Archive for April, 2008
by Rob Paterson
April 24, 2008 at 2:39 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Chris Corrigan, The 'Phoric, YouTube
Isn’t an underlying principle of 2.0 that it uses nature’s rules and hence should make everything a lot easier?
But because we have all spent a life time working against nature – using effort and control to hold back chaos – many of us don’t know what working with nature might look or feel like.
I who blather on about nature all the time am as guilty as any of us – I know this failure of mine to be true when I saw the 2 videos in this week’s ‘Phoric that were offered up by the incomparable Chris Corrigan.
Here is a taste – a video that shows that we need only use small tools to do big things – reminds me of the power of Twitter. Just as an aside, over 3 million people have seen this video. The power of 2.0! The other videos show why control is overrated as are goals!!!! Wow think of that Goals overrated? Give up control – NEVER!
by Jon Husband
April 23, 2008 at 6:25 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Interview, SOA, User Revolution, Web 2.0
Over the past two weeks in between a lot of work and some more hard work, I managed to pop in to several sessions at the OpenWeb Vancouver conference, a two-day conference focused on "showcasing open web technologies, communities and culture, and evangelizing the Open Web to developers, designers, organizers and the community at large".
At OpenWeb I was introduced to one of the presenters, Duane Nickull, Senior Global Technology Evangelist for Adobe. According to Duane, he is Adobe’s only Vancouver employee (nice work if you can get it, jetting all over the world whilst coming home every once in a while to this lovely little corner of the globe). Duane has also just co-authored a book with Tim O’Reilly … I’m pretty sure it’s about SOA but I can’t quite remember. I’ll clear that up soon and report back in the interview (see below).
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The main focus of my professional career has been working for both the United Nations CEFACT committee and OASIS for the purposes of writing and building new architectures for global integration of multiple systems. I also work for Adobe Systems which I love. Great company!
Since 1996, I have been fortunate enough to work on multiple enterprise architectures including many service oriented architectures (SOA) within various standards bodies including W3C, UN/CEFACT, OASIS and others. I have also contributed to many SOA papers and articles on service oriented architecture. My focus has shifted towards many web service standards in recent years.
I have worked on many other interesting technologies including the first contextual XML Search Engine, an Alternative fuel hydrogen project and the new UN/CEFACT eBusiness Architecture and related technologies. The next level of this work will probably be linked to Ontology work. I participate in the Ontolog Forum which is a great group.
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Duane’s OpenWeb Vancouver session was titled "Web 2.0 Design Patterns, Models and Analysis".
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"Many enterprises seek knowledge of the design patterns used by successful Web 2.0 companies. This session starts with Tim O’Reilly’s list of Web 2.0 examples and distills the abstract architectural patterns from behind the examples. By using the patterns notation, the core knowledge of the design principles is preserved in a template which can be reused in multiple domains including government."
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I asked Duane if I could interview him … about Adobe, it’s plans for Enterprise 2.0, what flows of information mean to him and his colleagues at Adobe and insights on noticing, and using patterns to design and build better, easier-to-use, more flexible and more powerful applications.
We’re still looking for a mutually convenient date (he travels a lot and is speaking at the Web 2.0 conference at the moment, so this really means when will Duane next be back in Vancouver ?), but it looks like I will interview him sometime in the first week of May. I hope you’ll check in for what I will strive mightily to make an interesting and educational interview.
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by Jevon MacDonald
April 23, 2008 at 10:24 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Onaswarm.com got a nice review form Mashable today that says it just might be the service to give FriendFeed a run for its money.
I played around with Onaswarm for the first time in a few months last night and there have been a lot of improvements. It is the only lifestreaming service that addresses many of the concerns I have expressed.
For those of you who aren’t sure what Lifestreaming or NewsFeeds are, they are reverse chronological updates about an individual’s activities. It is a format that was largely brought in to prominence by Facebook.
Tools like Onaswarm give us an idea of how this information flow format might be useful inside the enterprise. As we introduce more and more social, collaborative and intelligence tools, keeping track of activity becomes a practical impossibility, and the dashboard format becomes unwieldy and unreliable.
Onaswarm lets you break down the lifestreams of those you are following in to groups, and it lets larger groups form in to “swarms”. These kind of natural and ad-hoc groupings offer a huge advantage over more rigid and established models.
Could Lifestreams and News Feeds be the next generation of the enterprise dashboard?
by Bill Ives
April 22, 2008 at 3:14 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Forrester’s Oliver Young and a cast of five others recently came out with their projections for the Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 To 2013. In the summary they said that, “Enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013, with social networking, mashups, and RSS capturing the greatest share. In all, the market for enterprise Web 2.0 tools will be defined by commoditization, eroding prices, and subsumption into other enterprise collaboration software over the next five years; it will eventually disappear into the fabric of the enterprise, despite the major impacts the technology will have on how businesses market their products and optimize their workforces.”
I like the big numbers and major impact. I might prefer to say enterprise 2.0 will get integrated with the fabric of the enterprise (rather than disappear) as more enterprise 2.0 providers are providing open APIs and ways to integrate their social wares into the enterprise applications. I have seen this with BroadSoft, Connectbeam, InsideView, Nexaweb, Serena, SynerG, and others that I have interviewed for this blog and the AppGap. Mashups or some form of composite applications through data integration appears to be the pathway here.
I have not seen the full report and I am sure it will provide many interesting details. ReadWriteWeb offered a useful summary. In defining their subject the report did not include consumer services like Blogger, Facebook, Netvibes, and Twitter. They felt that these types of services are aimed at consumers and are often supported by ads, so they do not qualify as Enterprise 2.0 tools. I agree with their assessment. There are possible roles for these tools within some enterprises but they are the foundation for enterprise business processes except for some rare exceptions. Instead they included many of the vendors we have been discussing on this blog and the AppGap.
The report found that the larger the firm, the more likely that they will invest in enterprise 2.0 tools. I guess they have the budgets but they are often the most security concerned so perhaps some of these concerns are dropping away. The least likely are the very small companies, 6 to 99 employees. Perhaps they can still yell across the hallway but these companies often do not have any collaboration infrastructure to replace and should take advantage of the low (and sometimes free) cost tools available on the low end of enterprise 2.0.
One of the most interesting findings was their projection that most of the revenue growth will occur in social networking tools.. Enterprise 2.0 is often defined as social software so this should make sense. They rank social networking ahead of blogs, wikis, podcasts, and widgets on the growth curve. Mashups come in second. Now here is where it gets tricky as many social applications are using mashups to integrate with other enterprise applications as noted above. I also find that many blog and wiki providers are adding other features, including mashups and social networking. Some my prediction is that it will get harder and harder to separate these functions. However, I do agree that social networking is the big new thing and that mashups are the highway for social software integration.
by Jevon MacDonald
April 22, 2008 at 8:59 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Media
Business Intelligence, known as BI, is an area of enterprise software and strategy focused on the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of business information. This can be just-in-time data from business operations, market data, trends or any other business related information.
The prominence of BI has been rising in recent years, primarily due to the fact that more business data than ever is now available and we finally have reasonably priced systems for collecting and presenting that data.
The presentation of BI data is typically in the form of a Dashboard interface. Dashboards have been available in an enterprise setting since the late 90’s. While the polish of these offerings has improved, and there has been significant (in breadth) but slow movement toward open standards for dashboard elements (known as Widgets), there has been very little progress in improving the overall user experience and business value of the tool itself. Instead, the improvement in data, both in volume and quality, has driven most of the progress so far.
Open source projects such as Pentaho and JBoss portals are raising the status quo for the quality of the underlying infrastructure while companies like Mendix are driving the most significant interface and process-enhancing progress.
Smart, but could it drive you to irrelevance?
The opportunities made available by higher quality and highly relevant data can not be understated. Business Intelligence tools represent some of the most exciting possibilities in recent years, but it also has the potential to be the single biggest missed opportunity in the enterprise yet.
Do you remember the smartest kid in your school? (it may have been you — kudos!) There is always a sort of tragedy about just how smart a kid can be, as unless they posses the requisite social skills their smarts may never take them as far as a Ph.D and no further. More importantly, no matter how smart a person is, we all need to have a personal dream and vision, without those we lumber in obscurity.
The same is true for your company. In getting too smart about your business, there is a risk in alienating yourself from your staff, your partners and ultimately, your customers if you do not provide them with the ability to benefit from this new level of business data.
The Intelligence Funnel
Business Intelligence tools must be viewed as part of a stack strategy to not only improve business data, but to radically change how that data can be acted on. There are three core components of this strategy
Raw Business Intelligence
This is raw, real-time data from your operations. On-Time performance, costs, spend, etc. These are all critical data-points for monitoring the performance of your organization. The real-time nature of this data also means that you can react quickly to any trends or shifts that you observe.
Social Intelligence
Social Intelligence is your ability to understand what your customers, employees and partners perceive regarding your organization, product and strategy. The inability to listen closely is the achilles heel of the modern organization. So few resources are focused on listening and synthesizing information that the skill is almost non-existent.
Social Collaboration
This is the final, foundational, layer of your Intelligence Funnel. The volume of information you will be dealing with will mean it is a practical impossibility for a finite number of people to filter, manage and synthesize all of the available sources.
Your Intelligence Funnel will federate this component out as far in to your business network as possible. Can your restaurant managers do a better job of monitoring and troubleshooting your supply chain than your corporate staff can? Can your branch office staff provide more significant and timely feedback on the effectiveness of a new marketing campaign than a call center worker can? Will the clerk at your car rental shop have a better and more timely understanding of customer requests than your annual survey?
The list goes on, but the point is that the volume of data will continue to increase at an incredible rate and if you do not have a scalable plan in place to leverage that data than it will be both a wasted asset and eventually a liability and a cost driver.
New Business Processes
The end result of the Business Intelligence Funnel is the ability to identify, create and implement new business processes which are cheaper and better timed than what you are able to create and deploy now using a centralized model.
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