response’ mode (project-based funding), they have been ’stupified’ out of believing that they can/should think strategically. Typically, anyone with strategic mindsets have long ago left those environments to capitalize on new ideas in the marketplace.
As conference attendees describe their various challenges, I ask if they are doing basic things that could move them forward. They respond in a way that suggests they do not readily see how such actions would be important or would help their current situation. They cannot make the conceptual leap from the mess they’re in to a way forward.
Most of the recommendations Gartner and Forrester are making are perceived as being too ‘fluffy’ (the specific phrase is often “too conceptual”). IT resources are having problems moving beyond the locked down, concrete world that they are ideally suited to address, to the reality they face.
Strategic thinking, design thinking are inherently ’squishy’. 2.0 is not gaining momentum because it’s the ‘latest’ fad, it’s gaining momentum because of the need to address the complexity of reality. IT is uniquely positioned to help businesses address complexity, by providing the infrastructures to ‘let go’ of structure elsewhere.
Gartner is saying that 2.0 is justifiable because it provides a reality check from the things that 1.0 didn’t address (and thank goodness, they suggest that there is no relative justification for anything 3.0 — in the keynote this morning, “It’s the Web Stupid”).
IT understands technology. The predominant ‘thinking’ model inside of IT (those resources who readily survive) cannot see past their daily challenges. They need specifics — they’re more successful ‘doing’ than ‘thinking’, particularly in a business strategic way. This is not about adding more business analysts, they’re part of the problem too.
But telling IT that they need different resources only adds to their frustration and disillusionment. The possibilities offered to them as to a ‘way forward’ has to be reasonable. It has to consider their current reality: constrained time and resources.
Unless (as has happened in some cases) someone with deep IT experience also has the aptitude to move into a strategic role on the business side to change the investment model in IT, the existing IT resources need ways to sell new ideas to the business. The thinking models most effective for sales and marketing are the least effective for surviving in most IT environments. That means, they likely are challenged thinking this way – to even begin to imagine the possibilities.
This presents an opportunity to suggest things they can do to have more meaningful conversations with the business and begin to bridge the chasm that separates them. They need advice to help them do the following:
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Create and leverage conceptual artifacts that can ‘ground’ a shared understanding, to provide a context for continuous conversations. Often IT speaks in ways equally ‘fluffy’ from the business perspective. Such artifacts would include, at a minimum, Enterprise Framework components like Subject Areas (data architecture) and Function Areas (the means by which to ground a SOA, and by association a Web Services initiative – critical to the success of 2.0).
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Replace technological terms in business conversations with ‘results’, framed by reference to the Framework artifacts.
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Engage the business to decide, collectively, what their priorities are, relative to the Framework. Today IT is by default managing these priorities, robbing the business of the opportunity to see and resolve the conflicts in a more open, informed way.
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Create a 2.0 culture that exposes the work being done as a total picture (again, leveraging the Framework to communicate). This minimizes the ability for individual groups to ‘pander’ focuses on their initiatives, based solely on their ability to throw money at IT resources. Even where companies have attempted to initiate IT Governance Models to mitigate rogue IT spending, they often prove to be ineffective and inefficient as a ‘gate’ to spending. By nature of sheer numbers alone, such Governance bodies typically only review ‘large’ initiatives. In the new world, ‘small’ is the new black. The collective of the ‘smalls’ today are often larger than the biggest ‘large’ initiative.
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Learn to differentiate between technical architectures and capital “A”, Architecture. Many technical architects do not understand the fundamental principles of architecture. If they did, they would not be able to do their job effectively without all of the other architects who can/should influence the decisions they make: data architects, metadata architects (they are fundamentally different – such resources often come out of graduate programs in Library and Information Science), user experience architects, process architects, function architects (SOA, WOA), etc.
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Question the effectiveness of the Systems Development Lifecycle (SDLC). It is woefully inadequate to successfully leverage Architecture in a strategic, business-value-adding way. Learn about the well-established Commercial Construction industry. Blueprints go out to bid to ‘trades’. Applications Development is a trade. The SDLC ‘starts’ after a whole series of larger activities have already gone on to identify the effort – including the creation of blueprints and specifications. Requirements are the things that a ‘trade’ recommends back to the General Contractor (in the form of a bid) to suggest what it is they will do to fulfill the blueprints and specifications. The current effort to solicit “requirements” (in nearly every development methodology in practice today) is fundamentally flawed.
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Embrace the reality that the SDLC is meaningless in a 2.0 world. 2.0 development is informed in a wholly different way. It should be informed by Design Research, which in the simplest case is done as illustrated by Microsoft’s Patterns & Practices Group (see related video tours in The 5 Ps of Design & Development). In a larger perspective it is informed by continuous research about the business and its relationship with people and vice versa.
I challenge both Gartner and Forrester to apply some of these recommendations to their own companies and ask this question: Is the research we’re doing and the advice we’re giving grounded in a shared understanding of our customers and the context in which they’d have to apply this advice? Before answering that question, remember that most analyst interactions occur in response to a specific problem, taken out of context from a larger whole. Embrace the whole and see what emerges.
Forrester Provides More Tips on Implementing Enterprise Web 2.0
by Bill Ives
I like a report that encourages KM people to embrace Enterprise Web 2.0 (their term), “Information and knowledge management managers must move Web 2.0 policies and usage guidelines to the top of their priorities. It’s critical to address Web 2.0 now, before usage explodes within your organization.” This is one of the conclusions of Forrester’s Web 2.0 Social Computing Dresses Up For Business.
The report includes some research on the question, “using your best estimate, how much business value has been derived from your deployment of each of the following technologies?” They include IM, RSS, podcasting, wikis, social networking, and blogs. The report discusses the positive answers which are significant but I also found it interesting that for every technology except social networking (13%) the “no value” answers were 7% or less. In each of these cases there were more than twice as many “substantial value” answers (the highest rating) as “no value” answers.
Their research also found substantial usage of these enterprise 2.0 technologies in firms that have invested in the technologies. Even with firms that have no plans to use the technologies, the tools are already being used but to a much lesser extent. The report warns CIOs against allowing unsanctioned usage and offers some good suggestions for mitigating any risks. The writers also offer some excellent best practices to make Enterprise 2.0 adoption successful, beginning with an audit of current use. It is nice to see the analysts firms continue to pick up on Enterprise 2.0 and endorse it.
A related report, Passionate Employees: The Gateway to Enterprise Web 2.0 Sales, remarks, “Forrester user-clients regularly tell us that vocal employees have been hounding then to get blogs, social networking, and wikis into the enterprise.” It adds that employee requests were a driver in web 2.0 related investments nearly 40% of the time. These are the stories we need to help take Enterprise 2.0 mainstream.
There is more on how web 2.0 impacts the enterprise in the Forrester blog post, Web 2.0 Changes The Information Workplace, referenced in the report. Three of the changes include the evolution of role-based technologies into more individualized tools, as well as the increased social nature of the workplace and the increased speed. As they wrote, “Web 2.0 makes Information Workplaces easier to deploy, modify, and use than ever before.” These are all points made on this blog but it good to see them nicely articulated in another forum.
