Author Archive
by Joe McKendrick
July 16, 2008 at 1:00 am · Filed under
SOA
It couldn’t be more appropriate for the subject of Enterprise 2.0 than a virtual conference? ebizQ will be hosting a virtual conference covering various aspects of Enterprise 2.0 opportunities and challenges on July 23rd. (Free registration required.)
David Mitchell Smith, VP & Gartner Fellow, will kick off the event with a discussion of how innovations in the consumer Web 2.0 space are translating into enterprise applications. He will also discuss what lies beyond Web 2.0 — and it isn’t Web 3.0.
Smith’s presentation will be followed by a panel discussion on how the Web 2.0 and SOA fit together. Dan Woods (Evolved Media), Nathaniel Palmer (Workflow Management Coalition), and Puneet Gupta (Connectbeam) will debate about whether end users actually be able to create their own mashup applications, and how IT should control and manage this new breed of applications.
Rob Koplowitz, analyst with Forrester Research, will then talk about chaos — and how to leverage Web 2.0 technology entering the enterprise and still plan for maintaining process, system, and data integrity against an increasingly chaotic backdrop.
by Joe McKendrick
July 11, 2008 at 10:08 am · Filed under
Cloud Computing, Enterprise 2.0, Messy World, SaaS
The success of on-demand, Software as a Service, or Cloud computing has raised expectations beyond the point where enterprises and vendors can deliver, a new study concludes.
A new study from Saugatuck Technology states that users want SaaS throughout the enterprise, whether their enterprises are ready for it or not. And, by extension, SaaS is spreading throughout the enterprise, whether the vendors - or their offerings - are ready to support and deliver what users want.
The study, based on interviews with 400 executives and 30 SaaS solution provider and independent software vendors, finds that while users are increasingly demanding and expecting SaaS versions of everything from email to ERP, they often don’t understand the technological and organizational resource constraints to enterprise-wide SaaS.
Blame the vendors, who are scrambling to catch up with demand coming from within enterprises, according to Mike West, Saugatuck research vide president and leader of the SaaS study. “Unfortunately, not enough SaaS providers see or understand the increasing enterprise scope of user demands and desires. Over time they will face some real challenges when it comes to maintaining high user satisfaction and, ultimately, high rates of renewal or expansion of their services.”
Saugatuck identified four waves of SaaS evolution. While earlier-generation “Wave I” offerings continue to flourish, the broader market has moved on to “Wave II” solutions that integrate with on-premise data and processes.
Some providers are beginning to address key “Wave III” requirements, which support inter- and intra-company collaboration and personalized workflows.
Longer-term, “Wave IV” threatens to sweep IT and business together and forward beyond user and vendor experience. Continuous growth and innovation are core competitive requirements in most SaaS markets -addressing an ever-expanding array of customer and partner desires and requirements for interfaces and function.
The on-demand, cloud model of computing is poised to sweep enterprises — even those using traditional ons-ite software, Saugatuck predicts. With traditional on-premise license revenues stalling, ISVs will adopt SaaS strategies en masse, led by either internal development initiatives, acquisition of synergistic SaaS assets or via virtualization.
But there is no guarantee that many ISVs can and will make successful transitions to SaaS, Saugatuck adds. When asked to identify who the “SaaS Master Brands” of the future are likely to be, 51 percent of users chose either pure-play SaaS solution providers or said that “it was just too early to tell.”
As an enabler of Cloud-based software development, deployment, integration, and management, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) will significantly improve the enterprise-ready capabilities of most SaaS offerings. PaaS therefore becomes a key enabler of enterprise-ready SaaS, and of SaaS-ready enterprises.
Saugatuck predicts that “Cloud Computing” will evolve into “Cloud Business” — a natural progression of SaaS, the IT utility concept, and business process outsourcing and transformation.
by Joe McKendrick
June 25, 2008 at 10:00 pm · Filed under
Artisanal Economy, Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, User Revolution
Of course Enterprise 2.0 by itself won’t fix the U.S. Social Security system, which is projected to run out of money by the year 2020, but follow my logic here.
The New York Times just ran a piece on the advantages of keeping people working past what is considered “traditional” retirement age. As the article relates, there’s a lot of value to society in keeping people on the job, in both generating more tax revenues and less strain on the Social Security and Medicare system:
“The emphatic conclusion of recent research into retirement policy and labor markets is that working another two or three years would have a surprisingly powerful impact on the retirement living standards of millions of boomers and on the economy. The economic gains, according to a report published this month by the McKinsey Global Institute, a research group, would include increased household savings, higher tax collections and a reduction of the fiscal strain on Social Security and Medicare; together, that would add an estimated $13 trillion to the economy by 2025, or about a year’s total output of goods and services today.”
But, surprise, surprise, the corporate world still hasn’t gotten the message, and still clings to outdated and counter-productive prejudices about hiring employees over 50. It’s the same old story we’ve been hearing for years. In the 1980s, when I was director of the Administrative Management Society and editor of its journal, Management World, we issued countless reports and articles on the advantages of hiring and retaining “older” workers. We also spoke quite a bit about the convergence of work and life, and why work should be an ongoing source of meaning, learning, and inspiration, versus something you try to escape from as you enter your sixth decade.
But did companies listen? Nooooo….
Let’s look at what Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 could mean to the relationship between enterprises and individuals. That is, the workplace is quickly evolving from a structured show-your-face 9-to-5 cellblock to more of an open, participate community, linked by common interests and interlocking skills. These communities are global in nature, stretching well beyond corporate cubicle environments to home offices, remote locations, and anywhere anyone is using a mobile, connected device.
The corporation is evolving into a confederation on entrepreneurs. Work and insights are delivered through Web-based communities and ad-hoc teams pulled together for specific purposes.
Now, keep following my thinking here. What difference does it make that the individual at the other end of an electronic interchange is 18 or 80? You don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. For that matter, these electronic workplace communities are oblivious to race, ethnicity, gender, and nationality (assuming you can interact in the same language). There’s opportunity for everyone with the right skills, unencumbered by biases and archaic thinking.
And companies shouldn’t fret too much about the ability of more senior workers to learn and use computer technology. As the New York Times article reports, one 64-year-old administrative assistant at S.C. Johnson kept updating her skills in budgeting, financial planning and project management programs to the point where she is a highly valued project manager. She recently designed an emergency planning Website for the company. She wants to retire in a couple of years, but her boss wants her to stick around until she’s 70.
One of the beauties of Enterprise and Web 2.0 is that these technologies break down the barriers that closed many skilled and talented individuals out of the system.
by Joe McKendrick
June 19, 2008 at 9:58 am · Filed under
Data Management, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, semantic
Alas, the corporate data silo that we’ve all learned to love and cherish is slipping away. However, the enterprise, cross-enterprise, and cloud-based metadata and semantic data world taking its place means more than just lots of more data available to everyone. It means profound changes to the way we look at work, relationships, and the enterprise itself.
Paul Miller provides a summary of Kingsley Idehen’s comments at the recent Linked Data Planet conference in New York. Kingsley explored some themes we have been bouncing around at this blogsite as well — that is, how enterprises view the relationship between Web 2.0 and employee productivity.
The emerging semantic Web — in which intelligence is applied to data in the cloud — is blurring all the lines that demarcated employees versus customers, work time versus personal time, and even enterprises versus individuals. At the core is the idea of “Linked Data,”a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee that describes HTTP-based Data Access by Reference on the Web.
Kingsley is also highly linked himself. Access to slides from his presentation can be found here at his blogsite or here at AuthorStream, among many other places.
As Paul relates in his summary, Kingsley said that the revolution in “user generated content” in the consumer space has spread to enterprise environments. While this is a good thing, it also creates “increasingly complex challenges in engaging with and empowering its employees on the one hand, and recognizing and responding to the blurring lines between work time and personal time, employee and customer on the other.”
Linked Data, Kingsley argued, offers a powerful means to “mesh disparate and heterogenous data” over the web in ways that cross some of these boundaries.
by Joe McKendrick
May 26, 2008 at 11:09 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I’ve dedicated my whole career trying to elevate and deliver information above the noise, so Robert Scoble’s recent post on the value of tuning into the “noise” itself gave me reason for pause.
“I’m a noise junkie. I used to be a news junkie, but I’ve hung out with the world’s top journalists enough now to see that the good ones are noise junkies. They are the types that head into a crowded party and listen to pitch after pitch (noise) and drunken story after drunken story (noise) to find something that their audiences will find interesting (news)…. Last year I got a tour of the Wall Street Journal’s West Coast printing plant. They print 60,000 copies an hour. At the end of the tour the head pressman said ‘I’ve been reading this six hours before you did for more than 15 years now and it hasn’t helped yet.’ Why? Cause the news isn’t where the action is: the high value bits are stuck in the noise.”
He’s on to something here. Wall Street wizards have been tuned to the “noise” since the creation of the Stock Market. It’s also something intelligence agencies have known for years and have practiced. In World War II, for example, British and American intelligence analysts tracked regional newspaper articles coming out of Germany, not for the face value of the news itself (which was propagandized), but to conduct content analysis. Piecing together reports of lines at stores, factory closings, and casualty lists helped weave a picture of what was happening on the other side.
Likewise, in recent years, you may have heard in the news intelligence analysts track and perform content analysis on the “chatter” that takes place between suspected terrorists and their sympathizers over email, telephone, and the Web. On a more local level, police departments fight crime by keeping their ears to the ground to get a feel for what’s happening and what’s being said on “the street.”
So, as Scoble puts it, the tools we have out our disposal these days — Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, MySpace, et al, deliver information long before the “official” sources get a hold of it.
The role of enterprise search, in fact, seeks to help pull nuggets of valuable information from the noise of text, relational data, graphics, and all sorts of other data and files flooding our organizations.
Scoble goes on to put it this way:
“I like the noise. Why? Because I can see patterns before anyone else. I saw the Chinese earthquake happening 45 minutes before Google News reported it. Why? Because I was watching the noise, not the news.”
Our colleague right here, Rob Paterson, in fact, picked up upon this point in recent posts, noting that word of the China earthquake, as well as a rumbler in Virginia, was spreading across the Twitterverse almost real time. Plus, he notes how a corporate entity — H&R Block — is employing Twitter to listen to the “noise” to improve customer relationships.
So, it can be concluded that if you’re listening to the “noise” these days, it’s telling you that people are starting to listen to the noise.
But will there always be an informal, unstructured aspect to such analysis. Can these methodologies be institutionalized and made enterprise ready? Going to parties and gathering intel by listening to drunken stories is something that will never make its way into formal corporate processes. This is the old knowledge management conundrum — how can you capture and bottle informal, unstructured data? How do you capture serendipity — someone runs into a business colleague at an event, and learns that so-and-so is leaving because the company pulled support for a project? How do you take it out of peoples’ heads and digitize it?
Technology is helping to surface some of this serendipity — and pull nuggets from the noise. But some analysts still wonder if consumerish services such as Twitter are quite ready for the enterprise. Enterprise Irregular Dennis Howlett, for one, says Twitter appears squeamish about getting involved in legal tussles, even when it comes to enforcing its own terms of service. This doesn’t go over too well in building confidence in corporate settings, Dennis added. “Will enterprise trust a service that turns its back on the very community it seeks to foster? The answer to that is a resounding no.” In a previous post, Dennis also questioned whether Twitter’s infrastructure is ready to scale as it needs to meet burgeoning demand.
by Joe McKendrick
May 23, 2008 at 5:13 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, SOA
In his latest analysis, Dion Hinchcliffe reports fest-breaking progress in the area of user-created applications, or mashups. For example, he noted that there were at least nine different announcements around Web-based mashups coming out of the recent Web 2.0 conference.
Dion said that many business end users — still accustomed to forwarding their requirements over to IT when they need an application built — may not be ready to build their own front end interfaces. “The biggest challenge of all: The habits and expectations of the larger part of a generation of workers who don’t yet realize mashups are poised to change many things about the software landscape on the Web and in the workplace,” he writes.
Dion also observed that “the tools that empower users to weave together existing Web parts and open APIs into the exact solutions they need are just now becoming easy enough and robust enough to readily enable these scenarios.”
This is in line with research I have been involved with (Evans Data), which, in a recent survey of 380 enterprises, found that the greatest obstacle to user application creation, cited by 22% of respondents from a list, is the lack of availability of easy-to-use assembly tools.
However, help seems to be on the way, in the form of an emerging industry, including companies such as JackBe, DreamFace, Intel, IBM Lotus, Kapow, and Serena. Dion cites the latest market overview from Forrester, which estimates that this space is expected to grow into a $700 million a year industry sector by 2013, or about 1% of the entire software industry.
Now, granted, 1% is a very small chunk, but it will be a very potent chunk — one that’s grabbing the attention of more vendors. “One thing is now clear in this burgeoning new industry; that there is genuine interest in being a leading provider of enterprise mashup tools as organizations begin getting serious about applying them to make the development of Web-based business solutions faster, more commonplace, and less costly,” Dion says.
Dion also observes that “many of the issues that have been holding mashups back are beginning to be resolved.” Such issues included lack of a common assembly model, an immature services landscape, uncertainty about management support, security concerns, and data quality concerns. As more vendors emerge or wrap their offerings around mashup capabilities, mashups will become a more ubiquitous part of enterprise computing.
by Joe McKendrick
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.
by Joe McKendrick
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.
by Joe McKendrick
April 20, 2008 at 11:37 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
In many enterprises, Enterprise 2.0 ends up getting adopted under the radar, especially when clueless corporate types won’t see the light. Then there are those who attend a seminar or read a business journal article, and decide “we have to have this ‘Enterprise 2.0 stuff’ now or else.”
Geek & Poke’s Oliver Widder gives us an example of a corporate effort to sell E2.0 to the enterprise. You know, shades of “the floggings will continue until morale improves.”
by Joe McKendrick
April 18, 2008 at 2:55 pm · Filed under
Blogging, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Google, IT Department, Microsoft, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Yahoo, enterprise software, mashups
I recently completed work on a survey report for Evans Data measuring the impact and trends shaping Web 2.0 projects within the enterprise.
The survey of 385 corporate managers and developers covered Web 2.0-based development mechanisms — such as mashups and gadgets/widgets — as well as social networking tools. Both types of environments are now very much a part of the corporate scene, and have become important tools for corporate applications, the survey finds.
Demand for Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 talent is hot, as a matter of fact. Two out of three respondents say their demand for such talent will increase over the coming year. That’s because there is a lot of strategic business-to-business and internal business development going on by software developers in the survey. Developers are working on Web 2.0 software for business applications in several areas, including interface design, gadgets and widgets, and social networking.
Most Web 2.0 applications are being targeted at internal corporate requirements, versus consumer engagements. Close to half of the survey participants are focused on developing applications for internal use inside their companies. Less than a third are building Web 2.0 applications intended for delivery on a subscription base to online users.
Forty percent of interfaces for Web 2.0 applications are “mixed” web-rich clients that include AJAX for fast downloads of pages that include live feeds of data (gadgets) and other dynamic components found in Web 2.0 applications. An overwhelming majority of respondents are using gadgets and widgets (portable Web parts) from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and others to deploy fast, lightweight business applications and services.
More than four out of ten companies encourage social networking; however, most feel the business value still needs to be demonstrated at this time. Social networking is strongest among developers in scientific and technical fields, who see social networking as a communications and collaboration medium, and among OEMs and systems integrators, who see benefits in product delivery.
by Joe McKendrick
April 15, 2008 at 8:14 pm · Filed under
Cloud Computing, Enterprise 2.0, Google, Web Services, Zombies
I’ve been getting quite a bit of interesting reactions to a post over at my ZDNet SOA site, “Is Cloud Computing Too Good to Be True?” In the post, I discussed Google’s latest entree into the infrastructure-as-a-service space, Google App Engine, and how it competes with Amazon Web Services.
Both vendors offer storage, messaging, queuing, and back-end server scalability that can conceivably offer an alternative to buying and managing onsite software and hardware.
Amazingly enough, access to Google App Engine will be offered for free, versus Amazon’s incremental pricing plans. However, Amazon’s services are priced so low that free versus a couple of hundred dollars per month may not be an issue for enterprises. (Individual consumers, however, will more likely be drawn to the no-cost Google model.)
However, what may be an issue for enterprises are things such as governance, security, privacy, and control — all issues that cloud the Cloud computing space.
In an online poll I am conducting with the post, sentiments are running against Cloud computing for the enterprise: at the time of this writing, 62% said Cloud computing is still too risky of a bet for enterprises, versus 32% saying it is enterprise-capable.
Readers of this blogsite may have already seen my arguments in favor of moving to the Cloud — not having to deal with software maintenance and upgrades, and paying for only what you need. However, there are arguments against enterprise-scale Cloud computing, which include the following:
- Cloud computing may create a dependence on the provider (Google, Amazon) and may make it difficult to move to another platform.
- Google itself admits that Google App Engine is targeted at consumer applications, not businesses.
- Enterprises leveraging Cloud computing may become homogenized — and lose the competitive advantage that may come from custom-built systems.
- There’s always the risk that the Cloud provider may change business models or even go out of business.
by Joe McKendrick
April 11, 2008 at 3:13 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
The MIT Media Laboratory and Bank of America recently announced the creation of the “Center for Future Banking,” a five-year effort that will explore the impact of Web computing and social networking approaches on the way people manage their finances.
The Center will be funded by BofA to the tune of $3-$5 million annually, and is chartered to “explore new ideas in banking by inventing technologies that reveal and leverage insights across a wide range of physical and social scales, from one-on-one customer interactions to global transactions.”
Researchers will address such questions as: ‘How can every customer be empowered with the knowledge and tools to take better control of their financial futures?’ ‘How will banking interactions evolve as a customer’s physical and virtual worlds become completely intertwined?’ and ‘How will social networks and mobile platforms transform customers’ banking experiences, making it easier, more convenient, and better integrated with their daily lives?’.
The banking industry is just but one of many industries that will be rocked by the shift of empowerment and information management to end-users. The industry saw its first wave of transformation with the advent of Web computing in the mid to late 1990s. At that time, many institutions opened up online access as a new channel. Internet-only banks or subsidiaries of banks were launched. The next phase of this revolution may follow the rise of the networking effect of Web 2.0.
As Frank Moss, director of the MIT Media Lab, puts it: “We hope not only to discover the principles that will transform banking in the next decade, but also to advance our basic understanding of the rapidly changing relationship between people, technology, and society in the twenty-first century.”
by Joe McKendrick
March 26, 2008 at 10:25 pm · Filed under
Donut, Enterprise 2.0, Messy World, SOA, Web 2.0, mashups
Is Web 2.0 a potential peril to productivity? Is there a risk of employees spending their time on the company dime engaged in superfluous online activities, like trashing ex-girlfriends/boyfriends or watching music videos on YouTube?
Both Andrew McAfee and Dion Hinchcliffe have publicly stated that they are seeking examples of serious productivity issues resulting from Web 2.0 deployments. So far, Dion reports, “no one has come forward with a significant story around productivity loss, or misuse of these tools in the enterprise. “We have been unable to hear even one. So far, the evidence is looking favorable.”
Dion had recently joined Beth Gold-Bernstein, my colleague from ebizQ, who hosted a fascinating online panel discussion on the growing convergence between SOA and Web 2.0. Beth and Dion were joined by ZapThink’s Ron Schmelzer, and Doug Wilson, CTO of portals and collaboration products at IBM.
For those managers who fear the ramifications of productivity loss as a result of unleashing Web 2.0 into their enterprises, think back to the first Macs and Windows-based PCs 20 years ago, said Doug Wilson. “When we introduced GUIs 20 years ago, there was the same question. Weren’t we going to waste a lot of time, people moving the mouse around?”
Of course, PCs and Macs had a very different kind of an impact on productivity.
An even more delicious example is employee orientation at a candy factory, Doug added:
“Candy makers indoctrinate people by telling them to eat as much candy as they want off the line for the first day, or anytime else for that matter. After 20 minutes, people will have had their fill.”
Likewise, when a new technology or technique is introduced, it’s only natural for people to try and learn and teach themselves. That’s how human beings learn — they experiment and play.”
Dion also provided this example of how Web 2.0 sweeps through the enterprise:
“AOL rolled out…a very heavyweight content management platform. But users gravitated to a new media wiki platform, the same platform that powers Wikipedia. Within a couple of months, because the tool was so much easier to use, and had been proven on a very large scale, with all the adoption kinks worked out of it in that very large laboratory called the Web… it was successful to the point where 95% of their content management now occurs in those platforms.”
This is a fairly common story, Dion added — analogous to the way the PC came into the back door of organizations 20 years ago.
by Joe McKendrick
March 20, 2008 at 5:25 pm · Filed under
Cloud Computing, Enterprise 2.0
I’ve spoken plenty about the ‘cloud computing‘ phenomenon in these pages, so I got a kick out of James Governor’s take on how to tell if something isn’t cloud computing.
This is probably a good list to have, since many vendors will try to sell you the concept simply because it’s the latest and greatest hot buzzword. Simplicity is the watchword for cloud computing; anything that suggests different may still be traditional-load-and-fight-with-the-software computing.
Here are just some of James’ “Ways to Tell Its Not Cloud Computing:”
1) “If you need to send a 40 page requirements document to the vendor then… it is not a cloud.”
2) “If you can’t buy it on your personal credit card… it is not a cloud.”
3) “If they are trying to sell you hardware… its not a cloud.”
4) “If there is no API [application programming interface]… its not a cloud.”
5) “If it takes more than ten minutes to provision… its not a cloud.”
6) “If you can’t deprovision in less than ten minutes… its not a cloud.”
7) “If you know where the machines are… its not a cloud.
“If there is a consultant in the room… its not a cloud.”
9) “If you need to install software to use it… its not a cloud.”
by Joe McKendrick
March 17, 2008 at 10:34 pm · Filed under
Cloud Computing, Enterprise 2.0
There have been plenty of new developments on the cloud computing front. HP has just announced it is delivering a range of virtualization and cloud-computing capabilities it brands as “Next Generation DataCenter (NGDC).” The computer giant said that it would be opening its data centers for customers to use on an incremental basis.
Cloud computing is truly this year’s rising star. Nick Carr also talks about the rise of cloud computing in this new article in Ad Age. Nick says it so well when he speaks about the paradigm shift that has taken place in personal computing:
“In a closet in a spare bedroom of my house is a crate of PC-software programs on CD-ROMs and DVDs. There are dozens of them neatly wedged into their plastic cases — financial programs, graphics programs, encyclopedias, games, business applications and hobby applications. And they all seem, suddenly, like strange artifacts from the past.”
Most of the value of PCs and laptops, Nick says, “comes not from what’s inside them but from the network they’re hooked up to. They’ve become, essentially, terminals.”
Such is also the case with enterprise computing. This vision, in fact, has been bandied about for the past decade, in fact, by enterprise systems vendors such as IBM and Sun Microsystems. Back at the turn of the century, Sun’s Scott McNealy talked about delivering compute capacity via a “Big Freakin’ Webtone Switch.” IBM has long talked about opening up pools of its vast reservoirs of in-house systems to customers.
HP’s new “Adaptive Infrastructure as a Service” (AIaaS) offers customers access to HP-owned and managed data centers that deliver applications such as Exchange and SAP, as well as “other critical business applications.”
On a practical level, cloud computing makes it possible for enterprises to break out of the cycle of paying more and more for the costs and headaches of building and maintaining their own data centers. As a result, organizations need not be anchored as tightly to the expensive investments made in systems, and therefore able to change faster and more flexibly. And no one will miss the long weekends required to perform upgrades.
Is there a down side to such rosy scenarios? Enterprises must weigh the costs of paying eternal monthly access and licensing fees versus one-time purchases for licenses. Plus, there are the risks inherent in relying on an outside partner for computing –a loss of control. Data security also rears its head, and needs to be explored further.
But, for now at least, the future of cloud computing appears to be anything but cloudy.
by Joe McKendrick
March 5, 2008 at 4:01 pm · Filed under
Change, Collaboration, Dead Paradigms, Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, IT Department, Messy World, User Revolution
In the old days, radicals talked about workers owning the means of production.
What about owning the means of production in today’s information age?
Bob Lewis has a 21st Century take on this: why not leave it up up to the end users to supply their own computers on the job?
Here’s the lay of the land, as Bob puts it:
“When using their home computers, end-users experience a vast array of possibilities, but at the office they operate in a very constrained space; and increasingly, ‘work/life balance’ is giving way to “‘live your life wherever you are.’”
As we’ve seen from the many insights coming out of FastForward ‘08, users need to be unleashed to get their jobs done with the tools they see fit. So why not let employees do their thing with their own PCs? As Bob Lewis put it:
“No corporate-owned PCs at all. Let employees buy their own — whatever they think they need to do their jobs. It’s Nicholas Carr’s vision in reverse: Only central IT remains. Employees take over ownership of the periphery, including responsibility for their own PC support.”
We already see plenty of instances of employees using their own mobile devices for work-related connectivity. And, countless users log in from their homes to check into the intranet or for updated communications.
Of course, the legal departments would pull their hair out at the notion of everyone bringing in their own machines to work, especially in light of fears of data being taken out the door. But if there were a way to effectively lock down data either online or offline, wouldn’t this idea make a lot of sense?
So, Bob put another idea out there — virtualize. “Give end-users two virtual machines.” One virtual machine — the corporate virtual machine — could be “buttoned-down, corporate, protected, fully supported, and strongly connected.” The personal virtual machine could be the “sandbox,” on which users can do anything their hearts desire.
by Joe McKendrick
February 24, 2008 at 7:29 pm · Filed under
Economics, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, Management Theory
John Hagel helped kick off FastForward last week with a discussion of the what is probably the scarcest and most valuable commodity of all in this information and social networking age — attention. Attention has been one of those concepts that has been lurking in the background noise of Web 2.0, but now could ultimately mean the difference between survival and death of a business.
As we know, the commodities that determined value in the olden days (at least up until 1970 or so) were manufactured products or specialized services. As Hagel observed, the key scarce resource was shelf space, be it shelf space in a retail store, or shelf space in the form of a salesperson. That’s what everybody fought over for the last few decades — “there was limited shelfspace in terms of the number of products ands services that were available. Anybody with access to that shelfspace could create a lot of value.”
Now, however, information is the new oil, and with e-business, shelf space has become unlimited. Information about anything is abundant, easily accessible, and everywhere. The scarcest resource is no longer on the producer side, but on the consumer side — our time. After all, we only have 24 hours a day, of which six to eight is engaged in sleep.
“How we chose to allocate that attention over 24 hours increasingly is going to determine who creates value, who destroys value,” Hagel said.
Steve Gillmor famously has been beating the drums loudly and with great persistence in recent years, heralding the arrival of the Attention Economy. Gillmor recently explained the concept of attention in a post analyzing the market positions of major players:
“Attention was first proposed in 2004 by Technorati founder Dave Sifry and me as an XML specification called attention.xml. The notion was that the digital breadcrumbs we emit around the network could be captured and transmitted as a simple signature of behavior: who, what, and for how long. In RSS, this breaks down into the feed, the individual post or item, and the length of time spent on the page. In other words, the attention of the user. A clickstream recorder… or in fact, the recordings left by us as we browse services from Google, Yahoo, and every other site, are aggregated and processed based on the implicit understanding of the value of the service. What permission do you give us in return for the ‘free’ services that we provide?”
So, as Steve points out, there’s an implicit contract that emerges between producers and consumers of information across the Web.
John Hagel picked up on the Attention concept and proposes an internalized enterprise measure of value, calling it “return on attention,” or ROA. The questions that ROA may help organizations address is “in trems of return on attention, is how much effort and resources are needed to gain the attention of participants, and how much value have we generated from that attention over what period of time? What’s the productivity of that attention in terms of value received for effort and time invested?”
These are all questions that increasingly beg for answers. But, alas, answers are not coming anytime soon, Hagel says. Many organizations have terabytes upon terabytes of customer data stored away in data warehouses, but only are touching a small fraction of that information. Most companies understand the profitability of products, but have scant details on the profitability of a customer. Most companies have no idea yet how to capture and measure attention.
To survive and thrive in the Attention Economy, which is here and now, this has to change.
by Joe McKendrick
February 19, 2008 at 4:05 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, Information Management, Messy World
Links are more than those underscored words that fall in the middle of pages, and essentially say, ‘Okay, time to leave and go somewhere else.’
In his keynote at FastForward ‘08, David Weinberger took a close look at this phenomenon we’ve all become very used to, the link, and dissected what it all means for the way we view information.
In the good old days we called them hyperlinks, a very hyper-techy-sounding word for something that is ultimately very human-driven.
Of course, David spoke about much, much more than links. Bill Ives provides some perspective on David’s talk, here, and Jerry Michalski spoke to David in an onsite interview, posted here.
We’ve reached a stage in which “all contents are also connections,” David said. “Everything leads to everything else.” He added that unlike the structured approach to information retention we’ve grown accustomed to in enterprises (think relational databases), links are a very human interaction. “Links are the opposite of information,” he said. “Links are messy, personal, and one-way.” In other words, links are purely user controlled, part of the “unowned order.” And, in a way, adding soul to the soul-less machine.
Such is the progression we’re also seeing with the growth of the Web, and in the collaborative, Enterprise 2.0 communities and tools we are seeing. There is no owner; because we are all the owners.
by Joe McKendrick
February 19, 2008 at 3:36 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Artisanal Economy, Change, Collaboration, Economics, Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, Messy World, Social Networking, Wikinomics
In his keynote at FastForward 08, Don Tapscott asked a question I’ve always wondered about: “Why does the ‘firm’ exist? …Why isn’t everybody an independent contractor at every step of the proecss?”
I’ve always felt that there’s entrepreneurial energy in all of us, and that being relegated to worker bee roles stifles that innovation, locking it into a 9 to 5, two-week-vacation-a-year cage.
Don answered the question with the fact that the cost of transactions has historically been too high for most of us to bear.
Well, the times, they are a changing. Enterprise 2.0 has changed that equation dramatically. Don pointed out that collaboration costs have dropped dramatically, to the point where people are peers, and the can interact beyond the bounds of the traditional corporation.
Don offered an example of Goldcorp, a mining company, which had the challenge of locating new sources of the mineral within its properties.The company’s in-house staff of geologists were unable to identify new sources with the information they had. The CEO decided to open up all the information it had on its properties, including geological data, and offered a reward to anyone out on the net who could help locate new sources. Geologists and non-geologists alike offered information that led to new finds, and the company has grown from $90 million to $10 billion in assets.
Dare I say it? There’s gold out in them thar Enterprise 2.0 hills.
by Joe McKendrick
February 19, 2008 at 2:12 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Economics, Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08
Bill Ives and Sandy Kemsley have posted thorough reviews on Andrew McAfee’s (the patron saint of Enterprise 2.0) keynote at FastForward ‘08 on what’s happening in the Enterprise 2.0. You can catch the essence of McAfee’s talk from Sandy and Bill.
McAfee brought up an interesting point about something that has not been discussed enough up to this point — the role of incentives in encouraging Enterprise 2.0 use. Namely, that any incentives should be “soft” incentives, and the movement would be well served if collaboration were written into employee evaluations. (Hmm. How ’bout a nice pat on the back?)
Alas, however, the challenge is that companies will talk a good game about being all hip and collaborative and Web 2.0-ified, but when it comes down to the carrots and sticks to make it all a reality, they won’t do it. That’s because many managers work and are paid to work within siloed domains.
Getting Enterprise 2.0 technologies in the door and accepted is a challenge within itself. McAfee says even those most enlightened vendors and end users find it “hard to build good technology that is uncluttered, avoids feature creep, avoids love affairs with bells and whistles.” Managers, he said, “want to use technology to get through “pre-existing worklflows.”
And that is a challenge to gain acceptance of Enterprise 2.0 in the entreprise, which in turn will show up in job descriptions and incentive plans.
Where to start? Look for current technologies or processes that are causing people to scream in pain. “If people aren’t frustrated with what they’re doing now, getting them to move and change their work practices is going to be even more difficult.”
Moving to new technology approaches is a very painful process in and of itself, even if the move is to lightweight and collaborative applications. But this pain should be outweighed by the current pain being felt. That’s today’s challenge, McAfee said.
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