Does Enterprise 2.0 Need to be ‘Governed’?

September 30, 2008 at 8:51 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Many organizations are wrestling with the ways of governance for their service oriented architecture. SOA projects risk running seriously awry without getting a handle on their purpose and direction for the business.

Of course, since SOA and Enterprise 2.0 overlap so closely, this begs the question: should this governance be extended to Enterprise 2.0 activities?  For example, mashups are essentially the same as the composite applications that have formed the core of SOA projects for years now.

This was the question I recently put to a panel at ebizQ’s recent SOA Governance panel. I had the opportunity to moderate a stellar line-up of industry experts: Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director with Burton Group, and former Chief Technology Officer at Systinet; Ron Schmelzer, managing partner with ZapThink; Frank Martinez, senior vice president, product strategy for SOA Software; David Bressler, SOA Evangelist for the Actional products at Progress Software; Ed Horst, vice president of marketing and product strategy for AmberPoint; and John Michelson, a founder and chief scientist of iTKO LISA. (Archived audio replay available here.)

I posed the question: A lot of people engaged in rapid application development, or service development via mashups and other Web 2.0 methods. There’s a lot of potential for chaos. Should the emerging governance structures we see for SOA be extended to Web 2.0?  Should we go to the Web 2.0 folks and say, ‘Hi, I’m from the governance committee, and I’m here to help’?  Or will this kill Web 2.0 initiatives? Or, perhaps, Web 2.0ers will simply find a workaround the rules and policies?

Anne Thomas Manes says a lot of REST advocates she speaks with feel that governance isn’t required for REST-based services. “At which point I respond saying, are you kidding? Think about how many people have created really, really bad POX applications that they claim to be rest and actually have almost no representation of the REST principles involved. They don’t follow any of the constraints, and they’re basically just tunneling RPCs to URLs.”

Ron Schmelzer added that “we’re moving towards an environment where computing is being highly decentralized, where we’re not relying IT to be a sole providers of capabilities, but rather were relying more on the audience to create the value of that content.” But governance is paramount at the service provider level, he continued. “Organizations like Google and Amazon and YouTube simply can’t manage that environment where they have millions of people…making millions of contributions on a daily basis, without having some sort of environment where they can have control at the design at the change time and the runtime stage.”

Google Maps is a classic example, he continued. “There are thousands of applications now that are dependent on Google Maps API…  Google cant version that interface. They can’t just decide to up and change the way that the function works. If they do, they could be breaking some highly critical application that’s dependent on it.”

Such services require governance — “there’s really no choice,” Ron said. “It’s a matter of how they enable… Web 2.0 to continue to grow and provide value without making it brittle.”

Consumers of services also have issues, particularly in terms of keeping up with versioning. David Bressler pointed to soem of the issues that may arise when a service provider changes its apps. “When Google changes, if I’m the consumer, I want to make sure I’m not impacted,” he said. “As an enterprise, if I have a dozen different applications that are using my salesforce interface linking to Salesforce.com, I don’t want to have to manage a dozen different teams at the same team.”

Thus, governance takes on importance both on the producer and provider sides of Enterprise 2.0 services. (Archived audio replay of the panel discussion available here.)

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Enterprise 2.0 for Good Times, Enterprise 2.0 for Bad Times (And Everywhere in Between)

September 30, 2008 at 8:20 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

This past week has provided quite a lesson in the functioning of credit markets, and potential impacts on the economy at large. Will the credit crisis broaden into a deeper recession?  Who knows. But, as I’ve said in previous posts, the next economic downturn will be different than ones in the past, thanks to Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

For one, companies looking to trim expenditures will find Enterprise 2.0-style tools to be compelling solutions. eWeek’s Clint Boulton just explored some of the scenarios we may see in “Recession 2.0,” if it were to come to pass.

For example, there could be more Web conferencing instead of business travel. This was a shift first seen in the 2001 post-dot-bomb downturn.

There would also be more interest in collaborative and cloud computing. “Organizations that are looking to move into new technologies, normally a project that would be put on hold when budgets are tight, can still do small implementations with SAAS, including blogs, wikis and social-networking tools to lower costs.”

One more observation on this. Even if the economy suddenly broke into a growth surge, and money started flowing from all directions, we’ll still see growth in collaborative and cloud applications. Companies recognize that the growing capabilities now offered by Enterprise 2.0 and cloud applications offer a huge competitive advantage, not only because they are low cost, but also because they are flexible, and even more important, open up the information flow between teams, departments, partners, and customers.

We have seen the future, and it is online, it is collaborative, and it is wide open — no matter what the state of the economy.

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Inside or Outside? Gartner Attempts to Clear Cloud ‘Confusion’

September 29, 2008 at 10:56 am · Filed under Cloud Computing

Analyst firm Gartner just issued a statement that it believes there is “confusion” in the market over the definition of “cloud computing,” and wants to set the record straight.

Gartner defines cloud computing as “a style of computing in which massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ using Internet technologies to multiple external customers.”

However, the consultancy’s analysts say, there have been different perceptions of what is included in cloud computing.  ”The term cloud computing has come to mean two very different things: a broader use that focuses on ‘cloud,’ and a more-focused use on system infrastructure and virtualization,” said David Mitchell Smith, vice president and Gartner Fellow. “Mixing the discussion of ‘cloud-enabling technologies’ with ‘cloud computing services’ creates confusion.”

Gartner says some commentators and vendors have applied the “cloud” label to internal initiatives, such as virtualization and automation. However, in the broader context, cloud computing applies to “the perspective of the Internet/Web/software as a service (SaaS). The focus is more on cloud than computing with the emphasis placed on access to services from elsewhere (that is, from the cloud).”

Gartner says the internal aspects and the external Web-based aspects are related, but that the internal definition is more of a “subset” of the larger phenonemon.

Is Gartner getting too picky on this? By employing the same standards and principles, organizations will be supporting their own, secure internal “clouds” as well as relying on the global cloud. In many cases, the overlap will not even be apparent to end users.

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Will Tools Like Twitter Change the Ways We Work With Flows of Information and Knowledge ?

September 28, 2008 at 12:28 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Blogging, Change, Conferences, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Hylton Joliffe, Social Computing, Stuart Henshall, Twitter, User Revolution, Web 2.0

This is an edited version of a post I recently put up on the KMWorld 2008 blog (in blockquotes, below).  The KMWorld 2008 conference was interesting (FAST had an exhibitor’s booth) and the contrast with last year in terms of the tangible interest in and take-up of social computing tools was evident.

People everywhere are beginning to understand, and practice with, the utility of "watching" snippets and fragments of peoples’ thoughts (see Dave Snowden’s KMWorld article titled "Everything Is Fragmented") and being able to instantiate and jump into a possible conversation when something interesting to them flows by.

 It works … for example, late last night I twittered a response to one of Jeremiah Owyang’s tweets pointing to his recent blog post about "What’s After The Social Web?", and shortly thereafter I had a Twitter direct message from Jeremiah in my email inbox saying "sounds interesting, I think you’re on to something .. tell me more".  A professional, potentially knowledge-building, conversation is brewing.

Here’s a summary of Stuart Henshall’s reflections on working with and in knowledge flows with the nascent micro-blogging

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A Master Strategist’s Take on a (Possible) Future of Knowledge “Management”

From the keyboard of Stuart Henshall, one of the most advanced thinkers about the “flows” of information combined with usability and innovation.

Stuart helped out with the blogging at the just-ended KMWorld and also gave a presentation on the last day about how people are beginning to use Twitter to connect, stimulate, catalyze and coordinate flows of information.

I thought he did a great job of outlining interesting possibilities .. but it seems he made some people nervous and some people stretch their minds. That may be because he has been immersed in the world of constant micro-flows of information and mobility for the last half-year while many of those at KMWorld are just now beginning to come to terms with blogging, using wikis and social computing. There may be one of those classic mismatches, the kind that lead to phrases like “You can always recognize the pioneers, they’re the ones walking around with arrows sticking out of their backs“.

Here’s Stuart’s post:.

Social Media or KM / KM or Social Media

I sat in earlier on a session on the Future of KM. There are three very different people on the panel. I’ve been listening with half an ear. This means what I write may have nothing to do with the context of the session. However, part of the reason we come to events like this is to spark other thoughts and tangents.

So far today I’ve not heard the word “flows”, I don’t hear “lifestreaming” I still feel what I am hearing is that knowledge is to be managed, moved, manipulated. Plus I just heard Dave Pollard say that SARS, 9/11, Katrina etc were all failures of classic knowledge management. I can’t quite put my finger on why KM isn’t learning and moving forward more quickly. It suggests to me that there remains a bigger problem.

Individuals are increasingly using personal tools, blogs, wikis, social networks, mobile phone, etc. As they move into this realm publicly they create more information about themselves. I’m increasingly seeing these tools being put to use by marketing / PR. KM seems to be missing these social media implications. Thus adoption of these tools is not being driven by the need to manage knowledge. Rather it’s driven by responding faster, being more adaptive, building on what others do, opening up systems so they can find that they need just in time. It’s a learning centric approach. I see it when I go to blogging sessions and talk to people there. The difference is they are believers.

[ Snip ... ]

I’m thinking more and more that the social media experts are likely to usurp or overturn many KM practices in time. The fact that SAP, Oracle and IBM are today all working with Twitter like updates is at least encouraging.

Maybe they can still sell a knowledge platform?

.

It’s interesting that Stuart pointed out the directions large collaboration platforms are taking; Hylton Jolliffe, who manages this blog, just sent me an email a few days ago pointing out that Oracle’s developments with BeeHive may be signalling a new phase, while this ZDNet article (Did Oracle Burst The Enterprise 2.0 Startup Bubble?) suggest something similar.

At this very same conference one year ago (KMWorld 2007) Stuart wrote a post with which I agree 100% (link in the paragraph below) … while people in companies and business everywhere are looking for business case or ROI justification for using social media tools (while understanding semi-consciously that of course useful knowledge gets built in social interaction) they have to work (and experiment) at overcoming a lifetime of working in environments that divide and separate problems, responsibilities and challenges into discrete and divided bundles of tasks that are supposed to fit together like an orderly paint-by-numbers-like template (by which I mean an organizational chart).

To understand how using social media to increase effectiveness, responsiveness and innovation in an environment characterized by constant flows of information, you have to Use the Tools First; Then Talk To Me.

Read the whole post on a possible future for KM here ..

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Enterprise 2.0 Implementation, the book!

September 28, 2008 at 10:02 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

A few months ago Jeremy Thomas asked me if I would consider writing the forward for a new book he was writing with Aaron Newman. I was honored to be asked and said I would love to do it.

Today I have the final version of their hard work sitting in front of me: Enterprise 2.0 Implementation.

In a review of WikiPatterns, I called it “the first Enterprise 2.0 playbook” because it gave strategic advice on how to encourage adoption and spur interaction. In that context, Enterprise 2.0 Implementation is your Enterprise 2.0 blueprint. It provides a technical and tactical overview of how IT can understand and implement Enterprise 2.0 technologies. A book like this has been a need for a long time, and it will play a big role in taking Enterprise 2.0 mainstream.

This book covers everything from deploying Blogs and Wikis to building social networks and developing RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) and in the final chapter Aaron and Jeremy touch on Governance, Compliance, Risk Management and there is a big chapter on Security (which is one of the strongest components of the book).

Aaron and Jeremy have done a great job, and I know that a lot of blood and sweat has gone in to this. I am proud to have been asked to contribute, and I hope you will pick up the book and give it a read.

Packed with real-world examples and timesaving tips, Enterprise 2.0 Implementation shows how to use viral and social networking tools to gain the competitive edge. Get full details on managing corporate blogs, wikis, mashups, RSS feeds, tagging and bookmarking data, and RIAs. You’ll also learn how to maximize ROI, use Semantic Web technologies, and implement security.

• Expand corporate presence to Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Ning
• Build internal social networks using open source and commercial applications
• Reduce infrastructure and IT costs through SaaS vendors
• Consolidate disparate information using Enterprise 2.0 Discovery
• Manage wikis, blogs, mashups, and RSS/Atom feeds
• Set up Rich Internet Applications
• Develop security, risk management, and disaster recovery strategies

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