Don’t mash on the desktop - mash on the web

January 21, 2007 at 5:47 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, SOA

Dion Hinchcliffe says that Enterprise mashups get ready for prime-time. Back in June 2006 he wrote an interesting article describing the various strategies people take to mashing up web services. He came up with a list of five approaches, which basically break down to building the mash-up on the client, or building the mash-up on the server. The executable web is in it’s early stages, and most people are only familiar with mashups that combine two or three web services. HousingMaps.com, for example, combines Craigslist, a geo-endocder and Google Maps.

As the number of web services vendors (WSVs) increase, end users will demand even more complex mashup applications. These multi-stage mushups have the potential to both consume information and expose the results. Thus, just as it makes sense to move some applications off the desktop and on to the web, it will make sense to move mashup platforms off the desktop and onto the web.

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Web Services Vendor (WSV)

January 13, 2007 at 4:09 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

In a mash-up world where end users assemble customized “long-tail” business applications, there are a whole bunch of things that are important to a business end user:

1. How hard is it to assemble my customized business app?
2. Are there any network effects? ( A customized app on a server is better than a customized app on my desk top.)
3. What kind of cool easy to use services are out there?

I’m going to ignore the first two questions and just deal with the last question. If you are going to assemble a business class mash-up and if that thing is actually going to help you get work done, then you need cool useful web services.

Say, for example, you are a venture capitalist and you are about to invest in a company. Before making your investment decision, you need to gather detailed financial information on a series of comparable companies. How else are you going to come up with a valuation?

Today, you log onto Yahoo! finance, cut and paste the information you need into a spreadsheet. You repeat this manual process for every company you want to include in your analysis. If you add a new input variable, you have to go back and get that new piece of information for every single company you looked at. If you are a stock analyst or a fixed income investor. You do the same thing. But you get the information from a Bloomberg terminal, which costs over $1,000 per month.

This model of manually going to Yahoo! or Google finance will change as people move towards a customizable executable web. Instead of doing all the manual cut and paste, you will bring that information directly into a pre-build VC Comparables App. And the information will come from a highly specialized Web Services Vendor, or WSV.

Xignite is a great example of Web Servcies Vendor. Xignite powers “on-demand” financial applications.   They have a cool phone number: 1-866-XML-SOAP.   Xignite has API’s for exchange rate quotes, stock price quotes, EDGAR filings.   This information is really valuable and Xignite charges for it.

What kinds of Web Services Vendors are out there or are needed?   Here are a few ideas:

• Financial information
• Social network / contacts information
• Competitive pricing
• Mobile connectivity
• Data back-up and storage
• Billing & payment
• Translation
• Specialty/vertical analysis tools
• Work flow management

If you think of other types of Web Services Vendors, please let me know.

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Worksites

December 27, 2006 at 2:17 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Maggie Fox writes one of my favourite new blogs. Social Media Group.

Recently, she asked “how long before social media is recognized as the new email”?
Part of the reason why Blogging and Wikis have not gone mainstream within the enterprise is that people keep talking about them as a market conversation or as “social software”, rather than as solutions to basic business problems.

What if we call them “Worksites?”. A Worksite makes your Intranet both readable and writable. Worksites are designed to do at least 6 things:

1 - Increase profits by improving lateral communication within the organization. As people within silos start to communicate, many benefits follow. Banks, for example, will see increased cross-sell of products to their corporate clients and wealthy clients. Consulting firms with multiple teams will use the Worksites make sure they provide integrated and coordinated solutions for clients. Any company that builds anything (cars, software, couches) will use Worksites to make sure marketing, design, sales and manufacturing / development communicate those critical issues that differentiate an iPod from all the other mp3 players.

2 - Reduce risk by improving control through audit trails and access control. There is no real audit trails with MS Office files flying back and forth using email, IM and jump-drives. And there is no real, centralized, single sign on access control. Intranet Worksites fix those problems. You can see who wrote what when, who read it, what comments they left and there is an audit trail for every single change made in the system.

3 - Radically reduce email. Read/write intranet tools have been shown to reduce internal email on projects by 75%. What more do you want?

4 - Increase the pace of innovation. I wrote a paper on this back in late 2005 called Turning Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators. The summary is as follows:

• Constant innovation is required to succeed into today’s hyper competitive environment.
• Successful innovation is not about the ideas or inventions; it’s about the people.
• If you want innovation, you have to enable your innovation creators.

The paper discusses new approaches to managing for constant innovation and new tools for fostering innovation.

5 - Highlight the deadwood within your organization. Today, some mid level managers maintain their power within an organization not by contributing, but instead by limiting access to information, and obfuscation. There is less room to hide for these types of people to hide as Intranet Worksites increase internal transparency and thus highlight who adds value.

6 - Reduce costs by reducing repeated effort. Today, employees of large organizations spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel. They are forced to do this because they have no efficient way to tap into the organization’s collective know how. This was the holy grail of “knowledge management”, but knowledge management focused on the wrong thing. It focused on “knowledge”, which meant that it was implemented as a tax on the organization. After people completed work, they had to go back and document what they had learned. The concept of Worksites are based on communication tools that have proven successful on the Internet. People use them to get work done and to communicate. “Knowledge capture” falls out as a positive externality. Further, there is no need to “manage” the knowledge as these Internet tools are self organizing. There is no hierarchy that organizes the Internet, yet Google followed by Wikipedia are the two most efficient knowledge discovery tools in the world.

Note, however, that this does not mean you should fire your Chief Knowledge Officer. Instead, change her title to Chief Internal Communications Officer. As Harvard’s Dr. Andrew McAfee has said many times, to get the full benefit of a Read/Write Intranet, you need support from management. The CICO’s job is to get the right communication tools in place and then foster the right management environment to encourage the use of those tools.

Nothing in the list above is about blogs, wikis, RSS. Nor is it about external blogging for marketing purposes. Banks, Hospitals, and Hedge Funds do not need or want their employees to be blogging about work on the open Internet. “Mr. Boothby deposited $478.23 today” is not useful. In a Bank with 100,000 employees there might be room for only a few external blogs. However, there are plenty of reasons why the Bank would want to have far more than 100,000 internal blogs. To begin with, the Bank might want to have each employee create a People Page about what they do and what skills they bring to the table. The Bank might then want to create a Project Worksite for each of the major internal projects going on, including new product roll-outs, new system development, new marketing campaigns, etc. For major commercial clients, internal Client Worksites could help internal teams that are spread across geographies and departmental silos to improve coordination, better serve the client’s needs and sell the client more products. Finally, Product Worksites could help the bank keep its own employees up to date on the latest developments with each of the complex financial products they sell.

100,000 people + 10,000 projects + 30,000 major clients + 1,000 products.

It is only when companies start to realize how they can use these tools that we will see social media as the new email.

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