by Bill Ives
January 30, 2008 at 5:01 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
The second article in the IBM and mashups series by IBMers, Andy J. F. Bravery, Luba Cherbakov, and
Aroop Pandya covers “the IBM® experience in building the Situational Applications Environment (SAE), which has been developed to support the community-based computing that takes advantage of both traditional SOA and emerging Web 2.0 technologies and approaches.” It starts with a review of the roles in successful mashup development, the business users, the mashup assemblers, and the consumable builders. Sometimes people will cross over the roles but they each have different attributes and requirements.
There is a nice layout of a mashup development interface with links to apps, aggregated community ratings, discussion forums, search, activity monitoring, feed subscriptions, and news items. The article adds, “a catalog stores assets created or discovered by the community. These assets are either links to SAs or parts from which SAs are constructed. They might be Web services, JavaScript widgets, APIs, or code snippets—we call them consumables.”
They also provide observations of a mashup ecosystem in action. In the application life cycle “many SAs live for only a short period before being abandoned, or never become widely used beyond the original team that created them, some capture the imagination of a large number of people.” Examples of ones with legs are offered. The exposure of data through mashups has led to clean up, much like what occurs on Wikipedia. Managing the expectations of users, especially those beyond the original team that created the mashup are important.
They offer a few examples of business value and add that this will be the topic of the third article in the series. The article closes with some of the future directions for mashups at IBM and a long list of resources, many outside IBM. I found this a useful service. Thanks to Tomoaki Sawada for pointing it out to me.
by Bill Ives
January 30, 2008 at 4:56 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
There is a nice multi-part series on mashups by IBM. They call them Situational Applications or SAs. The series, written by IBMers, Andy J. F. Bravery, Luba Cherbakov, and
Aroop Pandya covers the “applicability of Web-based situational applications, what to the enterprise, their relationship to SOA, and how you can use them to improve the current state of corporate IT.” Here is a summary of Part One: Changing computing in the enterprise.
The name situational applications comes from Clay Shirky’s essay titled “Situated Software” that describes software “designed for use by a specific social group, rather than for a generic set of ‘users.’” Clay argues that “most software built for large numbers of users or designed to last indefinitely fails at both goals anyway.” This is an excellent point. I have seen many times where software to support a particular work process within a particular company culture was dragged around by numerous consulting companies hoping to leverage the initial success into a practice. It never seems to work the same way.
However, while mashups are often developed as situational applications, some go beyond the situation and others do not. I would prefer that they use the more common term, mashups, that describes the somewhat unique process, than use the term, situational, that can be applied to many other software development efforts. But this is a minor point, you can do the translation when you read the articles and I will call them mashups in these two posts.
There is a nice summary of the factors that led to the rise of mashups. They compare mashups and SOA, noting the opposing views on their relationship and take a middle ground. “Our observations show that while SOA and SA have contrasting development life cycles and motivations, different usage patterns, and even dissimilar enabling technologies, they also have important aspects in common: separation and exposure of legacy applications’ functionality into reusable services, software as a service, and composition or assembly of a new solution from distributed reusable and remixable parts.”
Contrasting mashups and SOA, they cover development life cycles, usage patterns, and the social aspects. There is nice summary of the business value and the improvements to business solutions are worth listing: “creating applications that are better fit to LOB problems, satisfying short-term knowledge workers’ needs, addressing niche market (The Long Tail) requirements, combining tactical SA-based solutions with the overall IT portfolio, focusing on the end user and creating a rich user experience, enriching IT data portfolio with unique, hard-to-recreate data that’s created by individuals and small teams; they get richer and “cleansed” as more people use them.” They go to cover the OI aspects and adoption challenges. I found this s useful summary of the general mashup situation. My next post reviews what they said about mashups within IBM. Thanks to Tomoaki Sawada for pointing it out to me.
by Jevon MacDonald
January 30, 2008 at 12:04 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
This is become more and more of an obvious trend to look out for: A twitter clone in the Enterprise. Some early tools are now sprouting up to enable cheap low-risk deployments of the necessary tools.
As I work on a more detailed post on the topic, I thought I would jot down some quick notes as to why I think this is a positive trend, but also why it will have some pitfalls.
Positive Results
- Forces reduction of hierarchy enforcing rules
- I say this because the more you constrain and layer access controls on “tweets” the less value they have overall, but more significantly, it directly reduces the benefit to the creator
- Personal Brand development – highly personal platform
- Crises discovery and management capability
- Increased awareness of ongoing work
- Interactions between individuals can strengthen their social-network ties to further inform other tools (like search, group forming, etc)
- Potential to outperform other tools in the rate of adoption (low barrier to start using the tool)
Potential Issues
- Immediate business value may not be apparent depending on the organization
- Low search value (individual entries to not usually contain full content on any specific topic)
- Must be device agnostic. Individuals who do almost all their email on a blackberry will need an appropriate version of an Enterprise twitter
I am just starting to form these thoughts. What do you think? Will Twitter be a disaster in the Enterprise, or will it be a hit?
by Jon Husband
January 30, 2008 at 8:29 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Artisanal Economy, Business Model, Change, Chris Anderson, Community, Culture, Economics, Emergent, Facebook, Long Tail, Relationships, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Objects, Trusted Space, Web 2.0, Web Advertising
A few days ago I wrote a post and linked to an Aspen Institute report titled The Rise of Collective Intelligence – Decentralized Co-Creation of Value as a New Paradigm of Commerce and Culture.
Today I’d like to offer readers an example of new tools and web services operating in social networks that in my opinion make the concepts and observations in the report come alive. The example involves people using search, content, collaboration and sharing, which are all central elements of the ecosystems of commerce and culture in which we will all be living, working and consuming.
There’s a small company up here in Vancouver, British Columbia (the warm and beautiful part of the Great White North of North America) that develops social networking platforms and customized elearning solutions. The Donat Group is also creating a social music initiative (Project Opus), a part of which involves Mixxmaker, a web service that helps music lovers build playlists collaboratively. Building playlists collaboratively creates a "Social Object", offering people a means of co-creating value around music they like and want to share with others they know.
We all know that the music industry is in real turmoil, and is searching frantically for new business logic and new business models. The major participants have all been under pressure from free downloads, and the price of music is under pressure as never before. Where will additional value, and eventually revenue, come from ?
David Gratton is the founder of the Donat Group, Project Opus and Mixxmaker. David recently wrote a post about why the digital packaging around music, especially as a social object, can and will be of value. Mainly, being able to search for, locate, aggregate and acquire various elements about a song or an artist that someone likes will help create meaning and in turn value.
He also wrote about ‘who’ is involved in the co-creation of this new form of value … or in other words how the market for value associated with songs is being broken up and then co-created anew. Doing this around a playlist that is built in collaboration with others also helps mightily in creating connections and trust, and lays a foundation for putting the dynamics of word-of-mouth marketing into dynamic operation.
It’s important to note here that David and his colleagues at Project Opus and Mixxmaker put a lot of work into staying within the bounds of Fair Use, an all-important consideration when exploring new paradigms for creating (or co-creating in this case) potentially new economic value.
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Once people start building today’s equivalent of albums together with their friends, the changes to the ways music is distributed and acquired will continue to diversify away from purchasing CDs, as David has noted. But people will still want that unusual album cover from the old vinyl days, or the most recent YouTube video clip of a given band’s performance, or a series of photos from Flickr (carrying the appropriate Creative Commons license, to be sure) to add to their own personal collection of digital artefacts about that kind of music, that band, that group of friends .. and so on.
It’s a pity, really, that this fun and easy-to-use capability exists only as a Facebook application at the moment. I seem to be observing a rapidly-growing trend of people turning down invitations to add another Facebook application to their Facebook profile (I am one of those people). While supposedly Mark Zuckerberg is aware of the growing dissatisfaction .. and you’d think the Beacon fiasco was notice enough … it’s hard to shake the sense that Facebook and its partner applications are all really just looking for ways to maximize page views and ad impression.
That, for me, does not fall into the category of decentralized co-creation of value, no matter how you spin it.
But .. I suspect that in the coming months and years we’ll see many more examples of applications and services like Mixxmaker that let and / or help people co-create online things that they care about and enjoy.
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Tags: Aspen Institute, Decentralized Co-creation of Value, Donat Group, Project Opus, Mixxmaker, Facebook
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by Paula Thornton
January 29, 2008 at 1:55 pm · Filed under
Books, Business Model, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, FASTforward08, Web 2.0
A collaborative writing project, not only sponsored by WebEx but also published by them, this book carries the byline: How the on-demand revolution powers the new knowledge economy. [“on-demand” is a critical element of the “customer revolution” -- the FASTforward ’08 theme]
The premise of the book is well stated in the Forward, written by Dr. Timothy Chou, author of “The End of Software” (a favorite mantra I repeat, walking IT halls):
…businesses and consumers alike can access amazing functionality, built on massive computing power, by simply connecting to it. Which prompts the question that is the title of this book: Why buy the cow, when you can get the milk for free? Or, if not for free, by paying only for value received, completely free of the headaches and burdens inherent in “cow ownership.”
As I was writing this (primed with another set of words to begin), these comments struck a different chord. Almost in a reverse-Billy-Crystalesque-City-Slicker sort of way, I thought of the dude ranch mentality. In this case, the irony plays out with the CIO-as-land-baron, who has grown so accustomed to a Dallas-like status that goes with managing a ‘large spread’ (they’re not called server farms for nuthin’), that CIOs can’t imagine any other way of doing business.
But they’ve been duped – somewhat attributed to the term which has labeled them all these many years: Information Technology. The reality is that they’re not barons of information – they’re barons of data. Ten years ago we started a movement to unleash the data from the applications they were locked into. Anyone who has to use enterprise software will suggest that we haven’t gotten very far.
CIOs are the barons of data technology, not information technology. Data only becomes information when it ‘informs’ – which requires a recipient-relevant context (ask any CIO what that even means). A map on the wall of an abandoned gas station in the Mojave desert is only useless data –unless the gas station is marked on the map AND it’s relative directional positioning (e.g. angles of the building to the grid of the map). Information is data in recipient-relevant context – and it has to ‘matter’ to me, as well.
Intentional or not, these barons of technology turned everyone else into information serfs or peasants – left to be satisfied with whatever they were given, whenever it was provided to them, and be thankful.
The internet and decreasing costs of computing power and storage shifted the power base. There was a land rush on – anyone could own a piece of land and call it their own. And they did.
The internet was the virtual space to create your own sandlot game, and let it grow into a major league ballpark (if that’s what you wanted). Many warned about the ungrounded economics upon which the stock prices of eCommerce companies were based – and they gloated when the stocks plummeted. The economics did prove to be wrong, but even in their supposed overinflated states, these stocks may still prove to be undervalued after all (Amazon’s 1999 $100+ price was matched again in Oct. 2007).
But, back to the book…it did get all these thoughts stirred up.
My colleague, Bill Ives, contributed two great chapters, both focused on 2.0 topics, with some stirring of his own. Offering real-world examples, he illustrated simple, successful 2.0 endeavors. Nothing earthshaking – but that’s the point of it all. Earthquakes are powerful and can move a lot of matter in a very short period of time, but they take a long time to build up and the results can be catastrophic.
There’s a time and a place for being treated like royalty, paying $100/person for a dinner. But most of the time, we really just want the price, convenience and the unique features of a really good roadside diner. Bill shares the sights and sounds of the digital Route 66.
High marks to Bill for totally ‘nailing’ the real value and potential of Knowledge Management – by aligning it to a del.icio.us example. That suddenly put to rest for me my distaste for Tom Davenport’s continuous insistence on harkening back to the over-engineered, over-controlled, baron-wielding-devices of the likes of Lotus Notes, as proof that 2.0 offers nothing new. KM isn’t about someone else managing my knowledge – it’s about me managing my own, on my own terms: THAT’s at the heart of the User Revolt (you have to understand the ‘why’ of the revolt if you want to seek ways to either quell or leverage the revolution).
Bill hints at, as I firmly believe, that we haven’t even begun to unleash the undiscovered potential of the next, yet-to-be-named-Wiki-Mash-a-Blog-Tag, that might define the rules of the ‘new’ game to be played in this vast field of dreams. One example he offers is Harvard’s H2O project which puts a different spin on knowledge collections (like del.icio.us), by creating playlists of content: http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/home.do [don’t confuse the letter in H2O with the number zero, as in 2.0].
Taking the time to champion once again the beauty of the fundamental doctrine of The Cluetrain Manifesto – Markets are Conversations – Bill offered many great examples of how markets are changed by conversations. While I seem to hear more rumors of corporate leaders getting caught in the backlash of having open conversations via blogs, Bill offers a great list of successes. He also features three case studies, illustrating specific economic capitalization:
- Creating Small Business Communities to Develop Markets
An Oklahoma winery gained its own market attention by drawing upon the collective strengths and energies of other wineries, by creating an online business community.
- Blogging Your Way to Success
A founder of a 2.0 solution gained focus for his offering by gaining attention to his blog.
- Creating Online Connections and Relationships
An on-demand service, filled a market need by facilitating the connection between individual needs and the service offerings of others (need-service matchmaking).
Bill shares a number of other artifacts and examples – thought appetizers. He calls attention to the behaviors of these emergent experiences as they evolve and connect one with another – an amazing element of emergence, unintentional results – often more valuable than the original design/intent.
I saw more evidences of a thread of truth, which we are not fully embracing. Enterprise 2.0 is far more significant than Web 2.0 because unlike the corollary of Web 2.0=internet, Enterprise 2.0>intranet. It fundamentally changes the way we can/should consider doing business, internally or externally, for ALL relationships.
A final Enterprise 2.0 perspective from Bill:
On-demand business solutions are already empowering businesses to interact in a richer and more personalized way with customers [I add here, all other relationships: vendors, dealers, employees, etc.]. In the future, we see a movement toward greater integration of these services, to offer a full spectrum of collaboration options, extending the benefits they offer. Participants will be able to move seamlessly from asynchronous dialogue media like blogs and wikis, into virtual meetings when the conversation calls for real-time exchanges…The availability of this full spectrum of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration technologies will expand the options for connection and further enable community.
So to close the circle on that chapter Bill, it goes back to the opening quotes you provided from the Cluetrain Manifesto, right? To ride the crest of the economic wave of ‘now’, we need to find new ways to enable and facilitate (ala. access to facts) continuous conversations – AND participate in them.
I’m waxing my surfboard.
