Archive for January, 2008
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.
by Jon Husband
January 28, 2008 at 9:23 pm · Filed under
Blogging, Change, Economics, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, IBM, IT Department, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Web Services, Wisdom of Crowds, enterprise software
This just off the presses at ZDNet …
It won’t be a surprise to most of the FASTForward blog readers, as I think there’s probably a unanimous consensus amongst analysts and pundits who write on this blog that social computing in an enterprise setting and the related architectures of hardware and software is an important and massive shift that will affect knowledge work and organizational structures.
And it’s now clear that Forrester, Gartner, Jupiter, McKinsey, Deloitte Touche, Watson Wyatt, Ernst & Young, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun … all the major ‘brand name’ providers of advice and technology to enterprises … are taking the emergence of Enterprise 2.0 very seriously.
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Enterprise Web 2.0 predictions from Forrester
Forrester published a report, “Top Enterprise Web 2.0 Predictions For 2008” ($775, about $100 per page), which concludes that blogs, wikis, and social networking will further gain importance in 2008 as enterprises look to Web 2.0 tools to solve long-standing worker problems.
Not a big revelation.
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UPDATE:
Huh ? 42% "Not on our agenda" and 32% "Not a priority" translates into Forrester’s "Web 2.0 will be a 2008 priority" ?
Did that non sequitur get your attention ? It did mine.
The next section of the short ZDNet piece states:
Forrester expects at least half of the 42 percent of enterprises that say Web 2.0 is not on their agenda to make it a priority by year’s end. Here’s why:
First, the IT shops that began experimenting with enterprise Web 2.0 tools for their own use in 2007 — for tasks like help desk ticket resolution, standards and documentation tracking and IT project management — will begin rolling out these tools more broadly to lines of business as they pass IT muster.
Second, CIOs will concede that they cannot quell passionate employees’ use of consumer-oriented or SaaS Web 2.0 tools and will mitigate risk by deploying enterprise-class tools in their stead.
Finally, for IT departments aspiring to be more relevant to the business, enterprise Web 2.0 tools will be a high-impact, low-cost method to show leadership and innovation.
Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Forrester
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by Bill Ives
January 28, 2008 at 1:01 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I recently received the list of most widely read McKinsey articles over the past year They said that “there was also great interest in articles on technology (including software as a service and Web 2.0) and on the crafting of simple marketing messages.” Here is what they were referring to in their words:
3. MARKETING | How businesses are using Web 2.0: A McKinsey Global Survey
By and large, executives are satisfied with their previous investments in Internet technology, and most are investing in trends that promote automation and networking online.
8. HIGH TECH | Delivering software as a service
A new delivery method is shaking the software industry’s foundations. Traditional vendors should take heed.
9. GOVERNANCE | Crafting a message that sticks: An interview with Chip Heath
The key to effective communication: make it simple, make it concrete, and make it surprising.
10. MARKETING | How companies are marketing online: A McKinsey Global Survey
A survey of marketers from around the world shows where online tools are most important, how they’re being used, and on which ones companies plan to spend more.
I included number 9 as I also found it to be a useful primer on how to write a good blog post, as well as communication in general. I would add to the first one, written in March 07, that another major emerging use is the application of web 2.0 principles to workflow applications. There is a new breed of web 2.0 or enterprise 2.0 tools that go beyond blogs and wikis to create workflow applications that incorporate this new transparency. Many of these have been covered in this blog. The transparency these tools offer allows for better team work AND a searchable, archived window into what the organization is doing for all who need to know, should know, and can benefit from this knowledge.
Now, when I say workflow or work process I do not mean the static inflexible workflow of old style content management or project management tools. The advantage of these new tools is that they allow work processes that are more organic and dynamic. They allow the users to control the workflow or process, build it up from tasks and make changes as needed. And, to repeat, they allow for transparency and archiving, and thus KM, to be a byproduct of work, rather than an added requirement. If they are smart at McKinsey this will be a feature for one of their articles or studies in 2008.
BTW, I started thinking about these last thoughts when Stan Garfield asked me to think about what I would say in a KM keynote address today.
by Rob Paterson
January 28, 2008 at 6:20 am · Filed under
Andy Carvin, Election 2008, Les Siegel, Politics, Social Media, Twitter
The Bryant Park Project (Twitter feed here)now has an inner core of over 200 “Diners” - this in a week. As Twitter gains a hold, BPP are also looking at how Twitter affects the political process. Here is the Twitter reality of the Primaries as compiled by Laura C <!– –>
I’m scrounging around for legitimate Twitter feeds from the presidential candidates. So far, my list looks like this:
Ron Paul, @RonPaul2008, with 822 followers
John Edwards, @johnedwards, with 4,282 followers
Barack Obama, @BarackObama, with 6,654 followers
Hillary Clinton, @hillaryclinton, with 197 followers
What do make of the Obama/Clinton result here?
What could Twitter do to bring younger voters back?
How might Twitter affect politics?
Update - Here is Lee Siegel talking about how BPP is using social media - Lee talks about how the “Cup Cake” is a refuge. Don’t understand - check the link
Update - Here is Andy Carvin with more on the Diner
by Rob Paterson
January 27, 2008 at 11:36 am · Filed under
COSI, Enterprise 2.0, Hugh McLeod, John Robb, Michael Wesch, Social Objects, Video, Web 2.0
“The Machine is Us/ing Us
A picture is worth a thousand words - So this video is worth millions (By the way MW also has made the best film on Learning today as well)
by Rob Paterson
January 27, 2008 at 7:32 am · Filed under
Andy Carvin, Business Model, Community, Grooming, NPR, Public Insight Journalism, Public Media, Social Computing, Social Media, Twitter, User Revolution, Wisdom of Crowds, iTouch
This is a slice of time last night on my Twitter. I am watching TV but I have my iTouch in my lap. When the ads come on, I mute the set and go back to my Twitter feed. here I have a real friend - not a Fake Friend - Andy Carvin covering the South Carolina Primary. I also have a Twitter friend worrying about how to cope with teen boys - her son is out late.
As Andy twittered his coverage, others that I know, pitched in too.
This was not strangers talking to strangers but Friends Talking to Friends - much much much much warmer.
Add the back channel of a parent asking for help about how to cope with your teens being out late and this is an entirely new Media Experience.
I am inside a system - inside a system that is deeply human and that I feel a part of.
BPPDiner - the Twitter inner circle for Bryant Park Project is also adding this warmth to the show. Already we are seeing program ideas being discussed in real time with the listener. Over the weekend even contact is still there between the crew and each other and their inner group.
My intuition is shouting out that somehting that I don’t fully understand yet is happening that will turn out to be momentous.
by Jon Husband
January 26, 2008 at 11:02 pm · Filed under
Business Model, Change, Charles Handy, Cloud Computing, Conferences, Dead Paradigms, Economics, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Long Tail, Relationships, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds, open source
Here below is an excerpt from and a link to a report just published by the recent Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society program.
In a previous post I mentioned a growing awareness of the impact of the interconnected digital infrastructure and digital natives on the Enterprise 2.0 market. The publication of this Aspen Institute report is to me just one more piece of evidence that it’s real and growing … and it’s a credible source (though not quite a tangible case study 
David Bollier reports from his OnTheCommons blog about "The Rise of Collective Intelligence: Decentralized Co-Creation of Value as a New Paradigm in Commerce and Culture” (pdf) published by the Aspen Institute.
It may be that the serious jargon of the term "collective intelligence" will put some (or many) off, but increasingly it seems to be becoming clear that the interactive social construction of knowledge put to use in response to constantly dynamic markets is demanding some new business logic, new points of friction with which to fashion transaction and new ways of designing and managing the work that leads to the creation of economic value.
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The Rise Of Collective Intelligence
Most forwarding-thinking businesses are starting to realize that they need to come to terms with the open Internet environment. This means making some radical changes in how they think about markets, how they structure their own enterprises and how they treat customers.
[ Snip … ]
On the Internet, people have acquired considerable powers of their own. They have developed their own sustainable micro-cultures. They can create their own commons to carry on conversations among peers and develop new forms of reliable “collective intelligence.”
This bottom-up knowledge empowers ordinary individuals to approach market transactions on a more equal footing with sellers, who have historically had greater market power and knowledge. The commoners are able to capture more of the knowledge they create, and use it to their own advantage. Indeed, the commons can be regarded as a source of cutting-edge R&D for companies, as MIT professor Eric von Hippel has shown in his book, Democratizing Innovation.
The phrase that the conference used to describe this phenomenon is “decentralized co-creation of value.” It means that the market is not the sole source of value-creation; dispersed online communities are now sources of value that businesses must collaborate with in order to generate value.
The commons stands on a more equal footing with the market. Instead of all “value” coming from centralized players like corporations, increasingly, value is coming from the “ends” of the Internet – the periphery, where new ideas and innovations first materialize. Value comes from individuals, and groups of individuals, operating in the free space of the commons, where overhead is low to nonexistent, and creativity is not regimented to service prearranged market niches. Thanks to the Internet, social niches are becoming “staging areas” for viable niche markets, a phenomenon also known as the “Long Tail.”
All of these developments create a real crunch for traditional large corporations because large companies like to have extreme control. That’s how they deliver predictable results to investors and protect their brand reputation. But on the Internet, control and predictability are not viable strategies. In fact, they are counter-productive.
Value is generated by having less control. Customers won’t trust a company that tries to use digital rights management or bullying tactics to assert too much control. In a sense, companies are not just competing against other companies, but against the freedoms of the commons.
The challenge for businesses, then, is to develop new sorts of “open business” models that can respect the social dynamics of the Internet, while still monetizing certain forms of value (e.g., selling advertising to the Web users who like your site). Companies have to realize that brands are forms of socially created value; brands are not simply the result of advertising and image campaigns. Online communities create and promote a brand every bit as much as mass media.
One of the most fascinating parts of the report is about the next generation of computing, often known as “The Cloud.” Bill Coleman, the entrepreneur who started BEA Systems and recently started the Cassatt Corporation, describes the Cloud as the convergence of voice, data and video in a networked system that also combines computing, telecommunications and the Internet. You plug your computing appliance into The Cloud – and all your data and stuff is “there,” not on your personal computer.
Everyone at the conference agreed that the current trends in economics and technology will make The Cloud inevitable. Software and hardware will become commodity products, computing will become a service provided by very large utilities, and a handful of these Cloud providers will eventually put the telephone service industry, the cable industry and Internet service providers out of business.
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I have been for some time been calling the emergent organizing principle that I believe underpins the necessary new business logic and models, derived from social-interaction-driven market niches, "wirearchy" - a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.
I am heartened this report has come out (emerged, let’s say) from a group of bright and aware people at the Aspen Institute. I suspect that it makes those of us who feel something big and different is going on bit by byte, link by link … a bit less iconoclastic.
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Tags: Collective intelligence, new business logic, new business models, ROII, Return On Investment in Interaction, cloud computing, co-creating value, decentralization, wirearchy, hierarchy
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by Paula Thornton
January 26, 2008 at 3:17 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, FASTforward08, Microsoft
Continuation of “The Offer: Part 1, Fast Responds”
Comments from the industry speak volumes. Within 36 hours of the Microsoft announcement to buy FAST, upwards of 500 stories hit the global media.
The most telling comment was from Microsoft itself. Microsoft Business Division president Jeff Raikes said: “Fast has the best people and the best technology.”
BusinessWeek also noted significant comments from Raikes.
Corporate search “will be for workers tomorrow what Internet search is for consumers today,” he said in a conference call after the deal was announced. Fast’s software may also help Microsoft improve its Web search engine while bolstering the company’s research and development efforts in Europe, added Raikes.
I originally found it interesting that Paul McDougal classified enterprise search as “a relatively new market” But Chris Kanaracus also reported that “the move means that enterprise search has truly arrived as a software category”.
Paul McDougal illustrated why this topic, even beyond the deal, is such an important issue – why enterprise search has significance beyond internet or even intranet search:
Corporate networks, by contrast, contain mountains of structured and unstructured data archived in numerous formats, some of them decades old and stored away in highly secure servers. So, for instance, engineers at an aircraft manufacturer might have a tough time finding schematics for an older airplane model if they’re suddenly needed for a crash investigation.
It’s a costly problem. A company that employs 1,000 information workers can expect to lose $5 million in annual salary costs on time spent searching for documents, according to IDC.
Benjamin Romano, of the Seattle Times, reported similar thoughts and suggests that “the acquisition signals Microsoft is serious about enterprise search, a market still very much up for grabs.” [emphasis added]
Benjamin also rightly suggests that, “Particularly for companies in information-intensive or regulated industries, search is becoming the starting point for many tasks — in much the same way it has become the starting point for navigating the Internet.” The conservative potential for such an industry is pegged by IDC analyst Susan Feldman at an annual growth of 20 percent.
While many accurately note the Microsoft offering as a 42% premium (which I reported earlier is really at par when sliced another way), John Blossom suggests the offer is “relative pocket change”. Concise and insightful, John introduces a reality check suggesting that FAST has been challenged by “a sales strategy that reached beyond their ability to deliver on ambitious promises”. He then also notes that Microsoft “failed to create any significant sales momentum behind its own enterprise search efforts”. He suggests that the results of the offer will, “bring together two impressive partners that promise to dominate enterprise platforms for some time to come”…“FAST’s rapid growth over the past few years into an increasingly dominant position in enterprise search markets is just the ticket that Microsoft needs to position itself in increasingly competitive enterprise platform markets.” Lastly, he reinforces his earlier financial comment: “it’s a major investment in securing Microsoft’s future cash flow.”
BusinessWeek reiterates this with comments from a financial analyst:
Buying Fast will cost Microsoft less than three weeks’ worth of free cash flow, and could provide better returns on the company’s $21.6 billion cash pile than stock buybacks and dividends, says Brendan Barnicle, a vice-president and senior research analyst at Pacific Crest Securities.
Chris Kanaracus offered related comments from Robert Tennant, CEO of Recommind, who has his own view of the potential of this market.
“We believe that search is really important to the next generation of all software,” he said. “It provides information access with context. We believe that you’ll see search … woven within the fabric of other applications.”
But then FAST talked about one important aspect of this concept and what they’re doing to address it, at last year’s conference (I’m looking forward to what the latest will be at this year’s conference).
So while Robert suggests that “search is really important to the next generation of all software”, here’s my predictive synthesis of the greatest yet-to-be-explored, yet-to-be-tapped industry potential – the ‘now’ great adventure before us: Enterprise, The Final Frontier
[Don’t take this analogy too lightly. Their trips were ultimately funded by the exploration (ala. search) of new knowledge.]
by Joe McKendrick
January 25, 2008 at 12:23 pm · Filed under
Artisanal Economy, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds
Dan Carew responded to my last post on ‘Recession 2.0,‘ in which I predicted that in the event of an economic downturn, people would not be as powerless as they once were, because they will have social networking and other Web 2.0-based tools at their disposal to reach out and grab new opportunities.
Dan is a bit more pessimistic, and said my thinking was based on ‘irrationally exuberant’ boosterism and pollyannishness:
“A stock market crash is going to sink Web 2.0 ships, just as surely as it sinks others. And you gotta be kidding if you think the read/write Web could mitigate, no less reverse it.”
Dan feels that an economic downturn, if severe, may give us more time to blog, or use our iPhones from the soup kitchen, but that’s about it. But Web 2.0 won’t do us much good when the electricity gets cut off.
Perhaps if I’m being too pollyanish, then Dan is being too Eeyorish (remember Eeyore?), and the actual scenario would fall somewhere in the middle.
In a follow-up discussion Dan and I are having, I point out that if and when layoffs hit (and we all know we don’t need a recession for that), people have more options to drive their own fate, versus living on unemployment checks and hoping the company calls them back.
“People can remain well-connected to their professional networks, and leverage tools and potential opportunities that have not been readily available in times gone by. If you want to try to start a new business, the Web offers an abundance of ideas and opportunities — and visibility across the globe. Not a lot of start-up capital is required. The Web is an incredible global tool at our disposal, for very minimal cost.”
But Dan argues that if things got bad, they would get real bad, and nobody will want your Web-based services, period:
“Consumers won’t have extra cash to buy the clever non-essential item you’re selling on eBay or a Web store; companies will be retrenching and won’t be hiring consultants.” And don’t bother casting a net for global buyers, because there won’t be any.
Dan also argues that increased productivity, and the advent of the radio and telephone didn’t help folks back in the 1930s. (Hey, didn’t Franklin Roosevelt’s radio fireside chats at least calm down the runs on the banks?)
My argument is that employees and entrepreneurs don’t have to be victims this time around, in the event of a downturn. We have access to far more knowledge, tools, and networks now than we did in previous times, and this is going to help us not only to manage through tough times, but even identify niches where we can flourish. And if this works for enough people, it could help turn the tide of a downturn.
Readers and fellow posters, it would be good to get your takes on whether Web 2.0 can make a difference if things got rough, or if you agree with Dan that we’re toast, no matter how many social network accounts we have.
by Jon Husband
January 22, 2008 at 9:40 pm · Filed under
Change, Dead Paradigms, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, New Realities, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Web Services, Wisdom of Crowds
Many of the readers of this blog will be familiar with the terms "digital natives" and "digital immigrants" (both terms coined by Marc Prensky, a virtual learning / game-based learning guru), and recently colleague Rob Paterson offered up a post (The Social Web - A New "World") noting his "aha" moment about the issue.
"It" is interactive, it’s fast, the flows of information are overwhelming, it feeds social computing, it’s not going away, and it will be coming to a workplace near you. It’s also becoming clearer and clearer that the pressures due to a growing demographic shift are getting more and more tangible every month. When the Gartner Group starts predicting that the coming generations of knowledge workers will understand how to work in wirearchies, and predict that their influx will cause 40+ % annual growth in the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities .. well, one might say that awareness is growing.
Remember sending groups of people off for training on the latest complicated software ? Will that change ?
JP Rangaswami, who writes often about the use of social software in the enterprise based on his experiences at DkW and BT recently emphasized the coming impacts at the LeWeb 3 conference in Paris, noting in his presentation that:
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The digital natives now starting to flood into the workplace are already all trained up on these (social software) tools.
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This also reminds me of the central issues raised in a seminal article article in the Economist 18 months ago titled The New Organization, namely that most organizations have watched the rise of the networked worker (and equipped them all with Crackberries) without making fundamental changes to organizational structures and work design,
I suspect that’s one of the core targets of Gary Hamel’s new book The Future of Management, in which he lays out this key challenge for executives and managers everywhere.
Here’s one Gartner Group analyst’s take on the coming challenges associated with Enterprise 2.0 and the war for talent in a digital era.
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‘Digital Natives’ Will Drive Web 2.0 into Your Business
Clint Boulton
September 20, 2007
Analysts delve into how businesses might leverage blogs, wikis and other social networking tools.
LAS VEGAS—Digital natives—people who grew up using interactive Internet tools—will push the enterprise social software market to grow at a compound annual revenue growth of 41.7 percent through 2011, said Gartner analysts at Web Innovations here Sept. 19.
As these digital natives grow up, they’re moving into the work force, taking with them blogs, wikis, mashups, RSS feeds and other so-called Web 2.0 social networking tools that will enable them to collaborate more freely in an enterprise environment, said Gartner analyst Anthony Bradley.
"They bring with them a set of expectations of how they will interact and the tools they’ll use to interact, and they can be woefully disappointed walking into organizations that don’t have some of the Web 2.0 tools that they’re used to using for building relationships and getting things done," Bradley said.
Digital natives will thus usher in what Gartner calls the Enterprise 2.0, where users will use rich Internet applications, social software and a Web platform to execute tasks.
Social software includes social networking (Facebook-like profiles), social collaboration (JotSpot-like wikis and blogs) and social publishing (social tagging, think Digg) tools to interact socially and boost organizational effectiveness.
While traditional Enterprise 1.0 tools were more rigid and siloed, Gartner analyst Tom Austin said Enterprise 2.0 technologies need to be "free form," or informal, messy and participatory, to make co-workers comfortable.
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Tags: Marc Prensky, Rob Paterson, JP Rangaswami, digital natives, Enterprise 2.0, hierarchy, wirearchy, the new organization, networks, Gartner Group
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by Joe McKendrick
January 21, 2008 at 11:20 pm · Filed under
SOA, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds
Lately, there has been a frenzy going on — at hysterical levels — across the media about a “looming recession.” I don’t intend to join the gloom-and-doom crowd, because I believe the economy is very diverse and resilient.
However, it is an inescapable fact that business growth moves in cycles — up and down. In the event of a downturn, let’s ponder the role of our hyper-networked space in managing through tougher times. We may have not seen anything like it.
Let me start with this thought: It’s not 1975 anymore. In the recession that stormed through the 1974-75 period, there were massive layoffs. Workers were dismissed from plants and offices, and were lined up at unemployment offices. They were powerless, and cut off from information relevant to their industry, coworkers, and new opportunities. Nor for that matter is it 1981, when the ugly cycle repeated itself, or 1991 and 2001, when more powerless white-collar workers joined the unemployment lines.
In those times, it often didn’t matter how much value employees provided to their organizations, when it came time to slash, they were cast out to the street. Of course, many were hired back within a couple of years as things get better. But in the meantime, there were anxious months — and afterwards, the constant fear of future layoffs.
Workers are no longer those powerless pawns, locked into 9-to-5 routines, subject to the whims of their employers. Instead, they carry around portable skills, portable resources, and portable networks that can be quickly applied and adapted to new environments and situations. As we frequently discuss here at FastForward, the balance of power in organizations has shifted to the end-user. If the organization thinks it can no longer afford the services and expertise an employee provides, that employee may be able to rapidly shift that expertise and services to another organization.
Now, employees remain connected in real time not only to their co-workers from organizations past and present, but also networks of professionals in their areas of expertise. Opportunities and new ideas for generating opportunities can be quickly shared and acted upon. Blogs, wikis, search engines and the like have transformed our workspaces into one single gigantic virtual workplace. We no longer depend on our coworkers down the hall; we now leverage resources from across the globe.
Many employees simply may not even need a full-time employer anymore. In 1975, the idea of going the entrepreneurial route was not a realistic option for most workers. It took plenty of seed money and visibility to get a new operation going and profitable.
Now, it’s possible to start an innovative new business with virtually little or no investment, employing Web-based resources. It’s now possible to run an entire business on Web 2.0-based services — from infrastructure to databases to business intelligence and analytics. Many are free, the rest only charge on an incremental per-use basis.
There’s the example of GigaVox Media, a podcasting support company, that invested a grand total of $80 for its first two months in the kind of same robust IT infrastructure that would be available to GM. All the computing power you need is available right from the Web — no investment required. Web 2.0 and Software as a Service may give rise to thousands of new businesses.
Unlike previous economic downturns, many of today’s workers and professionals will not resign themselves to the powerlessness of the unemployment line. Any economic downturn has the potential to be reversed or mitigated by empowered employees or entrepreneurs who will be able to collaborate, share information and knowledge, and quickly respond to and act on new opportunities, thanks to our networked economy.
by Bill Ives
January 21, 2008 at 9:21 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
When Dion talks about enterprise 2.0, we should all listen so here are his 12 Predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008. Overall he writes, “The driving forces for change this year will be the aging of existing IT systems, the rise of up-and-coming new approaches such as highly capable new Web-based applications, mashups, collective intelligence powered business software, Web-oriented architectures, and last but certainly not least, social software.” I certainly agree and have written so on the FAST Forward blog (e.g., Where is Internal IT Going?).
I want to mention a few of his predictions and add a few thoughts (predictions are his words, thoughts are mine - he is not responsible):
4. Unstructured information from blogs and wikis will proliferate, driving demand for solutions to extract and consolidate business information. I think this is where what I see as a new wave of enterprise applications and platforms will become more prominent. I have written about a number of them (see Enterprise 2.0 Tools: Update on Descriptions and Reviews from 2007). These platforms go beyond blogs and wikis to integrate content across channels and eliminate or reduce siloed information.
5. A large number of enterprise intranets will get social networking capabilities. Microsoft and IBM’s offerings have the beginnings of it. Many of the enterprise 2.0 vendors feature it, while making their offerings more of a platform to serve as an intranet. Then others have even turned to social networking as intranet and Worklight provides a secure front end to help others make this move.
6. Enterprise mashups will make their appearance in a widespread way but won’t take off big, yet – Here is some more from Dion as I was interested is his reasoning: “we’ll see mashup tools being deployed this year by early adopter enterprises and used by IT departments and power users… average business worker will need time, possibly several years, to absorb the possibilities of this new model for personal business application development but it’s highly likely we’ll see the first significant deployment of end-user assembled Web applications in 2008. Expect 2009 to be the year enterprise mashups begin hitting the tipping point of adoption.” I am a big fan of mashups and I see the capability being built into many tools by large, mid-size, and small vendors. He may be right but I think the vendors understand this barrier and it will be a major focus on their part, in terms of both ease of use features and marketing. As the jazz artist, Charlie Mingus, “Making the simple complicated is commonplace, making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” It is this creativity that will win over the business user, not more robust features.
12. Enterprise 2.0 will become a standard feature in most organizations. Now here is a prediction that I like. So I will close on it and hope Dion is right.
