Archive for innovator interviews
by Jon Husband
March 3, 2008 at 10:33 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Culture, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, IT Department, Information Management, Interview, Social Computing, Social Networking, Trusted Space, Web 2.0, enterprise software, innovator interviews
I sat down recently for lunch with Darren Gibbons and Gordon Ross of OpenRoad Communications, a small Vancouver firm focusing on the design and implementation of corporate intranets and internal communications strategy.
As part of their work with clients over the past several years and their experiences in designing and adapting intranets, they developed a hybrid wiki, blog and CMS platform called ThoughtFarmer.
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ThoughtFarmer
Beyond wikis - Knowledge Sharing for the new enterprise
ThoughtFarmer combines structure and social networking with easy wiki authoring, helping companies share knowledge and strengthen community.
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ThoughtFarmer has gained some significant clients over the past year or so, including NESTA (National Endowment for the Sciences, Technology and Arts - the largest single endowment devoted exclusively to supporting talent, innovation and creativity in the UK), IDEO (the globally renowned industrial design firm) and most recently eHarmony.
I’ve known about ThoughtFarmer since its early days, and wrote up a descriptive entry in the recent book "Making Knowledge Work - the arrival of web 2.0", published by the ARK Group (UK).
I wanted to delve a bit further into the why’s, what’s and how’s of ThoughtFarmer, to find out more about the appeal it held for client organizations who are serious about tackling the issues and dynamics of Enterprise 2.0.
I ran through the following 4 questions with Darren and Gordon in a question-and-answer interview format.
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1. I understand that ThoughtFarmer is an hybrid collaborative platform comprised of a wiki, social networking capabilities and various modular elements that traditionally have formed part of an enterprise’s intranet platform. Is that correct, and can you offer us a more concise description ?
D & G - Yes, it’s a hybrid, which is actually becoming a fairly standard architecture or configuration for Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platforms.
Our conception of ThoughtFarmer and its initial design came out of our work with clients helping them implement intranet publishing tools. As Web 2.0 tools and services became more prevalent, we realized that it would be natural to incorporate these into an intranet publishing and knowledge-sharing application, and so we set about designing and building what became ThoughtFarmer 1.0, a platform to support easy user publishing and the sharing of pertinent information and knowledge in an intranet environment.
Our first client, IntraWest (at that time owner of Whistler Blackcomb and other ski resort properties), essentially provided us with the design principles. They wanted a platform that would make it easy to:
- publish and maintain current, up to date and relevant content
- create and sustain a content repository that would also serve as the company’s central knowledge repository
- strengthen workplace community by bringing forward and exposing the relationships amongst colleagues who were spread out geographically, and
- minimize any additional work (the "thing" would have to be self-sustaining and create no additional employee headcount).
Interestingly, these design principles came out of the (admittedly progressive) HR function, who insisted that we focus on the needs of both the organization AND the users. Initially, IT said "Use Sharepoint" but that involved some fairly significant customization and user training efforts. HR said "that’s a non-starter", and so off we went.
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2. In your opinion, what most clearly differentiates ThoughtFarmer from the other recent arrivals on the Enterprise 2.0 scene that combine wikis, blogs, social networking, enterprise search, etc. ?
D & G - We think that the answer to that question has to be "ease-of-use". The core design principles can be summarized as "Simple" and “Social”
Simple - we got rid of as much jargon as we knew how - for example, everything a user posts is a "page" - and we provide the users with a fair bit of simple but clear structure. There are lots of simple "tools" that help users re-structure and shuffle around the content, such as by re-labeling or sorting the content, through the use of easy-to-manage tagging.
ThoughtFarmer offers full text search, making it easy to find all sorts of content, and the newer version (2.5) incorporates such useful features as activity tracking whereby everything that takes place is logged for easy future reference.
Social - we also focused on "Social" as a design principle, which essentially means that every feature and the pages on which the activity takes place follow the axiom "simple rules for complex spaces". We’re big fans of Edward T. Hall (The Hidden Dimension), and worked to introduce attention filters that allow for the customization based on the cognitive capacity of individual users. ThoughtFarmer features something we call activity tracking, which is based on Hall’s theory of proxemics (the study of the human use of space within the context of culture). We implemented a sllder-based attention filter that enables zooming in and / or out and lets a user see all the projects in which she or he is a member and all of the related project content and activity on the intranet.
We believe that his is a deeply humanistic design principle for knowledge work in social settings.
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3. I understand that for a small not-Silicon-Valley-based Canadian Enterprise 2.0 startup, you have had some impressive initial client wins. What is the implementation of ThoughtFarmer you are most proud of, and why ?
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D & G - We’re proud of the fact that some very innovative and innovation-oriented companies have chosen to use this application designed by a small Canadian communications firm. We’ve only just recently been able to talk about the fact that IDEO (designers of the Palm V, the Swiffer, the Apple Mouse and many other innovative products) chose ThoughtFarmer. IDEO evaluated every Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform they could find, and chose ours. They are currently using it on their main intranet and are rolling it out to their offices around the world..
4. Is it plug-and-play, or does it’s implementation involve customization and set-up depending upon a given enterprise’s overall information systems architecture .. or is this even the right question ?
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D& G - Yes, it’s essentially plug and play, although of course every organization will have different requirements and a different IT architecture with which ThoughtFarmer must operate. But to offer an example, a recent installation of ThoughtFarmer at eHarmony (involving more than 250 employees) required only 5 days to install the platform, train the employees and migrate all the pertinent content.
ThoughtFarmer is Microsoft-based (SQL server and .Net), and is "IT-shop" friendly. OpenRoad is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and ThoughtFarmer was recently certified for Windows Server and SQL Server 2005 by Microsoft’s product testing labs.
Even though we like to consider it "plug-and-play" the design does not preclude customization and specialized integration with complex corporate IT architectures. ThoughtFarmer can also be used as a collaboration-oriented module within larger-scale intranets, and of course a wide range of other business applications can be integrated into the core ThoughtFarmer platform.
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Tags: ThoughtFarmer, collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, IDEO, eHarmony, Microsoft, Sharepoint
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by Joe McKendrick
October 15, 2007 at 8:36 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, innovator interviews
At a recent event sponsored by Oracle, Harvard’s Andrew McAfee evangelized the Enterprise 2.0 message, predicting that it would turn the technology paradigm upside down within many organizations.
However, while technology and financial services have been quick to embrace the new technologies and methodologies, expect resistance from organizations with more structured ways of doing business, he cautioned.
McAfee admitted he was skeptical at first about applying Web 2.0 to the business, but the more he explored the possibilities, the more he saw the potential.
Unlike highly structured, lumbering enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM, Web 2.0-based applications were light and adaptable. “It did not impose anything on users. Instead it gave them a very, very free environment to work in and lets structures emerge over time.”
McAfee defines Enterprise 2.0 as “the use of a freeform social software platform inside an organization that allows them to do things that are important.”
by Dana Gardner
July 30, 2007 at 11:10 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, IBM, SOA, Web 2.0, enterprise software, innovator interviews, mashups, open source, podcasts
Read a full transcript of the discussion.The notion of a world wide web that anticipates a user’s needs, and adds a more human touch to mere surfing and searching, has long been a desire and goal. Yet how closer are we to a more “semantic” web? Will such improvements cross over into how enterprises manage semantic data and content?
Our expert panel digs into this and other recent trends in SOA and enterprise IT architecture in the latest BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition, volume 17. Our group also examines Adobe’s open source moves around Flex, and how UDDI is becoming more about politics than policy.
So join noted IT industry analysts Joe McKendrick, Jim Kobielus, Dave Linthicum and Todd Biske for our latest SOA podcast discussion, hosted and moderated by yours truly.
Here are some excerpts:
I saw one recent article where [the semantic web] was called Web 3.0, and I thought, “Oh, my Lord, we haven’t even decided that we are all in agreement on the notion of Web 2.0.”
[But] there is activity at the World Wide Web Consortium that’s been going on for a few years now to define various underlying standards and specifications, things like OWL and Sparql and the whole RDF and Ontologies, and so forth.
So, what is the Semantic Web? Well, to a great degree, it refers to some super-magical metadata description and policy layer that can somehow enable universal interoperability on a machine-to-machine basis, etc. It more or less makes the meanings manifest throughout the Web through some self-description capability.
You can look at semantic interoperability as being the global oceanic concern. Wouldn’t be great if every single application, data base, or file that was ever posted by anybody anywhere on the Internet somehow, magically is able to declare its full structure, behavior, and expectations?
Then you can look at semantic interoperability in a well-contained way as being specific to a particular application environment within an intranet or within a B2B environment. … The whole notion of a “semantic Web,” to the extent that we can all agree on a definition, won’t really come to the fore until there is substantial deployment inside of enterprises.
Conceivably, the enterprise information integration (EII) vendors are providing a core piece of infrastructure that could be used to realize this notion of a Semantic Web, a way of harmonizing and providing a logical unified view of heterogeneous data sources.
Red Hat, one of the leading open source players, is very geared to SOA and building an SOA suite. Now, they are acquiring an EII vendor, which itself is very SOA focused. So, you’ve got SOA; you’ve got open source; you’ve got this notion of a semantic layer, and so forth. To me, it’s like, you’ve stirred it all together in the broth here.
That sounds like the beginnings of a Semantic Web that conceivably could be universal or “unversalizable,” because as I said, it’s open source first and foremost.
If we build on this, it does solve a lot of key problems. You end up dealing with universal semantics, how that relates to B2B domains, and how that relates to the enterprise domains.
As I’m deploying and building SOAs out there in my client base, semantic mediation ultimately is a key problem we’re looking to solve.
The average developer is still focused on the functionality of the business solution that they’re providing. They know that they may have data in two different formats and they view it in a point-to-point fashion. They do what they have to do to make it work, and then go back to focusing on the functionality, not really seeing the broader semantic issues that come up when you take that approach.
One thing that’s going to happen with the influence of something like Google, which is having a ton of a push in the business right now, is that ultimately these guys are exposing APIs as services. … They’re coming to the realization that the developers that leverage these APIs need to have a shared semantic understanding out on the Web. Once that starts to emerge, you’re going to see a push down on the enterprise, if that becomes the de-facto standard that Google is driving.
In fact, they may be in a unique position to create the first semantic clearing house for all these APIs and applications that are out there, and they are certainly willing to participate in that, as long as they can get the hits, and, therefore, get the advertising revenue that’s driving the model.
[Google] is in the API business and they are in the services business. When you’re in for a penny, you’re in for a pound. … You start providing access to services, and rudimentary on-demand governance systems to account for the services and test for rogue services, and all those sorts of things. Then you ultimately get into semantics, security, and lots of other different areas they probably didn’t anticipate that they’d get into, but will be pushed into, based on the model they are moving into.
… Perhaps Google or others need to come into the market with a gateway appliance that would allow for policy, privilege, and governance. This would allow certain information from inside the organization that has been indexed in an appliance, say from Google, to then be accessed outside. Who is going to be in the best position to manage that gateway of content on a finely-grained basis? Google.
Read the full transcript for more IT analysis and SOA insights. Produced as a courtesy of Interarbor Solutions: analysis, consulting and rich new-media content production.
BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition, volume 17 [49:11m]:
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by Dana Gardner
July 9, 2007 at 10:08 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, SOA, SaaS, Sponsored Post, Web 2.0, enterprise software, innovator interviews, mashups, podcasts
Read a full transcript of the discussion. Sponsor: Cape Clear Software.
Take SOA and SaaS to their natural maturation and adding more interoperability and integration into the online services mix becomes inevitable. When standardized services come from a variety of sources, then a variety of means to connect them makes more sense, too.
So when will we see the first signs of integration as a service?The answer, it turns out, is now.
As the use of Enterprise 2.0 mashups sweeps the IT industry, the concept of converging enterprise services has expanded to hosted munging of business applications and back-office functions.
Why not then extend SOA itself by embracing more integration services that help vendors, ISVs, and service providers bring more elements of business processes together, too?
The budding notion of “integration-as-a-service” allows enterprise business leaders to “shop around” for their services, regardless of hosting, and opens up the prospect for a thriving new ecology of services and integration models for mission-critical activities … not just for maps and widgets. The advancement to SOA for many companies may well be accelerated by more choices on means of on-demand connections, both inside and outside the organization’s own IT boundaries.
I recently conducted a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast discussion with Annrai O’Toole, CEO of Cape Clear Software, on the eye-opening prospects for integration as a service. Early adopters are already outsourcing aspects of integration.
The implications are staggering: Business operators and entrepreneurs create and amend complex processes and workflows through a simple point and click interface that prompts integration that’s executed on someone else’s infrastructure. Pay by the use or general subscription. Retain control over data and ID management.
Here are some excerpts from the discussion:
A couple of factors are driving this. First, it’s the whole technology maturity thing. Six or seven years ago, the standards around Web services were in their infancy, and people didn’t have a lot of experience with them. Because they were young, unproven, untested, and lacking in key bits of functionality, people didn’t really want to go there. Technology is one element of it, but there are a few more important elements driving it as well.
One is a secular trend toward simplicity and flexibility. At some levels, this has been driven by teams through virtualization. Storage and processing power are being very quickly virtualized. Applications are being virtualized, with software-as-a-service, on demand. There is a long-term shift by customers, who are saying, “We don’t want to own complex infrastructure anymore. We’ve been there, and done that. We want something else.”
We had an RFP come in – and this isn’t all that unusual – from someone looking to do a big SOA initiative. It was – and I’m not joking — a 111-page RFP.
Customers look at the choices available to them, and say, “Do we want to do all this big SOA integration on our own by buying these complex things, or are we prepared to look at alternatives? And, do those alternatives have any reality?” They do, and many companies are shying away from these big, complex initiatives.
You can sit in a room with a bunch of executives, both from the business and IT segments and, say, “Hosted integration is a good idea,” and they’ll know that. We’ve got some proof points around it. Most notably, one of our marquee customers in the software-as-a-service base is Workday. The PeopleSoft founders got together to rebuild an ERP application, but this time on a hosted basis. Read the rest of this entry »
BriefingsDirect podcast discussion with Annrai O'Toole, CEO of Cape Clear Software [41:15m]:
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by Dana Gardner
June 21, 2007 at 2:34 pm · Filed under
Social Computing, Web 2.0, innovator interviews, mobile, podcasts
Read a full transcript of the discussion. Sponsor: UPS
As wireless communications technology becomes embedded in the lifestyles of consumers — led by the younger generations that have always known it — small businesses are seeking ways to catch the mobile wave.
Gaining an advantage with younger shoppers online and off can be daunting to small businesses that would rather not manage technology — but instead exploit it. I recently moderated a sponsored podcast that tells the story of how UPS extended its global package delivery tracking and Quantum View services to the wireless domain, and reached out in whole new ways via Short Message Service (SMS) texting to mobile devices.
One small retail business in Michigan, Moosejaw, uses UPS as its technology and logistics source to wirelessly aid its clients — to help them stay in touch, provide a strong sense of community, and to give them access to whatever information they may want on how to get their purchases quickly and easily. Some even got some lessons in dating. Go figure.
It turns out that weaving the use of SMS into B2C and B2B conversations has some unintended and auspicious viral consequences. Hear or read more about how UPS and and Moosejaw teamed up to let mobile users get their delivery data their way. We’re joined by Jeff Reid, UPS’s Director of Customer Technology Marketing, and Robert Wolfe, the Co-Founder of Moosejaw.
Here are some excerpts:
I started the company when I was 21, and had absolutely no clue what I was doing. So when customers would come in the store we were playing Nintendo or whiffle ball, and we asked them to join us. And that ended up turning into our marketing theory. So we really try to connect with the customer on a level that’s not just about the product.
So far it seems to be working. We definitely have more high school and college students, not only as our customers but also as our staff. And that’s really how we ended up being so proactive about wireless technology. Because when I look around and see everyone at Moosejaw, they don’t even talk to the people three seats away from them — they SMS text them. And half of them don’t even use their computers anymore; they just use their mobile phones and personal digital assistants.
When we began seeing that internally, we knew that we have to be first-to-market with all of that kind of wireless technology — and UPS has helped a ton, and not only with traditional tracking. I call it “traditional” even though it’s still pretty new. UPS began helping us all the way to getting tracking numbers tested, which we just started very recently. And it’s already been hugely successful. And when I say, “hugely successful,” we have had a lot of people sign up — but more importantly, the people who have signed up have loved it.
It sounds funny. You really don’t need to find out where your stuff is at that very movement, but it’s just that the whole idea of being able to use your phone for everything — our customers expect it. If we are not texting information to them, then we are yesterday’s news. We have to be able to embrace that kind of technology.
If it so happens that we sell products that our demographic loves — and it wouldn’t really matter if that product were coffee mugs — the fact that we are sending tracking information through a mobile phone is what’s important. Our customers are more likely to tell their friends that they just got their tracking number to their phone telling them when their new sunglasses are coming.
Our customers have become more mobile as their businesses have grown, and their lives converge with their day-to-day work activities. So we find a lot of customers are using our mobile capabilities to extend their flexibility and productivity outside of work.
Small businesses and individual users are the primary users of our wireless capabilities. So it is meeting our expectations of who would use the wireless capabilities. Yet it’s amazing how wireless services and our tracking information has made it even onto the golf course nowadays, where people are using it in all facets of their life — to check on that birthday gift to all the way down to managing their global supply chain. … The majority of the usage for wireless tracking comes from individuals in small businesses.
Some of our customers have large-scale service engagements where they have delivery vans out making calls. They require that a part be at a house before they can actually fix an item that they are going to service. So these large companies leverage our wireless capabilities to track a package within the van, so that they can determine whether or not that call will be effective — if the part has arrived or not. That’s an example of where efficiency throughout the supply chain is being introduced, and wireless tracking is certainly a large component of that efficiency equation.
We have wireless capabilities in over nine Asia-Pacific countries. It’s available in 24 European countries. Of course it’s here in the United States and Canada. It’s also available in five Middle East countries, and also in South Africa. So as long as you have a connection in any of those areas, UPS certainly has information that you can consume.
Read a full transcript of the podcast. Sponsor: UPS.
The story of how UPS extended its global package delivery tracking and Quantum View services to the wireless domain. [27:44m]:
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by Dana Gardner
June 15, 2007 at 3:21 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, SOA, Sponsored Post, Web 2.0, enterprise software, innovator interviews
Read a full transcript of the discussion. Sponsor: WSO2
WSO2, Inc. has entered the open source SOA field with a slate of veterans from Web services specifications, application server design and lightweight framework development. The company’s latest offering to the market came June 11 with the arrival of WSO2 ESB 1.0, based on Apache Synapse and targeted at both developers who want to use enterprise service buses (ESBs) quickly, as well as operations architects seeking lightweight and high-performing components.
To help better understand and evaluate WSO2’s approach, I recently moderated a sponsored podcast with guests Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink, and Paul Fremantle, co-founder and vice president of technology at WSO2.
Here are some excerpts:
I’ve been impressed with the fact that SOA is creating early-on an environment, in which open-source products are, in a sense, defining feature sets and approaches. In the past, we saw commercial products establish niches and define infrastructure areas that then became areas that open-source products might pursue.
One of the things that makes SOA different from CRM, ERP, or even traditional enterprise-application integration is that SOA is architecture. It’s a style, an approach, or a methodology for building loosely coupled, composable services that meet the needs of the businesses. So it doesn’t really demand a particular technology stack. As a matter of fact, people can implement SOA using a very wide variety of technologies, which they probably already own.
One of the things you see again and again in the computer industry is that people get to a point where they layer technologies on top of each other, and then it just gets too heavyweight. The benefits of reusing that old stuff are outweighed by the disadvantages.
We were very involved in open standards and in writing and implementing the specifications, but many of those implementations were layered on top of the Java EE enterprise runtime. We found that there was a whole new middleware based on XML and self-describing messages based on simple HTTP communications that didn’t need the existing EJB/Servlet runtime — that didn’t need to have all those existing layers.
So our philosophy when founding the company was to look at stuff afresh, and to build things with the simplest, most-lightweight combination possible. We tried to target users’ requirements, rather than target an existing code base and legacy solution than we might have if we were working for a large company.
We need to cover not just the Java platform but also the C, Perl, and PHP — the full gamut of platforms. SOA is not just a Java story. It’s really a cross-platform, cross-technology standard approach.
What you used to see was that companies would put together a kind of magic package, which was intellectual property, plus support, plus training, plus everything. And somehow they’d value all of this at some astronomical figure. Read the rest of this entry »
Learn more about the arrival of WSO2 ESB 1.0 [43:45m]:
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by Jerry Bowles
June 4, 2007 at 3:11 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, enterprise software, innovator interviews
Jigsaw is a fast-growing, controversial online marketplace that lets people trade their business contacts for more contacts or cash. Co-founded by veteran sales executive Jim Fowler, Jigsaw aims to become the world’s largest Rolodex. Before Jigsaw, Fowler spent more 12 years selling marketing and collaboration software.
1. What is Jigsaw? Give us the elevator speech.
Jigsaw is the world’s largest online directory of business cards and company information. The directory has over five million business cards and is built and maintained by over two hundred thousand members. Jigsaw helps salespeople, recruiters, marketers, job seekers, and anyone else who wants to reach the right person(s) at a particular company do so without having to call and crawl all over that organization.
2. How does it differ from other business networking sites like Linked In or Open BC?
Jigsaw doesn’t compete with LinkedIn or OpenBC. In fact, they are complimentary. LinkedIn and OpenBC are for networking. They allow business people to maintain and grow their business networks or find links between themselves and other business people. Jigsaw is a data company that uses a wiki (community) to build and maintain the database. Jigsaw competes directly with data dinosaurs such as Hoovers and InfoUSA, who build and maintain their own databases rather than empower a community to do so.
The Jigsaw directory focuses on business cards, all complete with email and phone number (in addition to name, title, address and company). In exchange for adding or updating contacts Jigsaw members earn points that are used to purchase other contact information from the database. This model of rewarding users for participation encourages members to continually grow and clean the database.
3. Sounds a little anti-social, more like plain old you show me yours and I’ll show you mine. Does it work?
We have over two hundred thousand members and the database is growing by twelve thousand new business cards every day. Members don’t trade with each other; they trade with the system. Members can add business cards that have no value to them in exchange for business cards that have extreme value. The great thing about self-organization is that one person’s trash is another’s treasure. The system is also self-correcting. If a member adds a bad contact they will get a point penalty when another member updates it with the correct status or information. The updater gets points and the person who added the bad contact gets a spanking.
This basic reward structure has worked remarkably well and created a database unlike any other in existence, and venture capitalists agree; we’ve raised $18M to date.
4. What’s your revenue model and when do you expect to be profitable?
Our basic offering is a “Pay or Play” model. Members may either pay $25 per month for 25 contacts, or play by adding 25 new contacts every month. Think of it as paying with money OR data. The cost, compared to other data offerings, is extremely low.
In addition to individual businesspersons, Jigsaw also has over four hundred corporate accounts that purchase subscriptions and data in bulk. Finally, we make a great deal of revenue cleaning CRM databases. Because every contact in the Jigsaw database is complete, our ability to identify dead records allows us to offer one-ofakind cleaning and append services. We will be profitable by the end of this year (2007).
5. Most people agree that with so many social networking sites out there, there is bound to be a shakeout. Tell me why you expect Jigsaw to be a survivor.
As mentioned previously, Jigsaw is not a social network. Unlike the social networks, we own the database created by the membership, and can sell this data in a very traditional way, without the traditional overhead of having to build and maintain the database ourselves. In essence, Jigsaw is doing to the data dinosaurs what Wikipedia is doing to Encyclopedia Brittanica. We have many other sources of revenue we haven’t even rolled out yet, such as advertising and affiliate programs. Our focus isn’t on survival, it is on how badly we can disrupt the data dinosaurs.
by Dana Gardner
May 29, 2007 at 9:03 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Sponsored Post, Web 2.0, enterprise software, guest commentary, innovator interviews, podcasts
Reports in The Economist, New York Times, and PC World point to a stunning lurch in the sophistication and reach of recent nefarious online attacks. And the initial sniff test pulls up a whiff of state or large-scale organization sponsorship and support of these events.
They may well be a bellwether of what to expect. These are likely not loosely aligned hackers, but outright strategic aggression designed to influence politics and the behaviors of nations and large corporations.
As many of these articles allude to, the attacks problem will not get any better until the basic architecture and governance of the Internet technologies themselves are addressed. Band-Aids on 1,000 cuts only propels the ongoing Spy vs. Spy gamesmanship — only the stakes are fast escalating.
And so with that I dust off a sponsored conversation I had last year with Akamai Technologies co-founder and chief scientist, Professor Tom Leighton. In it he pretty much predicts — nearly a year ago — what we’re now seeing. His prescriptions are not easy, but they increasingly seem necessary. Read the transcript, or listen to the podcast.
Disclosure: Akamai is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect B2B discussions on the Internet and society.
Akamai's Leighton on cyber security [28:22m]:
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by Dana Gardner
May 29, 2007 at 8:49 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, SOA, enterprise software, innovator interviews, podcasts
Read a full transcript of the discussion.
When the hype curve descends, advocacy takes over. And so it is with the SOA Consortium, formed earlier this year to establish SOA as a business productivity benefit and to glean proven adoption paths and proof-points from primarily end-users and enterprises. The advocacy group’s approach combines input from enterprises and vendors to promote the business strategy value for services oriented architecture (SOA).
Join noted IT analysts Joe McKendrick, Tony Baer, and Jim Kobielus for our podcast discussion on the goals and opportunities for the SOA Consortium with Dr. Richard Soley, the chairman and CEO of the Object Management Group (OMG) and also executive director of the consortium. I’ll be your host.
In June, SOA Consortium will begin holding quarterly CIO Summits with a small number of CIOs and CTOs from government agencies, large corporations, as well as non-governmental organizations.
OMG began the consortium with bevy of heavy-hitting companies — Avis, Bank of America, CellExchange, WebEx, BEA, Cisco, IBM, SAP, HP and Wells Fargo — and has grown already. The consortium, separate from OMG, is tasked with creating a community around SOA, and is not a standards group. “We strongly believe that SOA isn’t a technology at all, but rather an approach to achieve business agility. It’s not a technology, but rather a business strategy, says Soley.
Here are some additional excerpts:
Our SOA group at OMG has been focused on modeling SOA, modeling for software assurance, and modeling for software producibility, and so forth. At the other end of the spectrum, you have organizations like W3C and OASIS that are doing a great job designing the protocols and languages at the pipe level — how do we connect the systems together?
That hasn’t been our primary focus in over a decade. So we are not in that space. The advocacy group is exactly that — it’s an advocacy group. How do we help the CIO? And, we call this “Corner Office SOA.” How do we help the CIO get the news across to the rest of the C-suite that this is not a technology but a business strategy, and a business strategy that can deliver agility and a better bottom line?
[Also] … How do we help the enterprise architect, the domain architect, the data architect get the word across to his alter ego in the line of business that this is a business strategy and not a technology and it’s something he needs to pay attention to?
We are currently running 3-to-1 end-users to vendors, and that’s because the focus is on this advocacy activity. It’s not on whose SOA infrastructure we should buy and “Our Web service is cool,” or any of those questions. I am guessing that we are actually going to be more like 5-to-1 or 10-to-1 end-users to vendors eventually.
IT has traditionally focused in most organizations on what are the right tools to achieve what lines of business are telling us we need to achieve. Sure, there are going to be tools and there are going to be technologies and there are going to be frameworks to help you implement the SOA strategy, but it’s the other way around. It’s “What is it we need to achieve?” And, what we need to achieve is fairly easy to explain, right? What we need to achieve is capturing business processes, so that we can find them, so that we can make them more efficient, and so that we can reuse them — and this is nothing new.
What’s new here is the message that we are not just talking about workflow. We are not just talking about processes that can be automated. We are talking about any of the processes, especially customer-facing, but any value-chain processes within the organization that we might want to reuse.
Listen to the entire podcast, or read the full transcript for more IT analysis and SOA insights. Produced as a courtesy of Interarbor Solutions: analysis, consulting and rich new-media content production.
Analysts examine SOA Consortium [47:35m]:
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by Dana Gardner
May 23, 2007 at 6:38 am · Filed under
Social Computing, Sponsored Post, innovator interviews, podcasts
Read a full transcript of the discussion. Sponsor: UPS
Effective information-sharing across the distribution of goods — visibility into transportation supply chains and distribution networks — is a vital part of the information revolution and the knowledge economy.
Global and local players in the total distribution channel are constantly looking for reductions in cost, efficiency improvements, and slashed time to distribution — all of which can substantially reduce the total cost of an overall production and distribution activity, and heighten customer service and satisfaction.
UPS started with tracking on the Web in the early 1990s and today supports online tracking in 63 countries. UPS has extended basic services to cover broad supply chain visibility for shippers, receivers, importers, and exporters — both residential and commercial — through its traditional U.S. small package services, as well as via global UPS Freight, Air, and Ocean Freight Services.
I recently moderated a sponsored podcast that examines the market trends driving the need for greater supply chain technology and efficiency, as well as the visibility services UPS has in place. Joining me was Jim Rice, director of the Integrated Supply Chain Management Program at MIT; Stephanie Callaway, director of customer technology marketing at UPS; Frank Deen is the shipping manager at Rackmount Solutions, and John Schaffer, president of TrueWave.
Here are some excerpts:
… Companies and leaders [are] concerned … about continuity — business continuity. We saw that destructions like Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 caused a lot of companies to start recognizing that their supply chains are genuinely at risk.
A lot of vulnerabilities were always there, but weren’t very apparent or evident. So, there’s a fair amount of recognition about this vulnerability. Right now, there is some work going on in that some companies are planning to make their supply chains more resilient and trying to actively manage risks.
The companies are concerned with optimal supply chain design, and this takes in the aspect of outsourcing. How much outsourcing do we use? How much of that do we even think of putting offshore, trying to reduce cycle time, cost, and uncertainty in the system? That will ultimately enable them to be much more responsive to spikes and drops in demand.
Companies continue to squeeze their supply chain to lean it out, and make it more efficient and more effective. There are a lot of drivers in the industry right now that affect the price of sundry industries differently.
A lot of it comes down to having relationships with customers and suppliers. They would be open and free to share the information that ultimately will help both organizations to make better decisions, reduce uncertainty in the system, and take out some of the cost and uncertainty. That makes the system potentially much more efficient.
Some of these capabilities are becoming more readily available for large companies, and hopefully in the near term, to small- and medium-sized enterprises. The challenges aren’t simple, but I think there are some tools and processes emerging that are going to make this much more possible in the future, and therefore get us a little closer to that Nirvana of the synchronized supply chain.
Initially, when we started doing this, because we were shipping from so many locations, even though it was being shipped on our account, we would have to contact each one of those shipping points, each warehouse, each manufacturer to get tracking numbers to send to our customers. Of course, now we are able to have that information sent directly to the customer when the product ships. They get an email with that information.
Plus, on UPS Quantum View, we are able to pull up a report every day that shows everything that has been shipped out on our account, whether from our local warehouse or any of those other locations. We’re able to have that tracking number and see the exact progress of that package — when it was picked up, where it’s at currently, when it’s expected to be delivered, and the address that it’s expected to be delivered to. When a customer calls and asks a question about it, we are able to go to that and immediately give them an answer that provides a comfort level that we are keeping track of their merchandise that they are waiting to get.
We could get to the markets, but we couldn’t do in a way that allowed our customers to have visibility into the process. There’s a lot of uncertainty when you are shipping internationally. When you have visibility into the process from point A to point B, it really changes the dynamic quite a bit. One of the tools that Stephanie was discussing, Quantum View Manage, allows us to see if there are problems along the way. Then we can communicate with our customers in such a way that we can set the proper expectations.
Read a full transcript of the podcast. Sponsor: UPS
Listeners or readers of this podcast are invited to learn more about sponsored B2B podcasts.
UPS provides greater supply chain technology and efficiency [37:36m]:
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by Dana Gardner
May 4, 2007 at 12:09 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, SOA, Sponsored Post, Web 2.0, enterprise software, innovator interviews, podcasts
Read a full transcript of the discussion. Sponsor: IONA Technologies.
Unlike earlier open source initiatives, which often trailed commercial development of crucial software infrastructure, today’s many community-based services oriented architecture (SOA) projects are early-on defining the means through which SOA can be realized.
Development of commercial and open source versions of essential SOA components are happening concurrently. Open source SOA projects are providing a unique opportunity for developers to get their hands dirty and learn a little bit about the field, as well as contribute back some of their ideas in a form that is very healthy for new technologies.
Many commercial vendors are creating large software infrastructure stacks that are designed to target their customers with things that they have supported in the past. But a lot of new technologies and methods are also popping up, from rich Internet applications using AJAX applications, to new ways of using master data services — all of which present a new set of challenges, and a new set of connectivity options — that community development is great at solving.
To explore why this is true and how open source will shape the future of SOA infrastructure, join Dan Kulp, principal engineer and community lead at IONA Technologies, and Debbie Moynihan, IONA’s director of open source programs, for a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast discussion, hosted by me. IONA Technologies is taking an active role in several open source SOA initiatives, including the Apache incubation CXF enterprise service bus (ESB) framework project.
Here are some excerpts:
One of the goals of an open-source community is to bring new developers in. And a lot of times those new developers have different priorities or different ideas of what an ESB should do. They can provide a lot of expertise and new and fresh ideas that can make the open-source project a bit different than closed source, and provide some unique features.
One of the most fascinating things about the open-source community is something may not be my number-one requirement. But if it’s one of the other developer’s number-one requirements, they’re more than welcome to work on it and get it done. So in my mind it would have slipped. But in his mind it would have gotten done. It’s a fascinating environment.
For example, originally, when we were doing a lot of the Celtix stuff, we were still ObjectWeb, and Spring wasn’t really one of our priorities. From IONA’s standpoint, it’s not something that we’ve really experienced much with our customers. But as part of the merge with XFire, that user base was a little different than the Celtix user base.
Priorities got shifted, and we started developing more flexible models for deployment that allow the use of Spring, if you’re a Spring person. If you’re not a Spring developer, we have other options that are available to deploy your applications in a very different format that provides a lot of flexibility when you get that broad community throwing ideas out there.
There are definitely a lot of features being added that target a variety of users and use cases that really work into our original definition of what CXF was going to be. If you take a look at that Apache incubation project page, there’s a list of stuff. It was the original design of what this project was going to be. It’s going to have multiple bindings and multiple transports. We do have that, and that’s good. But with our growing list of cool features that developers keep coming up with, we’ve been adding all these multi-deployment capabilities. We’ve been adding a lot of these new WS specs like WS-Addressing and WS-Reliable Messaging.
Some of them weren’t even really anywhere close to final specs when we started the Apache CXF project. It’s a never-ending battle of more ideas coming at us, which is great — there are no complaints about that. But there’s definitely a lot of work to be done and a lot of new ideas. So, it’s a growing project with a growing list of features.
One of the other neat things about Apache is how many top-level projects they have. It’s in the 30s now, and a lot of the top-level projects have subprojects. So, there’s a lot of various functionality and different projects. One of the things that we’re trying to do from Apache’s success standpoint is reach out to some of those other communities, get involved with them, and help them get involved with CXF. Hopefully, we can work together to figure out the gaps that we have. Maybe we can use some of their technology, and they can use some of the CXF stuff.
The CXF runtime provides a lot of flexibility. We have a lot of interceptor points where core developers, who really know what they’re doing, can intercept various points of that message as it’s going through the system to do some partial processing or validation. We have some work in progress to do, like partial message encryption on some of the XML stuff. That’s done via some of these flexibility touch points, where developers can just take a part of the message and say, “Okay, we are going to encrypt this.” So, flexibility is another big word that’s important from a developer’s standpoint.
We’ve been working on some new features that we haven’t had in some of the previous generations of IONA’s SOA tool. Some of the main ones we have are the REST integrations. If you are not familiar with the Web 2.0/REST stuff, AJAX is the popular word that actually uses it. It’s a different style of interaction, where you do “gets” to get your XML data. Then it is a little bit processed on the client side, a little bit processed on the server side. There’s a lot of scripting going on in the marketplace today. There are a lot of JavaScript developers working with AJAX or doing other types of JavaScript, even on the server side. So, a lot of what we’ve done with CXF is to give those file developers some new tools to produce applications.
We’ve created a set of REST annotations. If you have existing Java services that you want to expose via REST capabilities, your AJAX clients can talk to them. You can annotate the code with these REST annotations, and CXF will pick up on them and do the REST or the SOAP interactions. We also provide support for writing your SOA applications in JavaScript. JavaScript is one of those neat interpreted things for rapid development, where you avoid some of that compile-repackage-redeploy cycle.
With the commercial product there are release cycles of six months or a year, or something like that. A lot of commercial vendors try to figure out what’s going into a particular release six months before it’s even released. So if those Web services specs aren’t finalized six months before release, they may not make that release cycle. In an open-source environment, where you have a constantly evolving development, as soon as these things get finalized, it can be made available almost immediately.
For developers that aren’t familiar with these things, it does give an opportunity to learn about them and use them in something that’s relatively easy. Expanding their knowledge is always a good thing from a career perspective. The more you know, the better off you are.
Read a full transcript of the podcast. Sponsor: IONA Technologies.
Listeners or readers of this podcast are invited to learn more about sponsored B2B podcasts.
SOA and open source with IONA Technologies [40:36m]:
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by Dana Gardner
April 1, 2007 at 3:47 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, SOA, innovator interviews, podcasts
Read a full transcript of the discussion.
Follow service oriented architecture (SOA) to its logical conclusions and you recognize that modern corporations will soon be operated on the equivalent of aviation’s “fly by wire.” The traditional governance and management means of running a business — the levers, pulleys, cables, and brute muscle — will through SOA become more automated, rules- and event-driven, self-service, pre-programmed, policy-orchestrated … agile.
Instead of directing a business on how to function from the board-room megaphone, with explanations and edicts, countless meetings, and then reviews and crass incentives, there may soon be policy-driven decisions on how to execute made on a more federated basis — collaborative and productive by making IT not just the means of operating the computer applications, but making IT the means through which to operate the very business itself.
Sound far-fetched? Consider that whomever controls the full-fledged SOA to a large extent controls the company. So how should that control actually work? Will companies take a lesson from world history on how to run the business and allow for federated and balanced power? Or will mismatched control over business elements, exacerbated by IT that can not reflect the will or wills of the controlling factors, drag productivity and the company down? To fail at SOA is to fail at modern business?
Our assemblage of analysts and guests have some unconventional and startling conclusions, as well as thoughtful insights. With that, welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect SOA Insights Edition, Vol. 11, a weekly discussion and dissection of SOA-related news and events, with our panel of noted IT industry analysts. Join experts Steve Garone, Joe McKendrick, and Jim Kobielus — along with guest Miko Matsumura, the vice president of SOA products at webMethods — for our discussion, hosted and moderated by me, Interarbor analyst Dana Gardner.
We start the discussion on what contributes to SOA failures, and the need for operational cultural transformation to accompany any meaningful advancement in SOA. We then examine federated approaches to balancing governance and control for business as well as … yikes! … governments. We conclude that SOA “failure” is probably necessary and a good, as it shows momentum — as long as the organization deals with failure maturely and constructively. No quitters!
Listen in: There are lessons from world history on how to run your business, and on how to use IT to define, balance and invoke power. Roll over Clausewitz.
Here are some excerpts:
On Failure in SOA
in 2007 we’re as likely to see catastrophic failures as we are limited success. There are a huge number of moving parts within SOA, and I’m going to use that almost as a handout point to this very well-considered group of folks. We need to categorize for the listener which moving parts are more dangerous than other moving parts, because those are the things that eventually cause the thing to kind of wiggle the wrong way, and send it to a tailspin.
Corporate backing … is more focused on the people-oriented things and the collaborative issues associated with deciding what to build and how to build it [than technology].
The most dangerous moving parts — are people. From our perspective, the system is sort of cybernetic, half-human, half-machine. The human pieces of SOA are the parts that we’ve seen in failure mode. It’s not necessarily just the human beings themselves [but] … the interfaces between the human world and the machine world, whether those interfaces are the specifications used to design applications, or the mechanisms used to manifest constraints … [Do] people, when they do fight each other, fight each other in a way that’s productive, as opposed to destructive.
When projects are pitched … [as if] we’re going to totally clean up our development practices and our integration practices … you’re just setting up the SOA project for failure.
A Battle for Control Over Who Controls SOA
The people who control the SOA are the people who essentially control the policies. The policie
