November 24th, 2009
The cloud computing battleground takes shape. Will it be winner-take-all?
You can bet that the industry will be playing for keeps yet businesses can increasingly reap real bottom line benefits. This year has been one of relatively grand alliances between emerging cloud computing vendors as they fill holes in their capabilities and try to create appealing one-stop enterprise cloud services.
We’ve seen major announcements so far from IBM and Juniper, Cisco/EMC/VMware, and most recently BMC and Salesforce. There are many other smaller initiatives that have formed as well and all of these efforts underscore several key points for those businesses trying to understand the real strategic benefits of the cloud including cost, agility, and scalability:
First, there is no single vendor that can today provide an end-to-end cloud computing solution for businesses, hence the reason for all the alliances. The cloud computing stack (facilities, bandwidth, compute power, storage, operations, management, etc.) is deep and comprises not only most of the elements that you would find in a corporate data center but a great deal more besides. This includes R&D, product development, support capabilities, developer networks, and capabilities such as compliance monitoring and additional layers of security and governance.
Second, it’s unclear how the cloud computing vendor landscape is going to shape up. Everyone is in early days yet with only Amazon with anything approaching operational maturity, with Google and Force.com vying for the lower end of the enterprise. Making long-term decisions isn’t a good idea in this environment, though using cloud computing tactically does make good sense at this point, especially if you’re experimenting with private cloud technology that will likely translate well to public clouds, such as Eucalyptus.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, standards for cloud computing are just emerging and only cover today an incomplete portion of the cloud computing stack. This means scenarios where you can seamlessly move your cloud computing workloads from your private cloud and public clouds of choice are fairly far off still, unless you are willing to commit to one of the alliances that will enable it with proprietary approaches. This is the core scenario that businesses are interested in as dabble with cloud technology internally today and then want to move outside to get cost and quality advantages as they get more confidence in the cloud. But it’s one that is currently rife with lock-in and those that remember the platform wars of the 90s are wise to recall.
Related: Cloud computing and the return of the platform wars
Let’s also not forget the economics of online services, which apply generally to any cloud computing service that is self-provisioning (meaning users can sign-up and begin using it immediately). Infoworld’s Zack Urlocker pointed out last week that Tim O’Reilly’s discussion of the tendency of the end-game scenario for a given online segment to be winner-takes-all almost certainly applies to cloud computing as well:
While the benefits of cloud computing are enormous in terms of reducing costs, increasing utilization, and providing scalability, there’s a significant risk of lock-in. Given the early state of cloud technology, there simply aren’t adequate standards to offset this.
My fellow ZDNet colleague Phil Wainewright recently pointed out what I like to call the
November 18th, 2009
Salesforce Chatter: Social operating systems emerge on the IT stage
The next big shift: Intranets, portals, and software suites that are the integrating force of the social fabric for our organizations. This morning’s announcement here at Dreamforce today from Salesforce of Chatter, an enterprise-class realization of Facebook and Twitter, is further evidence of the industry’s push for social Web capabilities for business activities.
Early indications are that Chatter will drive conversation and attention on this subject in enterprise circles very much like Google Wave did for consumer circles (as well as some businesses.)
Of course, a central question is — given current economic challenges for example — whether this is what the enterprise world is really looking for right now. However, as I’ve covered here throughout the year, enterprise social computing has been coming into its own as a significant component of modern business software for a number of reasons lately.
So while adoption numbers vary, it’s an increasingly smart bet that not only are social applications moving into the enterprise, but that existing business applications will begin to get more and more social features.
I often cite Reed’s Law as compelling evidence that social systems have a strong innate tendency to create more value that non-social systems. The message: Social business applications are just a more effective model in general for building business value. However announcements like Chatter begin to make this argument less important. That’s because it’s built right into the Salesforce platform and according to Sam Diaz “will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com.” In other words, the argument is essentially over when social computing becomes baked into the infrastructure of the enterprise.
This will allow the 135,000+ existing apps built on Force.com to have a unified social environment complete with security and one common social graph as well as consistent, shared collaboration features. This is a major step up from the traditional world of non-social business software, all the more so because it’s as much of an infrastructure play as an application play. A comparable response would be to make Microsoft Office more social or perhaps more accurately, the fundamental Google Apps infrastructure. It’s also arguable that the new Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is just such a move (creating an enterprise-wide social environment that’s also an app platform) that’s just not as clearly communicated.
In the end there’s a lot to be said — particularly in the sometimes uncertain realm of enterprise social computing — about having a secure solution that works across your application environment and is easy to integrate into your existing applications and user environments. And while the Salesforce ecosystem is far from a consistent application environment for most enterprises, which are a complex landscape of legacy systems from dozens of vendors, it highlights the next big shift: Intranets, portals, and software suites that are the integrating force of the social fabric for our organizations.
Chatter is a solid example of
November 12th, 2009
Enterprise 2.0: What do we know today about moving our organizations into the 21st century?
We spend 60-80% of our time in the workplace on interaction and collaborative activity. This week in Frankfurt at the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT and last week at the inaugural Enterprise 2.0 Conference West in San Francisco has been an good microcosm of the state of the industry.
It does appear that we’re entering a new stage in the maturity of enterprise social computing. The good news: Most of the lessons learned are good ones, yet as we’ll see, some challenges remain.
Based on my conversations with practitioners and thought leaders here and the many discussions over the last two weeks, the practice of Enterprise 2.0 has effectively moved beyond the initial novelty of years past. There’s now a much more practical focus on how to create, manage, and govern social business communities, the specific ways to deliver measurable business value, and most of all, a desire to learn what works best (or not) in the realm of collaboration and social software.
The broad outlines of what it actually takes to apply new social business models have emerged lately along with the techniques to deliver on them successfully in the longer term. In particular, these include topics such as business case, tool selection, worker policies, community management, and the governance of social business environments.
Just as importantly, we are also starting to see customers implementing Enterprise 2.0 in scale. These typically include enterprise social networking, wikis, and social CRM. This is different than a year ago when there were only a handful of stories about Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 companies seriously exploring the potential benefits of social computing.
In the sense that the hard work has started, we are also seeing the end of the beginning for Enterprise 2.0. We’ve learned a lot along the way, particularly from early adopters, and it has been interesting to participate back-to-back in two of the largest enterprise social computing events of the season. This has helped get a sense of what’s taking place in Europe and North America with customers as well as the industry growing up around Enterprise 2.0 in terms of tools and services.
Related: Social applications are now well-entrenched in enterprise networks around the globe
Where is Enterprise 2.0 headed?
Here are my top takeaways from the discussions, research, and findings here in Frankfurt this week and San Francisco last week:
- Businesses are actively seeking information about how best to implement Enterprise 2.0. While last year they were kicking the tires and evaluating what the benefits are (establishing why) there’s a lot more actual project activity this year and this is driving significant demand for knowledge about how. The rise of the 2.0 Adoption Council is one demonstration of this need to share information about what works. Further providing evidence that there’s a need for how: A recent survey showed that 36% of their members were currently managing multi-million dollar budgets this year for Enterprise 2.0. In other words, they’re in the “how” stage. Finally, the end-users I talked with in my workshops at both events demanded detailed, specific information about how to make Enterprise 2.0 work for their businesses.
- There is still lots of debate about how to
October 25th, 2009
Are the iPhone and social networks making the classic Web and intranet obsolete?
Many as-yet-unforeseen new developments will create enormous societal, cultural, and business opportunities over the next decade, just as long as we don’t make irreversible decisions down the wrong path. There’s been an important and relatively sudden change taking place over the last couple of years in the way that we interact with the Web. While direct access or search activity has been (and still is) the most common way that we access the content and applications of the Web, new ways have been rapidly growing and competing with how we work online, both at home and at work.
Thus these new models, exemplified by social networking sites like Facebook or mobile apps on platforms like the iPhone, Palm’s new webOS, and Android, will ultimately herald a change in the way that we work with our IT systems in the enterprise.
The once relatively unified world of the Internet, with a few major top-level types of access directly connected to it (browser, e-mail, IRC client, newsreader, etc.) and a few key sub-apps such as search that virtually everyone online used have been extended — as well as fragmented — into popular new channels into which users are now rapidly moving en masse.
That’s not to say that direct usage of the Internet (loading up and using sites and apps via the traditional Web browser) is going away. It’s still far and away the most common way to interact with the Web today and will likely be that way for quite some time, if not forever.
But real shifts in both online platform alternatives and in the mobile market are beginning to usher in foundational new usage patterns by users. These new channels — of which the latest generation of mobile apps and social networking platforms, which are often tightly integrated with the Web but are not truly one with it, are just the two biggest examples — demonstrate what is probably a generational transformation of the vital border between us and the Internet.
And this is the crux of the point: Where the point of user attention and interaction resides and who controls it is one of the most important conversations between us and our “preferred intermediaries”, a fancy term for who we like to work with to interact with the Web. This in turn has significant implications for enterprise intranets, our often clunky yet essential local “Web” in our organizations.
Why are these changes happening? There are at least two major reasons:
The first is that user attention on the Web has been moving to social networks, best exhibited by Facebook, which has been the single largest gainer of online usage in the last 3 years, over all other applications. Even e-mail has been eclipsed in many markets and only search remains more dominant. Social networks, which are platforms in their own right — just like the Web, but also have touchpoints well outside of it — have come into their own as competing yet codependent platforms that sprawl across the Internet, telecommunications infrastructure, mobile devices, and desktop computers.
The second reason is
October 5th, 2009
Twenty-two power laws of the emerging social economy
Traditional measures of business success are becoming less and less important.There is a time for big picture thinking and there is a time for details in business and IT, the latter which make business and technical strategy a reality and the former which provides needed direction and focus.
Highlighting the big picture side last week we saw Steve Ballmer’s exploration of the efficiencies he believes are being driven by something he calls “the new normal”. In this view, he tries to frame up how a reset of economic expectations during the downturn has created an environment that is putting pressure on business to do more with less, affecting IT at least as much as the rest of the organization, if not more.
We’ve seen also seen similar and broader variations on this theme this year, such as John Hagel’s capable attempt to define the “Big Shifts” in business taking place in this century. Just recently McKinsey published a similar reported titled The 10 Trends You Have to Watch: And What They Mean For IT in the Harvard Business Journal (summary is by Gartner).
If we factor out the commonalities in these views, it highlights a core set of strategic trends in IT and business in 2009, namely:
- New resource constraints. Today’s new economic baselines (the downturn, green business, etc) are requiring that we find ways to accomplish our goals using fewer resources. This includes identifying the means to capture opportunity and transform “in process” business activities using newer, more efficient models. Business leaders will need to effectively link IT and business much more so than in the past to accomplish the movement to this new baseline. This also doesn’t mean everything is constrained. As we’ll see on the technology side, abundance is being produced that may address shortcomings in the business side.
- Value shifting from transactions to relationships. This is the growing realization that the traditional rote business transaction as the core source of organizational value is diminishing and value is now coming from relationship dynamics. This has many implications including using new management methods (example: from top down command-and-control to community curator and facilitator), tapping into new reservoirs of innovation, adopting new ways of interacting with customers, or driving better tacit interactions. Web 2.0 and social computing will be key enablers of this for business units and IT organizations that want increased relevance.
- Industries in flux with new ones emerging. Previously stable industries such as finance and media are feeling the pinch the strongest, but most others are as well. The recession is creating a bigger gap between healthy and unhealthy businesses while many industries are being unbundled or transformed into new ones (traditional software companies moving to SaaS and cloud computing for example or the rise of crowdsourcing competing with outsourcing at the low end.) Again, today’s dynamic Web-driven global knowledge flows and agile online models for computing and collaboration — as well as economic and intellectual production — are now a significant change agent.
- Moving from change as the exception to change as the norm. Today we’re seeing faster consumer behavior shifts, quicker pricing changes, more rapid product cycles, and faster media feedback loops. While this can also lead to more extreme market conditions, it also enables opportunities to be turned into bottom-line impact for organizations that can adapt to market realities quickly enough. The network is the culprit (and solution) for much of this again: We now have pervasive social media instantly transmitting and shaping cultural phenomenon and faster financial cause-and-effect in the markets, real-time online markets, and so on. In the 21st century, following a plan is increasingly less important than responding actively and effectively to change.
- A shift of control to the edge of organizations. This has been predicted at least as far back as the Cluetrain Manifesto, if not farther. It’s not even really a shift, it’s more like the addition of a new dimension to how we operate organizationally, something I’ve referred to previously as “social business.” This new addition changes the dynamics of where useful information comes from, how decisions are made, and how more autonomy and self-organization will be needed (and tolerated) in modern organizations to meet more dynamic and changing global marketplace.
As I explored recently in “How the Web OS has begun to reshape IT and business”, today’s Internet has become a central driver of how we do things today. It’s the richest marketplace that
September 28th, 2009
Community management: The 'essential' capability of successful Enterprise 2.0 efforts
You wouldn’t provide new software to users without proper support. The case must be made that you can’t do the same with social environments. It’s not a skill that’s been widely understood until quite recently, however community management has begun to move to the forefront of discussions about enterprise social computing as the use of social tools begins to climb the maturity curve. Now community management is increasingly proving not just useful but a critical component of Enterprise 2.0 efforts despite an often vague understanding of what it is and where it should be situated in the org chart.
Community management itself can be sensitive subject in the social media arena. Some believe that to be authentic and to grow properly online communities should be as completely self-organized and “unmanaged” as possible. In this vision they should be free of corporate heavy-handedness or even immediate business requirements, thereby allowed to grow organically and naturally to fruition without the chill of censorship or excessive expectation. In this view, as the utility of things like PCs, e-mail, and computer networks became self-evident, workers naturally found all sorts of good uses for them, and the same goes for social tools.
Others believe that there must be some central oversight as well as guidance and support to accomplish anything useful with social software, especially in a business context. This view prescribes the need to actively deal with any potential risks such as inappropriate use, low return on investment, and lack of alignment with business goals. In other words, the business must also have a seat at the community table while helping it ensure the effort has what it needs to succeed.
Click To Enlarge
The truth is probably somewhere in between and most likely a bit more towards self-interested oversight than in the other direction. But how can we really determine this? Although my own research has started showing a strong correlation between successful Enterprise 2.0 efforts and well-organized and properly resourced community management, I wanted a broader, more current snapshot of what’s really happening with community management and the use of social tools today. To do this I needed some good data and luckily for me I knew just who I could ask.
Surveying Enterprise 2.0 practitioners
So a couple of weeks ago I reached out to my good friend Susan Scrupski, a maven of all things social computing in the enterprise and — not coincidentally — founder of The 2.0 Adoption Council, a rapidly growing private community of practitioners of Enterprise 2.0 whose 100+ members are mostly from large Fortune 500 efforts. This group, which represents some of the largest companies in the world, might be able to give us a snapshot of their experiences with community management. I inquired if she could ask the council the following question:
How important has community management been to your Enterprise 2.0 effort?
A. Essential
B. Important
C. Not that important
Susan kindly agreed and recently reported the results to me. Although I’d been pretty confident that community management was going to score well based on 1) what I’ve seen from other projects, 2) a growing body of anecdotal information, and 3) the findings from case studies that I’ve seen reported recently, I was still pretty surprised at the results, even given the small but influential sample, which you can see below:
Community Management Survey Results:
The vast majority of the respondents, 95% of them, rated community management as “essential” to their Enterprise 2.0 effort. The remainder listed it as “important”. None of them reported it as “Not that important”. While there is always the possibility of groupthink in results like this, it’s fascinating that community management, while still barely rating a few lines of description in pro-Web 2.0 sources such as Wikipedia, has become such an important aspect of online communities.
Some of the comments that respondents to the survey gave are worth repeating here as well, which I do below with permission from Susan. For example, I especially liked this vignette of community management at CSC, a large, well-known business services company:
While the whole idea of Enterprise 2.0 has at its source crowdsourcing and peer support/interaction - some times users just need guidance and support. Users will have questions. You need someone worrying about the right help content, seeding discussions, guiding users as they ask questions. And in fact, you don’t just need one community manager, but a solid network of community managers. So yes, we have one ‘community manager’ so to speak (actually several of us share the role) but then many ‘chief champions’… No matter how easy a tool is to use, there are still those that have questions and need ‘community coaching’ (I’m talking about the business piece of community leadership) and general guidance. — Claire Flanagan, Sr. Mgr, KM and Enterprise Social Software Strategy, CSC
There were also more general statements of affirmation like:
I can’t imagine a success story without some manner of engagement/governance/particpation. — Megan Murray, Community Manager/Project Coordinator, Booz Allen Hamilton
We also saw some of the shades of Enterprise 2.0 failure causes such as the tool-first instead of community-first approach as well as the recurrence of the now-familiar suitability of SharePoint for Enterprise 2.0 discussion. Both of these, as we’ve seen on other projects as well, tends to leave community management efforts under funded and without the resources to make the effort succeed:
SharePoint has been pitched as a plug-and-play solution for collaboration and community. We now know it is certainly not - but this expectation has resulted in under-budgeting for community management resources. Adjusting that expectation, and the implications for the “TCO” of SharePoint will be essential for Enterprise 2.0 and community building to succeed. I think this applies to any collaboration or e20 solution, not just SharePoint: Vendors and IT groups who pitch a platform may be failing to account for the community leader role as a key element to success. — Abigail Lewis-Bowen, Johnson & Johnson
Though the act of community management has been taking place since the advent of online conversations going back to newsgroups, open source development projects, and discussion forums, it’s only now starting to get serious attention as a technique for managing social collaboration within organizations.
Community Management: Not new but newly focused on social collaboration
But what exactly does a community manager do?
September 24th, 2009
Creating a unified model for enterprise mashups
A unified mashup model can increase software quality, lower IT costs, and directly drive choice and innovation. I’ve written here over the years about software mashups; simple combinations of pieces of the Web that are rearranged into new useful forms. I’ve even called the approach a key to the future of software development. While mashups in the enterprise have been reasonably successful up until now — about a third of enterprises have them today — there have been challenges in enabling the same level of wide use and benefits that are currently evident on the open Web.
Fortunately, this may be about to change. Today marks the introduction of an effort by the new Open Mashup Alliance (OMA), a federation of interested parties in the mashup space that want to bring the benefits of standardization, consistency, interoperability, and a real marketplace to the world of enterprise mashups. The initial participants include a wide range of firms such as Adobe, CapGemini, HP, Intel, JackBe, Kapow, Programmable Web, Synteractive, and Xignite. Disclaimer: My company is also a founding member organization of the OMA. Note that anyone can become an OMA member, either as a company or a user and the principles of the organization are open and egalitarian.
Related: Joe McKendrick’s Enterprise mashup proponents start organizing.
What makes OMA especially interesting from my perspective is that it’s much more than a “high concept” strategic effort that will one day put forth specifications or technology that may or may not be useful to enterprises for creating mashups. Instead OMA sponsor JackBe, one of the world’s top enterprise mashups vendors, has generously contributed their existing and proven enterprise mashups model — known as the Enterprise Mashup Markup Language — along with a fully working reference implementation of an EMML runtime, as well as 50 working mashups.
Thus EMML exists fully today as one of the more mature enterprise mashup specifications available. It is robust, mature (it has been supporting production applications for several years), and now it is open for anyone to use via a Creative Commons license. And given JackBe’s technology roots in the Java community — their CTO is the respected John Crupi of Core J2EE patterns and Sun fame — it is free of proprietary technologies and formats. EMML also brings the leverage, speed, and power of domain-specific languages to the table as well.
The result is an open enterprise mashup specification and runtime model using familiar standards and/or community technologies such as XML, XPath, XQuery, SQL, JavaScript, and JRuby. Using the EMML reference guide, anyone can now create an EMML-compliant mashup runtime. This also means any EMML-based mashup is able to run inside any EMML-compliant runtime. The resulting mashups — because they are built with an open, interoperable specification — can now be published, shared, reused, and if applicable sold in a larger, standardized market. This creates the possibilities of a real enterprise mashup ecosystem and marketplace that wouldn’t happen of its own accord. The potential is not inconsiderable given that so far the enterprise mashups industry, lacking a consistent model (outside the browser itself, see below for further details) has been fragmented into a story of multiple competing vendors and technologies. This included IBM (Mashup Center), Serena (Mashup Composer), JackBe (Presto), and many others.
I’ve personally examined EMML and can attest that it’s a clean powerful design that includes potent capabilities such as declarative data transformation, advanced procedural logic, parallelism, meta-data and much more. That’s not to say more can’t or won’t be done to extend and evolve EMML but it’s a credible start to create a consistent model and runtime artifacts for the design and operation of enterprise mashups across all the vendors that support it. At its core, however, EMML and its runtime is essentially an enterprise-class version of Yahoo Pipes.
While it’s also true that today’s announcement will certainly not hurt JackBe as the top provider of EMML tools today, I also know — based on my conversations with them lately and over the years — that 1) they are a startup company that is volunteering the output of their hard work and is unlikely to vault to market domination on this basis alone and 2) that they believe this effort is one of the best practical ways to help enterprise mashups gain critical mass and that 3) the benefit to them is by improving the conditions of the enterprise mashups industry as a whole. At least that’s my perspective.
Ultimately, the OMA creates a standardized approach to enterprise mashups that creates an open and vibrant market for competing runtimes, mashups, and an array of important aftermarket services such as development/testing tools, management and administration appliances, governance frameworks, education, professional services, and so on. Creating an ecosystem like this is only possible when the mashup industry is focused on heading in the same general direction instead of competing over individual technologies (notably, this is one of the reasons the Web works so well).
Enough of the mashup development and runtime process is left open with EMML that there is also plenty of room for differentiation. While EMML will indeed level the playing field, vendors also have plenty of room around the edges to offer additional capabilities for EMML-based environments including visual designer tools/IDEs, modeling systems, administration consoles, portfolio management systems, and so on.
In the larger view, there has always been the tantalizing possibility for
September 17th, 2009
Going beyond the hype: Identifying Enterprise 2.0 best practices
There’s been plenty of discussion recently in the blogosphere, including here, about the successes and challenges of Enterprise 2.0 projects. But there’s still just a rough general sense of what it really takes to create an effective collaborative community using social tools.
It’s starting to become clear that successful Enterprise 2.0 efforts have community management as a core function. Stewart Mader’s guest post this week on Dennis Howlett’s blog here on ZDNet helps tell part of this story: As businesses go about their daily activities, they aren’t looking for either Enterprise 2.0 or a social tool like a wiki for its own sake. Instead, they are looking to solve problems and meet their deadlines in easier, cheaper, and better ways. To the extent that social computing can help do this, it will remain a topical subject in business and IT. To the extent that it’s a distraction, a risk, or more overhead, it won’t.
Those trying to read the tea leaves about Enterprise 2.0 these days can see that the software at least has arrived in a bare majority of companies, even if it’s just Facebook or Twitter across the firewall. Genuine adoption and meaningful integration into business processes has certainly happened in a number of organizations, but is still the edge case today rather than the rule. That’s not to say the current case studies aren’t reporting gains, they generally are. But the message here is that many enterprises are now actively in full contact with the social computing world, whether they want to or not, and now it’s time to understand how to deal with the benefits and issues.
What does seem to be emerging are the first broad outlines of a body of knowledge on how to make social computing work in a business setting. So-called best practices and effective techniques are beginning to be identified and understood. And if one accepts that some level of adoption of social tools is inevitable in most workplaces (just not that big an “if” these days), then understanding how to manage the upside while dealing with any potential downsides of Enterprise 2.0 just makes good business sense.
The advent of most new technology improvements to business ultimately get codified into frameworks or methodologies, big formal sounding words that just refer to systematic ways of identifying and applying methods in a given discipline. This helps identify and organize practices that work and ones that don’t by ensuring new efforts don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time. The first social software and Enterprise 2.0 methodologies are now beginning to emerge, some explicitly but most implicitly, as practitioners assess their early successes and try to understand what worked and what didn’t.
Emerging best practices in social software
The last couple of years has seen a steady, conscious effort to collect and codify social computing techniques and best practices. These include:
- Andrew McAfee’s attempt to create a pattern language for Enterprise 2.0.
- Stewart Mader’s excellent Wikipatterns.
- Sun’s well produced Social Software Pattern Language.
- The social patterns captured in Designing Social Interfaces by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone and probably best summarized here.
But while these efforts are laudable and often extremely useful when designing social software or structuring online communities, they often lack
September 9th, 2009
Government 2.0: A tale of "risk, control, and trust"
Yesterday in downtown Washington DC I was fortunate to be able to attend two important Government 2.0 events: the LMI Executive Forum on Mission 2.0 and O’Reilly/TechWeb’s Government 2.0 Expo. Both of these events highlighted the benefits as well as the challenges of improving the way the government does so much of what it does today.
Self-organizing and self-directed behavior is much more likely in the government of the near-future.
Social collaboration, information sharing, and open data were broad themes extensively explored and certainly championed by many at both events, admittedly myself one of them. Cautious optimism was apparent in the participants as there seems to be a broadening consensus that there will be striking changes in government over the next few years. This optimism was occasionally overshadowed in many discussions by the recurrence of issues such as the challenges that bureaucracy poses to progress including HR, policy, reward systems, and management motivations. Especially evident were worries about the classic issues of hierarchical management which LMI Executive Forum participant Mark Oehlert summarized smartly in three broad themes: “Risk, control, and trust.“
The interest, however, in improving government through the innovative use of the latest Web 2.0 approaches and tools is at the moment reaching nearly a fever pitch in the public sector, at least in the nation’s capital. Throughout the summer and fall there have been events and meetups around the Washington DC area exploring how social computing, Enterprise 2.0, agile integration, and data sharing between agencies in the federal government can achieve many of the goals for next-generation government that those, including national CIO Vivek Kundra, have been expounding in recent months.
A lot of this recent interest has been spurred by a new administration, particularly President Barack Obama’s early moves this year, and the issuance in particular of the Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies on Transparency and Open Government. In this document, Obama says that:
Government should be collaborative. Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector.
While orders and memoranda are issued all the time in government, often without substantial impact, the broad influence of social computing these days, both in the consumer space as well as the enterprise, has made social systems one of the top approaches of interest when it comes to open government initiatives this year, as we’ll see from the discussions yesterday.
Exploring Mission 2.0: An emerging subset of Government 2.0
The LMI Executive Forum yesterday was attended by senior members of various government agencies including the CIA, DNI, and the DoD. The attendees, including myself as a guest, discussed at length social computing in the federal workplace, in particular the more secure, mission-oriented environments such as the intelligence community. The use of Web 2.0 tools in this environment can be called Mission 2.0.
A number of key points came out of the discussion that highlight the differences between private sector use of Web 2.0 approaches and their realization in a so-called Mission 2.0 environment. In particular is
September 6th, 2009
How the Web OS has begun to reshape IT and business
These days in the halls of IT departments around the world there is a growing realization that the next wave of outsourcing, things like cloud computing and crowdsourcing, are going to require responses that will forever change the trajectory of their current relationship with the business, or finally cause them to be relegated as a primarily administrative, keep-the-lights-on function.
IT is going to either have to get more strategic to the business or get out of the way. Businesses too must grow a Web DNA. The proximal cause of this seems to be the growing domination of the global network that surrounds all businesses today: The Web. If you’ve read my writings here since 2006 you largely know what’s happening: Today’s highly evolved Web has grown far beyond its original roots in content distribution and communication. It has become a fully fledged platform for media (TV, movies, music, newspapers, gaming, etc. have been strongly disrupted by the Web and now largely reside there) as well as more strategic pursuits. Probably most significantly is computing in all its many forms. This ranges from low-level services such as raw compute power and storage to social computing, semantics, and collective intelligence.
But the advent of a Web OS is certainly not just an IT story. It’s also — and really mostly — a business story. Those who are trying to track the so-called “big shifts” in the 21st century, thinkers like John Hagel, are attempting to pin down the specific changes taking place in the world today. John recently noted that “we are moving from a relatively stable business environment to one characterized by rapid rates of change with ever more disruptions generating increasing uncertainty and unpredictability“. In this way, routinely transforming instability and rapid change from a threat (which it is to most businesses today) into opportunity is a core skill that organizations increasingly must be able to cultivate.
That much of the pace of change today is driven by the modern world’s pervasive and instant global flows of knowledge is largely due to influence of the Web and its billions of two-way touchpoints with nearly a third of the world’s population (including practically all of the developed world). In addition to ultra fast feedback loops that drive real-time action/response scenarios in the marketplace, the Web has also become an incredibly efficient, inexpensive, and easy-to-use delivery system for just about anything that an interface can be wrapped around.
This has created a new form of leverage in terms of the ability to change and adapt by tapping rapidly and deeply into on-demand resources (be they computing, data, or even people and ideas) in virtually real-time. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal noted that because of modern technology, particularly the Web, business “initiatives that used to take months and megabucks to coordinate and launch can often be started in seconds for cents.” Clearly, this is a brave new world, even if it’s one that’s still happening more on the edge than in the core of businesses today.
WOA = Web-Oriented Architecture
CC/SRR = Creative Commons/Some Rights Reserved
AOP = Architectures of Participation
It’s a world where scarcity practically doesn’t exist and access to abundance is virtually free. It’s also true that the business models of the Web OS are only emerging as well. While monetization is prevalent for those consuming or participating in the Web OS, there is also a real and ongoing concern that it’s also the modern version of sharecropping. That traditional management approaches often don’t understand the nuances of these issues and aren’t designed to take advantage of this modern economic landscape, much less compete with a growing number of businesses that do, is a whole side story I’ll explore when I’m able. But it’s one in which the Web OS is increasingly forcing a serious reevaluation of modern business practices as well as the very notion of how an opportunity is defined, identified, and targeted.
What is the Web OS?
While there are multiple ways of looking at the Web as an operating system, from cloud environments that mimic a desktop operating system to sets of services packaged together and bundled as an individual product to companies, the largest — and the most significant — is the idea of an overarching and emergent Internet operating system. The data, services, and even communities of the Web are now programmatic and can be incorporated and remixed into any other business or product at will. The concept of a Web OS isn’t new. But its arrival on the scene in compelling form with serious impact to the enterprise is.
Over the last few years, as open APIs, social networking platforms, cloud computing, open identity services, sensor-driven databases (such as with GPS and OpenStreetMap), or even people (example: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) have created open ecosystems in which anyone can participate, including business, both to contribute and to consume. The Web has become the ultimate outsourcing platform and one that is incredibly agile too, combined with economies of scale that are very hard to match. There are challenges too: Unpredictabilities and risks exist that must be dealt with both routinely and successfully.
But to perform well in this changing business environment organizations have to
An internationally recognized enterprise architect and business strategist, Dion Hinchcliffe has been working for two decades with leading-edge methods to accelerate project schedules and raise the bar for software quality. You can follow Dion on Twitter.
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