While the keynotes from FASTforward ‘08 featured topics and elements of the ‘new’ Digital Natives, now there’s a whole new category: Long-tail natives of Social Work-net-ing
Read Lauie Parker’s experience journey, over the several-year evolution of P&G’s Long-Tail-of-Research via the Innocentive research collaboration model: Profiles in Innovation.
An issue for a lowly graduate student…grad students don’t exactly have the time or the resources to actually try the chemistry that is needed to demonstrate solutions to synthetic problems…. my first submitted solution…although I didn’t win…I received helpful critique and encouragement in the review of my solution.
How’d I become aware of this piece? Via the ‘draw’ of their recently-improved-format newsletter: Inside Innovation, delivered straight to my inbox.
Let’s just say that their overall design progression has been positive (but then I don’t rely on ‘opinion’, I look at the data).
Sam Walton’s wife’s deal with Sam when they got married was that he could do whatever he wanted - he wanted to be a retailer - but she would never live in a community that had more than 10,000 people. So his constraint was to build an epochal retail system but in the boonies. Look at what he accomplished with this as a restraint! He also found on his path that being in the boonies also gave him a defence against the huge competitors such as Kmart and Sears. No one took someone who worked in the boonies seriously. That is until it was too late!
My point is that, no matter what you think of WalMart now, that we are predjudiced about the boonies. Smart people in all fields - not the least in Social Media - tend to have a big city bias. We too often over look the boonies and those that live and work there - how could they affect us? We all know that you have to be in the big city to know what is really going on. Of course that is why Warren Buffett is the richest man in the world!
My story today is about a man that you likely have never heard of - who lives and works in a small town that you also may never have heard of. We can never know today if he may become the Sam Walton or the Warren Buffett of media, but my bet is that if he does not then someone like him will be.
My bet is that at the heart of the real social media revolution is that if we do indeed move to a networked world then small communities will be able to stand toe to toe with the big cities.
Meet Brian Hurlburt who lives in Yarmouth Nova Scotia a small port on the southern tip of the province where the high speed ferry comes in from Portland. Brian owns a runs a Web “Something” (Yarmouthcounty.com) that tells the aggregated story of everything that happens in Yarmouth. I call it a web “something” because it is more than a web site - it is closer to the old style of really local newspaper that you might see in a western.
Until Brian, everyone had ignored Yarmouth. The fact that the domain was available told Brian that no one cared. The Province did not care - Yarmouth is off the radar in Halifax. Tourists from the US got off the ferry and drive through town and onto other more exotic places that were better known. (Nothing is really exotic in Atlantic Canada but you know what I mean) The B & B’s were all separated and isolated and could not get their message out. So were all the social groups such as Church groups. Small business struggled to get noticed and worried about maybe a WalMart coming to town. The social capital of Yarmouth was draining away. At some point, it would no longer be a community at all.
So who is Brian Hulrburt? Is he some flash young techhie? No Brian is a regular guy who knew next to nothing about the web. Everything he now knows about how the web works he has learned by trial and error. All the fears that a church or a B & B may have about the web - he has experienced himself.
Fear is the great barrier that we all have of the new. So how Brian learned and how he is - an open and vulnerable man - is an important key to his success in bringing so many parts of his community together online. He can describe what has to be done in language and in a tone that does not judge or appear mysterious.
He also did not try and monetize the site until it was ready. He had faith that if he was able to reach a critical mass that the money would come. So he also did not carry a lot of costs himself. He could not afford to have costs involved that would force him to force the economics before the time was right.
Is this not the Craigslist model?
What he has been able to do is to aggregate the life of Yarmouth online. Aggregation in a safe and trusted place is going to be one of the key value creation processes in a world of infinite content. By not pushing the economics he has built the trust and now “owns” the space.
The underlying metrics are also emerging that will drive an economic model that benefits not just Brian but all those who inhabit the site.
In 2007 the site had 100,000 visits. Not hits, over 1 1/2 million of those, but real visits. Because of the power of aggregation, all those that live on the site have now access to al this traffic that they could never have reached on their own. The local paper reaches about 20-30,000. So Brian is reaching more and at a fraction of the cost of the paper. He also enables a growing interaction between all parties which is not possible in a paper.
This is more than Google Local or Craigslist - this is a personal aggregation that includes a filtering that is part Brian and part the client. It can therefore be trusted more than a simple mechanical aggregation. It will over time therefore have more value than a simple algorithm.
A growing part of what Brian can now offer his family of clients is the kind of measurement that conventional advertising cannot. Brian is becoming expert in analytics.
Here I think is part of the core of the new economic model. Mass Marketing needed a mass market as there was so much leakage. With no precision possible, as in WWII, only area bombing was possible. So what could a small place do like Yarmouth. Their feeble sums of money wouldn’t even be noise in the larger scheme of trying to get noticed. What Brian can offer is precision - the Long Tail in action. A B & B can see exactly who it is reaching online and can adjust to get a better focus and hence result.
This will kill the mass media alternatives. Niche + precision = high return.
For me the lessons that I have gained from looking at Brian are these:
Niche is where the energy is - the Value will be on the right hand side of the Long Tail
Aggregation around niche is where the value is - the more personal the better
Precision about what happens in the aggregated niche is what drives the economics and the return
Power will shift from the large and diffused to the small and concentrated
I asked Brian “where is it going?” He replied by saying that “The web is changing the world. It is helping us help each other again. We can take charge of our own lives again. I want to be part of this.”
I have been dwelling on Tom Matrullo’s thoughtful post, An Adjacency of Opposites, which put the spotlight on Clare Hart’s and David Weinberger’s back-to-back talks at FASTforward08, and their apparent differences in approach to the emergence of the user revolution. (If you haven’t yet, check out Jerry Michalski’s interviews with Clare and David here on the fastforward blog.)
First, I should acknowledge the compliment Tom extended us at FAST in stating: “…it’s to the conference creators’ credit that it stretched its community of discourse to include both.” (Clare and David’s perspectives, that is.) But it was actually a simple decision, as their perspectives represent what we view as adjacent planes in a larger conversation about uncovering meaning in an online world where answers hide in plain sight.
One big reason it made sense to slot Clare and David together is that they have what amounts to very similar backgrounds in confronting some of the largest and most challenging problems in online information access and provisioning. They didn’t just arrive on the FASTforward08 big stage with a bunch of fresh and innovative ideas; for each of them, the ideas have been developing over careers that have spanned a couple of decades. In David’s case, it included time at Open Text and some serious familiarity with the pioneer legacy of Tim Bray’s search index of the Oxford English Dictionary and the mid-‘90’s Open Text Index of the Web, at one point among the largest of Web search engines. In Clare’s case, it included grappling with the issues of aggregating news and professionally published journals - thousands of sources and hundreds of thousands of incremental items daily - from the early days of dial-in Dow Jones News Retrieval to today’s almost unrecognizably improved Factiva experience (the dashboard that she shared with the gathering in Orlando).
So adjacency is the strong concept, uncovering meaning is the practice. I would propose to Tom that it is not so much about there being two opposites here as about evidence of complementary practices where the user is concerned. We might think of adjacent opposites in the sense of two sides of a coin. “Heads” and “tails” can serve as powerful differentiators, if we want to decide quickly between two options. But if we want to get the benefit of the coin’s “practice” as money, we have to use the whole coin.
For David, the core idea of his powerfully evoked image of “the new front page” is that we have shifted the control of the structure of our information engagement from the owners of the content to ourselves as the community of users of the content.
But most of the time, we are not interacting with information just for its own sake – we don’t search because we decided to come into work in the morning and spend 45’ searching – we are interacting with information because we want to accomplish something. And there’s great news! As David says, we now can use metadata as a lever to pry what we need out of the amazing sea of data and content out there. And in the Factiva work toward provisioning role-based interfaces that aggregate news and journal content and blogs and videos for a number of common professions in business, Clare is taking a lead in shaping the generic use of metadata into a practice that allows the users’ context to construct at least algorithmically emergent “dashboard” environments. And these can leverage that web messiness to help people get very specific things accomplished quickly. Is this an objectionable overlay of structure? Ask the people who wouldn’t or couldn’t work without their Bloomberg machines.
To leverage the user revolution, we need both Clare’s and David’s perspectives to engage in the next-gen practice of sense making in a “read-write” world. We need to promote the “messiness” of the web’s contributed and participatory metadata while at the same time we need search and provisioning tools that keep us from being buried in the very mess that creates the additional value. In the conversation between these two “corners,” as Tom calls them, we are just now starting to see where the search patterns will emerge to drive the web experiences we will choose — as people and as professionals.
A year or so ago, my sister Diana and I were writing a series on courtesans - we were exploring the unconventional aspects of relationships where some women had the upper hand. Where they used their minds and their innate understanding of men to gain power and an independent life. Women like Madame de Stael or Pamela Harriman.
As I posted, my blog was discovered by a leading light in the escort community - Yes a Governer Spitzer kind of escort but one with the difference that at the really high end, women like the English Courtesan work for themselves only.
The English Courtesan - whom I regret I have never met - is a true advocate of the culture of social media is excellent at connecting with her own world.
Here is a taste as she introduces some of her friends. As you can see, Blogging has become a central tool in the highly personal branding that the high end woman of the world has to have. I love her “About” page too.
The other blogs may surprise you - here is a link to a video of one of the women introducing an artist at a reading dinner. Why might she do this? Because I think at the high end, the real appeal is that they offer warmth and intellect as well as the obvious. This is miles away from CW!
Ed Felten at Freedom to Tinker has some interesting points to add to Bruce Schneier’s piece on “Security Mindset” that I posted about yesterday. Felten focuses on the notion of “harmless failures.” It provides still more reason to approach all systems design problems with an eye firmly fixed on the social context in which your technology will operate.
…Not all “harmless failures” lead to big trouble, but it’s surprising how often a clever adversary can pile up a stack of seemingly harmless failures into a dangerous tower of trouble. Harmless failures are bad hygiene. We try to stamp them out when we can.
To see why, consider the donotreply.com email story that hit the press recently. When companies send out commercial email (e.g., an airline notifying a passenger of a flight delay) and they don’t want the recipient to reply to the email, they often put in a bogus From address like donotreply@donotreply.com. A clever guy registered the domain donotreply.com, thereby receiving all email addressed to donotreply.com. This included “bounce” replies to misaddressed emails, some of which contained copies of the original email, with information such as bank account statements, site information about military bases in Iraq, and so on. Misdirected ants might not be too dangerous, but misdirected email can cause no end of trouble.
The people who put donotreply.com email addresses into their outgoing email must have known that they didn’t control the donotreply.com domain, so they must have thought of any reply messages directed there as harmless failures. Having gotten that far, there are two ways to avoid trouble. The first way is to think carefully about the traffic that might go to donotreply.com, and realize that some of it is actually dangerous. The second way is to think, “This looks like a harmless failure, but we should avoid it anyway. No good can come of this.” The first way protects you if you’re clever; the second way always protects you.
Which illustrates yet another part of the security mindset: Don’t rely too much on your own cleverness, because somebody out there is surely more clever and more motivated than you are.
Today Google announce that content providers on YouTube will get real time analytics form those who watch the video. In TV terms - real time personal ratings!(NYT)
In a move to provide better data to its users, YouTube formally announced late Wednesday that it had added a free feature that will show video creators when and where viewers are watching their videos. With this, the company hopes to turn YouTube from an online video site into a place where marketers can test their messages, Tracy Chan, YouTube product manager, said.
This program, called YouTube Insight, provides a detailed view of a video’s popularity, both over time and geographically, broken down by state. (Internationally, YouTube Insight is not as insightful, providing only popularity by country.)
YouTube has provided basic analytical information to creators of videos since its introduction, including the number of views, the viewers’ ratings of the video, and the number of comments left. Advertisers received a slightly more sophisticated summary.
With the Insight information, video creators can dig into the specifics of a video’s performance and find, for example, that it peaks on Fridays in winter months, or it has taken several weeks to get traction — information that can help better promote their work. The information, presented as a color-coded map and a graph of a video’s popularity, is accessible through a link from a video creator’s account page on YouTube. The company will update the data once a day.
What does this mean? How will this accelerate the shift from traditional to social media?
Next week I will be publishing an interview with Brian Hurlburt who is doing a Sam Walton in local news/publishing in Yarmouth Nova Scotia. Brian has become the most important source of what is going on in a small town. One of the most important tools in Brian’s kit bag is measurement. He can show the local B & B, the church group, the activist group, the tourism folks what kind of traction they are getting on the web. They know exactly who is looking at them and how and why. Of course traditional advertising cannot do this.
Brian’s story I think is at the heart of the shift to come and the YouTube announcement fits into this context.
Brian’s experience is telling him that the money will leave the traditional media once there is only an initial base of people online. They will go to the new, even when the pool is not that large because what is there is so clearly measurable.
For isn’t mass media is really a lottery? Even when you win, you may not know enough about what happened. But with highly measurable new media, you can refine and refine until you get exactly what you want.
Now a small business in a small town can have TV ads. Access to the media itself is cheap. Making the video is cheap. With measurement you can tailor the offering to suit you best. Now even large businesses can have video ads that are fully measurable.
Why would you pay a regular TV station or a local newspaper for an offering that costs so much more and where you have no idea what will happen?
I think that we are going to see a major move here. I think that, just as Craigslist gutted Personals, so measurable web-based media will gut the rest of mass advertising. As the money flows so will the attention and the shift to online will accelerate.
The money will move because of measurement and it will move before the masses move to online. There is less time to respond that conventional TV, Radio and Print think.
This is surely why Google are working so hard on Analytics.
Is Web 2.0 a potential peril to productivity? Is there a risk of employees spending their time on the company dime engaged in superfluous online activities, like trashing ex-girlfriends/boyfriends or watching music videos on YouTube?
Both Andrew McAfee and Dion Hinchcliffe have publicly stated that they are seeking examples of serious productivity issues resulting from Web 2.0 deployments. So far, Dion reports, “no one has come forward with a significant story around productivity loss, or misuse of these tools in the enterprise. “We have been unable to hear even one. So far, the evidence is looking favorable.”
For those managers who fear the ramifications of productivity loss as a result of unleashing Web 2.0 into their enterprises, think back to the first Macs and Windows-based PCs 20 years ago, said Doug Wilson. “When we introduced GUIs 20 years ago, there was the same question. Weren’t we going to waste a lot of time, people moving the mouse around?”
Of course, PCs and Macs had a very different kind of an impact on productivity.
An even more delicious example is employee orientation at a candy factory, Doug added:
“Candy makers indoctrinate people by telling them to eat as much candy as they want off the line for the first day, or anytime else for that matter. After 20 minutes, people will have had their fill.”
Likewise, when a new technology or technique is introduced, it’s only natural for people to try and learn and teach themselves. That’s how human beings learn — they experiment and play.”
Dion also provided this example of how Web 2.0 sweeps through the enterprise:
“AOL rolled out…a very heavyweight content management platform. But users gravitated to a new media wiki platform, the same platform that powers Wikipedia. Within a couple of months, because the tool was so much easier to use, and had been proven on a very large scale, with all the adoption kinks worked out of it in that very large laboratory called the Web… it was successful to the point where 95% of their content management now occurs in those platforms.”
This is a fairly common story, Dion added — analogous to the way the PC came into the back door of organizations 20 years ago.
One of the things I keep hearing from customers (buyers of enterprise software) here at the Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit is that as they start to make the leap and begin purchasing social platforms and tools from vendors, they are getting left out in the cold when it comes to roll out. Often broken deployments, poor documentation, ever changing interfaces with lagging documentation, half-baked features, the list went on.
These conversations are just reinforcing something for me that I have believed for a long time: When you sell collaboration tools, you are taking on a level of responsibility that software vendors have not assumed in the past.
One of the big offenders appears to be IBM. The chief complaint being that their new platforms such as Quickr are so poorly documented and there is so little use case and other guidance that IT departments that are installing it aren’t able to properly train users. There were also several mentions of incomplete and downright broken features being put in to the software at critical social junctions. The response from IBM, according to was that those particular features were still in testing. You hear this less about Sharepoint, but the reliance on integrators would explain most of that. I have also heard the same thing about smaller vendors, but the level of satisfaction seems to be higher.
I did not experience this first hand — I am not a customer and have only demoed these tools — so take it with a grain of salt — this is all anecdotal of course, but it is making a clear point: Vendors need to understand the implications of social software and guide their clients in both achieving the maximum impact from social tools but they must also help mitigate the initial pain.
This is a new depth of the customer-vendor relationship, but for the short-term at least, it is going to be a prerequisite for successful deployments.
What we have right now are traditional vendors, IBM, Novell, Microsoft and BEA in particular, who understand that Social Software can open up a huge new market for them, but they are not at all ready yet themselves to properly address the market needs. They are showing a level of immaturity and irresponsibility that is unsettling. Instead of looking to outside thinkers and experienced practitioners for guidance, they are putting their customers at a huge risks post-deployment while promising too much up front.
Organizations with an internal locus of self control will gravitate toward smaller vendors and vendors who provide toolkits that the organization can customize and deploy in their own way. Longer term, customer are going to start buying social tools that fit specific needs in their value chain and workflow, and we are finally starting to see vendors popping up to provide these tools.
Much of this runs counter to my recent position that the incumbents are going to sweep up the majority of the new market and the space within the existing markets. I still think that is true, but I think the long term outlook is much fuzzier.
Bruce Schneier is high on my list of smart people to pay attention to. His blog, Schneier on Security, always provides useful insights into the interplay between technology and people. Yesterday, he offered an interesting observation about what he labels “the security mindset.”
Security requires a particular mindset. Security professionals — at least the good ones — see the world differently. They can’t walk into a store without noticing how they might shoplift. They can’t use a computer without wondering about the security vulnerabilities. They can’t vote without trying to figure out how to vote twice. They just can’t help it.
SmartWater is a liquid with a unique identifier linked to a particular owner. “The idea is for me to paint this stuff on my valuables as proof of ownership,” I wrote when I first learned about the idea. “I think a better idea would be for me to paint it on your valuables, and then call the police.”
Really, we can’t help it.
This kind of thinking is not natural for most people. It’s not natural for engineers. Good engineering involves thinking about how things can be made to work; the security mindset involves thinking about how things can be made to fail. It involves thinking like an attacker, an adversary or a criminal. You don’t have to exploit the vulnerabilities you find, but if you don’t see the world that way, you’ll never notice most security problems.
…
I’d push his observations a bit farther. When you are designing and building systems that incorporate people and technology, you had better think about both how to make things work and about how things might fail.
Human systems are interesting and effective because they are resilient. Good designers allow for the reality of human strengths and weaknesses and factor both into their designs. Too many poor or lazy designers ignore or gloss over failure modes. How many project plans have you seen, for example, that assume no one on the project team will ever be out sick? And then management complains when the project fails to meet its deadlines.
There’s actually quite a lot of good material on failure in human/technology systems and how to compensate for reality. I’d recommend the following as good starting points:
Here is Michael Rosenblum in a tour de force nailing why TV is dead. No fuzziness - Just the straight math!
Every Board member in Public TV should see this and know why simply trying harder means death. Thanks to John Proffitt who is in the pub Radio/TV world in Anchorage whose Blog - Gravity Medium is becoming a centre of the debate about the future of public media.
My friend Ray Sims is collecting definitions of knowledge management at his blog, Sims Learning Connections. Ray was the former head of knowledge management at Novell and is now an independent consultant. His opening paragraph parallels many of my thoughts:
“For many years I’ve been saying that I didn’t like the term “knowledge management” as (a) it was fundamentally an oxymoron, (b) there was no consensus within the industry as to what the term meant, and (c) in many companies the term carries negative connotations due to a perceived lack of value from earlier so-called knowledge management efforts and/or belief that knowledge management was a fad that we have moved on past or has been absorbed into other disciplines. On top of this add claims by many writers that the term has been hijacked by technology vendors, management consultants, or academics.”
And yet knowledge management persists as one of the longest running fads/trends in enhancing employee performance. I always liked the idea since it was trying to make people do their job better during the rise of process re-engineering (aka) laying off people) and later out sourcing (aka) laying off people. In my former life at a large consulting firm we had our own definition, not unlike may of those found in Ray’s post. Now we have enterprise 2.0 tools to actually realize the promise of knowledge management. Maybe it will stick around a bit longer with even more definitions. Check out what Ray wrote to see if your favorite definition is represented.
A particular juxtaposition struck me on the middle day of FASTforward08 – I wonder if anyone else found it worth pondering as well. On Tuesday we had the fine keynote by Clare Hart of Dow Jones, who focused on the increasingly contextualized modes in which business information, news, and other commodified data will be gathered into “dashboards” that anticipate the specific needs of professional end users.
Immediately following Hart, David Weinberger gave us his vision of where the chaotic, miscellaneous, Web in all its ganglionic glory appears to be tending. Weinberger offered a radical recasting of the now hallowed nostrum, “Information wants to be free.” It’s quite otherwise — if I may paraphrase his thought: It’s we who are trying to be free from information.
Hart and Weinberger were coming to the crux of FASTforward08 from seemingly antipodal perspectives, and it’s to the conference creators’ credit that it stretched its community of discourse to include both:
In this corner, Hart, the corporate maven, looking at advanced search and context as a new platform for news and data providers like Dow Jones to actualize in ways that add tremendous and new kinds of informational value to large numbers of end users – so much so that they’ll happily pay ample subscriber fees for the privilege.
In that corner, Weinberger, looking at the “here comes everybody” energy, complexity, and messiness of the web as it is today, with its social spontaneity, its twittering micro-nets, its folksonomies that defy rational taxonomies because they’re spun from the arbitrariness of all those other minds. Each of whose lives, passions, traumas and idiosyncrasies is planting its own imprint on what matters to them. The result: a burgeoning infinity of highly idiosyncratic tags, links and ephemera, each of which makes sense within the universe of one that constitutes any single end user, but which present varying degrees of opacity to any data-mining operative whose success depends upon predicting how various sets of users organize their most vitally important data.
The differences between Hart and Weinberger come through in the differences between Hart’s dashboard and Weinberger’s “new front page.” For Hart, the idea is to know what the user needs and wants, and to build a unique set of data that changes with the contextual moment. Her example of the finance worker whose top news stories and analyses will be shaped by his or her clients’ portfolios made perfect sense, because the professional setting from day to day offers a predicable set of tasks, hotspots, and priorities.
Weinberger’s “front page,” on the other hand, is described as a rich and amorphous mess of referrals, nets, connections, keyed to the individual but marshaled by no one, controlled by no one. No two front pages of this kind will ever be alike, raising serious questions about to what extent there could ever be some commodification sufficiently compelling as to command a subscription fee.
Of course a key difference is that Hart’s dashboard is driven by professionally identified objectives and informational needs, where Weinberger’s “new front page” has as many shapes as it has users. Where Hart begins with the assumption that much of what her user needs and wants can be intuited and provided, Weinberger’s user is pretty much the vortex of a dynamic series of singularities – indeed, his user’s “front page” is more like the sign of what is unknowable until it exists, and mutates as soon as it is known. Never the same, as once was said of a river.
In a way, isn’t this one paradox at the heart of FASTforward08? Its ambitious spectrum brought the promise and excitement of advanced search techniques that will surely provide large new affordances within the Enterprise and new opportunities for monetization in the space between the Enterprise and its end users. At the same time, it touched on some thorny questions arising from the fact that human beings are usually not transparent, often do not understand themselves, and resist efforts by others to horn in where they themselves may fear to tread.
Which gives us reason to ponder one of the many suggestive things FAST ceo John Markus Lervik had to say in his opening address:
Today’s online environment is shaped by the person in it.
If true – and there’s reason to think it is becoming more true each day – then the professional knowledge worker is about to enter an environment steeped in a precocious awareness of her needs and wishes.
But those who, like irritants in oysters, generate something in the web that goes deeper than the consumption of information, could be less than delighted when approached by someone offering to do it all for them.
This is probably a good list to have, since many vendors will try to sell you the concept simply because it’s the latest and greatest hot buzzword. Simplicity is the watchword for cloud computing; anything that suggests different may still be traditional-load-and-fight-with-the-software computing.
Here are just some of James’ “Ways to Tell Its Not Cloud Computing:”
1) “If you need to send a 40 page requirements document to the vendor then… it is not a cloud.”
2) “If you can’t buy it on your personal credit card… it is not a cloud.”
3) “If they are trying to sell you hardware… its not a cloud.”
4) “If there is no API [application programming interface]… its not a cloud.”
5) “If it takes more than ten minutes to provision… its not a cloud.”
6) “If you can’t deprovision in less than ten minutes… its not a cloud.”
7) “If you know where the machines are… its not a cloud.
“If there is a consultant in the room… its not a cloud.”
9) “If you need to install software to use it… its not a cloud.”
… is that the contributors to this blog have for the past nine months or more been analyzing and opining upon the issues about Enterprise 2.0 takeup and implementation that are highlighted by this article in today’s ZDNet by Dennis Howlett.
Notwithstanding a substantial amount over the past two years of online and offline "press" about the Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 phenomena and the increasingly participative and interactive online environment (first for consumers and now increasingly apparent as "the" future for the workplace), decision-making about enterprise software in general continues to warily circle the issues involved with implementing community-based collaboration or more broadly defined, "social computing".
You’ll note that in the article (excerpt below) Dennis checks in with FASTForward’s Jevon Macdonald, who is of the opinion that Microsoft Sharepoint may well be the safe, "default" implementation of choice. Certainly Sharepoint has developed some key alliances over the past year that seem designed to support that point of view.
Here’s a You Tube video (also featured in Dennis’ article .. thanks for the pointer, Dennis) that presents a wide range of views on the question "Enterprise 2.0 - Hype or Happening?"
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Enterprise 2.0 - Hype or Happening ?
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In the ZDNet article Dennis (and Jevon) make a key point about value propositions. That said, getting an enterprise IT shop to listen seriously to the value proposition of a small startup is a key challenge in and of itself, regardless of how good it is.
I also believe (even after a decade or more of general agreement that functional stovepipes and silos are not helpful) that a large number of enterprises do not really know how to come to grips with regular and continuous flows of information across functional boundaries and throughout the organization. And it’s quite likely they won’t be able to come to grips with using such flows effectively (in any practical sense) until the architecture of their IT systems enables it and supports it, and the management learns, and practices with, using these flows to feed effective collaboration.
…as you know it. Right now I’m falling over startup vendors vying for attention in the so-called ’social software’ space. The fact enterprise people hate the term doesn’t seem to bother those who are bypassing IT as they sell into the marketing departments of companies at departmental budget prices. But there is a battle brewing on two fronts.
First, we have the mega vendors who think they ‘own’ the enterprise but have little clue what they’re doing when it comes to providing community style collaborative software. As Barry Libert, chairman of Mzinga said to me: “Does Microsoft have a relationship with me? Do any of the ‘monster’ vendors?” Second, we have the startups who are largely making their money by selling social media style solutions to marketers. While the two solution sets may look the same from the outside, they are being bought in fundamentally different ways and are setting up a tension that today is barely felt but which will have a disruptive effect on the software buying patterns of the future.
It is particularly appropriate that Phil Wainewright has penned an article dubbed Enter the socialprise as this plays directly to the themes I am currently exploring.
He says:
But enterprise computing is still designed for the old, stovepipe model in which every transaction took place within the same firm. There’s no connection with the social automation that’s happening between individuals.
[ Snip … ]
I then spoke to another Irregular, Jevon MacDonald who has been working in the so-called Enterprise 2.0 (aka socialprise) space for some time. He said that where the startups fail but where the incumbents succeed is in identifying a specific value proposition within specific industries.
His view is that Sharepoint will be a ‘big winner in the next five years.’ If the amount of noise being made by Microsoft is indicative, then it should be a winner. But…he also says: “Sharepoint deployments are horrendous and I really don’t know why people put up with them.”
There have been plenty of new developments on the cloud computing front. HP has just announced it is delivering a range of virtualization and cloud-computing capabilities it brands as “Next Generation DataCenter (NGDC).” The computer giant said that it would be opening its data centers for customers to use on an incremental basis.
Cloud computing is truly this year’s rising star. Nick Carr also talks about the rise of cloud computing in this new article in Ad Age. Nick says it so well when he speaks about the paradigm shift that has taken place in personal computing:
“In a closet in a spare bedroom of my house is a crate of PC-software programs on CD-ROMs and DVDs. There are dozens of them neatly wedged into their plastic cases — financial programs, graphics programs, encyclopedias, games, business applications and hobby applications. And they all seem, suddenly, like strange artifacts from the past.”
Most of the value of PCs and laptops, Nick says, “comes not from what’s inside them but from the network they’re hooked up to. They’ve become, essentially, terminals.”
Such is also the case with enterprise computing. This vision, in fact, has been bandied about for the past decade, in fact, by enterprise systems vendors such as IBM and Sun Microsystems. Back at the turn of the century, Sun’s Scott McNealy talked about delivering compute capacity via a “Big Freakin’ Webtone Switch.” IBM has long talked about opening up pools of its vast reservoirs of in-house systems to customers.
HP’s new “Adaptive Infrastructure as a Service” (AIaaS) offers customers access to HP-owned and managed data centers that deliver applications such as Exchange and SAP, as well as “other critical business applications.”
On a practical level, cloud computing makes it possible for enterprises to break out of the cycle of paying more and more for the costs and headaches of building and maintaining their own data centers. As a result, organizations need not be anchored as tightly to the expensive investments made in systems, and therefore able to change faster and more flexibly. And no one will miss the long weekends required to perform upgrades.
Is there a down side to such rosy scenarios? Enterprises must weigh the costs of paying eternal monthly access and licensing fees versus one-time purchases for licenses. Plus, there are the risks inherent in relying on an outside partner for computing –a loss of control. Data security also rears its head, and needs to be explored further.
But, for now at least, the future of cloud computing appears to be anything but cloudy.
I recently picked up my copy of the March 20 issue of Rolling Stone Magazine and read their cover story on The Machinery of Hope, describing the how the Obama field organization is “transforming the way political campaigns are run.” I may be biased but I think this belongs to the growing list of enterprise 2.0 success stories. But remember you read about it here on March 5 in How Obama is Using Web (and Enterprise) 2.0 in the US Primary Campaign, long before the Rolling Stone came out:) Rob Paterson commented on my post on March 5, “Imagine a fortune 500 CEO with this approach and what they could do.” Keep Rob’s comment in mind as you read this long excerpt from the much longer Rolling Stone article.
“Over the past year, the Obama campaign has quietly worked to integrate the online technologies that fueled the rise of Howard Dean —as well as social-networking and video tools that didn’t even exist in 2004 — with the kind of neighbor-to-neighbor movement-building that Obama learned as a young organizer on the streets of Chicago. “That’s the magic of what they’ve done,” says Simon Rosenberg, president of the Democratic think tank NDN. “They’ve married the incredibly powerful online community they built with real on-the-ground field operations. We’ve never seen anything like this before in American political history.” In the process, the Obama campaign has shattered the top-down, command-and-control, broadcast-TV model that has dominated American politics since the early 1960s. “They have taken the bottom-up campaign and absolutely perfected it,” says Joe Trippi, who masterminded Dean’s Internet campaign in 2004. “It’s light-years ahead of where we were four years ago. They’ll have 100,000 people in a state who have signed up on their Web site and put in their zip code. Now, paid organizers can get in touch with people at the precinct level and help them build the organization bottom up. That’s never happened before. It never was possible before.”
The meeting in San Marcos wasn’t advertised in any traditional sense. Instead, the campaign posted the event on my.barackobama.com — its social-networking site affectionately known as “MyBo” — and e-mailed local residents who had donated to the campaign or surrendered their addresses as the price of admission to an Obama rally. And the volunteers who showed up won’t be micromanaged by Ukman or anyone else from the campaign. They’ll be able to call their own shots, from organizing local rallies to recruiting and training a crew of fellow Obama supporters to man their precincts on election day. To identify and mobilize Obama backers, they’ll log on to the password-protected texasprecinctcaptains.com, download the phone numbers of targeted voters, make calls from their homes and upload the results to Austin headquarters. They’ll also organize early-voting open houses — which will be publicized on MyBo — to boost turnout among core supporters…. Over the course of the three-day weekend, the Obama campaign trained 4,000 precinct captains in more than twenty communities, from El Paso to Corpus Christi.” (end of quote)
Parts of their version is the similar to what I wrote after interviewing Central Desktop CEO, Issac Garcia, on March 4. Central Desktop is one of the tools the Obama campaign used to train and empower the precinct captains. As a disclaimer, I support Obama but have no relationship to his campaign except that I voted for him in the Massachusetts primary. One of the things I admire about him as a leader is the organizational effectiveness of the campaign and its use of the new web. One of my hopes is that this will be used to get more people involved in our government after the election.
However, the effective use of the web is certainly not limited to Obama or the Democrats. One could argue that the Republicans made more effective use of blogs in the 2004 election (or at least it was a tie). I remember reading in the Guardian in 2005 on how the UK Conservatives wanted to learn from their US counterparts how to use blogs to help to regain some of their lost position. But all of this use of donation sites, web sites, and blogs is web 1.0 and web 2.0. I feel what Obama is doing is enterprise 2.0 since the tools support those within his campaign’s organization or enterprise. It seems to be that this is different from has been done before in political uses of the web (as the Rolling Stone article suggests) and it is consistent with his message of considering everyone part of the enterprise that he and his campaign are trying to build. In light of this, they are giving their enterprise participants the tools to help build the enterprise themselves and empowering people to make more decisions.
There are a number of other web initiatives within the Obama campaign. There is an Obama blog like almost all campaigns now. Today there was post on with excerpts from the morning news. It was posted at 9:30. Two hours later there were 319 comments. A few hours later there 521 comments. A post showed a video of Obama explaining how easy it was to register to vote in Pennsylvania. There was a warning that you had to register to vote by March 24 and you can download the registration form along with many ways to get it turned in. There is a community blog page also for all the Obama campaign bloggers. I was actually able to start my own blog on the site in a few minutes and make a post. There seem to be doznes of postings by different bloggers every hour when I checked back to see if my post went up. The community blog seems to be open to many opinions.
Another web initiative is the MyObama.com referred to in the Rolling Stone article. In addition, there is the Obama Answer Center, a dynamic FAQ listing. The Answer Center was developed by RightNow Technologies and I am scheduled to talk with their project leader for the effort later this week. I will be back with what I learned. In the meanwhile here is one of the first questions and their answer:
Question: “What is the Answer Center and how does it work? “
Answer: “Barack is running a different kind of campaign — one that is more open and connected to you. That’s why we created the Answer Center, a database of questions-and-answers that helps you find information on everything from volunteering to policy.
Here’s a step-by-step guide for navigating the Answer Center:
Type your query into the field called “Search by Keyword” and click “Search.”
Click on the question for which you want to see an answer. (You can click on anything that appears in blue font to link to an answer.)
rowse through as many Q&As as you’d like.
To browse all answers for a particular subject, choose that subject from the “Search by Category” dropdown and leave the keyword field blank.
If you can’t find the answer to your question, click here to suggest a new question.”
…YouTube is not just white-labeling its video-hosting infrastructure for other sites, devices, and desktop applications. It is offering video-hosting for free. This could prove highly disruptive to other video-hosting platforms such as Brightcove, Maven Networks (now part of Yahoo), and Move Networks.
By offering developers the ability to actually alter the user interface of the player, Google is making it very hard to say no. One day, we may see local news sites using the
“If there is a consultant in the room… its not a cloud.”
