Mashups: So Easy a Caveman Can Write Them?

August 31, 2008 at 10:13 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, SOA, Social Computing, Social Media

Okay, sorry to keep offending you cavemen out there; but I’m not trying to sell auto insurance… But since applications are getting easier and easier to write, it’s only a matter of time until many non-programmers will be building applications in some capacity.

Are we there yet? Can Kathy in finance now build a front-end analytical application that will call up data from several different departments to help her prepare a new quarterly budget report? Or does she still need to go to IT to make sure it’s “done right”?  Industry watchers have been pondering the efficacy and possibilities of user-built applications over the last few years, and generally have concluded that most business users aren’t quite ready and willing to spend a lot of time in application development. Plus, enterprises need to keep tabs on who’s doing what with data and applications.

But, lately, Enterprise 2.0 tools and platforms — especially mashups — have been clearly exhibiting the levels of accessibility and simplicity that may make user-built apps more of a reality. There’s certainly a great deal of collaborative interfaces and Websites being built by non-techy folks — are they ready to take on more sophticated apps?

Ovum analyst Tony Baer recently took a look at the mashup phenomenon that is gaining steam across the Enterprise 2.0 landscape, and sees some progress, but agrees that we’re not quite there yet in terms of end-users building more sophisticated apps: As he puts it:

“…the very notion of “writing programs” is not exactly the kind of thing that you would expect your grandmother to do, not to mention business stakeholders who do not fall under the category of ‘power users.’ To date, that goal has only been realized with the common office productivity tools that are equipped on just about every desktop which provide bare bones features for extending a spreadsheet or word processed document with a macro, and to varying extents, hobbyist programs like kinder simpler photo editors that are thrown in gratis with Windows or Mac platforms. But for the most part these are automation, not programming tools.”

Tony warns that particularly at the enterprise level, IT still needs to stay involved in end-user projects, pointing out that “no matter how visual mashup tools are, you still need developers or power users at some point of the lifecycle, whether it be to vet objects or sources than can be safely mashed up without violating some corporate policy, or to deal with some complexities of JavaScript under the hood.”

However, there is progress, as exhibited by the Mozilla Foundation’s “Ubiquity” project. Ubiquity is supposed to bring mashup app development to users of all stripes, in what Tony describes as an “attempt to transform the browser into a natural language mashup tool accessible to non-programmers.”

Tony illustrates the types of mashups a Ubiquity-enable browser would enable:

“Ubiquity, is supposed to enable anybody – not just JavaScript developers – to casually mash things up when you perform tasks like send emails. Let’s say you want to throw a party and invite a bunch of friends to a restaurant. Instead of signing up with a site like Evite, simply name the restaurant, hit an option key, type in ‘Map,’ and voila, a Google Map with the location of the restaurant populates your email. Want some reviews or a display of the menu. Press the option key again and enter a command like ‘Yelp’ and type in natural language that you want some reviews or display a menu. Of course, you can do similar things today by embedding links, but this makes the process a lot more direct.”

Tony adds that the concept could also find its way into other leading portal sites such as Facebook and Yahoo News “to embellish messaging, Wikis, micro-blogging, or other uses limited only by the imagination.” However, he adds, since corporate data and software are involved, enterprises will still need to maintain boundaries over such activities, so IT staffers may still need to play a supporting role for the foreseeable future.

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Social Media - Gustav - Emergencies

August 31, 2008 at 9:02 am · Filed under Andy Carvin, Emergency, Gustav, Network Effect, News, Ning, Public Media, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, User Revolution, Video, Videos, Web 2.0, Wikis, mashups

Social Media came of age after the Tsunami. It showed its power to provide vital information very quickly when the official channels could not.

With Gustav a day away from landfall many of the most experienced people in the field are coalescing on a Ning site that will aggregate as much information as possible in one place. Wiki, Twets, RSS feeds from Blogs, Video - everything.

Here is the address of the site

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Knowledge work and micro-processes

August 27, 2008 at 10:46 am · Filed under Change, Enterprise 2.0

Recently, I sat through a presentation about a Sharepoint-based intranet project to improve processes within the HR group of a medium-sized organization. The process in question was one of collecting annual performance reviews throughout the organization. Using Sharepoint, the HR group and their consultants replaced Word documents, spreadsheets, and email with Infopath forms and programmatic workflows. The client was happy and the consultants had a nice demo they could show to their prospects. Nonetheless, I found myself dissatisfied.

For all the new technology deployed, this effort struck me as an example of what my old friend and mentor Benn Konsynski calls "speeding up the mess." This HR process is an instance of the micro-processes that comprise knowledge work activities in organizations.

Other examples might include:

• Customizing an existing sales presentation for a meeting with a new prospect
• Designing the agenda and preparing materials for an internal brainstorming meeting
• Putting together the briefing materials for a quarterly business review meeting
• Analyzing and making sense out of a competitor’s recent pricing announcement

These micro-processes are characterized by:

• A small number of steps
• Ad hoc design created by the knowledge workers responsible for the process
• Loose definitions of the beginning and end of the process
• Loose notions of control, sign-offs, and approvals
• Technology-enabled, if at all, by email and office suite tools.

None of these processes were ever explicitly designed; they’ve evolved over time. The cumulative pain and productivity drag imposed by these processes is accepted as a fact of organizational life. While various technologies are offered up as ways out of the swamp, we need an overall improvement strategy to provide the necessary direction.

The appropriate strategy is readily available. It is the same strategy originally deployed by Frederick Taylor in improving the productivity of manual labor in factory settings. The late Peter Drucker summarizes this strategy nicely:

Taylor’s principles sound deceptively simple. The first step in making the  manual worker more productive is to look at the task and to analyze its constituent motions. The next step is to record each motion, the physical effort it takes, and the time it takes. Then motions that are not needed can be eliminated; and whenever we have looked at manual work, we have found that a great many of the traditionally most- hallowed procedures turn out to be waste and do not add anything. Then, each of the motions that remain as essential to obtaining the  finished product is set up so as to be done the simplest way, the easiest way, the way that puts the least physical and  mental strain on the operator, and the  way that requires the least time. Next, these motions are put together again into a "job" that is in a logical sequence. Finally, the tools needed to do the motions are redesigned. Whenever we have looked at any job-no matter for how many thousands of years it has been performed-we have found that the traditional tools are wrong for the task.
[Peter Drucker. "Knowledge worker  productivity: The biggest challenge."  California Management Review. V41, #2.  Winter 1999. pp. 79-94.]

While the strategy of “go, look, think, improve” is sound, there are some challenges in translating it successfully to knowledge work. First, the outputs of knowledge work are fluid and ill-defined. We have no widgets of constant quality to anchor process improvements against. I’ve argued elsewhere that one of the distinguishing factors of knowledge work deliverables is achieving the necessary uniqueness in the end result (Crafting Uniqueness in Knowledge Work). Applied uncritically, Taylor’s approach can lead us to emphasize superficial uniformities over essential uniqueness. Before we can even hope to improve a knowledge work process, we need to define deliverables in a way that allows us to judge them to be of sufficient quality.

Second, many of the steps in knowledge work processes are invisible. For physical tasks, what we could observe was more than sufficient to identify places for improvement. Not so with knowledge work. Is the person banging away answering email more or less productive than the one reading the latest journal article? Is the all-day project status meeting more or less productive than a well-maintained project wiki and issue tracking system? How would you go about comparing project management approaches to decide? The challenge is to find ways to make the invisible more visible, to distinguish essential activities from peripheral, and to develop robust insights into mental work processes. For that later challenge, I’m planning on revisiting books like John Medina’ Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.

Third, we need to understand how to market knowledge work improvement to knowledge workers. In the world of Frederick Taylor we could treat workers as experimental subjects to be manipulated. Not so with the knowledge workers who drive today’s economy. These are individuals with the discretion and autonomy to ignore our advice on principle or on a whim. They can’t be compelled; they must be persuaded, sold, and possibly seduced into modifying their behaviors. At the very least, we’re going to need to carefully rethink the skills and perspectives we want to have in our deployment efforts.

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Update on the Obama Campaign’s Use of the Web

August 27, 2008 at 8:22 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Last week I spoke again with Colin Jones, a Regional Manager for the Public Sector and the RightNow project manager for the Obama effort and Andrew Hull, Director of Product Marketing to get an update on Obama’s use of the web through RightNow. See Obama’s Answer Center - CRM from RightNow on the Campaign Trail for my first post on the topic.

The Obama campaign has now upgraded to RightNow release May ’08 to provide extra capability. With this release, contact center workers have greater context on callers including the caller’s history of connections with the campaign. They are also able to get more focused background information based on the nature of the call (asking a question, wanting to volunteer, etc.) to more quickly respond to the inquiry. The campaign is also able to have access to this same contextual information for email responses and chat sessions.

The campaign was running on RightNow November 07. The contextual desktop feature was added in the February 08 release but the campaign was too busy with the primaries to upgrade at the time. Now they are getting ready for the rest of the Presidential campaign and making upgrades. RightNow allows clients to skip releases if the timing is not right and then bring forward all the functionality of all past releases when they do upgrade.

Over two million donors have now contributed to campaign and close to three million have contacted the campaign through the Obama Answer Center and other means. RightNow is currently working to integrate the contact information of everyone who has connected with Obama’s site into their database so there is a common database of all contacts that can serve all contact channels for a variety of purposes. They are pulling data from all the tools used by the campaign to create this single database that can then feed back information where needed.

They continue to look at questions by region to see what the concerns of each part of the country and have a better connect with the voters. As I have written before, it will be great if the US government adopts these practices to better connect with citizens. Perhaps lessons on effective web practices learned during the campaign can be adopted by the government. There is great potential here.

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Office 2.0 Conference coming up

August 25, 2008 at 8:21 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

I am sad to say that I will be missing the Office 2.0 conference for the first time ever. I went and was completely inspired at the first one, and was a co-organizer last year. 

There are a few things about Office 2.0 that put it above most other conferences. Here are my thoughts:

The Gadget

Obviously this is a big one. When I turned up for the first Office 2.0 conference, I didn’t even know we’d be getting a gadget at all. The whole place was buzzing. Last year it was great to get the iPhone. This year it looks even better. This year it is the HP 2133 Mini-Note, which looks incredible.

The thing about the device is that you are more or less forced to use it for the duration of the conference. It is the best way to get the schedule, leave messages for other people, etc.  Being immersed in the use of the device forces you to wake up to the possibilities that portable computing devices put in front of us. It also makes you think about the sociality of mobile computing.

Bang for your buck

This partially relates to getting the gadget as well (it usually makes up 3/4 or more of the cost of your registration), but since Office 2.0 is not run as a money maker, you get treated well, and I mean really well, instead of being seen as an opportunity for profit.

The lunches are a big tastier, the coffee is decent (and the Tea at the St Regis is incredible), and in general you feel like the conference is being put on for you, not someone else.

Content

Sure, there is some of the usual vendor content at Office 2.0, but there is one key difference. Ismael puts quality first, and he never allows a panel or keynote to go ahead unless he sees the value to the community. Office 2.0 is one of the only conference that can change the way you think about collaboration, productivity and web 2.0

People

Every year Office 2.0 is packed with really cool and brilliant people. The big difference though is there is never the “cooler than thou” vibe you might get other places. People are constantly organizing dinners, drinks and parties and the only way you won’t get an invite is if you don’t talk to anyone.

Wow. It is hard to believe I won’t be there. I think I should go check for flights and cancel my meetings!

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Denver - Twitter as a News Service - TweetDeck a major help?

August 25, 2008 at 7:13 am · Filed under Democratic Convention, Denver, Fast, TweetDeck, Twitter

Many of the conventional news services will be going all out in Denver this week at the Democratic Convention. Many Bloggers are there too. But I think that this may be the Twitter Convention too.

Here are just a few from the PBS system:

Laura Hertzfeld, Vote 2008 producer: http://twitter.com/Laura_PBS
PBS Vote 2008: http://twitter.com/pbsvote2008
NewsHour: http://twitter.com/NewsHour
Tavis Smiley: http://twitter.com/tavissmiley

My Twitter feed has many more and all the breaking news services. But what I want is for those Twittering to give me a feel. To be like a composite eye whose many perspectives ad up up to a collective.

The “headlines” will be covered by the regular news channels. The feel of the floor and the deep background can be offered by a Twitter “Collective”. In time a station need not send its own staff at their own cost. It can use local volunteers to Twitter for them - creating a new kind of “Wire Service”.

But how to make sense of all these Twitter inputs? I already have nearly 400 feeds - how can I see the patterns from the noise? How could a station with say hundreds of volunteers Twittering the worlds news or simply using search to find the coverage separate the news from the noise?

I think that an answer may be TweetDeck

I have been using TweetDeck for a few days now and I am really impressed. I can easily create groups of meaning - beats for news - and I can easily use the search capability to extract content that has a focus. As Twitter users breach the 150 Dunbar number of followers and chaos and noise build, they can use TweetDeck to recreate meaning again.

I restrict my “Friends” group to my real friends. I have set up a Beat to cover media - all my pub TV and radio and Media folks go in here. I have set up a news channel.  To learn more bout Joe Biden, I did a serach for Biden and have a column there. It could have been any topic of course.

Is not the real value of social media in Convening or Meaning Making?

Assuming Twitter can solve its stability issues, the risk will always be noise. Success for twitter will bring too much noise for most people to handle.

A tool like TweetDeck starts to address this noise issue and starts to help us use Twitter to find more meaning and hence value.

Update: Jon Husband asked me to look at monitter - a tool that enables you to set 3 search variables and have access to everything that is happening in the Twitterverse. I have set it to Denver, NPR and Obama - I am really there!

Is there room for a “retail” Fast Search Tool that will enable me to “Parse the Web” for other content that fits my profile? A tool that would have a Dashboard that would feed back by my self selected groups things that I would like based on my prior actions and the actions of say a group of selected friends?

What would my web world be like then? What would be the value of such a tool?

Disclaimer - I have no connection to TweetDeck other than I have just donated some money to them!

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Managing Data in the Clouds

August 22, 2008 at 11:48 am · Filed under Cloud Computing, Enterprise 2.0

Will integration issues dampen the enthusiasm around cloud computing? What are the role of data environments in these new scenarios?

The folks that manage data integration have some interesting observations to make on this topic. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Chris Boorman, chief marketing officer with Informatica, and Ron Papas, senior vice president and general manager for Informatica On Demand, about the enterprise data management implications of this growing trend.  (The interviews are posted here and here in this two-part series.)

As cloud computing engagements increase in sophistication and edge ever closer to the mission-critical core of the enterprise, recognition is growing that there are enterprise data management issues that still need to be worked out. “Our belief is that cloud computing or on-demand computing is simply a way of further fragmenting data, because customers are absolving themselves from responsibility for the management, storage, security, and backup and recovery of the availability of that data,” Chris pointed out. However, he emphasized, “you must never, ever, absolve responsibility for the quality and the ownership of the data, and having such quality and ownership as part of your core business processes. And that requires integration.”

Cloud computing hands off many of the aches and pains associated with systems and application development and management to someone else. But this does not relieve enterprises of the requirements and responsibilities around effectively managing enterprise data. Many observers, in fact, are concerned about the implications of cloud computing on enterprise data management and integration, since much of the processing and storage of information shifts to outside providers.

As Informatica’s Ron Papas put it, technically, there isn’t a lot of difference between on-site systems and data stores and cloud-managed systems and data stores.  However, there’s a big difference in the ownership of these applications:

“What’s that’s doing is it’s bypassing the traditional process of having IT design the whole integration processes into the solution. So, before you know it, you could be up and running with Salesforce.com without having put much thought into integration, because it’s really being led by the line of business side. You could have someone in the sales and marketing unit that somehow bypassed IT and went up and implemented Salesforce. All of a sudden, they realize they need access to that data. they need it synchronized.”

More companies are emphasizing their ability to compete on analytics, and the ability to integrate and leverage enterprise data is key. Whether on-site or in the cloud, effective data integration is a must.

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If We Ever Get Tired of the Term ‘Enterprise 2.0,’ Here are Some Ideas

August 18, 2008 at 6:01 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Monikers and buzzwords are rampant across our industries. There has been plenty of teeth-gnashing and guffawing over the ‘Web 2.0′ term, right down to lawsuits over its use with conference venues. The term itself has gotten plenty of eye-rolls, and eyes really start to roll if someone mentions ‘Web 3.0′

Enterprise 2.0 has had fewer eye-rolls, but is very much the close sibling of Web 2.0.

Krissy Danielsson over at ebizQ has an interesting post: She suggests that maybe it’s time to call Web 2.0 something else, like ‘Live Web.’ It describes the real-time, real access, immediate nature of the technology and methodology. By extension, we could call Enterprise 2.0 ‘Live Enterprise’ and Software as a Service (which creates the ugly acronym SaaS) ‘Live Software.’ (This would also segway nicely into the Microsoft ‘Live’ sets of offerings.)

Krissy reminds us one of caveat: someone may have already copyrighted these terms. But it is a catchy idea.

Another term that describes what Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 is all about and getting a lot of play is ‘Web Oriented Architecture,’ or WOA, which links things, at least semantically, with the more internal enterprise track of SOA.

Let’s face it, as these technologies and methodologies advance, it doesn’t make sense to keep referring them as release ‘2.0.’  We’ve been calling Web 2.0 ‘Web 2.0′ for almost four years now. And calling everything ‘3.0′ will invite lots of ridicule.  We need a new moniker to describe what we’re doing here — time is running short.

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The Human Voice - Leroy Sievers

August 18, 2008 at 6:00 am · Filed under Blogging, Cancer, Community, Death and Dying, Leroy Sievers, NPR, Public Media, Public radio, Relationships, Web 2.0

Leroy Sievers died this weekend. This picture is one of him blogging for NPR on his cancer. His column on the NP Blog is called “My Cancer“.

I post about Leroy today not just to honor a great journalist and a courageous man but to make a point about voice. The human voice that is central to the relationship world that is struggling to emerge from the transactional world that we mainly inhabit today.

Leroy’s column at NPR was unusual in two ways. First of all it was based on a journalist telling a story about himself - what it was like to to live with and die from a disease that had condemned him. Death in our society is itself one of the great taboos. We can talk of almost anything but this. Secondly Leroy did not allow any distance between his public voice and himself. So he could and did talk of his fears and uncertainties, of the days when he despaired and felt too weak to go on, of the joys of little things and the vital importance of friends and lovers.

For those of us in the “club”, his column was an immense comfort. For we too feel all these things. By bringing his voice to the ’sphere, he gave us ours.

And that my friends is the point. Here is the announcement of his death on the blog. Please have a look at the comments - there are hundreds and hundreds already - to see what I mean by him giving us a voice.

For when it all is stripped away, the great power of the 2.0 world is not to sell us more stuff but to help us regain our humanity.

If you would like to know more about Leroy Sievers and what he meant to many people - NPR have a wonderful tribute page here

I find this photo album especially moving as Leroy unlocks the unpspoken words in others and they alo offer a glimpse of themselves - the face tells so much

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Some 2008 Enterprise 2.0 Success Stories - Tell Me More

August 17, 2008 at 10:28 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

A while back I posted a number of Enterprise 2.0 success stories for 2007 on the AppGap blog. They came from this blog and my Portals and KM blog. Now, I am starting to collect stories from 2008. Recently, after an exchange of emails I got this list from Justin Kistner of Voce Communications, a communications consultancy that creates marketing programs for their clients. His firm also writes the blog, Voce Nation that looks at social media, among other things.

Justin was clear that the first two of the stories were about his client, Social Text, but the rest are from other firms. I really appreciate this research on his part and his sharing of the list.

Here is the list. With one exception, these are all links to stories in the press. It is great to see more and more enterprise 2.0 successes. If you know of any enterprise 2.0 success stories please feel free to add them in the comments, just provide the facts and don’t engage in your own marketing or spin.

How a Marketing Firm Implemented an Enterprise Wiki - Using a wiki from Socialtext, a social software vendor, CoActive, a New York-based marketing firm, has been able to take critical work out of e-mail boxes and put it into one transparent, searchable portal.

Web 2.0 Tools Transform Osborne’s Management Strategies - electrical equipment manufacturer Osborne Transformer implemented a wiki for a variety of tasks such as company’s ISO certification process.

Forrester Report: CIOs See Value in Web 2.0 - Analyst study finds rogue usage of consumer-grade technologies still on the rise.

Wikis Get Users Talking at MIT, Johns Hopkins

Canada embarks on major Web 2.0 initiative - The Federal government’s decision to create a comprehensive system for future online collaboration and social networking projects is growing proof that Canada acknowledges the explosive potential of Web 2.0, industry experts say.

Podcast with Clark Kokich, CEO of Avenue A | Razorfish on CEO blogging – He regularly blogs internally to employees.

Improved Collaboration a primary driver for Web 2.0 technologies, says Ziff Davis survey with more than 71 percent of respondents indicating this.

Things the CIA learned about implementing an enterprise wiki - When it comes to social software implementation, they stressed the importance of administering access, starting small and moving information out of narrow channels like e-mail and into broader platforms like wikis.

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Saving the Newspapers, Should the Focus be on Content or Audience?

August 15, 2008 at 2:28 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Whenever we meet with a traditional media company, I count the number of times “content” is mentioned relative to the word “audience.” (Yes I’m still paying attention, but I’m playing my counting game anyway). Without fail, you hear ‘content’ more often.

Why? Most media companies are still in an old fashioned mindset: content is where the value is, and the audience simply follows content assets. The mindset is not surprising - content development and production probably are the company’s biggest expenses.

But there is an alternative to content development: audience management. Audience management describes focusing on customer satisfaction, managing user entry and exits and Tearing Down the Garden Walls in order to feature external content. This strategic approach may leave the media company with more satisfied customers and more pageviews than content enrichment can deliver alone – but it exposes their user base to content from competitive sites and effectively transforms what was once a content site, into a portal. As Joe Lichtman mentioned in his last post, several major media sites see audience management as worth the risk, and they are beginning to adopt this portal strategy. But why?

Simply, media companies are finding audience management superior to additional content development. This is true for a couple reasons. First, tracking the direct revenue impact of content development is challenging: What sort of content investment could measurably drive an additional 10 million page views? How could a content owner make the content 20 percent better? By contrast, projects that leverage search technologies and UI improvements have highly measurable ROI.

More concretely, we’ve seen that making the switch to a portal approach is simply more profitable for established sites. Here’s an example: Let’s say in order to satisfy its customers from a content perspective, a major site must deliver one thousand new content pages per year. These new content pages would be enough to attract about $2million in new revenue for a big site. Strong revenue growth to be sure, but this content-centric approach would require paying at least ten new authors. This approach might drive a gross profit of $1m (see below).

(click to enlarge) Assumptions: $100k annual writer salary, $500k software cost amortized over four years; $2000 in revenue generated per content page

But if a site takes an audience management or portal-like approach, yielding two million new pageviews doesn’t require ten new content authors. In this approach, site managers use search technology for three purposes: 1) to enhance the level of personalization on the site 2) to aggregate content from multiple sources across the web 3) to present links to external content of interest. All of these purposes provide the opportunity to delight and satisfy readers without requiring new editorial content. Looked at a different way, an audience management approach uses a technology investment to replace human capital and (some) editorial effort. As we’ve shown in the simplistic model above, a forward thinking media company could yield twice the profit from the same number of content pages with an audience management approach. And so far this calculation ignores benefits from some complimentary tactics like topic based communities and social search.

There is risk here, however – without proper management users can more easily churn to other sites. Moreover, it requires a mindset that is very different than that of the traditional media company. Yet we believe that audience management, and the higher margins it delivers, is what will save the newspapers going forward. Interested? In the next post, we’ll talk about how to get it done.

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