by Joe McKendrick
June 5, 2009 at 5:38 pm · Filed under
Economics, Social Networking
More than a year ago or so, I talked on this blogsite about the impact information technology and social networking would make on the economic downturn. (”If there is a recession, will be it be ‘Recession 2.0′?”) That is, people would be in better control of their destiny, and companies in better control of their costs, thanks to all the incredible online resources we now have at our disposal.
This downturn would not be a repeat of 1975, when all millions of helpless people could do is collect unemployment and scan truncated newspaper help-wanted sections. Nor is it even 2001 for that matter.
We’re now emerging from the other side of the downturn (things are looking up), and evidence is piling up that social networking and IT is making a huge difference in mitigating the pain, and even helping people and organizations to thrive in new ways. Through the tough times, social networking has been an empowering force. I call it the LIFT factor — LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter.
A recent article in The New York Times describes how one laid-off engineer turned to Facebook and LinkedIn, and soon found himself to be the object of a talent search by a hiring company.
For the engineer, the connection meant getting back to work and off the unemployment rolls. For the company, social networking is providing a valuable talent recruiting resource. “More personal pages, profiles and social networks are serving as fodder for companies looking to fill jobs,” the report states. To mine its employees’ social networking contacts for potential hires, a business can pay for services from companies like Appirio or Jobvite.”
Here’s how it works, as described in the article:
“A hiring company that uses Appirio’s product asks its employees to add an application to their Facebook pages. The tool will notify the employees when new jobs open and which of their friends might be a good fit. Appirio’s matching engine comes up with a list of friends whose job titles, geographic location and other keywords match their company’s available positions, and the employee can send them a referral in Facebook. The matching engine has access to the same information that a Facebook friend does. A friend who gets a referral can apply for the job if interested. If that person is hired, the company can use Appirio’s service to track which employee found the match and offer a referral bonus.”
Neat stuff. As we become more networked and connected, opportunities grow exponentially. Advice from a report in Microgeist urges active participation in social media to expand this range of opportunities:
“The continuing evolution of the Web comes not from immediate financial opportunities. The opportunity is the opportunity to participate and contribute. Those who provide research, insight and imagination will find themselves able to generate dependable traffic as and the consequent direct advertising opportunities. First and foremost, however is participation and contribution.”
Oh, and by the way, good riddance, Recession 2.0.
by Paula Thornton
June 4, 2009 at 4:38 pm · Filed under
FASTforward'09
I can still picture the day I saw this piece hit the business section of the Wall Street Journal — in 1999: A New Model for the Nature of Business: It’s Alive!
And yet we’ve still barely started to embrace what it suggests. Having not looked at the chart in some time, I was even more shocked to recall the “Principle Economic Constraint: Creativity”. In contrast to the ‘old’ focus of capital — is is any wonder Enterprise 2.0 runs headlong against old mindsets looking for things like ROI (a ‘backwards’ thinking mindset) vs. “cost avoidance” or “opportunity potential” (a ‘forward’ thinking mindset)?
I was having a related conversation with colleague Rob Patterson (@robpatrob). It sparked a whole new focus for him on the topic. He immediately penned the first of a great series: How the Natural Organization Works.
But the conversation started with my turning to Rob for a clue about assessing size issues (as in, how does this all scale) using the principles of Fibonacci (we’d had a great conversation about how the patterns can be leveraged, when we were gathered at FASTforward ‘08 — it was clear Rob was the designated expert among us on the topic). I hit a wildcat — the gush was on:
I think that all our HR and org design theory is based on nothing but dogma. As I study natural organization – the military and gaming and VC’s experience with new companies – I see how the Fibonacci sequence plays again and again.
…those whose work I find interesting on this topic … Chris Allen is worth a good look.
We keep coming back to 8 – 34 – 89 – 150 as the key elements
- 8 appears to the the building block – the core unit of intimacy
- 15 seems to be very difficult number…satisfaction dips in groups of 15
- 34, a platoon, is the ideal
- 89 like 15 is an interim number
- 150 is the ideal total human unit – where natural cohesion still applies…over that you need bureaucracy and rules
The Roman Army – where all these numbers were refined by experience over hundreds of year – settled on 8 men in a tent as its core. The Century is 80 men. The Maniple is 150.
The legion had a head office of 7. 6 interns, Tribunes on 6 month rotations and a legate on a 2- 5 year tour.
The management of the legion was embodied in the working leader – the centurion. Centurions were managed on an Empire wide basis and had over 8 ranks themselves. They would be shifted around the empire building experience in many fields and a network of colleagues.
In reality the legate relied on his 2 senior centurions to run the logistics and the military side.
In modern times we have to use too many managers because we pay no attention to the natural organization. A 5,000 person organization would have hundreds in HO. A Centurion is also a different type of manager. He was a leader/manager who had more experience and skills than his men. You still see this in armies with NCO’s who do not sit behind a desk separate from the work, the risk and their men. You still see this in the Fire Brigades. Same with the core numbers in both armies and firebrigades.
Why do these numbers and roles still remain there? Not I think becuase of some learned treatise. But because in war or in a fire, there is no fooling around. These numbers and roles have evolved out of hard experience. They work.
It is also interesting that the 8 man tent where you spent 25 years with the same people, is replicated in the firehall where the teams live with each other. I think this is where the push back really comes about women in the fire service. Intimacy is at the heart of the bond. Love. With women in the group, Pandora’s box is opened.
We separate work from home. In natural organizations, the two are the same. The deeply personal and the mundane such as housekeeping create trust and love that enables people to die for each other if they have to.
Ask why the attachment to the fire service is so great when the money is so poor? I think that we thrive as humans in this more natural tribal organization.
Tribal…Francois (@fgossieaux), I’m sure you’ll want to chime in on that lead-in?
by Joe McKendrick
June 3, 2009 at 11:02 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, SOA
We’re clearly moving to a service-oriented way of doing business. And the services businesses will increasingly rely on will originate from a number of places — they could be SOAP-based services, but they may also be mashups or REST-based services, or they may be coming from the cloud.
There are four forces converging that are changing the way services are being delivered. There’s SOA. And cloud. There’s virtualization. And Enterprise 2.0. These forces are all interrelated, and all leading to the same thing.
I just wrapped up the keynote address for ebizQ’s latest Cloud QCamp, exploring the growing convergence of SOA with cloud computing, Enterprise 2.0 and virtualization. Listen to the Webcast here.
David Bressler of Progress Software joined me in the second half of the session for his take on SOA=cloud, followed by a rousing audience Q&A session.
What’s a good word for this convergence? Dion Hinchcliffe coined a good term for it — Web Oriented Architecture. Perhaps the path to agility is through WOA, enabled by these cloud and Enterprise 2.0 services.
To wrap up the session, I proposed 10 HBIs — half-baked ideas — for the year ahead, and beyond:
- HBI #1: Less talk about “service oriented architecture” in the market — but this doesn’t mean SOA will have gone away.
- HBI #2: The new economy emerging from the downturn will drive SOA, WOA, and cloud computing in new directions — as vehicles for new business growth.
- HBI #3: The rise of the Intelligent Web — SOA, WOA and the cloud are turning business intelligence into “collaborative intelligence.”
- HBI #4: The rise of the “Loosely Coupled Business,” built on brokered or aggregated services.
- HBI #5: Computing Power “Too Cheap to Meter?” Thanks to SOA, WOA and the cloud, massive data center power is available for literally pennies.
- HBI #6: Made to order: Application vendors may begin to look more like “Dells” than “IBMs” as they become assemblers of made-to-order, pre-built software components.
- HBI #7: Opportunity knocks: Companies will seek services from third parties, providing new opportunities for smaller microbusinesses — as well as large “cloud combines.”
- HBI #8: Integration, light and simple: Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 is becoming the “Global SOA.”
- HBI #9: SOA, WOA and cloud will increase outsourcing, but outsourcing will take a new form — fewer mega-deals, more micro-outsourcing.
- HBI # 10: More business users will be building their own applications. More IT people will be involved in the business.
by Bill Ives
June 2, 2009 at 1:01 pm · Filed under
FASTforward'09
This post started with a conversation with Paula Thornton. We were discussing the implications of the cloud for business processes and software and I will cover this in another post. Here, I first want to address the business model issue that will either carry forward or compromise this innovation.
Most SaaS providers I talk with are doing very well in the down economy. Some are having record profits. For example, Jen Grant at Box.net said that as a SaaS provider they continue to exceed their revenue targets. She attributed this to pressure on IT departments and business units to keep expenses down. With Box and many other SaaS tools, it is easy to get started and there are no implementation or systems integration costs. Employees still need to do work. Box and other SaaS tools provide a lower cost way to accomplish many content related tasks.
While Spigit, the innovation management software firm, offers both cloud and on-premise solutions, 95% of their customers are choosing SaaS. GroupSwim has gone to a total cloud offering so they can scale quickly, another major benefit of the cloud and making servers virtual. QuickBase has also seen significant growth for its SaaS based shareable database despite a down market. They feel that companies are seeing this class of applications as a way to both cut costs and increase productivity. Traction Software, the SaaS based teaming platform, continues to beat its revenue goals. (correction, Traction is actually not SaaS as Paula notes below, but they are doing quite well and have a great product.)
SaaS is an important component of the move to Enterprise 2.0. The analysts seem to agree with the software providers I have talked with. IDC recently issued the report, Software as a Service Market Will Expand Rather than Contract Despite the Economic Crisis. They projected that by the end of 2009, 76% of U.S. organizations will use at least one SaaS-delivered application for business use. SaaS applications are also getting an increasing percentage of IT budgets.
So where will this all go? According to the Wikipedia, electricity was once generated on premise but through a series of technology innovations, the grid and remote sourcing of power became possible. It took a while to get the business models sorted out and FDR won his first election, in part, on the promise to clean up the corrupt electric utilities of the day.
I am not suggesting there is anything like that corruption going on now with the cloud. However, as use of the cloud grows the final business model does remain to be determined. Will it become a utility in the business sense, as well as the practical sense? Will it need regulation?
The players continue to grow. For example, Amazon went from selling books online to also becoming a major cloud service provider. However, it and several of the other major cloud players have not signed the Open Cloud Manifesto. I am not taking sides on this issue, just noting that there is an issue.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a non-regulatory arm of the US Commerce Department, has helped by developing a draft definition for federal use of cloud computing. They are ahead of the private sector here. Let’s hope that those who stand to benefit from the cloud can come to agreement that allows the cloud to reach its potential and helps the users, as well as our economy.
It will take a while for the final business model to evolve as the cloud moves data and content storage toward becoming a utility in a practical sense. Let’s hope we do a better job that we did with electricity.
by Jevon MacDonald
June 1, 2009 at 12:40 pm · Filed under
FASTforward'09
It would be hard to deny that open source has changed enterprise computing in a big way. Linux, MySQL, PHP and a slew of other tools have allowed companies to test ideas and implement solutions at a fraction of the cost of some closed-commercial software.
Right now however, it is mostly commercial vendors creating enterprise social software products, both as on-premise and SaaS based services. Innovation and thought is being driven almost entirely by these vendor, and while that is healthy, we also need to consider the opportunities for Open Source to play a role.
So, what’s next for Open Source in the enterprise? Specifically, what’s next for Open Source and Social Software?
I was watching Fred Wilson talking about the next layer of the social software stack. He says it is Aggregation and Filtering.
I think he is right, and that same thinking extends out of social software and it applies to open source as well. Right now there is an open source alternative for almost any commercial enterprise social software application. In fact, there are usually more and better open source solutions. What is missing however is the ability to aggregate and filter the things we are creating in those tools, inside the firewall.
The Economist says that Open Source has “won the argument” but that it must now find its way in a world where Cloud Computing is becoming a dominate force. This is another example of the many challenges ahead for Open Source.
What we don’t have is an open source suite of tools which can not only be an effective alternative to closed source social software for the enterprise, but can be effectively aggregated and filtered to create an entirely new, and better, experience.
We need an Open Source Social Business Stack which can serve as a foundation to help companies get started with social software, much in the same way the LAMP stack makes development cheaper, a social stack need to provide a set of software which, when aggregated together, create a complete solution.
We have seen SLATES and FLATNESSES, which I believe are great frameworks for defining the elements of enterprise social software. The stack I have been working with is similar in it’s approach to SLATES and FLATNESSES, but it is meant to be more of a deployment-ready stack of enterprise open source social software.
If we break out the stack, I believe that the tools necessary to deploy a foundation of enterprise social software fall in to 4 categories and 2 more general buckets.
Community is the result of a strong set of Profiles and Collaboration tools. The ability to Measure results and effectively calculate ROI comes from building Streams, Filters and Intelligence tools.
This stack provides a foundation to socialize and redefine existing business processes. Like a development stack, these tools will need to be open and interoperable in order to be effective.
So, can Open Source play a role in the future of enterprise social software, or should everyone sit back and wait for the large vendors to provide all the answers? I believe that open source can put renewed momentum behind social tools in the enterprise. To see how close we are, I tried to put together an ideal open source stack.
This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, and it is a work in progress, but I think it identifies some of the best available open source tools to get you started deploying enterprise social tools.
Wikis have been leaders in both the Enterprise and Open Source worlds for a long time. Collaboration tools such as PBwiki (now PBWorks) and Deki Wiki are two of the best enterprise wikis available, and they are open source. MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia, is also open source.
Buddypress is one of the most interesting new projects this year. They are developing an open source community, profiles and blogging platform that I think will change community software the way Wordpress (Buddypress’ parent project) has changed blogging. Buddypress also includes a great streaming and filtering capability called “The Wire”, which seems to be evolving in definition and specification. Lovdbyless is another community platform project to watch. Both of these will be extremely powerful when used inside the firewall.
Jboss Portal Server and Liferay are two of the biggest enterprise open source stories, and their filtering and intelligence capability will be a powerful tool when combined with the other elements of a complete stack.
Finally, Noserub is a stream aggregation engine which can be used to centralize enterprise events and activity, much like a Friendfeed for the enterprise. It would need a lot of customization however, but it is a start. Laconica is the best available micro-messaging tool and it is giving the commercial SaaS vendors a viable alternative. Jive’s OpenFire and eJabberd are two of the best, and most easily integrated, enterprise instant messaging servers out there and offer a potentially powerful integration platform through which enterprise users could intact with, or get information from, other enterprise tools.
These filtering and aggregation tools are crucial because they allow us to knit the stack together, instead of deploying a small set of isolated tools.
What am I missing? What other tools do you think need to be included in a foundational stack to get organizations up and running? I have created a Google Spreadsheet here where you can add entries and help me build a list of Open Source Enterprise 2.0 tools.
The next step is to find some integration points for these tools. Noserub could be a great starting point for integration, or a solid open source RSS reader might be a good start as well.
Please head on over and feel free to add categories, edit entries and help keep things up to date.
