iTKO LISA - Software Validation and Testing at the Speed of Enterprise 2.0

May 14, 2008 at 7:59 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Here is a topic that recently came to my attention that I think has many implications for the success of enterprise 2.0 so I wanted to share it on this forum. Enterprise 2.0 has provided us with many opportunities to more rapidly develop applications drawing from numerous data sources. However, this is both an opportunity and a challenge. The evolution of application development has been extremely aggressive over the past year and a half. What started out as standard base platforms quickly migrated to composite applications through Web 2.0 and SOA. This rapid development with an increasing array of independent data sources that are now inter-connected represents a challenge for software testing and validation to keep up.

There is more opportunity for failure, or at best inefficiency, if validation and testing cannot maintain the required time frames in the faster paced enterprise 2.0. Any enterprise application has to be able to trust the multiple data sources that get mashed up in a composite application but many of these data sources may be outside its reach at the point of origin. iTKO addresses this issue as we shall see.

Last week I spoke with iTKO Founder and Chief Architect John Michelsen on this topic. He mentioned that when enterprise 2.0 apps were out on the fringe in the form of blogs and wikis, the testing issues were not such a big deal. Now that enterprise 2.0 is moving deeper into the enterprise, as we have discussed a good bit on this blog, the stakes are much higher. iTKO’s LISA software helps to mitigate the risks in three ways.

First, it allows companies to re-think the testing strategy. Most software testing has been done manually in the waterfall manner. The enterprise 2.0 world is moving too fast for this. Data can be brought into composition applications without sufficient testing. For example, one of their clients, a top cable provider, operates in a very competitive field. They were limited to two major application platform releases a year simply because of the testing requirements. Much of this testing is now automated through iTKO. The company has reduced six weeks of manual testing to four machine hours. They are now able to provide new functionality at a faster pace.

Secondly, iTKO helps with ongoing validation of data and the underlying business logic. Since data coming in through composite applications can change without notice, ongoing validation becomes more important. Using the same approach as it does with testing, iTKO can provide continuous validation. For example, a government agency that runs highly sensitive data from multiple sources, has iTKO re-validate it every 30 seconds. It does business logic testing by putting sample business problems into play and making sure the correct responses occur.

Thirdly, iTKO has LISA Virtual Service Environment (VSE) to simulate the real world for testing and validation when test systems are not available and testing cannot be done on production systems. For example, a major travel site had a significant performance downgrade. Virtualization enabled them to test outside the production system, discover the information source that lead to the downgrade, and correct it. To go offline to find this issue would have been impossible. In another example, a bank had only limited access to production systems for testing new functionality. The virtual version gave them unlimited access.

LISA VSE also allows you to test against applications that are not even built yet. If you know what it is going to be, they can create a virtual model for testing. This allows rapid innovation as you can see some of the potential problems before they occur. A major airline is using iTKO’s virtualization of services to increase the pace of development for their next generation, composite application-based platform. In this case they will obtaining data from their many travel partner’s applications such as hotel rewards systems and rental car platforms. Now they can test all the connections before they even occur through iTKO’s virtualization services. The use of composite applications is greatly streamlining the implementation of their next generation system. Services from iTKO allow testing and validation to keep up with this accelerated pace of development derived from enterprise 2.0. iTKO uses the term SOV or services oriented validation as a complement to SOA. It refers to the strategy of simulating the behavior of deployed software assets, and the synthetic construction of those services not in existence, that make up an enterprise SOA application.

I used to develop technology-enabled software training in the 80s and I can appreciate the need for such a service. It was very hard to develop training until it was too late because we could not see what they systems would look like and function until a few weeks before the training was needed. This virtualization should also enhance training development and provisioning training environments.

There is more on their web site including white papers, research reports, and forums. They also offer a blog, the iTKO SOA Testing & Validation Soapbox, which covers SOA testing, validation and virtualization, software quality, automated testing, and IT governance issues with John Michelsen and other iTKO executives.

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Mr. Wiki Goes to Washington

May 12, 2008 at 10:15 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Social Media

“Government is the ultimate institution retaining the traditional top-down structure, technologically backward, with big decisions almost always made with incomplete information on what works and what doesn’t work. Here’s hoping that Web 2.0 can make government more effective by tapping information among officials and citizens, perhaps even finding a new consensus on where the wisdom of government begins and ends.”

- L. Gordon Crovitz, The Wall Street Journal

Ah, such idealism. Remember the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, in which an idealistic senator, played by James Stewart, attempts to cut through the vested interests of a corrupt system to get funding for his boy’s camp? As he and many other idealists found over the years, cleaning out landed interests, lobbyists and special interest groups is no easy task. Trying to change the direction of government and its huge bureaucracy is about as simple as turning an oceanliner around — while battling sharks circling in the water.

WSJ’s Crovitz is pondering whether Web 2.0 could be the force that connects government closer to the people. He cites Don Tapscott’s latest work in the Web 2.0 space, which shows a lot of government interest in Web 2.0 applications.

And yes, Don does call this new wave “Government 2.0.” Don has written leading-edge books on the promise of technology and Web 2.0 (his latest being Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything).

Don is reportedly now working with the US Office of Management and Budget to employ Web-based collaboration to “reinvent government.” Project Government 2.0 posits that “If governments are to ensure their relevance and authority, they must move quickly to meet rising expectations for openness, accountability, effectiveness and efficiency in the public sector.”

Crovitz cites examples of emerging Government 2.0 initiatives, which don’t necessarily bring government closer to the people, but do appear to be mechanisms for improving information sharing across agencies:

• “‘Intellipedia’ lets 37,000 officials at the CIA, FBI, NSA and other U.S. intelligence agencies share information and even rate one another for accuracy in password-protected wikis, some ‘top secret.’”
• “‘Diplopedia’ lets State Department staff share information.” The State Department also has a virtual embassy in Second Life.

The government is famous for its inability to manage information.  If agencies and departments are able to break down some of the walls and silos and better share and process knowledge, there’s a great lesson there for organizations of all sizes and persuasions.

Ensuring more accountability from our government is now being aided by a range of technology-enhanced communities of interest. Just as an example, the prolific blogging community inside and outside the Beltway (and I’m not just talking about Wonkette) is helping to keep many causes and issues in the public spotlight. Many issues would have faded into obscurity in years gone by.

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Twitter - Breaking News - Chinese/Language No Barrier

May 12, 2008 at 9:20 am · Filed under Google, News, Tweetscan, Twitter

Using Google - here are Chinese Tweets being translated into English

So with Tweetscan and Google, any newsroom can get breaking news - the network is here right now!

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Jon Stewart Must Have Read Our Blog

May 12, 2008 at 9:02 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

As he might say, just kidding. However, I was struck by the similarity between his comments on blogging and some of what we discussed in here in the post, Are Us Bloggers to be Trusted? Recently, Jon interviewed David Perlmetter, author of Blog Wars, on the Daily Show recently. The book, itself, covers political blogs but the discussion is relevant beyond that topic. Here are some excerpts:

David: “I think that the good ones (bloggers) are helping to expand democracy and give more people access to the political process.

Jon: Do you think there is push back? Is there a sense that people are accepting the new medium? Or resenting it” Or just looking at porn? What do you think is going on?”

David: “ I can’t speak to the last one…but blogging has become part of the political process (he elaborates)

Jon: “Is there a fear that they are using it as a Trojan horse? (he goes on to express the concern that people may be getting paid behind the scenes to blog on topics)

David: “This came up in the 2006 campaign… Sock puppets in the term for people who just repeat (the party line). But you know blogging is like a personal relationship and you learn over time who is just feeding you what they get (off the party web site) and who is authentic.“

Jon: “ You see this is the thing about blogging. Any of the criticism about it… They say oh this person hasn’t been vetted or this work hasn’t been vetted, but the work speaks for itself. I do not know how you can be negative about something that is just…It is like saying I don’t like these writers because it is just writing (elaborates) If you find someone you like you follow them. I do not understand why there would be push back.”

David concurs that blogs have become mainstream and Jon agrees says that some bloggers are just as good as the mainstream journalists.

I sat through some of the early “wars” between political bloggers and mainstream press in panels during 2004 and 2005. Now blogs are an accepted channel as we can see everywhere. Blogging came to the forefront of attention during the US Presidential election of 2004, as both sides used it. Blog was Webster’s word of the year in 2004 and bloggers were one of ABC News’ “People of the Year.” Then the business world caught on. Fortune Magazine named blogging in the top ten business technology trends for 2005 and the Harvard Business Review included business blogs in their list of breakthrough ideas for 2005. Blogs made the cover of Business Week in 2005. Now the issues that came up in political blogging are coming up in business blogging to no surprise.

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China Quake - Twitter Comes of Age as THE Breaking News Tool

May 12, 2008 at 8:21 am · Filed under Dave Winer, News, Reuters, Robert Scoble, Twitter, User Revolution

Here is the timeline of the quake and Twitter as it happens

From “From the Frontline“:

The BBCs Rory Cellan-Jones wonders whether Twitter has come of age with the earthquake that struck Sichuan province in China this morning,

Let’s see, as this story unfolds, whether this is the moment when Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media, while allowing participants and onlookers to share their experiences. link

I didn’t know anything about the earthquake until I picked up on a (private) tweet from Rebecca Mackinnon in Hong Kong. A quick blast through Twitter using Tweetscan and it soon became clear the Tweetsphere was abuzz with chatter and information sharing about the earthquake. It also became clear news was coming out quicker on Twitter than by more established means. Some pictures appeared on Flickr within an hour of the quake. Meanwhile Robin Hamman points me to a tool that automatically translates what Chinese Twitterers are saying about the earthquake.

There is more - Here is Reuters telling the story of how Dave Winer broke the Virginia earthquake story on twitter.

At about 1:37 pm, software developer Dave Winer asked the Twitterverse: “Explosion in Falls Church, VA?” (Perhaps not coincidentally, Winer is a well-known blogger and podcasting evangelist). A flurry of posts, or “tweets,” followed, as users reported rumbles as far away as Alexandria.

The mainstream media entered the fray at 2:33 pm, with radio station WTOP reporting ground rumblings throughout Northern Virginia, citing a possible earthquake. Officials also told the radio station that the rumblings were part of construction blasts at nearby Ft. Belvoir, which had been scheduled for later in the afternoon as part of a new building for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

Twitter users continued to pile on, pointing out data from the Maryland Geological Survey and adding their own commentary. Twitterer DataG wrote: “After the ‘Falls Church explosion’ event that was covered on Twitter, I saw the value in having a Twitter account at-the-ready.”

By 2:56 pm — nearly 90 minutes after Winer’s initial alert — WTOP had the official word from the U.S. Geological Survey: A not-exactly-massive 1.8 magnitude earthquake with an epicenter near Annandale, VA.

The “Falls Church Incident” was earthshaking only in the most literal sense, but it is an interesting proof of concept that news can be broken on Twitter. Reuters is looking at ways to use Twitter in the newsroom, although our feed is currently under renovation.

Twitter - the new AP - no cost - high impact (Thanks to Scoble for the links)

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Social Media - Restoring the American Dream?

May 12, 2008 at 6:49 am · Filed under Blogging, Collaboration, Columbus, Energy, Peak Oil, WOSU

When de Tocqeuville came to America he was stunned by how Americans did not wait for the official authorities to fix local problems as they did in France. He saw that Americans usually got together as a community and worked things out for themselves. Most of see now that this response has been lost.

But there are signs that blogging and social media is restoring the original values of America. Here is how “The Other Paper” is describing the work that WOSU is doing to spark the Bloggers in Columbus to life as a real force in the city:

A civic divide is growing in Columbus. For the past decade or so, ordinary people have become less inclined to call their political representatives or drive all the way down to City Hall to personally lobby government officials.

But a community of tech-savvy, affluent white kids say they’re picking up the slack. Columbus’s bloggers believe they’re furthering democracy, improving the economy and advancing humanity—all without missing Grey’s Anatomy.

Ranked as the No. 8 most active blogging community in the nation, an estimated 10 percent of Columbus inhabitants regularly pounded the keyboard in 2007, offering up online commentary themselves or consuming somebody else’s, according to Nielson Media Research.

If you’re among the remaining 90 percent, all this probably seems like a colossal waste of time.

In fact, according to the bloggers themselves, they’re saving the city.

“The need for two-way or conversational media is more vital than ever,” said Jeff Johnson of the Urban Infill blog.

Johnson compared his medium with what he called the “doomsday” style of the mainstream media. Traditional outlets simply report troublesome news, he said. Bloggers, on the other hand, “have a propensity for uncovering solutions,” he said.

When bloggers get together, “We create ideas. We create a vibration that this city is thirsting for.”

There are problems that just cannot be solved by the “authorities”. Will the school system reform itself? How will the mortgage crisis resolve iself? How will the middle class and the working poor cope with higher oil prices? My bet is that these kinds of issues can only be resolved by communities working with each other.

Here is how they are helping with the Mayor’s plan for bringing back streetcars:

“These are the kind of people who will make Columbus great as we move forward,” said Mike Brown, spokesman for Mayor Mike Coleman.

“This audience is important to the mayor, and he is paying attention,” he said.

Nevertheless, the mayor is eager to capture the hearts and minds of the demographic that lean toward blogging, Brown said.

“Many of them are young, creative professionals. He loves the energy.”

One reason Coleman might love the energy is that bloggers have embraced his pet proposal: streetcars. The online community has been more supportive than the public at large for the mayor’s plan, which is now stalled, to run a streetcar line between Downtown and campus.

Many bloggers have put “My blog supports Columbus Streetcars” icons on their websites. RetroMetro’s Paul Bonneville has launched Columbus-streetcars.com, the “unofficial citizen support site for the Columbus Streetcars.”

I think in 2008, the pips will begin to squeak. Higher food and energy costs will begin to fracture how we all live. Where I live on Prince Edward Island in Canada, the average wage is $26,000. Half the people live in rural settings and have to have a car/truck. We have a 6 month heating season. Many are hanging on by their finger nails right now.  I am sure that large parts of America are in the same situation.

I think it will become clear soon that we will have to re-design nearly every aspect of how we live becuase the design we use now assumes affordable energy prices.

Social Software may well be at the heart of how we do this re-design.

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Why Stop at Enterprise 2.0? - IIR Portals, Collaboration and Content conference renamed Enterprise3

May 9, 2008 at 5:25 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

The Collaboration Technologies Conference had already grabbed the name, the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, last year so the Portals, Collaboration and Content conference moved on to select Enterprise3. Actually one of the major sections of the conference is Enterprise 2.0 and to be fair they mean enterprise cubed or as in the Boston Celtics, the Enterprise Big Three - Portals, Collaboration, and Web. If you live in Boston you might ask which one is KG? I would vote for the last one. A few years ago I used run a portals practice but now it seems funny to still hear about portals. However, they are very much in existence, depending on your definition.

The wikipedia defines an Enterprise portal, as “a framework to provide a single point of access to a variety of information and tools.” But then defines Portal (fiction) as, “a magical or technological doorway that connects two distant locations.” As I witnessed some old style portal implementations run into the millions a few years ago without yet working I was not sure which definition was correct. What I have now seen that with some enterprise 2.0 composite applications, the single point becomes an intelligence integrator and not simply a doorway.

The conference site said,

“Portal technology has changed dramatically during the ten years I have been chairing this event. During this time period, portals have evolved from simply replacing intranets to embracing all aspects of enterprise computing for delivering and sharing business content both inside and outside organizations. To reflect the important role portals now play in the enterprise, the IIR Portals, Collaboration and Content conference has been renamed to Enterprise3.”

This is a good move and I am sure it will be a good conference looking at the program. It is coming up soon, May 19 -22 in San Diego. Apologies to the conference but it is late on a rainy Friday and I could resist these comments. Have a great weekend.

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Technology for us - the heart of Enterprise 2.0?

May 9, 2008 at 10:55 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, FASTforward08

The phrase “technology for us” has been kicking around in my head for the past several months. At the FASTForward ‘08 conference, I took a first pass at articulating my thinking in a video interview with Jerry Michalski. Consider this my next attempt. I expect there will be more.

Technology for Them

Information systems in organizations generally have been “technology for them.” Accounting systems, inventory control systems, ERP systems, reservations systems are all designed and imposed on their users.

Done properly, these systems yield efficiencies, predictable quality, and significant economic benefits. The design and implementation processes for these systems are industrial engineering at its best. Expert designers observe, redesign, and streamline processes to define and constrain what the target user population is allowed to do.

In these systems, users are simply one component in a mechanistic environment designed to constrain behaviors. User roles are limited to situations where technology is too expensive and a human user is more economical. Individual creativity and initiative are neither desirable or appropriate.

Technology for Me

The personal computer revolution brought “technology for me.” We saw innovation and scores of programs designed to improve the productivity and effectiveness of individual knowledge workers. Few of us would go back to a world without spreadsheets, word processors, or the other tools made possible and accessible via personal level information technology.

The first waves of innovation in the PC world focused largely on individual productivity. Attention to work process, if any, was a function of the idiosyncrasies of each user. Broadly speaking, innovation took one of two forms. Programmers and developers generalized from their own needs to develop unique tools solving their own problems. With luck, those solutions found enough kindred spirits to sustain a market. Early examples here would include the original Visicalc, ThinkTank, More, and dBase. More recent examples would include MindManager, SketchUp, Powerpoint, and the Brain.

The alternate development path was more corporate, with planned attempts to meet the application needs of perceived large markets of individual information and knowledge workers. Examples here would include the original Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft Word, and Visio.

This development path emphasized industrial and mechanistic conceptions of work. Moreover, the logic of mass markets produced products targeted to the perceived lowest common denominator of user needs. At its worst, this path leads right back to technology for them and Microsoft Bob as a distorted model of users and use cases.

Us as Knowledge Worker

There are two dimensions of “technology for us” worth exploring. The first is “us” as knowledge workers; individuals charged with “thinking for a living” in Tom Davenport’s coinage and expected to exercise substantial initiative and autonomy in the design and execution of their work. The second dimension of “us” is the degree to which key work products and deliverables emerge from the collective and coordinated action of multiple knowledge workers. We’ll return to this second form of us in a bit.

There are both political and practical problems with applying technology effectively to the unique needs of knowledge workers. Previous organizational uses of technology have not had to deal with situations where the target audience was free to ignore you. Knowledge workers occupy positions of power and influence within the enterprise. They have the power and inclination to ignore, dismiss, and actively undermine ill-conceived and poorly executed efforts to modify their work practices. For that matter, they have to power to dismiss well-conceived and well-executed efforts on their behalf. 

If you’re smart enough to avoid the trap of trying to dictate an approach to this user community and actively engage them in the design and implementation process, you run into the next constraint. Knowledge workers can’t articulate quality, effectiveness, or efficiency with anything resembling the precision that applies to manual or information work. The nature of knowledge work and its deliverables makes typical measurement approaches suspect (see Crafting Uniqueness in Knowledge Work and The Invisibility of Knowledge Work, for example). We have only recently begun to understand individual knowledge work practices in ways that let us apply technology with some likelihood of success. In many ways we are still working out the details of the vision of knowledge work support first articulated by Vannevar Bush in the mid-1940s in As We May Think.

Us as Groups of Knowledge Workers

Organizations exist to solve problems beyond the capacity of individuals to tackle. This is as true of knowledge work as it is for all other types of work. For all the power of technology to make individual knowledge workers more productive and effective, the greater opportunity lies in developing skill at using technology to support collective activity.

What we haven’t yet done well is knit together our knowledge of how to improve group oriented work practices and technological possibilities. Further, the more promising efforts have seen limited penetration into organizations. When dealing with collective knowledge work we compound the problem of knowledge worker autonomy with the problem that the knowledge work processes we wish to improve are vague, imprecise, and squishy in ways quite uncharacteristic of the work processes we are comfortable working with in industrial settings.

If we take the analysis and improvement tools we are comfortable with in industrial process settings and simply port them to knowledge work environments, one of two things happens. Either, we become hopelessly frustrated trying to force a dynamic and fluid process into the confines of our swimlanes. Or, we mistake the small fraction of the process we can force fit into our tools for the entire phenomenon; guaranteeing that our target users will ignore us and route around our efforts.

While there are people who have thought about the problems of applying technology to complex knowledge work processes and practices, their work has not achieved the widespread adoption it needs to be a meaningful factor in most organizations. Some good entry points into this work include:

• Doug Engelbart. Toward High-Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware
• Alan Kay. The Real Computer Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet
• Dave Snowden. Cognitive Edge (Snowden’s blog may be the simplest place to start here; the papers tend to be a bit academic)
• Jeff Conklin. Wicked Problems and Social Complexity (pdf). Cognexus Institute

The inventory of technology solutions promising to streamline, improve, or transform group activities continues to grow, although it often seems more like baroque and rococo variations on a handful of themes than like new insights or frameworks. Will the next implementation of threaded discussion make any major contribution to educating a group on when and how to make effective use of that technique? Or to understanding what situations make it a poor choice of tool?

What seems to be missing is a synthesis of Group Behavior 101 and a groupware pattern language. I’m not aware of anything that would fit that bill, although Stewart Mader’s recent Wikipatterns might represent a potential starting point. Can anyone point to some examples I’m unaware of? Is this something that we should be working to develop?

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Web 2.0-Enterprise 2.0 boundary, like work-life, is getting blurry

May 6, 2008 at 10:56 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

My colleague Bill Ives just posted a thought-provoking discussion on why Web 2.0 is not the same animal as Enterprise 2.0.

There are definitely clear distinctions between the consumerist Web 2.0 services in play out there, versus the tools and services businesses are adopting. When technologies or services are taken behind the firewall, their purpose and requirements change, which is to solve business problems.

It’s worth noting, however, that in recent years, starting with the PC, we have seen a lot of consumer technologies percolating into the enterprise. As a recent article in Knowledge@Wharton observes, the lines keep blurring — “the boundaries between corporate and consumer technologies are beginning to disappear.”

As Christian Terwiesch, a professor of operations and information management at Wharton, put it: “We have observed a convergence of technologies between these two segments [consumer and corporate] because the user needs have been converging. For instance, workers are demanding that corporate technology — say a search tool within a company — be as user friendly as Google’s popular search site.”

In fact, the article notes, in a few years, as predicted by Gartner, at least 10% of all information technology
spending will reside with employees (for laptops, iPhones and the like), and they will customize at least 90% of the technology they use at work.

Beyond gadgetry and online videos, the article goes on to make a very important observation as well: “the line between personal lives and work has blurred.” Employees often perform personal tasks — like watching the latest popular video on YouTube or shopping at Amazon.com — at work and they frequently complete corporate tasks at home on their own time.

Perhaps, as Clay Shirky is saying (cited here by Jim McGee), the organization as we know it is disappearing. Yes, there are still formal government regulations that define the legal status of an “employee” and how many hours are worked per week and so forth. But thanks to information technology and networking, organizations can function more effectively as confederations of entrepreneurs/service providers than as rigid, hierarchical 9-to-5 entities.

There are issues, of course. Security, for one, can be a real show-stopper. Many companies are not comfortable — and may even have legal issues with — with the idea of data and processes being taken to offsite providers. These are issues that have to be worked out.

However, the boundaries between consumer-business technology and work-life have blurred to the point where there’s no going back. Just as continuing education is a personal initiative that is in every company’s best interest to foster, the knowledge and value being gained through “consumerist” social networking and computing will only come back to enrich productivity and spur motivation within the enterprise.

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Awareness Makes a Smart Move with Its Facebook Integration

May 5, 2008 at 7:12 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Last week I had an interesting conversation with Eric Schurr, VP of Marketing and Direct sales at Awareness. We discussed their recently announced Facebook integration through their Awareness Facebook Application Framework. I have written about Awareness a number of times here and elsewhere (see Awareness – Enterprise 2.0 Social Media Platform). I have also been writing a bit about Facebook on this blog (e.g., Enterprise 2.0 is not Web 2.0 nor is it an Oxymoron). I discussed how Facebook is not a business-oriented platform for solving business problems inside the enterprise, with rare exceptions, as it is a consumer web application with different objectives. However, I also said, picking up from Puneet Gupta, that Facebook can play a role in the enterprise when it is used appropriately as a social networking vehicle.

I have also written about how a number of firms have provided a means to integrate social software (aka enterprise 2.0) with traditional enterprise applications. Now Awareness, an enterprise social software platform, has taken things the other way by allowing for the integration of their business oriented social software platform with the consumer web platform, Facebook. They are doing this to combine the robust business oriented capabilities of their program with the networking capabilities of Facebook to allow firms to build better communities, primarily for business to consumer communities. I think this is a smart move and a good use of Facebook for business out in the consumer web.

Many of us know what Facebook brings to the table for groups and communities. It certainly has become the dominant player in this space so we are on it because our friends are. I am a member for that reason, as well as its enhanced social networking capabilities. Awareness comes to the table with a single architecture for all forms of user-generated content (e.g., text, video, photos, etc.) that operates in a uniform fashion across all forms of social media (e.g., blogs, wikis, discussion groups, forums, mashups, etc.). User-generated content is also captured and stored with profile information about the user who generated it. This allows you to gather content through any channel (e.g., blog. wiki) and share it thorough any other channel, while retaining the context of the author who generated it.

These are clearly not capabilities within Facebook but they are capabilities that are very useful for a business oriented B2C community. Awareness builds a branded Facebook application for each customer. The resulting Facebook application is unique to each customer’s community. The benefit of having an Awarness-powered Facebook application is that it “extends” their community into Facebook and they can use Facebook’s viral marketing tools. I asked Eric to elaborate on this. He made several points:

1. You are in complete control. You establish the rules for the community dynamics – moderation, security, permissioning, etc. – and you can change them as your needs evolve. You can control who can do what, who can see what, what content is appropriate or not, etc.

2, It’s your content, and you can use it anyway you want. You can mine the content for valuable trends and insights; you can analyze participation metrics; you can access it via APIs and reuse it elsewhere as they do on their own Awareness site.

3. You can extend your community to other places where your users “live.” If you build a group in Facebook or some other social site, it will be there and only there. However, if you have an Awareness-powered community, you can also extend your community to Facebook (via the Awareness Facebook Application Framework) and eventually other social sites so your community can “live” in more than one place.

4. You can modify the community to meet your users’ needs. You can change the look and feel, incorporate new features (tagging, mapping, calendars, etc) to adjust to your users’ needs.

5. You can integrate it with your enterprise environment. Integrate with SSO/identity management systems, enterprise search, third party applications, etc.

6. You can monetize your community. It’s yours to do as you please. If you want to run ads on it or some other form of monetization, you can.

7. The community is in your brand image and style and strengthens your web presence. It’s your URL, your look/feel, and can be a seamless part of your web presence. Their Awareness site is an example of this (you can’t tell where the community ends and the website begins).

Eric offered an example of an Awareness powered Facebook community run by The Port Charlotte Voice, a New York Times Regional newspaper. It is their first customer to implement the Awareness Facebook Application Framework and the Facebook group is in its early stages. The newspaper can now present a variety of headlines, user-generated content and more from its online Awareness-powered social media community directly into Facebook. You can see the Port Charlotte Voice Facebook application with the link in this sentence.

The consumer web has brought a lot to the enterprise. Companies have taken many concepts from the consumer web to create business tools such as Awareness. It is nice to see some of the robustness of these new business tools going back into the consumer web to make it more robust for business.

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It Takes A Long Time For Change To Happen Quickly

May 3, 2008 at 2:26 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Adoption, Change, Culture, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, SOA, SaaS, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, barriers, enterprise software

Taylorism changed a lot about the nature of work in North American and western Europe pretty quickly, all things told … but it still took thirty or forty years to emerge into its relatively full-blown effects.  At its heyday, the manufacturing might and effectiveness of the United States that Taylorism helped create enabled it (along with important agricultural and resources capabilities and growing financial clout) to become the world power economically over several decades at most. 

In an important sense, it was useful to his theories that 1) they helped respond to the massive spread of the Industrial Era’s requirements for growth in the first half of the 20th century, and 2) World Wars I and II came along in the late 1910’s and in the late 1930’s to provide a massive need for manufacturing.

30+ years elapsed from the publication of Principles of Scientific Management in 1911 to the codification of those principles into work design methodologies in the 1940’s and early 1950’s.  He and his theories get a bad rap today, but it seems clear that they were highly useful to the process of creating wealth by improving manufacturing processes and capabilities.

It seems banal to say that those theories are less effective today, but I am not sure that’s the case.  There have been no comprehensive theories and principles come along (yet) to replace them, notwithstanding a plethora of management books published since the mid-1980’s promising enhance organizational effectiveness … more often than not by combining Taylorist principles with developmental workarounds and adaptations.

The recent emergence of the field called Enterprise 2.0, and clarion calls for management innovation that have followed (see Gary Hamel, Andrew McAfee, Tom Davenport, Don Tapscott, Dave Snowden and many, many others) promises much potential disruption.  It also portends significant struggle as the forces of buttoned-and-battened-down efficiency derived from a manufacturing-focused era vie with the forces arising from networked flows of information in an era where economic value is derived from the construction and application of knowledge to product and service design and delivery (manufacturing happens in China now).

Via Wikipedia:

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Taylor published his Principles of Scientific Management in 1911, which elucidated four core principles:

1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.

2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.

3. Provide "Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker’s discrete task".

4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks

Management theory

Taylor thought that by analysing work, the "One Best Way" to do it would be found. He is most remembered for developing the time and motion study. He would break a job into its component parts and measure each to the hundredth of a minute.

[ Snip … ]

He was generally unsuccessful in getting his concepts applied and was dismissed from Bethlehem Steel. It was largely through the efforts of his disciples (most notably H.L. Gantt) that industry came to implement his ideas.

Managers and workers

Taylor had very precise ideas about how to introduce his system:

"It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone." (Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, cited by Montgomery 1989:229, italics with Taylor)

Workers were supposed to be incapable of understanding what they were doing. According to Taylor this was true even for rather simple tasks.

"’I can say, without the slightest hesitation,’ Taylor told a congressional committee, ‘that the science of handling pig-iron is so great that the man who is … physically able to handle pig-iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend

[The scope of] Taylor’s Influence - United States

• Carl Barth helped Taylor to develop speed-and-feed-calculating slide rules to a previously unknown level of usefulness. Similar aids are still used in machine shops today. Barth became an early consultant on scientific management and later taught at Harvard.
• H. L. Gantt developed the Gantt chart, a visual aid for scheduling tasks and displaying the flow of work.
• Harrington Emerson introduced scientific management to the railroad industry, and proposed the dichotomy of staff versus line employees, with the former advising the latter.
• Morris Cooke adapted scientific management to educational and municipal organizations.
• Hugo Münsterberg created industrial psychology.
• Lillian Gilbreth introduced psychology to management studies.
• Frank Gilbreth (husband of Lillian) discovered scientific management while working in the construction industry, eventually developing motion studies independently of Taylor. These logically complemented Taylor’s time studies, as time and motion are two sides of the efficiency improvement coin. The two fields eventually became time and motion study.
• Harvard University, one of the first American universities to offer a graduate degree in business management in 1908, based its first-year curriculum on Taylor’s scientific management.
• Harlow S. Person, as dean of Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School of Administration and Finance, promoted the teaching of scientific management.
• James O. McKinsey, professor of accounting at the University of Chicago and founder of the consulting firm bearing his name, advocated budgets as a means of assuring accountability and of measuring performance.

I’ve long appreciated the aphorism that is the title of this post, and I think of it regularly when surfing and reading the latest insight from the many pundits and critics of the Web.  And toda