Finally - The answer to adoption of Enterprise 2.0 in the traditional Corporation

April 9, 2008 at 6:15 am · Filed under Change, Culture, Dr David Vaine, Euan Semple, Interviews, KM, Management Theory, Public Media, Relationships, Social Media, Social Networking, Story, The 'Phoric, Video, YouTube, interaction, podcasts

On April 1st, we had the honor of recording a podcast of the esteemed Dr David Vaine, Senior Partner of Apparently KM PLC, who has finally revealed how to make 2.0 work in the most traditional organization.

The link to the “Phoric” is here. I must warn you that some of the material may not be workplace safe.

The ‘Phoric” is a site where well known people in the 2.0 world choose 3 clips from YouTube and discuss why these are important to them. You may find some of the other guests moving and funny. Guest include Matt Moore, Euan Semple, Alex Kjerulf (Chief Happiness Officer)

All fun aside, and there is lots of fun here, the “Phoric shows the “heart” of the 2.0 relationship explicitly and it shows how simple tools can have a huge impact.

Enjoy

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Andrew McAfee Must Have Been Quite Persuasive …

February 24, 2008 at 9:03 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Blogging, Change, Culture, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, FASTforward08, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, podcasts

I don’t think it was as a result of Andrew’s presentation at the recent FASTForward 08 conference, but may have been related to the recent Enterprise 2.0 / KM discussion reported on this blog involving Tom Davenport and Andrew McAfee, moderated by colleague Jim McGee.

David Gurteen reports in his most recent newsletter that Tom Davenport has agreed to understand that social software and social computing has a growing and perhaps central role in the ongoing evolution of knowledge work.  This is news because it was, I believe, beginning to seem as if Davenport was becoming a somewhat curmudgeonly holdout against a growing consensus that wikis, blogs and social computing are having a clear impact on the nature of knowledge work and the "management" off socially-constructed just-in-time knowledge.

As a general assertion, I think it’s fair to say that social computing is bringing new capabilities and capacity to the (interactive) construction of just-in-time knowledge in an environment characterized by ongoing flows of information

Tom Davenport quoted in the Gurteen Knowledge newsletter:

.

" Still, that E2.0 is the new KM didn’t hit me for a while. But when Andy said the ultimate value of E2.0 initiatives consists of greater responsiveness, better "knowledge capture and sharing",  and more effective "collective intelligence", there wasn’t much doubt. When he talked about the need for a willingness to share and a helpful attitude, I remembered all the times over the past 15 years I’d heard that about KM."

and later

"I admit to a mild hostility to the hype around Enterprise 2.0 in the past. I have reacted in a curmudgeonly fashion to what smelled like old wine in new bottles. But I realized after hearing Andy talk that he was an ally, not a competitor. If E2.0 can give KM a mid-life kicker, so much the better. If a new set of technologies can bring about a knowledge-sharing culture, more power to them. Knowledge management was getting a little tired anyway."

.

Actually, it’s not fair to say that Tom Davenport "has agreed to understand" …. it’s more fair to say that the context in which terminology and jargon are being used has become clearer to him and more commonly shared amongst participants in (an important) conversation.

It seems clear to me that "Enterprise 2.0" is here to stay … the clearest signal to date is the raft of changes made over the past two or three years to the mainstream offerings of the biggest workplace productivity vendors to enable many forms of collaboration, combined with acquisitions, strategic alliances with innovative smaller E2.0 players and the beginning moves by the major consulting firms (such as publishing white papers, surveys and research reports) to pay attention to the emerging Enterprise 2.0 field.

I believe that social computing in the workplace will lead to the re-design of the fundamental principles of knowledge work.  Dave Snowden is a well-known KM guru who has said as much in a podcast created several months ago wherein I asked him about the likely impacts of Web 2.0 on knowledge work and knowledge management. 

Here’s a link to that podcast, wherein in my opinion Dave holds forth on the coming changes to the design and dynamics of knowledge work in a particularly clear and coherent manner.

Dave Snowden is also fond of saying that "one should not throw the baby out with the bathwater" … and in the context of this post I think it’s useful to note that one of the happy outcomes of our growing understanding of the Enterprise 2.0 field is that the advent of using wikis and blogs and widgets and social computing inside the firewall does not mean that all the thinking, theorizing and implementation of initiatives related to KM 1.0 needs to be tossed away.  Rather it seems that much of what has gone before can be built upon and enhanced, and notably in the areas of cultural adaptation and changes to management practices.

Indeed, I (and my co-author Jim Bair) have tried to reflect these emerging perspectives in a just-published industry book titled "Making Knowledge Work - the arrival of Web 2.0" - (ARK Group UK), recently given an initial once-over on this blog by colleague Bill Ives, wherein I cite Andrew McAfee, Tom Davenport, Dave Snowden, Dion Hinchcliffe, Ikujiro Nonaka and a number of other well-known KM theorists and practitioners.  I like to believe that the book’s content has struck an initial balance between the complex taxonomies of many organizations’ accumulated "knowledge", the large investments made over the past decade to enterprise information architecture, many workers’ need for some structure and direction and the clear power of more organic social computing carried out by interconnected individuals with a wide range of styles when it comes to cognition, learning and ways to turn pertinent information into useful knowledge.

I also think it’s clear that we are all going to be learning a lot more about the design, dynamics and management of knowledge work over the next several years.  It will never be left to be completely organic - free-flowing, self-assembling and emergent.  Humans are tinkerers, especially in a technocratic era and even more so those of such an era who are bent on having organizations perform more and better.  They will always be looking for ways to make knowledge and knowledge work more effective and more profitable. 

FASTForward 08 made that clear.

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Today’s interviews by Jerry Michalski

February 19, 2008 at 6:56 pm · Filed under FASTForward '08, Interviews, podcasts

Below you’ll find links to the many great interviews we’ve posted so far. Tune in, pass them around, and feel free to follow up on the interviewee’s remarks in the comments.

• John Hagel - consultant, author
• Joe McKendrick - analyst, blogger
• Bob Coxe - chief information officer for Criterion Systems
• Robert Paterson - Robert Paterson, consultant, blogger
• Clare Hart - EVP, Dow Jones & Company
• David Sutija - SVP of enterprise products, FAST
• David Weinberger - speaker, consultant, author
• Tom Davenport - consultant, author
• Jorn Ellefsen - CEO of Comperio
• Charles Fiesel - Roundarch
• Don Tapscott - strategist, author of “Wikinomics”
• Sue Feldman - research vice president, content technologies group, IDC

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A Meaning for the Yahoo bid by MSFT

February 2, 2008 at 6:59 am · Filed under Apple, Business Model, Enterprise 2.0, Microsoft, NPR, PBS, Public Media, Relationships, barriers, iTouch, iTunes, podcasts

As sure as the sun rises in the morning - the web will become the primary delivery platform for all information.

Many in public radio and TV, have told me that my feelings about how fast the shift would take place from “air” and cable to web are exagerated. My argument is this. “Weight of money”.

When you pay $45 billion dollars you are not fooling around.

MSFT wish to get ready NOW for this new reality for when the bulk of advertising revenue and action are on the web. Ad revenues are $50 billion right now and are expected to rise to $80 billion by 2009/10. This is the prize. When the ad money shifts out of traditional media, you will hear the sucking sound of a mortal wound. It will be too late to reinvent your self then.

All the supporting parts of a web based radio and TV will have to accelerate their plans

• The viewing platforms such as the iPods and the large screen TV’s are ready now for a direct link. The Early Adopters are watching the bulk of their video online.
• Many listen to radio online at the office or on their iPods on their commute
• YouTube is bursting with great content both from traditional sources and from new entrants
• Channels such as iTunes and Miro are building capacity - it will be the ease of use that these channels offer that will pull in the Early Majority.
• Major Networks have their toe in the water and are offering some content online

The Yahoo bid will accelerate all this work.

So what is the work that Public TV and Radio have to do in this context of no time? It is to solve the business model problem. How to offer the best content from TV and Radio AND keep the stations whole. How to do that? I think the answer is to make the offer direct with the forced choice of the show and the station.

I am not saying that people will not listen to radio nor am I saying that people will stop watching TV. People will still buy SUV’s and Trucks. But the bulk of the people, especially people who are naturally curious will make the switch.

Remember Mikey - “Give it to Mikey - he hates everything. Well my wife Robin, is the tech Mikey.

Robin is very very resistant to gadgets. BUT …….. She now listens to all her radio online - loading the podcasts onto her MP3 player which she uses when she is doing stuff around the house and walking the dogs. And in her down time, I hardly ever see her anymore - she has discovered YouTube. She has discovered that it is packed with content that she wants to watch - content that is “serious” that is just what a good Public TV member would want to watch. She has discovered that it is easy to watch and listen to what she wants when she wants and that there is tons and tons of great content out there.

She is closer to 60 than 50 and is in the centre of the demographic for Public TV.

So Robin’s desire for interesting content that intrigues her has been met already. Just imagine how easy it will be for her to have access to even more and what her choices will be soon.

Don’t you want her and the millions like her as your audience?

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The Last Web Frontier - The Car

January 11, 2008 at 6:43 am · Filed under Autos, CES, NPR, News, Public Media, Social Media, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Web Advertising, podcasts

Part of the growth of audience for public radio has been the car. For many Americans, commuting can take up between 1 and 2 hours a day. NPR’s key shows Morning Edition and All Things Considered have been designed to meet the demand of thoughtful people who sit alone day after day in traffic. Many of the hosts seem to have become friends - after all for a 4 hour commute, the radio hosts spend more “talk” time with the commuter than any other person.

Until now, the car, like the plane, has been a “Web Free Zone” But all of this is going to change.

At the CES this month, Cars moved onto the spotlight. (AP)

Cars and automotive technologies from startups and established aftermarket makers are abundant at this gadget show. They’re coming in such variety that they encapsulate many of the advances seen elsewhere at CES in cell phones, TVs, video games and wireless Internet networking.

For example, one theme at CES is the development of touch-screen and voice-activated controls for portable devices. Cars are showing that off, too, with systems that let people make phone calls, navigate, choose music and have e-mails read to them without dangerously fumbling for manual controls.

Or look how CES overall is highlighting the widening availability of Internet content. Autonet Mobile Inc. offers a small box for car trunks that takes a cellular broadband signal and uses Wi-Fi to relay it to portable computers in the car, so people can browse the Internet in the vehicle. And while the car is parked near a home wireless network, people can beam music and video content to it for enjoyment on upcoming road trips.

“The car is a lifestyle product,” said Sterling Pratz, Autonet Mobile’s CEO. “It’s not just a car anymore.”

The clock is ticking for the car terrestial radio market. Wifi is not only seen as being key to car entertainment and guidance but also enables the systems in cars to be updated.

One reason for automakers’ increasing comfort is that powerful computers now found in cars can get software updates fired in by wireless networks, letting vendors fix bugs and keep features up to date, said Erik Goldman, president of Hughes Telematics Inc. His company is expected to begin outfitting Chrysler and Mercedes cars with a navigation, entertainment and diagnostics service in 2009.

Another change is that car makers have often sought to differentiate themselves with proprietary electronic systems, like General Motors Corp.’s OnStar, that operate independently from gadgets people regularly use outside the car.

But these days automotive electronics are being more closely integrated with standard Web technologies.

For example, the Hughes Telematics system will include a personal Web portal that lets people remotely lock and unlock their car doors, plan routes, check their auto’s emissions and engine status, select music playlists and even monitor their vehicle’s location.

Increasing ties to the Web could broaden the field of automotive-tech vendors beyond traditional players. Last year, OnStar began working with MapQuest.com, part of Time Warner Inc.’s AOL LLC, so drivers could plan their routes online and send them to the car.

At a CES panel on the interplay between cars and electronics, Eckhard Steinmeier, general manager of BMW’s “Connected Drive” initiative, showed a commercial in which a woman says she wants to investigate sushi options. So she heads out of her house, in the rain, to do a Google search from her Beemer’s dashboard.

Where and how we connect to the web and to each other is becoming ubiquitous. Finding the best interface is therefore shaping up as being very important.

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Is Web 2.0 Business Peoples’ Revenge for SOA?

November 2, 2007 at 11:46 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, SOA, SaaS, Web 2.0, podcasts

“They’ve turned SOA into a huge infrastructure project that takes years to come to fruition, and in the meantime, the business people don’t get much of a look at what’s going on. In a way, Web 2.0 is the business peoples’ revenge.”

-Phil Wainewright

EbizQ’s Krissi Danielsson has published a great overview of my panel discussion with industry luminaries Phil Wainewright and Dana Gardner on “SOA and Web 2.0: Mashups, SaaS, and Collaboration: Putting the Pieces Together.”

Dana and Phil agreed to disagree on the speed of the Web 2.0 and SOA convergence — Dana sees the two paradigms as “complementary,” and noted that many of the Web 2.0 techniques around rapid front-end application development can be considered a form of “Guerrilla SOA.”

Phil, however, cautions that Web 2.0 may be too uncontrolled and ungovernable to blend in with more deliberate and planned SOA methodologies. “I think it’ll be a few years before Web 2.0 and SOA really coexist,” Wainewright said. “Web 2.0 is so ill defined and people are still using it to experiment rather than with a definitive purpose.”

Both Phil and Dana agree that the combined forces of SOA and Web 2.0 will be tremendous market disruptors.

Perhaps SOA and Web 2.0 can both be categorized as Web-Oriented Architecture, or WOA. Dana put it best when he suggested that WOA perhaps should be called “Watercooler-Oriented Architecture.” After all, is this not where the REAL communication and information gets exchanged within organizations? “The social nature of Web 2.0 technologies tends to increase the sharing of experiences and wisdom as well, almost making a Waterfountain Oriented Architecture, ” Dana pointed out.

My Web 2.0-SOA panel discussion, as well as the other eight sessions that were part of the “SOA in Action” conference, are archived for on-demand listening here. (Free registration required.)

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SOA Insights analysts on Web 3.0, Google’s role in semantics, and the future of UDDI

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]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (640)

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The macro economics side of Web 2.0 marketing efficiencies

July 22, 2007 at 11:05 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Media, Web 2.0, podcasts

The Wall Street Journal on July 2 contained an excellent story about how economists view U.S. businesses’ prospects for the coming months. The story explains how businesses are facing higher energy, food, and labor costs while needing to hire more workers — all of which mutes general productivity.

The story says:

If they can’t pull off a resurgence in productivity, businesses face a tough choice: Raise prices or live with reduced profit margins. Judging from their outlook for corporate profits, the forecasters believe that many … will choose to split the difference.

That means raising their prices some and living with lower profits, too. This is quite different from the most previous business climate where consistently rising productivity and tame inflation allowed for ongoing record profits.

However, there is another aspect to this somewhat bleak assessment. The next business cycle will demand that many companies focus on efficient top-line growth so that they can maintain profits, even as productivity slackens.

Many businesses may be constrained in how they can grow revenues, perhaps because they only supply a static region or supply a shrinking customer base. Most businesses, however, can find new ways to sell their goods and services in more places — especially by better use of the Internet. That’s because the Internet is and will continue to be a marketer’s most powerful tool.

If the past business climate was about productivity as a means to profits, and the Internet was a benefit, then the next business cycle is about revenue growth and finding new markets as the means to fiscal health. And that means that the Internet becomes indispensable. The better you know how to leverage the Internet for your business the better off you will be as an individual — for your current employer or the next.

Interestingly, the need to find efficient ways to increase the market for goods and services comes just as advertising — a traditional way to grow revenues — is in transition. Many businesses are re-evaluating how they advertise, spurred on by Google, viral marketing on the Web, and better use of community outreach and online communication with customers, partners, and prospects.

In observing IT vendors in how they reach markets in novel ways, I now see four major thrusts (and a further diminishing role for traditional advertising). The four major go-to-market avenues are:

• Traditional inside efforts. This means creating a compelling web site, a great sales force (inside, outside, direct and channel), strong ecommerce applications, downloads and other online distribution means, and super customer support. This will not change.

• Traditional outside efforts. This means advertising through new and old media, marketing promotions and events, email and direct marketing, and PR/AR/IR. This section may well see resources shifted to the two newer categories …

• Viral. This means creating content and conversation, blogs/podcasts/videocasts, or reacting to content and conversation, such that online awareness is understanding is generated about your goods, services, and image, via the social networking effects on the Web. This is and should continue to grow significantly, probably funded by the previous ad budgets.

• Search. Through all of a business’s efforts, they should focus on making their values and knowledge easily accessed via Web, and more discretely searched through the keywords and phrases that best bind it to their users and communities. This will be the more effective way to grow the top line revenues for many companies for some time. Again, look for traditional ad budgets to fuel this arena, too.

So if you are associated with a business they sees the landscape as the country’s leading economists do, and you recognize you must grow both current and new markets — to spur more revenue and business volume — and that you must do it efficiently, do yourself a favor. Right now pretend that you are a customer or prospect of what you sell.

Now, go to Google or another major web search engine. Search on some terms that might come to your mind as you begin a research or informational journey on what your business supplies. Focus on the problem that your online prospect will have, and the solution you bring to them. Does a search on one lead to the other? Does a question about to fix what you fix actually point to how to evaluate and/or acquire that fix? Right now, online?

It should. What you should see there in the top search results on the left, or organic side, are the fruits of all your marketing efforts:

• Your website, your product and service descriptions, pricing and how you beat the competition in value, the means to contact a sales rep, a click-through to purchase option, or more direct help.

• The freely available trustworthy informational assets on the problem-solution set that defines your business value, including conversations, media write-ups, third-party endorsements, interviews, and blogs … anything that your communities generate about you.

This is how new revenues and market opportunities will be born most productively. When the going gets tough, a business’s online marketing gets going.

Like many, you will also buy search-based advertising, based on those essential keywords, that create more ways for those seeking you out as a business to reach your website, product information, sales and support, and solutions. But when you want the most bang for the fewer bucks, the organic results pay best and longest. Invest in them now.

What’s also interesting is that the investment, and — more importantly — the return on the investment you and your clients make in organic search results will remain strong in nearly any macro business environment. That’s right, whether the business cycle is in profit growth mode, revenue growth mode, recession, depression, boom times or flat — your best ticket to keeping the accountants happy is bringing in leads and sales organically, via search-inspired research and inquiry.

So my prognosis is that the ways in which the Internet can assist companies have evolved well during the past 10 years, but the coming business climate — no matter what climate it is — is where Internet marketing will be needed the most. And the future, no matter what the world economy is up to, will also deliver the most value and power through the reach of the World Wide Web.

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Parsing search marketing, the ‘content pyramid’ and RSS strategies with Sam Whitmore

July 12, 2007 at 8:29 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Media, Web 2.0, open source, podcasts

Read a transcript of the discussion.

In my work covering enterprise application development and deployment strategies, I often find myself also witnessing a sea-change in how software providers market their values. Software has always been a challenge to market, and many of the most innovative thinking in online marketing has come from the software industry.

I’m now seeing four distinct legs of support under the software marketing bench: 1) traditional internal marketing (web sites, downloads, product literature), 2) traditional external marketing (advertising, events, webinars, lists, email, newsletters), 3) viral (blogs, podcasts, videocasts, community sites, social media), and 4) search (all of the above plus tagging, sharing, community, relevance).

I’m also seeing a hastening shift from the second leg to the third and fourth, in terms of investment and expected return. Companies are moving the emphasis from traditional media to social media.

Creating and distributing good content is essential to all these activities, and accelerates the movement to social networking and community development. I recently had a podcast conversation with Sam Whitmore, editor and proprietor of Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey, in which we discuss these themes along with the burgeoning role of RSS, community, conversations, and search.

Together we wonder whether the “public” relations community will soon gain a new cohort, the “search” relations person. It’s a new way to reach the public, the right public, and on the public’s terms. Their search terms. Search is the new media. [ADDENDUM: Here are two other podcasts I’ve done on search, one with ZoomInfo and the other with FAST Search and Transfer.]
Here are some excerpts:

We’re now getting people to understand the concept of “You don’t have to browse anymore.” They still search, of course, probably more than ever before. But you think about the two ways … that people get their information now, it’s either through RSS syndication, or through search. And it’s almost quaint to think back about, “Yeah, I think I am going to go through my bookmarks and see what I haven’t visited in a while.” I don’t know anybody who does that anymore.

The idea is to start thinking strategically about your content. Instead of having thousands of people around your company, each creating their own content without much interaction about it, without much coordination about it — but perhaps a lot of overlap and a lack of reuse — adding to more of a case of redundancy. And that goes for everything from mimeographs to RSS feeds, and all in between.

But when you think about content more strategically — and can plan for and create core content that they can be reused and extended across different uses, like marketing literature, the documentation you provide for your services and products, your advertising, as well as your communications with your investors, with analysts, with press — you create more of a coordinated core set of messages and documents and content. And we’ll be seeing more audio and video increasingly in this mix.

If a company can create this content core and allow people to use it and make it accessible — in the same way as with the development of software tools and components — you can better control your costs; you can control better your message because more of your messaging will be in sync, because its all coming off of the same core.

Any company that has a strategic direction that they are taking their business to should say, “What are the keywords that relate to our future? What is the content we can create that will drive recognition from those keywords of our value, specifically as an individual company? And how can we create an ongoing process by which we’re feeding that algorithm machine over and over again to retain that high ranking?”

That to me is marketing 2.0.

I think that these IT trade titles and these people that are being rapidly disintermediated, they need to figure out how to get some of their content to rank well in generic search environments. And that brings us back to SEO and the fact that you can subscribe to RSS search results and these people really are getting hammered.

The way you go about a whitepaper is you do research, you get information and you do interviews — primary research. And what is an interview? It’s a discussion. Why not just create a great discussion with the experts and put that up, instead of putting it into some sort of a turgid-prose, 80-page tome that people only read the executive summary of?

Why not give the long tail its due and put up a series of five key discussions with the experts you would have interviewed anyway for the whitepaper, and let people either read the transcript or glance at the executive summary of each individual interview or discussion, and then pick and choose? To me that’s just a better way to learn. And it also, by the way, is a lot easier for the experts as well as the authors. So it really is a discussion.

Read a transcript of the discussion.

 

 A podcast conversation with Sam Whitmore on marketing 2.0 [44:27m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (517)

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SOA and SaaS convergence points to new market demand for ‘integration-as-a-service’

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]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (593)

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