Archive for August, 2008
by Joe McKendrick
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.
by Rob Paterson
August 31, 2008 at 9:02 am · Filed under
Andy Carvin, Emergency, Gustav, Mashups, Network Effect, News, Ning, Public Media, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, User Revolution, Video, Videos, Web 2.0, Wikis
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
by Jim McGee
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.
by Bill Ives
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.
by Jevon MacDonald
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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