Column 2 by Sandy Kemsley : Enterprise 2.0

{ Category Archives } Enterprise 2.0

IT360: Matthew Glotzbach, Google Enterprise

I’m at the IT360 for a couple of hours this morning, mostly to hear Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management for Google Enterprise. It’s a sad commentary on the culture of Canadian IT conferences shows that this session is entitled "Meet Matthew Glotzbach of Google" in the conference guide, as if he doesn’t need to actually talk about anything, just show up here in the frozen north — we need to work on that "we’re not worthy" attitude.

Google’s Enterprise division includes, as you might expect, search applications such as site search and dedicated search appliances, but also includes Google Apps which many of us now use for hosting email, calendaring and document collaboration functions.

Glotzbach’s actual presentation title is "Head in the Clouds", referring to cloud computing, or more properly in this context, software as a service. He made an analogy between SaaS applications and electricity, referencing Nicholas Carr’s book The Big Switch, talking about the shift from each factory generating its own power to the centralized generation of electricity that is now sold as a service on the power grid. Just as it took a cultural shift to move from each company having their own power generation facilities (and a VP of electricity who was intent on defending his turf), we’re now undergoing a cultural shift to move from each company managing all of their own IT services to using best-of-breed services at a much lower cost over the internet.

He discussed five things that cloud computing has given us:

Democratization of information, giving anyone the chance to have their say in some way, from Wikipedia to Twitter to blogs. This is dependent upon and facilitated by standards, particularly simple, easy-to-use standards like RSS; in fact, all public APIs for Google Apps are RSS-based. What IT can learn from this is to keep things simple, something that enterprise IT is not really known for. Cloud computing also allows for a much freer exchange of information between people who don’t speak the same language, through real-time translation capabilities that aren’t feasible on a desktop platform: for example, add en2zh (en2zh@bot.talk.google.com) to your Google group chat so that you can have a text chat with someone with one of you typing in English and the other in Mandarin Chinese.
Economics of the new information supply chain. Cloud computing fundamentally changes the economics of enterprise IT: the massive scale of cloud-based storage (e.g., Google Apps, Amazon S3) and computing (e.g., Amazon EC2) drives down the cost so much that it’s almost ridiculous not to consider using some of that capacity for enterprise functionality. Of course, we’ve been seeing this manifested in consumer applications for a couple of years now, with practically unlimited storage offered in online email and photo storage applications, but more companies need to start making this part of their enterprise strategy to reduce costs on systems that are essential but not a competitive differentiator.
Democratization of capabilities, allowing a developing nation to compete with a developed country, or a small business to compete with a major corporation, since they all have access to the same type of IT-related functionality through the cloud. In fact, those without legacy infrastructure are sometimes in a better position since they can start with a clean slate of new technology and become innovative collaborators. It’s also possible for any company, no matter how small, to get the necessary Googlejuice for a high ranking in search results if they have quality, targeted information on their site — as the cartoon says, on the internet no one knows you’re a dog.
Consumer-driven innovation will set the pace, and will drive IT. The consumer market is much more Darwinian in nature: consumers have more choices, and are notoriously fast to switch to another vendor. Businesses tend not to do this because of the high costs involved in both the selection process and in switching between vendors; I’m not sure that Glotzbach is giving enough weight to the costs of switching corporate applications, since he seems to indicate that companies may adopt more of a consumer-like fickleness in their vendor relationships. As more companies adopted more cloud computing, that will likely change as it becomes easier to switch providers.
Barriers to adoption of cloud computing are falling away. The main challenges have been connectivity, security, offline access, reliability and user experience; all of these have either been fully addressed or are in the process of being addressed. My biggest issue is still connectivity/offline access (which are really two sides of the same coin) such that I use a lot of desktop applications so that I can work on planes, in hotels with flaky access, or at the Toronto convention centre that I’m at today. He had some interesting stats on security: 60% of corporate data resides on desktop and laptop computers, and 1 in 10 laptops are stolen within 12 months of purchase — the FBI lost 160 laptops in the last 44 months — such that corporate security professionals consider laptops to be one of the biggest security risks. In other words, the data is probably safer in the cloud than it is on corporate laptops.

He finished up with a slide showing a list of well-known companies, all of which use Google Apps; alarmingly, I heard someone behind me say "just show me one Canadian company doing that". I’m not sure if that is an indication of the old-school nature of this conference’s attendees, or of Canadian IT businesspeople in general.

Glotzbach’s closing thoughts:

On-premise software is not going away
Most of the interesting innovation in software and technology over the next decade will be "in the cloud"
Market will have lots of competitors
Your new employees are the cloud generation, both welcoming and expecting that some big part of their social graph lives in the cloud
We (Google and other cloud providers) need to earn your trust.

Great presentation, and well worth braving the pouring rain to come out this morning.

Tagged google, matthew glotzbach

2008 04 09 IT360
SaaS Comments (2)

IT360: Social Networking for Business

I’m dropping in on a few sessions at the IT360 conference being held in Toronto this week — nice to be able to walk a conference for a change — and attended John Reid of CATA Alliance talking about the value of social networking for business. He’s a stand-in-the-audience sort of guy, and is standing about 4 feet from me, so I’m here for the duration.

He started with some pretty mainstream stats and information about social networks, such as a new blog being created every 2 seconds, then moved on to discuss the degree of risk that comes from publication and dissemination of information, starting with a bit of an obscure story about being threatened with a lawsuit for some information that he distributed in a spammy sort of fax operation several years ago up to how some companies are starting to ban Facebook access from inside the firewall.

He’s doing the presentation almost completely with audience participation; having first done an audience poll on whether we fell that social networks had high, medium or low value for business, he’s selecting people from each of the respondent categories to say why they feel the way that they do about social networking. We’re hearing about how social networks can be used to get closer to your customer, although this is dependent on the industry, the target audience and the company’s corporate culture. There’s a lot of old-school types in the audience, those who raised their hand for "low/no value"; more than one person said that they use no social networks at all, and these were people who appear to be considerably younger than me. One of them even referred to "this blogging thing" in a somewhat derisive tone. This is not, as Don Tapscott proposes, an issue of age; it’s an issue of culture and position. In fact, the most vocal supporter of social networking from the audience declared himself to be 59. There are a lot of self-declared skeptics in the audience who say that they’re going to wait and see what the value is; one person said that he could spend the 8-10 hours per week that he believes is necessary to maintain a Facebook presence; he has 70 contacts on LinkedIn but it’s never really come to anything; and he wonders what happens to all those blogs that have a lot of effort put into them but no one reads them. Get real: if you put effort into blogging about something that’s of interest to someone and put some effort into being a good citizen in the blogosphere, people will read it. This blog is proof.

The business owners who are speaking up really seem to be in command-and-control mode: one stated that they’re blocking Facebook because they’re concerned that employees will put confidential information on it; doesn’t he know that if he hires untrustworthy people, they’ll do that from their home computer, so that blocking Facebook at work doesn’t solve that problem? He also said that people will spend too much time on sites like this if they’re allowed to do so, but you have to consider that people do have to take breaks sometimes, and allowing them to read their personal email or check Facebook while they’re on a break is no different than allowing them to make a personal phone call on their break. If you have sufficient technology to block specific sites, then you likely have the ability to monitor the usage and raise flags if people appear to be abusing the privilege rather than just blocking things outright.

Keith Parsonage from Industry Canada (who is speaking later today) popped up and admitted that he can’t access Facebook or a personal email service like Gmail from his office, but that the federal government is on a campaign to hire young people. This is definitely going to come back and bite them, since people who expect to be able to access sites like Facebook and Gmail while on their break at work aren’t going to be happy in an old-school corporate environment where they’re treated like irresponsible and unprofessional children.

Reid is really trying to get to the key points of how to incorporate social networking into business in terms of outward-facing communications, such as blogs; it’s unfortunate that this turned into too much of a discussion of who does and doesn’t use Facebook, and whether they’re allowed to do so at work.

Unfortunately, there’s no free wifi at the convention centre; in fact, the only available wifi is that geared for exhibitors and priced at an extortionate $395 for access for a single computer. I grabbed a couple of 30-minutes online passes in the press room, but I’m tempted to boycott it just so that MTCC doesn’t get the conference organizer’s money for this.

Tagged facebook

2008 04 08 IT360
Web 2.0
blogging Comments (0)

Webinar: Applying Web 2.0 to your business challenges

A bit late notice: today at 1pm Eastern, there’s a webinar on applying Web 2.0 to your business challenges, featuring Don Tapscott, Jeremiah Owyang and Robert Scoble.

This is sponsored by Cisco, and will include a demo of their new WebEx Connect collaboration workspace. From the event description:

Traditional models for management and problem solving are changing. Thanks to the advent of wikis, blogs, social networks, and other Web 2.0 tools, the ways organizations foster collaboration and promote innovation are undergoing profound change.

This 60-minute video Webcast explores the new paradigm created by the Web 2.0 phenomenon and shows you how this model can be applied to virtually any business process. Learn how you can use Web 2.0 applications to solve technical challenges, promote business innovation, uncover new product or market opportunities, and make employees much more productive.

There will be interactive Q&A with the participants during the webinar.

2008 04 03 Web 2.0 Comments (0)

Forrester webinar on Enterprise 2.0 strategy

Really wanted to be on the Socialtext-sponsored Forrester webinar today on Enterprise 2.0 strategy, but one minor logistical problem intervened: they didn’t provide the password in the confirmation or reminder emails. I’m listening in on the call, but it’s not really the same without the visuals.

Obviously some people did get on, since they mentioned at the beginning that they were waiting while people joined the WebEx, but Susan Scrupski Twittered that she didn’t receive a password either.

Apparently it will available for replay, I’ll have to catch it then.

2008 03 13 Comments (2)

Upcoming conferences

I’ll be attending three conferences in the next three weeks (after a hiatus of over two months, it’s going to be strange to get back on a plane), and live-blogging from each conference, wifi permitting.

Next week is the Gartner BPM summit in Las Vegas: one of the key BPM conferences of the year (at least, until Gartner watered it down by running a second one in September last year). The presentations are typically a mix of Gartner analysts discussing BPM, SOA and related subjects, and customers discussing their implementations. The trade show includes every BPM vendor who wants to be taken seriously in this market. Expect to see some of my posts from this week syndicated over on Intelligent Enterprise, plus I’ll be doing a wrap-up article at the end of the week exclusively on their site.

February 13-15 is ARIS ProcessWorld in Orlando, IDS Scheer’s user conference. I attended this last year and enjoyed it; last year was only the second time that I’d been to any sort of process modelling user conference (having attended Proforma’s conference in 2006), and it’s really valuable to see how the front-end modelling tools fit together with the BPMS that automate those processes. IDS Scheer is paying my travel expenses to attend.

February 18-20 I’m back in Orlando for FASTforward, which is sort of a user conference for FAST enterprise search (which is being acquired by Microsoft), but really goes beyond that cover a lot of Enterprise 2.0 territory. Featured speakers include Andrew McAfee, Tom Davenport and Don Tapscott, all of whom I’ve written about in the past couple of week. You can register for FASTforward here, and put my name (Sandy Kemsley) in the reference field so that they know where you came from. FAST is paying my travel expenses to attend. All of my live-blogging posts will be cross-posted to the FASTforward blog, and I’ll do a daily wrap-up post exclusive to their site.

As an aside, I’ve consolidated all posts for all Gartner BPM coverage under one category regardless of year, and all for ProcessWorld under their own category.

If you’re going to be at any of these events, look me up.

2008 01 30 ARISProcessWorld
BPA
BPM
FASTforward08
Gartner BPM Comments (4)

Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport debate the viability of Enterprise 2.0

I missed the McAfee/Davenport debate when I arrived a bit late to the Enterprise 2.0 conference last June, so I’m happy to be listening in on today’s version.

McAfee kicked off with some examples of where he’s seeing Enterprise 2.0 making a difference: a construction company that encouraged its employees to blog; a large financial services centre using an internal wiki for their customer service people to share information, which has reduced their average call time; and Intellipedia within the US intelligence community.

Davenport countered that organizations are even more hierarchical than before, and that Enterprise 2.0 is not having the collaborative and flattening effects that were expected, and that if it was just about the technology and not transforming the enterprise, it should have been called “Knowledge Management 1.5″.

There then ensued a wordsmithing debate over what it should be called, what version number it should have, and whether the functionality provided by today’s Enterprise 2.0 collaborative software is really all that innovative, or just a natural progression from previous groupware applications like Sharepoint and Lotus Notes. As the debate goes on, Davenport continue to drive the point that this technology isn’t revolutionary relative to corporate information management/sharing tools, it’s evolutionary.

Davenport stated that if you don’t do the organizational preparation in advance, then Enterprise 2.0 will fail at its goals; McAfee disagreed, saying that he’s seen examples of organizations that were very poorly suited to engaging in Enterprise 2.0 collaboration (such as the intelligence community) have some key people latch onto the tools once they’re in place and help to shift the organizational culture.

In other words, is the technology driving the collaborative effects, or does the organization have to be collaboratively-minded before the technology will be used? That seems to be the core issue that’s being addressed in this debate so far.

McAfee feels that Enterprise 2.0 tools don’t make it any easier to engage in bad behaviour (harassing other employees, sharing company information externally) that people could have done before these tools; I tend to agree with this: if employees are educated about what is and isn’t appropriate behaviour, they’ll make their choices on how to behave regardless of the tools available.

30 minutes into the debate, and process was just mentioned for the first time, in the context of how Enterprise 2.0 is impacting the business processes between a company and its customers/partners. Davenport states that Web 2.0 is having a bigger impact here, since he sees Enterprise 2.0 as purely behind the firewall, whereas McAfee said that his definition of Enterprise 2.0 includes interactions between a company and its partners and customers that happen on the web. Does this include Facebook groups sponsored by a company, or just a company’s own websites?

There was an interesting discussion on control, on which they mostly agreed, and how the “gatekeeper” model of enterprise knowledge management systems is giving way to a more wiki-like “gardening” model: let everyone contribute then clean up the results, rather than restricting who can contribute.

For the second time in this debate, Davenport refers to McAfee’s language as “messianic” in terms of how he promotes the capabilities of Enterprise 2.0 tools; Davenport insists that older-style tools could provide much of the same collaborative environment, and although there is some great new functionality, the technology is not driving the type of organizational change that is suggested by the definitions of Enterprise 2.0.

In summary, Davenport feels that companies should be exploring the technology and loosening control over information creation, but not expect the deployment of these Enterprise 2.0 technologies to change organizational culture. McAfee agrees with the first part, but not the second — he feels that putting these technologies in place will cause emergent applications that will create organizational culture changes.

The debate was recorded and will be posted at the FASTForward blog.

2008 01 11 Comments (1)

Webinar: The New Paradigm for Business Intelligence - Collaborative, User Centric, Process Embedded

I’m watching this webinar featuring Don Tapscott of New Paradigm and Katrina Coyle of Molson Canada, sponsored by SAP.

Tapscott spoke first, and started with a reworked version of the same presentation that I saw last June at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, covering the four basic drivers for change: web 2.0, the net generation, the social revolution, and the economic revolution. He went on, however, to talk about the changing face of business intelligence: moving from cost-cutting to a focus on growth and creating relationships with customers and partners. There’s a number of factors at play:

Simplifying BI from a tool for tech-savvy power users to a visual, interactive tool for business decision makers
Making it easier to filter out the relevant data for making decisions rather that being confronted with a sea of data (a foundation of automated decisioning and complex event processing)
Providing interactive and iterative tools rather than creating standard reports through batch processes
Integrating with business processes for automated decisioning rather than just one-way periodic reporting

He sees more of this in the future: simpler interfaces to allow more people to participate in BI, new visualization techniques, better integration with other technologies, and support for harnessing the collective intelligence of participants.

I love that Tapscott’s using the term “BI 2.0″, which I first used in early 2006 to refer to the entire field of analytics in the face of a new batch of terms that seemed determined to relegate BI to refer only to periodic, one-way reporting.

We were then treated to a 24-slide presentation by Lothar Schubert, Director of Solution Marketing for SAP NetWeaver. Although he provided coverage of the landscape and history of BI, this could have been a bit shorter since we were left with only about 10 minutes for the customer case study.

Next up was Katrina Coyle, BI Team Manager for Molson, discussing their complex business environment — partnerships, acquisitions, multiple geographic locations with different go-to-market strategies, changes to consumer preferences — and how a single version of the truth through BI is absolutely necessary in order for them to continue to build their brand successfully.

Molson has been pushing innovation in their products and through social networking, but also through information using BI. This greatly improves information quality and timeliness throughout their supply chain, which in turn changes their physical loading and shipping practices. Problems in the supply chain are identified as they occur, and less time is spent managing the information and reporting.

You can see a replay of the webinar at the first link above.

2008 01 09 BI Comments (0)

Outsourcing the intranet

I’ve told a lot of people about Avenue A|Razorfish and their use of MediaWiki as their intranet platform (discussed here and here), and there’s a lot of people who are downright uncomfortable with the idea of any sort of non-standard intranet platform, such as allowing anyone in the company to edit any page on the intranet, or contribute content to the home page via tagging and feeds.

Imagine, then, how freaked out those people would be to have Facebook as their intranet.

Andrew McAfee discusses a prototype of a Facebook application that he’s seen that provides a secure enterprise overlay for Facebook, allowing for easy but secure social networking within the organization. According to WorkLight, the creators of the application:

WorkBook combines all the capabilities of Facebook with all the controls of a corporate environment, including integration with existing enterprise security services and information sources. With WorkBook, employees can find and stay in touch with corporate colleagues, publish company-related news, create bookmarks to enterprise application data and securely share the bookmarks with authorized colleagues, update on status change and get general company news.

This sort of interaction is critical for any organization, and once you get past a certain size or start to spread geographically, you can’t do it with a bulletin board and a water cooler any more; however, many companies either build their own (usually badly) or use some of the emerging Enterprise 2.0 software to do something inside their firewall. As Facebook becomes more widely used for business purposes, however, why not leverage a platform that pretty much everyone under the age of 40 is already using (and a few of us over that age)? One company, Serena Software, is already doing this, although they appear to be using the naked Facebook platform, so likely aren’t putting any sensitive information on there, even in invitation-only groups.

Personally, I quite like the idea, although I’m a bit of an anarchist when it comes to corporate organizations.

There’s a lot that would have to happen for Facebook to become a company’s intranet (or even a part of it): primarily sorting out issues of data ownership and export. There’s lots of people putting confidential data into Salesforce.com and other SaaS platforms that I think we can get past the philosophical question of whether or not to store corporate data outside the firewall; it just needs to be proven to be private, secure and exportable.

I also found an interesting post, coincidentally by an analyst at Serena, discussing how business mashups should be human process centric, which was in response to Keith Harrison-Broninski’s post on mashups and process. Although Facebook isn’t a mashup platform in any real sense, one thing that should be considered in using Facebook as a company’s intranet is how much process can — or should — be built into that. You really can’t do a full intranet without some sort of processes, and although WorkBook is targeted only at the social networking part of the intranet, it could easily become the preferred intranet user interface if it were adopted for that purpose.

Update: Facebook launched Friends Lists today, that is, the ability to group your contacts into different lists that can then be used for messaging and invitations. Although it doesn’t (yet) include the ability to assign different privacy settings for each group, it’s a big step on the way to more of a business platform. LinkedIn, you better get that IPO done soon…

2007 12 19 SaaS
mashups Comments (3)

Collaboration software survey

Jive Software recently did a survey about “collaboration software”, which includes social networking tools such as blogs and wikis, although it’s not clear if it also includes other collaboration tools such as ECM. I think the latter, since 63% of the respondents said that they have access to some type of collaboration software, 78% use it at least weekly, and half use it on a daily basis.

Social networking is definitely starting to make an impact in enterprises, however: 98% of the respondents know what a blog is, and 63% know what a wiki is. No question about whether those people can define any enterprise uses for blogs and wikis, however.

2007 10 17 Comments (2)

Atlassian releases a SharePoint plug-in for Confluence

I had an update from Jeffrey Walker of Atlassian about today’s joint announcement with Microsoft at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit: Microsoft is partnering with a few Web 2.0 innovators including Atlassian (which is a pretty big vote of confidence since Atlassian is Java-based) in order to position SharePoint as a social computing platform. As part of this initiative, Atlassian is releasing a SharePoint connector/plug-in for their Confluence enterprise wiki product that provides for single sign-on to both product, and provides two pretty interesting capabilities: federated search and content sharing.

Every customer that I deal with has multiple content repositories of some sort — most of them including some amount of SharePoint — so the issue with bringing in any new content repository such as an enterprise wiki is that users will need to search in multiple locations to find information. The Atlassian plug-in allows for federating a search across Confluence and SharePoint repositories, regardless of where the search originated, while respecting each product’s security.

The second major capability of the plug-in is to allow content sharing. From the SharePoint side, this allows Confluence pages to be embedded into SharePoint pages, including in combination with other SharePoint content. From the Confluence side, you can link directly to SharePoint content, which is a bit lighter-weight integration, but allows for things such as a single click to edit an Office document that is stored within SharePoint.

This plugin is available today in beta for free (assuming that you already have Confluence and SharePoint, of course), and will become a for-fee plug-in when it reaches version 1.0 at some point in the future.

The other Enterprise 2.0 vendor included in this latest Microsoft initiative is NewsGator, although I don’t know much about their part except what I read in the Microsoft press release:

NewsGator, a leading RSS company that helps individuals and businesses improve the way they access information and communicate, today announced the general availability of NewsGator Social Sites. NewsGator Social Sites is a collection of site templates, profiles, Web parts and middleware that will enhance the social computing capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows

2007 10 17 Comments (0)

Wiki as intranet

A presentation on the current state of the Avenue A|Razorfish intranet wiki that I discussed in a previous post:

They’re getting ready to rework the wiki, and will be posting about the progress on their own blog.

2007 10 03 Comments (2)

LongJump revisited

I had an interview with Pankaj Malviya, CEO of LongJump, back in July, and another a few days ago to bring me up date for this week’s launch of their SaaS platform and applications. There hasn’t been a lot of new functionality since then, but they’ve accelerated their launch date: in July, they said that they’d be in an open beta by the end of the year (which I said was longish), and now they’ve done a full (non-beta) launch instead in a shorter time frame, so they must have felt the heat of the competition to get things going. They’ll be starting to offer training in about a week, and will eventually have some videos available online to allow you to preview applications.

Their focus remains on the small and medium business market, with the idea to prove to those companies that LongJump is sufficiently reliable to trust with their business data. Since they’re part of Relationals, they have a track record at providing hosted CRM for a couple of years now, which is certainly a good start over many of the other SaaS providers.

Although LongJump is a platform, they’re focussed on applications, not the platform itself. The basic package contains two applications: OfficeSpace, a group calendaring and collaboration application to manage documents, projects and discussions; and Customer Manager, a starter CRM application that integrates with Outlook. There will be other CRM applications available as well, such as Deal Manager for creating and tracking quotes, and non-sales management applications such as the IT asset tracking one that I discussed in my first post about them.

In fact in their press release, they list 12 applications that they say that they are initially introducing, although it’s not clear if all 12 are available now.

I am, of course, interested in what else that they’re doing with workflow after seeing it in the initial demo; they’re not releasing that until October, but they’re moving from a list-based set of states to a graphical process designer and there will be five applications released at the same time to take advantage of the workflow capabilities.

All of the applications will be free for the next three months in order to encourage people to try out LongJump, then it will move to regular pricing. Although the regular pricing was given to me verbally, it wasn’t confirmed so I don’t want to quote it here, but suffice it to say that the price point may give them an advantage over Salesforce.com for CRM, although you’d have to dig in and do a full functionality review (which I haven’t) to know how comparable that they really are.

You can read their full press release here.

2007 09 25 SaaS Comments (1)

Forrester Day 1: Rob Koplowitz

Lots of choice in the breakout sessions, but I’ve decided on Rob Koplowitz (who works with Connie Moore) on Web 2.0 and Social Computing in the Enterprise. The official statement:

Enterprise Web 2.0 can drive new efficiencies, but it needs to be approached like any new technology coming into the enterprise.

He had a good slide on how Web 2.0 changes group dynamics, from reviewed repository (predefined contributors and reviewers with a central point of communication) to facilitated community (clusters of communications with a facilitator in each cluster) to social networks (unstructured peer-to-peer communications).

He made a distinction of four types of social networking technologies: “listen to me” (blogs), “listen to us” (wikis), “find people like me” (tagging, profiles, social networks, virtual worlds) and “find stuff I need” (tagging, RSS feeds). He then went on to discuss which of these adds the most value within an enterprise based on research that they’ve done; after instant messaging, which was really just added in as a benchmark, RSS feeds came in as next most useful, which doesn’t really surprise me give what I’ve been seeing in the past months in the Enterprise 2.0 space. What happens, then, is a combined environment of a corporate information workplace with external sources of information, mashed up using various tools to provide value to users.

He referred to RSS as a lightweight integration fabric within organizations, which is a great characterization, and showed it on a spectrum of enablers that also included mashups, SOA and BPM.

Koplowitz then looked at the risks of Web 2.0 technologies within the enterprise, such as privacy and security; note that he’s talking about using consumer Web 2.0 technologies that are available via SaaS on the public internet, whereas there’s a ton of new Enterprise 2.0 solutions that are sold as on-premise, inside-the-firewall solutions rather than risk an improperly-hosted solution. There’s also many reputable Web 2.0 vendors who don’t do risky things with your data, or not any more risky than your own data center does now. He gave a scary-sounding example using Quechup, a recently social networking disaster that decided to spam your entire address book without permission and was quickly outed and shamed on the internet; this information came out with a few short days of this starting, and if the person involved had just been a bit more careful about watching the internet buzz on Quechup rather than jumping right in with their corporate address book exposed, then this would have been a non-story.

His recommendation is not to stop people from using social networking site, but to be cautious and appropriate about what they put out there, and to audit their behavior to ensure that they’re not violating corporate confidentiality. As he points out, Gen Y’s (18-26 years old) are the target hiring market for many companies these days, and they’re using these tools as creators of content as well as participants. However, the higher-level management in most companies, smack in the middle of the boomer years, are much less likely to participate and hence less likely to fund any related efforts.

Forrester will be publishing some research very shortly about vendors in the Enterprise Web 2.0 space, although he didn’t give us much of a sneak preview except to name a few vendors both in the Web 2.0 space and the enterprise space (BEA, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, Oracle), and predicting a collision. Traditional vendors are following the old-style release and adoption cycles, which may not play very well with the faster iterations that will come from the SaaS offerings from the Web 2.0 space; however, those traditional vendors are also in the position to just start bundling their Enterprise 2.0 offerings into their standard offerings (WebSphere Portal as a mashup platform, anyone?) to encourage adoption with their existing customers. There’s a new breed of vendors, however, that have deep enterprise roots and the agility of the hair-on-fire Web 2.0 vendors, that are likely to give the big guys a run for their money. Most likely, any organization is going to use a combination of vendors, both traditional enterprise vendors (who will be favored in the long run, based on history) and the new vendors (who are likely to be acquired by the big vendors). You’ll also see a combination of technologies, for example, ad hoc processes in a wiki with more structured processes in a BPM system linked to that.

His summary:

Enterprise Web 2.0 is part of the Information Workplace fabric
Corporations are getting value today from Enterprise Web 2.0
Users are getting social without appropriate guidance
Process and content need to be managed
The investment decision includes change management.
The vendors are colliding in this space.

There was an interesting discussion during the Q&A on the place of Google in the environment (Koplowitz thinks they have to solve their security issues first, such as not transmitting data to and from Google spreadsheets in clear text).

He points out that for many organizations that have a significant portion of younger workers, especially in technology-heavy industries, there is no way to put this genie back in the bottle; organizations have to deal with this, and “just say no” isn’t an alternative.

2007 09 25 ForresterITLeadership
Web 2.0 Comments (1)

Forrester Day 1: Connie Moore Keynote

Connie Moore gave the opening keynote on Design for People, Build for Change: Transforming the Nature of Work. Her focus is on how business and IT have to work together in order to achieve this, but she likes the term “blended business-IT” rather than “business-IT alignment” because she wants them to be seen as a single entity rather than two separate bodies that need to be aligned in some way. I’ve heard Moore speaking at other conferences and on webinars previously, usually on the topic of BPM, and it’s significant that Forrester puts a BPM analyst in the keynote position at this forum: it really drives home that the key focus here is on process.

She posed three questions about this sort of transformation: why now, what underpins this trend, and how will it unfold.

In the “why now” category, she discussed the evolution in design that’s underway in all sorts of consumer products, and asked us to envision what would happen if the leaders in consumer product design (e.g., Apple) came into organizations and set to redesigning enterprise systems. Interesting thought, and something that I’ve written about when discussing Enterprise 2.0, which brings consumer Web 2.0 functionality into enterprise applications. The new generation of workers, dubbed “millenials” by Moore, have grown up with completely different experiences and therefore have completely different expectations about what systems will look like as they enter the workforce, particularly around social networking. Added to all this is the evolution of process management as a discipline, and the dissolution of monolithic business applications into composite applications that use BPM, SOA, business rules, collaboration and other technologies, either on-premise or as SaaS.

As for what underpins this trend, Moore discussed the dichotomy between the detailed transactional type of work (which she characterizes as left-brained) and the big picture type of work (right-brained) that have to be supported simultaneously by our systems. She lays out four key principles for designing for people, and gave a detailed example of each (including a really interesting Second Life example for the 4th point):

Business processes adapt to changing business conditions.
Applications evolve continuously while preserving process integrity.
Processes, tasks and the associated information always maintain context.
Systems are unitary, information-rich and reflect the social needs of the business.

The first two of these are about build for change, and the last two are about design for people

This is all unfolding with the big vendors making some large investments in BPM-related technologies as well as newer things like Web 2.0 and mashups. Cisco’s TelePresence got a huge plug here (I’m guessing that they’re a big client of Forrester ), including a clip from 24 that used it. This new focus will require some new skills as well: business analysts need to become process designers, and developers need to become (application) assemblers: this is how design for people and build for change come together. This is completely aligned with what I plan to discuss tomorrow in terms of putting the design of processes in the hands of the business and creating agile processes.

Moore finished up with how to get started on all this, from the viewpoint of IT management, business managers, process designers, application developers, enterprise architects, and the CIO.

2007 09 25 BPM
ForresterITLeadership
SOA Comments (3)

Appian Anywhere update

I had a chance to hear an update of Appian Anywhere, Appian’s SaaS BPM offering, while at the Gartner BPM conference this week. I’m very interested in BPM and Enterprise 2.0, and SaaS BPM fits nicely into that intersection.

Although they originally planned for GA in Q307, it looks like Q108 before they’re going to be available to their planned SMB target audience with payments by credit card and other functionality that you’d expect for a SaaS offering. The reason appears to be that they’ve had so much interest from large corporate customers that they’re offering a large-client configuration first to a small number of select customers, so have diverted resources from the SMB functionality to focus on the big fish first. It seems to me that that would tend to cannibalize their on-premise business, although I’m sure that there are large organizations who will use this as a way to try before they buy.

They’re really trying to create an ecosystem for partners to develop applications on their platform. To prime the pump, they’ve created 30+ applications of their own that they’ll offer out for free with the basic subscription; partners are developing other applications that will be offered on a subscription based in the Appian Anywhere marketplace. Encouraging this sort of application development is a web service-like integration capability (I don’t think that it is exactly web services, but similar in nature) to integrate between Appian Anywhere applications and behind-the-firewall applications, which makes it much more useful as a BPM platform, since I can’t think of any customer of mine who wouldn’t have to integrate with one of their on-premise systems at some point.

They’re also creating some video training to minimize the need for professional services to get you up and running on the platform.

There’s still a lot of resistance to SaaS for core business processes, although I think that this could catch on for the non-critical ones as a starting point. However, there’s some pure Enterprise 2.0 vendors such as LongJump who are going to creep into this space — from the other direction and with a very different sort of offering — and pick up some of the market.

2007 09 22 BPM
SaaS Comments (0)

Web apps are great, until you get on a 9-hour flight

From Dion Hinchcliffe’s Facebook updates earlier today:

Dion Hinchcliffe is getting on a plane from Europe to SFO. He’s really starting to feel the need for Web apps that run offline.

As someone with over 35,000 flight miles on the clock so far this year, I feel your pain.

2007 09 12 Web 2.0 Comments (1)

Why SaaS rocks

I hear a lot of opposition to software as a service from customers, ranging from an unformed mistrust of anything that crosses the firewall, to the feeling that anything that runs in a browser must be a toy, to a full-blown (and justified) concern of non-American companies about having their data stored on US-based servers where it is presumably accessible to US government agencies on demand. Keeping in mind that many of them are large, fairly conservative financial services organizations, I obviously have a long way to go in terms of convincing them otherwise, yet I still try.

Going back to Tim O’Reilly’s original treatise on Web 2.0, SaaS is baked right into the definition in two important ways:

the web as platform
the end of the software release cycle

The first of these is likely what sells most people originally: the idea that nothing needs to be installed at your own site, and all you need to do is pay $x per month per user (where x is about the cost of a couple of cappuccini at Starbucks) to have access to a fully-functional application. Think that this is only for small businesses? Salesforce.com announced yesterday that Dell is increasing their number of Salesforce.com subscriptions from 15,000 to 40,000 users. There’s all sorts of good reasons why to do this — lower TCO, small ongoing expense versus a large capital expenditure, no need to bring a new servers and applications into your data centre — but the somewhat unspoken reason is that it’s a way for the business to escape the tyranny of IT when it comes to purchasing applications. I’ve seen many cases of a smallish business unit within a large organization wanting to bring in new technology (BPM, BPA and BI are all ones that I’ve seen in this scenario), but IT adds on an unduly large burden of corporate standards and application vetting that kills the ROI, and the business goes back to their paper and spreadsheets. I’m not saying that IT shouldn’t be involved in these decisions, but when their time spent reviewing and “architecting” a packaged solution costs as much as the external costs, something’s wrong. If the business can get equivalent functionality from a SaaS offering with much less IT involvement and a small monthly bill rather than a large up-front capital expenditure, that’s going to look much more attractive.

The second driver for SaaS from O’Reilly’s definition is where the benefits will really accrue in the future, although that’s likely unrecognized by many people. The idea that you don’t have massive software releases that take the system down for hours or days, but that new features are gradually introduced with little or no fanfare, means that there’s much less disruption to the users, and that they’ll be pleasantly surprised by new functionality. I had exactly this experience of pleasant surprise this morning, when I noticed that Google Reader, which I’ve been using for a couple of months now, has gone from listing the number of unread items as “100+” to the actual number, a feature that I sorely missed from Bloglines since I almost always have more than 100 unread items and I really want to know how many more. They didn’t, to my knowledge, disrupt service in order to add this new functionality: it just appeared in my browser this morning (or maybe before, I’m not all that observant sometimes). I believe that there’s still the need for some major upgrades, such as a complete UI paradigm shift, but most of the enhancements to most business applications could be done incrementally and introduced as they’re ready, if the infrastructure is there to support it. That requires a browser-based application to avoid a download and install each time something changes, if not actually SaaS, but it also requires a new mindset for development teams about agile development and release: something that is much more prevalent in the SaaS vendors than in corporate IT groups.

If you read my post on Enterprise 2.0 updates recently, or the original Dion Hinchcliffe post that inspired it, it starts to become clear that Enterprise 2.0 will be dependent to some degree on SaaS, at least in the short term: many IT organizations are just not ready to start installing this new breed of application on their own servers, and the business groups will look outside to get their problems solved. This will lead to a further commoditization of IT, since once the business is using SaaS successfully, that genie’s not going back into the bottle.

Update: Google Reader also added search capabilities in this set of incremental upgrades, which I didn’t even notice (as enamoured as a I was with the accurate unread item count) until I read it on Mashable.

2007 09 06 SaaS Comments (0)

Enterprise 2.0: an update

Dion Hinchcliffe wrote a great post a couple of weeks ago giving a checkpoint on Web 2.0 in the enterprise. I was going to just tag it in my del.icio.us links, which would have had it come up in my daily links post, but I wanted to take the time to comment on it since I think that he has a great way of capturing the essential information about the subject. Also, I’ve been waiting for Part 2, which was promised in advance of his Web 2.0 for the Enterprise webinar on July 31st, but I haven’t seen it yet.

His graphic, which you can see in small form on the right (click through to his Flickr page for the larger version, or see it in situ in the linked article above), divides Web 2.0 in the enterprise into four quadrants based on two factors: social versus technical, and internally versus externally-facing. In this first part, he walks through each of the aspects shown on the right, or internally-facing, part.

My thoughts on some of his notes, especially as they relate to BPM:

Wikis are now something that I discuss with every end-customer organization that I visit, even though I’m almost always there to do BPM-related work, not talk to them about Enterprise 2.0. I’m seeing uses in a number of line-of-business areas, such as sharing vendor pricing information across different company locations, and collaborating on updates to operational procedures manuals. Dion points out their importance for internal collaboration as well as a platform for user-built web pages, which ties in with his later comments about collective intelligence.
Collaboration 2.0 is like a wiki with a bit more structure, and an important class of applications/functionality that lies between unstructured collaboration and the highly-structured end of the spectrum that we see in BPM. As this space becomes more defined, I expect to see BPM vendors expand in this direction.
His comments on emergent structure are completely bang on: “The underlying concept of emergent structure is that we guess far too much up front about the features of the software we need or the way the data should be organized.” This speaks to a number of problems in current enterprise software development practices, most importantly that of the massive over-design of software that tends to take too long to deploy, ends up not being what the users need anyway, and being custom-coded hence not very agile. I’m a strong proponent of the “give the users the out of the box tools and see what they come up with” school of customization when it comes to BPM products (as well as many other software products) since the tools provided by the vendors are, for the most part, fairly usable by a trained user or business analyst.
Data aggregation is critical for reuse, but visibility/availability is really the key issue here. In my Enterprise 2.0 conference coverage, I mentioned a few times that I see RSS (or rather, the ability to subscribe to events and data) as a key functionality that’s going to sweep through enterprises. He covers syndication as a separate point later, but these are really two sides of the same issue.
Enterprise mashups are also going to be critical — and make use of that aggregated data via feeds — as the next generation of end-user computing platforms. Instead of Excel and Access, semi-technical users within business departments are going to be using mashup platforms to build the simple applications that they can never get IT to build for them.
Rich user experiences are already throughout organizations for end-user functionality, but that usage needs to continue to expand to include tools such as (in the BPM space) process modellers/designers so that they can be run anywhere by anyone, given the appropriate user authentication. FileNet has long had a Java applet for their process designer; the download is a bit clunky and it looks quite outdated now, but it still doesn’t require the software to be explicitly installed/upgraded at each workstation. Other more modern (Ajax-based) process designers are appearing from BPM vendors such as Appian and Cordys, and this trend is not going to reverse.

He covers a number of other aspects that I haven’t mentioned here; definitely worth a read. I look forward to Part 2 of this article.

Update: Part 2 of Dion’s article published here.

2007 08 19 BPM Comments (2)

BPM Think Tank Day 3: Enterprise 2.0/BPM Mashups Roundtable

I facilitated one of the last roundtables of on the conference, about Enterprise 2.0 and BPM mashups.

Mashups (considered a part of Enterprise 2.0) are lightweight integration of web-based services and data, often in ways that the service providers never intended them to be used; personally, I think that as mashup techniques get easier, mashups will become the technology of choice for what’s referred to as “end-user computing”, that is, all the stuff that is created within business units (typically now using Excel or Access) because it’s either too small for IT to take on as a project or they can’t turn it around in a timely manner. I see software-as-a-service BPM and other services as having an impact on the ability to do mashups, since these platforms are often designed with a bit more openness in mind.

I’ve looked a lot in the past at Enterprise 2.0 and BPM, and the features that are (or should be) creeping into BPM under the influence of Enterprise 2.0: RSS, tagging, SaaS, mashups, collaboration, and all sorts of user-created content in general. There’s a lot of challenges around this, many of the cultural, since Enterprise 2.0 decentralizes control of IT assets and requires a certain level of user participation.

We spent most of the session talking about BPM mashups, not Enterprise 2.0 in general. At one level, a BPMS can be considered to be a mashup platform, given the right business services available for assembly.

BPM mashups can take several forms:

Lightweight assemblies of subprocesses and services
User-facing information at a step in the process, e.g., Google maps mashed up with BPM data and presented to a user in a form in order to complete a task
BPM as a component within a portal, possibly assembled by a user

Issues around mashup adoption include IT not trusting something that is user-created, and business analysts not understanding the concept of mashups as well as not yet having easy enough tools to do mashups. There are also issues around discoverability of services (as I discussed the previous week in a Mashup Camp session) and the use of internal versus external services, where both types require some sort of SLA to be included in any sort of production mashup.

By lowering the barrier to entry, mashups can play an important role as application prototypes, or emergent applications that IT wouldn’t have thought to build for the business; IT can learn from what the business creates for itself in order to create more structured applications and processes.This is similar to the concept of how a folksonomy is used to gradually become a taxonomy: allow the users to do it themselves, then observe and detect the patterns. My favourite phrase that someone used at this point was to “intelligently stumble upon the future” and the whole idea of unintended consequences of mashups, although there was some discussion as to whether is was closer to serendipity or Frankenstein. Along this line, we talked about how to keep bad things from happening in mashups, and agreed that the services and data to be mashed up had to be controlled in some way (by IT) so that, for example, someone couldn’t do an unindexed full text search on a multi-million record database.

Without a doubt, mashups enable agility in application development, and BPM stands to benefit from enabling all types of BPM mashups.

There was some discussion around whether business users/analysts were asking for this, and whether they really wanted a full mashup capability, or just some parameterized configuration. I think that they don’t even know what’s possible through mashups, and if they did, they’d want it.

2007 08 02 BPM
BPMThinkTank
mashups Comments (0)

Interview on BPM, SOA and Web 2.0

I missed this when it was published a few weeks ago: here’s an interview with me entitled The ‘Battle’ Between SOA and BPM and Why Companies Fear Web 2.0.

2007 07 13 BPM
SOA Comments (2)

Column 2 by Sandy Kemsley