Archive for SOA
by Joe McKendrick
August 20, 2011 at 11:06 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, SOA, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0
I have been covering and reporting and analyzing the business technology scene for more than 25 years now.
And every couple of years or so, a new technology “revolution” would spring up. Not the stale, overhyped prior revolution that had just passed — but a new, exciting revolution.This time, things would be different. This new revolution would change the way we thought about technology. This revolution would change the business. This revolution would bring the power of information technology to the masses. A revolution unlike any other revolution that ever came before it. The most incredible, unbelievable, paradigm-shifting revolution ever. Yada, yada. Promises, promises. Here are a few revolutions:
- In the late 1980s, it was client/server computing — sticking a PC in front of a larger computer.
- In the late 1990s. it was Web computing — sticking a browser in front of a network.
- In the late 1990s, it was dot-coms — sticking a browser in front of a store.
- In the early 2000s decade, it was Web services and XML — sticking standardized code in front of an application.
- In the late 2000s decade, it was cloud — sticking a cloud in front of everything.
- And lots of revolutions in between — usually sticking something in front of something else.
Note on the above list: some would call these techniques “putting lipstick on a pig.”
And when I would come home for dinner at night, or saw friends over the weekend, nobody would ask me what I was up to, and eyes would glaze over if I attempted to tell them. I wouldn’t even attempt to begin to explain to people what I had been writing about all day long. What’s so revolutionary about speeding up a purchase order process or building a rules engine that reduced exception reporting? What’s revolutionary about displaying 3270 “green-screen” code within a terminal emulation window? (Good stuff every business should pursue — but not something that will make you the life of the party.)
Then, one day a couple of years ago, I came home — and found my daughters (tween and teen) actively participating in the revolution. The social networking revolution. An information-technology revolution had finally hit home, and in a big way. Unlike the decades of vendor pronouncements about revolution, this one was real. The old order was being driven out — by employees and children of employees.
I knew this time, it was different. So, my daughters may someday ask me: “What did you do in the Social Networking Revolution, Daddy”*? I will tell them about the writings my colleagues and I did here at the FastForward site. And where the revolution took us.
Social media was more than a platform or a new mode of computing — it was a new way of connecting, of doing business, of leading nations, of working, of making friends and renewing friendships. But, for purposes of this site, first commissioned in December 2006, the theme was to explore to unfolding new world of Enterprise 2.0 in work and business settings. Consider where the social revolution has taken us in just a few short years:
Personal outsourcing: For the first time, employees all up and down the line have access to information they need to do their jobs better, advance companies, and advance their careers. John Schmidt so accurately described it as “personal outsourcing.” Unlike the traditional model for outsourcing — firms contracting out functions or processes to an outside firm — “individuals are starting to outsource their problem-solving and their own professional development,” he says. “They’re leveraging things like wikis, blogs, other collaboration events to collaborate in real-time with other individuals.” IT professionals go to Google, Wikipedia, and other online sources of support, Schmidt says. “They write out their question in their blog and look for their community to respond and help them. …they extended their network of peers to outside the four walls of their company. …they’re taking their problems and their professional challenges to the world.”
Economic revitalization and opportunity: Social networking and E2.0 provides a vast new array of tools for seeking out new markets, as well as managing through the tough times. Companies have means to better leverage the knowledge coursing through their corporate veins to turn around distressed lines of business. Employees have tools to ride through tough times, by staying well-connected with their professional networks and potential employers — even after they have been laid off. They no longer have to be powerless victims of recessions. (I called it the LIFT phenomenon — LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.) Employers have a resource to identify key talent to build their organizations.
Improving the quality — and joy — and therefore productivity — of work: The 9-to-5 rut had been withering on the vine for a number of years, and social networking is putting the final stakes in the industrialized, command-and-control model of management. Productivity is not something that occurs in a cubicle between 9 and 5, it’s something that comes in “bursts.” Social networks and E2.0 give everyone the flexibility and connectivity to respond to those bursts. In the process, the lines between work and personal life have not only just blurred — they’ve disappeared completely. Some Gloomy Guses say that’s not a good thing, and that employers will exploit it. I say it’s a real good thing. People should be proud of their work, and have the passion raging within them to want to pursue it, think about it, and embed it into their lives. Good riddance, 9 to 5.
Return on investment: A hotly debated topic. But the ROI is there. McKinsey & Company, for one, did countless studies the past few years that proved it. A couple of years back for example, they published the results of a survey of nearly 1,700 executives from around the world which paints a highly positive picture of the business returns being seen from E2.0 deployments. Close to seven out of ten respondents (69%) report that their companies “have gained measurable business benefits [italics mine], including more innovative products and services, more effective marketing, better access to knowledge, lower cost of doing business, and higher revenues.”
It’s been close to five years that we have been covering the revolution — a real revolution — at this site. And it’s only just begun.
(*By the way, the title of this post is a paraphrase of the 1966 movie “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” in which a bunch of soldiers in World War II hosted a street festival in an Italian town. One could say social networking is a global festival of sorts.)
by Joe McKendrick
November 8, 2010 at 6:15 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, SOA, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0
MIT’s Andrew McAfee, one of the world’s leading advocates of Enterprise 2.0, says he has started to notice a “sea change” in enterprise and CIO thinking about the Enterprise 2.o constellation of capabilities.
Speaking to an assembly of “old-economy” CIOs — typically jaded and seasoned individuals who have seen technology fads come and go and come and go again — McAfee says they recognized that Enterprise 2.0 had much to offer their organizations. “I realized that a fundamental shift had taken place: these executives were no longer talking mainly about their concerns, hesitations, or reasons for caution around Enterprise 2.0,” he relates. “Instead, they were talking about their frustrations that their companies weren’t moving faster toward it. For the first time with a group of ‘old economy’ CIOs, I was preaching to the converted.”
I have been hearing similar messages from CIOs over the past year, and Enterprise 2.0 offers two types of advantages to their businesses. First, it offers a way for IT and business end-users to better collaborate on new technology initiatives. One of the greatest criticisms of IT departments over the past decade is their “disconnect” from IT. Think about the mega-millions spent on large ERP and CRM systems over the years, only to face end-user resistance. Practices such as “Agile development” are intended to get IT and end-users to work more in sync with one another; social media and Enterprise 2.0 transcend physical and geographic barriers (e.g., executives in EU; developers in India; sales offices in USA) to enable groups to come together in real time.
Second, Enterprise 2.0 offers a way to put power directly in the hands of end-users to create and manage their own applications and networks without the bureaucracy of IT to slow things down. IT still has an extremely important role to play — ensuring the security, availability and conformity to standards of Enterprise 2.0 environments. But end users shouldn’t burn daylight waiting for reports and interfaces from their IT departments.
by Joe McKendrick
September 14, 2010 at 4:27 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, SOA, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0
Over at my ZDNet site, I’ve been engaged in a number of discussions about the uncertain future of IT departments as we know them. Outsourcing and cloud computing — especially cloud computing — are being seen as the culprits bringing about a new IT reality, with technology services increasingly delivered from outside the firewall.
Whether or not you agree that IT departments will wither away in the years to come, there’s no question that the role of IT executives, managers and professionals will evolve, likely away from that of hands-on technologists and more toward that of “technical strategic thinkers,” or consultants to the business that identify and secure the necessary IT resources to move the enterprise forward.
That being said, another important element of the evolution of IT that must be considered is the trend toward “self-service IT.” That is, thanks to Enterprise 2.0 tools and services, business end-users are now masters of their own domains, they can create and share their own front-end applications (or mashups) without having to submit requests to IT. Does this mean less of a role for IT, or simply less hassle of fussing with piles of user requests and the ability to concentrate on the big things, like back-end security? More likely the latter.
Dion Hinchcliffe recently weighed in on the future of IT, and suggests a new type of re-alignment is taking place. Dion is in the camp that suggests rising tides such as cloud computing, social business computing, and now, “enterprise app stores” are killing off enterprise data centers.
What will take the place of enterprise IT? Dion calls it “Shadow IT” or “CoIT,” which will soon be competing with traditional IT departments for IT dollars:
“IT is increasingly being marginalized by such business priorities and needs on one end and on the other end by workers on the ground who feel they have a better grasp of their own local requirements and are therefore happy to use the consumer IT they are so familiar with to address them.”
CoIT may see success because it percolates up from the business, and is not based on big-budget projects that often don’t see much adoption across enterprises. IT departments may find themselves working more closely than ever with the business as end-users assume greater responsibility for their technology choices. And remember, having advanced technology does not automatically mean business success. Anyone can make a high-quality movie these days, but how many new Steven Spielbergs are on the horizon? Probably no more than 40 years ago.
Perhaps the new role of IT is work with the business to bring out the magic that technology makes possible. “There is an important supporting role for IT but history has shown that only in a small number of companies does IT lead business innovation,” Dion says. “A larger group of non-IT workers than ever before in history can now see what’s clearly possible with technology, we are surrounded by it every day on the Web and in our persona lives.”
by Joe McKendrick
July 11, 2010 at 4:29 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, SOA, Social Computing, Social Media, User Revolution, Web 2.0
Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin didn’t have social networking or Enterprise 2.0 technologies at their disposal. But they had a global, visionary way of thinking. Imagine how the power of their ideas would have been shared and spread if they did have such tools. That’s what’s happening these days.
With the multi-disciplinary talents they possessed, visionaries such as da Vinci, Franklin, and others shook the world. Now, the world demands new versatility. Today’s managers and professionals are in a prime position to capture that spirit and carry it forward, thanks to technology innovations, says Vinnie Mirchandani in his new book, The New Polymath: Profiles in Compound-Technology Innovations.
Today’s organizations are looking for new ways of competing in today’s crazy global economy — digitally, virtually, and analytically. Vinnie’s book points out how technology innovations are expanding beyond the bounds of managing operating and storage systems. (Polymath is a Greek word for one who excels in many disciplines.) Technology — thanks to the network effect — is driving many of the important changes now reshaping business and society.
For example, Vinnie takes a look at GE’s approach to corporate IT — not as a cost center, but as a profit center — which makes the business even more innovative. The company “is innovating based on savvy understanding of global technology economics and the astute leveraging of licensing and intellectual property rights.” For example, GE maintains a “professional networking platform” called SupportCentral that “has more than 50,000 communities with over 10,000 experts across almost 20,000 business process flows.” With 25 million hits a day in 20 languages from GE employees around the globe, SupportCentral, as Vinnie describes it, is “the biggest business-focused social network you have never heard of.”
The IT culture GE supports helps it to maintain its lead as one of the most innovative companies in the world. As Vinnie describes it, “in a world focused on light innovation around social networks and mobile devices, GE is making industrial innovation fashionable again…. Its internal IT innovates on its own and coaches its business unit on intellectual property and technology contracting issues as the businesses increasingly embed technology into their products.”
Vinnie also discusses the growing role of analytics in helping guide corporate decisions, but cautions that it takes knowledgeable humans to make the most of the capabilities the technology unleashes. “A wide range of analytical tools and technologies is available to enterprises today. Particularly encouraging is the progress around unstructured analytics, predictive analytics, and data visualization. Of course, recent misses in economic forecasting have reemphasized the need for ‘human intelligence.’ For that reason, it is nice to see a new generation of analytical ‘artists’ like Paul Kredrosky [author of the 'Infectious Greed' blog] emerge and the move to a decision-, not data-centric, analytical framework.”
Taking a cue from the Renaissance nature of the today’s technology, Vinnie distills much of his thinking into a RENAISSANCE Framework, which encompasses the following:
- Residence: “Homes better technologically equipped than the office.” As Vinnie describes it: “Enterprises are gradually waking up to the fact there is no law precluding them from using products aimed at consumers themselves, sometimes at startling savings.”
- Exotics: “Innovation from left field.”
- Networks: “Bluetooth to broadband.” Vinnie describes the revolution reshaping communications on all levels — limitless telco opportunities; mobile apps, entire countries joining the computer network, function-rich devices, and citizen journalism.
- “Arsonists” and other disruptors. Vinnie observes that “most rebels tend to be start-ups, but often larger, established vendors will go after one another, especially when they are trailing in a market or introducing a new product.” Vinnie quotes Seth Ravin: industries need to go through conversions, to go against what some would call today’s “evil empires.”
- Interfaces: “For all our services.” Beyond the iPad, Vinnie discusses technology-driven transportation, and even technology you can wear.
- Sustainability: “Delivering to both the ‘green’ and ‘gold’ agendas.” Social responsibility is not just a PR strategy; it’s baked into the business model of many organizations.
- Singularity: “The human-machine convergence.”
- Analytics: “Spreadsheets, search, and semantics.” Vinnie cites examples such as Best Buy, which “has 15-plus terabytes of data on over 75 million customers… its sophisticated analytics has allowed it to identify that a sliver—just seven percent of its customers—drive 43 percent of the company’s overall sales volume.”
- Networks: “Communities, crowds, contracts, and collaboration.” Vinnie quotes Paul Greenberg, who talks about the “Social CRM” phenomenon: “The customer is increasingly controlling the conversation… Classic” CRM was operational… Social CRM is not operational—it’s collaborative more often than not. It is based on the company and customer’s interplay. It’s no longer how do you manage a customer but how you engage that customer.”
- Clouds: “Technology-as-a-service.”
- Ethics: Essential in “an age of cyberwar and cloning.” Vinnie quotes Batya Friedman: “Value Sensitive Design (VSD) is a way of looking at systems that brings in human values — so informed consent, human dignity, physical and psychological well – being among others; designers can use VSD alongside their favorite design practices, doing their best technical and usability work.”
Image: Diagram of a random network containing components that all have approximately the same number of connectivity. Image courtesy of Panos Oikonomou and Philippe Cluzel, University of Chicago.
by Joe McKendrick
March 11, 2010 at 10:16 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Event Announcements, FASTforward'09, SOA, Social Computing, Social Media, User Revolution, Web 2.0
I just got back from the FASTforward event held in New York City, in which more than 400 attendees were treated to a range of applications and new thinking around the way organizations collaborate. Bjorn Olstad, distinguished engineer for Microsoft and CTO of FAST, kicked off the proceedings with an overview of the latest FAST search functionality, available as part of Microsoft SharePoint or as a standalone solution. He discussed the growing interconnectness between search — offered via internal networks as well as through customer-facing portals — and collaboration and real-time customer experiences.
Major organizations are leveraging collaborative tools to improve the experiences for customers and constituents, and this was explained by representatives of two major global organizations. G. “Gurvais” Clayton Grigg, chief knowledge officer for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, explained how his agency is managing an enormous flow of data into an already massive amount of content and documents. He said it was estimated that the FBI maintains enough paper to create a tower 178 miles high.
The challenge is transfer the nuggets of important information on some of this paper to a digitized and accessible form, Grigg says. Paper artifacts will be around for a long time to come, he points out. “The bad guys aren’t going to be organizing their evidence as metadata,” he says. “They’re not going to hand you everything on a CD.”
He said the agency’s strategy is to better leverage three sources of information — data, paper, and people.
Questions that need to be asked about information include “What do we know?” “Who knows it?” “How is it being used?” and “How is it being shared?” Grigg says. The ability to connect people and help them collaborate is paramount, he adds. “While it’s really good to help people find data, it’s even better to help them find the people with the data,” he says.
Technology needs to take a back seat to people and business considerations, he adds. “When people come to me requesting a technology, I first ask them to describe the problem without technology. If they can do that, they understand the problem better.”
Michael Rossotti, application services sr. analyst at Merck, explained how the pharmaceutical giant was leveraging the FAST Enterprise Search Platform and complementary solutions to deliver the latest information to physicians and consumers around the world.
The company maintains two primary portals, Merck Medicus, for doctors, and MerckSource for consumers. Both now have search capabilities built in.
The goals of the implementation, begun in March 2007, were to “have the user experience be central,” Rossotti says. “We wanted to build trust with the customer. Sometimes our only interactions with customers is through our portals.” The company conducted a phased rollout of capabilities, starting with an advanced search feature for Medicus. The first phase was linking to 50 companies across the enterprise that were crawled on a daily basis. The portals were later enhanced with a federated search capability to other search results, but still contained within the portal page. In 2009, the company integrated its portal search capabilities with SharePoint, he says. Currently, the system sees about five queries a second, he says.
Rossotti says some of the lessons learned from the experience include the need to “be wary of feature creep,” as departments seek to activate more tools and enhancements at the sites. “If you start to do too much, the experience for the client can become too complex.” The priorities, Rossotti, are to “step forward on governance, and meet increased demand.”
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