Retro: What Happened to the User Revolution?

January 13, 2011 at 9:29 pm · Filed under FASTForward '08, FASTforward08

This blog, and the collection of esteemed writers herein, came together as a result of annual events that FAST Search & Technology sponsored, focused on Enterprise 2.0- related issues. In 2008, the last year before being purchased by Microsoft, Chief Technology Officer Bjørn Olstad offered a wonderful vision that FAST was working toward. Recast below, I’ve pulled a number of key quotes for review.

The theme of FASTforward ‘08 was “The User Revolution”. Based on what Bjørn spoke of then, one has to wonder what has happened to the potential of that revolution.

…previously people thought that intent was what they typed in a query box…And now people are seeing that intent can be captured in many ways. It can be what you type, it can be what you do, it can be how you collaborate with other people, it can be you as a person, it can be the team you work in… How do you capture intent? How do you act on intent?

Power is switching from a publishing perspective to a consumer perspective. That is a big challenge…

Bjørn explained that over time FAST had been focused more on the back end than the front end — the interaction space. And that they committed to a shift to the front end through their release of an Interaction Management module, part of their overall planned architecture.

If you can work on developing the user experience, that adds so much more value than developing deep in the core. So over time we have shifted most of the focus to create that richness about how search is powering actual algorithmic experiences far beyond what people believe was search — in portals, in deep applications, in rich applications — being powered by algorithms.

In the past, applications have kept various types of content, structured data and media as separate elements. FAST wanted to break down the barriers between these.

We have a new search core which is taking this to the next level…unstructured data, text, rich media all blended together but natively represented, and query languages of all types to access this that are also native.

…you get a new level of completeness, a data fusion model where you work on all types of data and it works on all types of queries, coming from applications (legacy) and users.

He goes on to talk about the significance of tags, but not only explicit tags, but things that can be inferred from behaviors.

That connection between work — that ability to tap into usage and convert that into metadata, implicit metadata, that subsequently can power more precise user experiences — has also been a key method.

He spoke of the difference of doing so at the individual levels and also making inferences at a team level (more social implications), moving lastly to the crowd level (wisdom of crowds implications).

In reflecting on the evolution of search, Bjørn notes while many companies have leveraged search as a mechanism for revenue generation, search can be leveraged as a business platform:

So it’s not just a technology — how can I put a search bar in the upper right-hand corner — this has become a platform as to how I can run my media company. Because the core assets have been changing. It used to be the content: I own the newspaper. Now…the power is with the user. How can they reach out to the user? Search is a key technology to do that.

It’s not just like the web search — you type a query, you get a list of links, you click on it and then you go and read it. What if it was quantitative? What if the value is not just in any document but is across documents and it’s only when you bring these pieces together that you actually see a pattern? …to get to a new level of analysis…bypassing the current BI level approach…using a much simpler access paradigm…

Talking about the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 that had already started to be seen across the market, Bjørn noted that even for the adoption of SharePoint, collaboration is one of the top 4 focuses. From a search perspective you can close the loop on things that go beyond the content itself and can look at the use of the content to infer value.

At that time, looking to the future of FAST Bjørn said:

The next generation technology for FAST has 3 pillars, 3 cornerstones…content [how can we aggregate it]…the user [search moves from being an API for content to something that can be managed directly]…a search core [changing the physics of search]

We need to rethink information access: is it databases, is it search, is it a business platform? This is really now changing and the technology stack is going to change forever, based on these components.

I really miss these events. The energy was tremendous.

If FAST was already moving toward this reality in early 2008, complete with customers demonstrating same, how is it that Tim Berners-Lee was trying to sell a similar vision at TED in early 2009, touted as the Next Web and Linked Data?

And what happened to all this forward momentum? Have we buried critical technologies again?

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E2.0 Power Term: Sharing

May 28, 2010 at 3:13 pm · Filed under Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08

Everybody’s talking about social: social networking, social CRM, social-this, social-that. It’s all just noise to me. We’re social. Get over it. It’s redundant. It only has to be called out because the stupid technology wasn’t designed for real people. We get it already.

Heck, I’ve even been blathering about transparency, bladda, bladda. While all of this is still relevant, I now see the value in fine-tuning our focus just a bit. The real potential — the power curve — is in focusing on sharing.

Sharing is something that comes naturally to people — we want to help each other. Indeed sharing is at the top of the list in All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.

Working with each other ensures the survival of the species. It turns out that survival of the fittest isn’t just about strength, power and the ability to overpower others by competition — everyone for themselves — but that truly sustainable species rely equally on cooperation, or social sharing.

What we see in the wild is not every animal for itself. Cooperation is an incredibly successful survival strategy. Indeed it has been the basis of all the most dramatic steps in the history of life.

Business cultures are ripe with language and actions of competitiveness. Many seek to ‘protect turf’. These behaviors are relevant during times of duress and/or limited resources. But embracing such language and mindsets can actually create duress and serve to unnecessarily limit the potential of existing resources.

A very telling visual representation of the limits imposed by such mindsets is the chart grabbed from a TED presentation by Johanna Blakley who spoke about the real issues that Intellectual Property protection impose on creativity and growth. [Thanks to @jorgebarba for sharing]

On the left are the 2007 Gross Sales in US $BIL of industries with low IP protection, on the right are the high IP. The evidence is staggering. Johanna also created her own chart to lay out a comparison of common items and where they fall into a copyright scheme.

Indeed what most intrigued me was when Johanna made the subtle distinctions between the idea and the expression thereof. We’ll just leave that as a pending topic to explore further, another time.

We’ve talked about IP on this blog before. The topic had high visibility at FASTforward ‘08 with a banner exclaiming (a quote that appears to be attributable to Bill Gates): “Intellectual Property has the shelf-life of a banana.” Heck, I even remember the most significant change I noticed in Bill Gates demeanor toward his competitors (even in close range on panels at Gartner conferences where the analysts relished stirring up trouble), when he exclaimed (paraphrasing):

I learned, this isn’t a zero sum game. When my competitors make money, I make money too.

And in a panel I hosted at FASTforward ‘08, I recall the most significant points brought up, related to IP and the negative implications in our changing environment:

• It’s both expensive and time consuming to actually protect intellectual property
• The rate of turnover of products is increasing at a rate that the window of opportunity to protect them is becoming shorter than the time it takes to do so
• The costs to protect IP are rising at a faster rate than the potential earnings to be gained

[Kudos to @jhagel @jobsworth @jmcgee and @billives for BE-ing the panel, and to @skemsley for covering it. I find it none-too-coincidental that they're all active on Twitter.]

Even the almighty dollar (euro, yen, etc.) is wielding its influence on concerns over publicly-shared infrastructure as companies rethink their opposition to operating in the cloud.

Enterprise 2.0 seeks to shift the balance away from oppressive, limiting cultures by facilitating open, sharing ways of working and ‘being’. Even in cultures where this is not the norm, E2.0 technologies and approaches will allow for the natural working and sharing tendencies of people to emerge and return the critical balance needed not just for sustainable survival but for productive striving (another great s-word).

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I Know What I Did Last Summer

September 9, 2008 at 4:20 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, FASTForward '08, User Revolution

FastForward colleague Bill Ives provided a glimpse of his summer hours, 21st-century style, which is informal, yet highly productive. He relays how his colleague Tom Davenport stays connected, even from the wild dunes of Cape Cod.

That was the case with me as well. Call me a wannabe “Technomadic.” From Chicago (where I was a panelist for a session at The Open Group Enterprise Architecture conference — details here), on northward to the wilderness of Upper Peninsula Michigan, Mackinac Island (pictured here), Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, and, later in the summer, to the Green Mountain Inn in Vermont, I posted blogs, collaborated with colleagues, published research, and worked on applications, quite seamlessly, without anyone knowing where I was on any given day.

The Green Mountain Inn’s claim to fame is that Lowell Thomas, the famed broadcaster, would conduct his shows from the inn during ski season. In other words, Lowell wanted to get away on ski vacations without leaving work, so he brought his work with him. Now with wireless access and broadband, every average Joe can broadcast from the inn.

Some might say it’s a little obsessive to want to always stay connected; but I am my own boss, and therefore do not receive vacation pay. So I prefer to stay in touch with the world. But by spending a couple of hours a day online at a minimum, work flowed and clients were kept happy (I hope) and I still had a refreshing amount of downtime.

Technomadic is a term coined by Steve Roberts, who many years ago, set off on a cross-country trek on a bicycle outfitted with a satellite uplink, the latest communications technology and microprocessors of the time. Now, anyone can compute and collaborate, anywhere, anytime. The Web has made sense of place irrelevant to modern-day work.

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Cloud Computing: Uh Oh, Now It’s Getting Serious

July 29, 2008 at 11:12 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Barriers, Cloud Computing, Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, Social Computing

The beauty of cloud computing was that it was something you just did without having to think too hard about it. Now, apparently, some people are trying to think very hard about it.

HP, Intel, and Yahoo! have just announced the creation of a “global, multi-data center, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education.”

What is the purpose of having a test bed?  I mean, isn’t the Internet and its user base the test bed for such things? (This is said partially tongue in cheek…) According to the joint press release, the “official” Cloud Computing Test Bed will provide a testing environment to study cloud computing issues “on at a larger scale than ever before.”

The institutions supporting the test bed include the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the National Science Foundation, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany. HP, Intel, and Yahoo! will also host centers.

Each location will host a cloud computing infrastructure, largely based on HP hardware and Intel processors, and will have 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores capable of supporting the data-intensive research associated with cloud computing. The test bed locations are expected to be fully operational later this year. Parties interested in using the test beds for their own budding cloud applications will need to go through a selection process, however.

This initiative is another sign — a very high-level one at that — of the tectonic shift taking place beneath the feet of the entire computer and software industry. End users are increasingly looking to the network to take advantage of applications, services, and utilities, versus installing and maintaining these artifacts at their own sites.

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A Modest Proposal to Kick Off the Ultimate User Revolution

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.

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