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.
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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.”
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.
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Mashups for the business world are a promising outcome of the application of design and development principles coming from the consumer application and web services arena to the business environment.
As noted in the excerpt from the NY Times below, Microsoft has for the most part been regarded as a laggard, or essentially a reluctant participant in the Web 2.0 world to date because of its focus on operating systems (though its Blue Monster initiative was created in order to address that perception, I believe).
While it’s Popfly initiative and a team of 17 programmers does not represent a wholesale shift in strategic direction for Microsoft, it’s an interesting signal.
While most readers of this blog will no doubt be familiar with Web 2.0 and mashups, here’s a bit of context. Generally, Web 2.0 refers to a "second generation" of web sites whereon visitors / users can contribute information for purposes of sharing and collaboration. Web 2.0 applications use Web services - most commonly Flash, Ajax, Silverlight or JavaFX user interfaces, Web syndication, blogs, and wikis. There are no set standards for Web 2.0, and generally it has come into existence through the work of designers and programmers building upon existing web server architecture and adding / stitching together web services. It can be said that Web 2.0 shares some principles and characteristics with SOA.
Mashups are often thought of as Web 2.0 applications. "Enterprise mashup" describes Web applications that combine content from multiple sources into an integrated user experience. Enterprise mashups are application hybrids combining content and functions from more than one existing source to create powerful Web applications, integrated Web experiences and to expand customer value networks. They are created when different application program interfaces (APIs) are combined or ‘mashed’ such that the functions from the combined applications come together to create an entirely new application.
As noted in the NY Times article, "Microsoft has long been a software engineering culture in which huge projects like Windows Vista are developed and tested by teams of hundreds, and whose completion time is measured in a large fraction of decades.
Although it is not yet widely visible to the outside world, some people inside Microsoft are beginning to break that mold."
Mr. Montgomery, a veteran product manager who has also worked as a computer industry writer and editor, is an example of how it just might be possible to teach dinosaurs to dance.
Last fall, his team introduced an intriguing software Web service called Popfly that is intended to make it possible for nonprogrammers to plug together Web components and data sources quickly to create useful new Web services. For example, news feeds could be added to digital images, or data lists to maps.
Introduced at the Web 2.0 conference last year by Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, Popfly was picked by PC World magazine as one of the most innovative computing and consumer electronics products of 2007. It has garnered more than 100,000 users — the company says the exact number is confidential — and now has a library of more than 50,000 “mashups”: new components or Web pages that have been created in a visual snap-together fashion, like Lego blocks.
The mashup is at the heart of a generation of Lego-style software that is emblematic of the second generation of the Internet. Both Google and Yahoo have developed tools to help Web users display apartment rentals on maps, or build complicated Web sites like
The Popfly programmers, however, have gone a step further in an effort to design a tool that is intended for a generation of Web users who are familiar with the Internet but are not skilled programmers.
A user might take Popfly and mash up his list of Amazon book recommendations with the Seattle Library book catalog on the Web, he said, and receive a notification when the waiting list for a particular book was down to zero.
“This is not just a passive experience,” Mr. Montgomery said. “You can take this stuff and use it in new ways.”
He now sees his target audience as people who are not professional developers, but who work with information.
Popfly, he said, is for “the 21- to 27-year-old crowd who grew up on the Web.”
“They have never known a world without eBay, Amazon, or Google,” he added. “They assume that when you create a piece of software it will be Internet-connected and it will have an innate sense of who your friends are.”
Microsoft is certainly not alone in seeing this kind of an opportunity. Yahoo offers a widely used tool call Yahoo Pipes that offers some of the same capabilities as Popfly, and Google has designed a “mashup editor” for more skilled programmers.
But Mr. Montgomery sees Popfly as a more ambitious and comprehensive effort. He also thinks that it could turn into a general educational tool for nonprogrammers.
[ Snip … ]
The largest challenge facing the Microsoft team of Popfly developers will be to gain the acceptance of the broader Web world. Because the company chose to design Popfly using a Microsoft Web graphics and animation technology called Silverlight, it will be treated with suspicion by an Internet universe that is increasingly committed to open standards.
Silverlight is an alternative developed by Microsoft to compete against Adobe’s Flash and, more recently, Flex systems, that are now used ubiquitously by Web developers.
Mr. Montgomery will also have to overcome the skepticism with which many Internet veterans now view Microsoft.
“Popfly shows me that Microsoft still thinks this is all about software, rather than about accumulating data via network effects, which to me is the core of Web 2.0,” said Tim O’Reilly, the founder and chief executive of O’Reilly Media, a print and online publisher. “They are using Popfly to push Silverlight, rather than really trying to get into the mashup game.”
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I’m sure we’ll find out how serious Microsoft is …
I have a sister-in-law who just turned 50 who has been until recently remarkably (and determinedly) resistant to online activities. She has basically not ever used the Internet for anything but email, and even that sparingly. Part of her reluctance and resistance is lack of familiarity (beginner’s embarrassment) and the other equally strong aspect has been her clear sense of how online can encroach on or steal time from what many will call "real life".
That there are forms of emergent social isolation and alienation, and addictive behaviours, that have developed as the online world has grwon and spread is irrefutable … just as the number(s) and types (s) of connections and interactions have multiplied and led to interesting behaviours and outcomes.
Back to my sister in law. She is also a very good cook (let’s say amateur gourmet chef) and a talented amateur photographer. As she has grown in her capabilities with a digital camera, she has also gotten more familiar with online environments. Bit by bit, her attitude has been changing. Recently she discovered StumbleUpon, and has almost become an evangelist, taking time out from conversations to show people who visit the interesting things that one can stumble upon just by clicking once. It was also interesting to see her and her girlfriends’ initial reaction to finding people they knew on Facebook.
Slowly and surely, more and more people will use services and tools on the Internet as it weaves its way into and throughout our lives. And as that happens, people will notice more and more the smooth sides and sharp edges of ways this spreading and weaving will impact the ways we live and work .. as will whatever the Cloud becomes.
"2008 is the year that sees Microsoft’s ambitions challenged" is a line halfway through the movie posted below. Eerily prescient, no?
What also seems certain is that even if Microsoft does not acquire Yahoo !, other acquisitions and mergers (and the concomitant convergence and integration) are sure to happen over the next decade
Maybe EPIC 2015 (originally released as EPIC 2014 in 2004 by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson) does not seem so weird or impossible today ?
This new CRC report reveals the major drivers of user-led innovation and explores how it is affecting organisations’ relationships with key stakeholders.
It investigates how user-led practices generate business and social value through a major case study of the virtual world Second Life. The report canvasses a number of pathways for organisations to leverage the participation of their audiences, customers and citizens in the interest of co-creating new products, services and platforms.
The research draws on extensive interviews with some of the world’s leading thinkers on the social, economic and legal aspects of user-led innovation including: Eric von Hippel (MIT), Yochai Benkler (Harvard), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Siva Vaidhyanathan (Virginia), John Howkins (Adelphi Charter), Michel Bauwens (P2P Alternatives) and Mitch Kapor (Linden Lab).
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The people interviewed, as cited, are certainly amongst those that are seen to carry significant authority in this Internet era. The same can be said of the Aspen Institute Roundtable participants, who included John Seeley Brown , Joi Ito, John Hagel (featured speaker at the upcoming FASTForward08 conference), Tom Malone of MIT, and other clearly credible folks.
At the risk of being seen to be involved in repeated and shameless self-promotion (I tagged this on to the previous post as well), I’d like to tag onto this emerging activity the working definition of wirearchy from a couple or so years ago. I promise I’ll stop soon
"a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology"
If you’re familiar with Twitter, you’ve probably figured out there’s some interesting things you can do with these types of SMS-based apps. If you’re a power Twitterer all of you know it’s way more than "what am I doing". Jaiku’s the other one, and although essentially both provide the same capabilities, I give an aesthetic edge to Jaiku for its slick looking badges. That aside, while working on a community project yesterday, we started thinking about how these tools can benefit the business. If you extrapolate what’s being done by some of the big brands, it’s pretty easy to see the evolution. Take ZDNet for instance. Their approach aggregates all of their blogs into one Twitter feed. Using something like TwitKu, (screenshot below) I get a pulse of what ZDNet is covering that hour. And ZDNet knows most people won’t have the inclination to subscribe to all of their blogs, so they give us options. That’s an important notion when building your business case. Always give the user options. If you want to be a media company, act like one. Show me how to consume, repurpose, mashup, and deliver your content not just in ways you want but ways I want.
Other companies, including Dell and the NYTimes, also use use Twitter to push out all sorts of content, from product updates and discounts to industry information and news. And isn’t it a bit ironic that the NY Times is so prolific on Twitter? They came across as a skeptic back in April.
So know that we know there’s some real-world scenarios for this stuff, the question becomes how to best incorporate these communication tools into an integrated and cohesive marketing strategy? I’d suggest start by stripping away all the Web 2.0 monikers and buzzwords and boil it down to content and communication. From there think about what everyone else is thinking about. How do I come up with creative ways to distribute my content? After that, think about how to be a facilitator. Once a brand becomes a trusted information source or content provider, conversations happen. Tools like Twitter and Jaiku can drive those conversations. And conversations build brand.
All major technology projects require a Return on Investment calculation that presumably shows the company making more money as a result of the implementation than it put into it. Of course, the “hard-dollar” numbers make for an easier sell to the C-level executives.
The problem with Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, of course, is that the benefits delivered are “soft” benefits; there are few examples of hard numbers to show ROI.
New research out of Forrester says these hard numbers are hard to come by. (InformationWeek report here, InfoWorld report here.)
As I noted in a previous post, the vice president of engineering of Google and the CIO of McKesson both acknowledged at a recent presentation that Web 2.0 is, at this stage, unmeasurable — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t delivering value to the organization.
The Forrester report acknowledges as much, noting that there have been some tangible business benefits seen, such as a drop in support center calls because of rich Internet applications or a database system replaced by a corporate wiki. But the greatest advantages are seen in softer benefits, such as business efficiency and competitive advantage.
Forrester’s survey of 275 executives finds that 63 percent of those surveyed use total cost of ownership, ROI, or internal rate of return to measure the value of Web 2.0 tools.
The executives rank instant messaging as having the most value to their organizations. At the bottom of the list is blogging. IM was rated by 37 percent as delivering “substantial value,” while only 11 percent rated blogging as such.
One potential flaw in the study (at least from what the articles say) is that it limited its area of study to RSS, podcasting, wikis, social networks or blogs. These are the important communication tools of Web 2.0.
However, it would be interesting to see a study of the perceived value of the information processing platforms engendered through Web 2.0 — such as mashups or Software as a Service. Are executives having more success determining hard-dollar ROI from these approaches?
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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?
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.
TIBCO Software is easing the way for Ajax component interoperability with the donation this week of its core Ajax message bus technology to the OpenAjax Alliance (OAA) Hub project. TIBCO announced the donation today, at the same time as it released its PageBus, a related open source product.
What’s in it for you? Well, besides the technological benefits, developers could walk away with a 50-inch plasma TV or a 30-GB iPod, if they enter — and win — the Ultimate Mashup Ajax Challenge.
PageBus applies “publish and subscribe” message bus programming patterns within the context of a single Web page, allowing communication among multiple Ajax components. This allows developers to create composite applications from reusable parts and services. All of this is designed to reduce development costs, improve interfaces over HTML and increase business agility.
The message-bus approach solves one of the key problems that comes from combining increasingly sophisticated composite applications. As the number of composite applications and mashups increase, the programming — and needed event-driven reliability — required can increase exponentially.
What’s more, creating client-SOA applications becomes easier because the same conceptual architecture — publish and subscribe — is used for both rich Internet client (RIA) activities as well as for compositing backend services. TIBCO says it has large banks and other users delivering mission critical, real-time data through SOA backends to scads of Ajax-enabled components on RIA clients.
Users get a quick, rich experience, while developers and architects gain flexibility and speed-to-deployment. TIBCO gains by riding the wave of increased demand for back-end SOA integration and messaging infrastructure to support the RIA ramp-up.
TIBCO, as a member of the OAA, is working with more than 70 companies to standardize key aspects of Ajax. The OpenAjaxHub 1.0, the group’s first specification implementation, aims to provide Ajax interoperability through the publish/subscribe interface. The specification will formally be out in about six weeks, but the code is now at Sourceforge.net.
PageBus is open source and can be downloaded. It’s also shipped as part of the TIBCO Ajax Message Service.
The above-noted mashup challenge is a developer community project to build the world’s largest mashup using PageBus and TIBCO’s General Interface. The contest runs through September 30, after which TIBCO and co-sponsor Artima will award prizes for the best entries.
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Can SOA and Web 2.0 co-exist? Better than that — they can finish each other’s sentences, so to speak.
Enterprise and Web 2.0 technologies — AJAX, mashups, and the like — can serve as rapidly deployable and highly flexible front-ends to back-end SOA. Desktop-installed software increasingly is being displaced through the use of AJAX and services.
eWeek’s Darryl Taft brought the worlds of SOA and Web 2.0 together in a recent article, noting how service firms are connecting the dots between front-end flexibility and back-end scalability.
For example, H&R Block — which uses a lot of seasonal workers, especially in the weeks leading up to April 15th — deployed SOA-connected AJAX portlets to more than 12,000 branch offices for temporary work spaces to meet the company’s staffing needs. The company employed AJAX instead of traditional desktop applications.
The Sports Club/LA is using both Web 2.0 technologies and SOA to support interaction with its 30,000 customers. The club’s Web site communicated data to the company’s Salesforce.com CRM system via Web services called through AJAX interfaces.
Dan Hushon, chief technology officer at EMC’s Grid Business Unit, speculates in the article that Web 2.0 concepts and technologies may, over time, “displace the WS-* stack in
many cases.”
Hushon said that lately, he’s seeing more JSON [JavaScript Object Access Protocol]/REST-based APIs to services than SOAP and JSON/REST. “And, in fact, REST, with its more data-centric approach, may very well prove to be better aligned with the need for collaborating around data. However, systemic security remains an Achilles’ heel for REST,” he said.
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Information technology is now entering an unprecedented era of rapidly expanding development productivity. This is because of two unassailable facts: The number and types of people who can actively participate in software development are expanding, while — at the same time — we’re seeing a rapid compression in the effort, cost and risk of taking applications and services from concept into full production.</
