October 5th, 2009

Twenty-two power laws of the emerging social economy

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 1:41 pm

Categories: Architecture of Participation, Business Models, Cloud computing, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Community, Community Management, Cost-effective scalability, Crowdsourcing, Customer Community, Customer Self-Service, Design Patterns, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Grassroots Community, Innovation marketplace, Network effects, Social Computing, Social Economy, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, The Long Tail, Two-Way Web, User Generated Content, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform

Tags: Web, Knowledge, Information Technology, Knowledge Economy, Amara, Strategy, Web 2.0, Management, Internet, Dion Hinchcliffe

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

Read the rest of this entry »

June 3rd, 2009

Building a vision for Government 2.0

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 4:49 pm

Categories: Architecture of Participation, Business Models, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Community, Convergence, Crowdsourcing, Customer Community, Customer Self-Service, Design Patterns, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Grassroots Community, Network Effects, Network effects, Right To Remix, SaaS, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, The Long Tail, The Social Graph, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform

Tags: Web, Citizen, Web 2.0, Vision, Vivek Kundra, Government, Vertical Industries, Dion Hinchcliffe

Government 2.0 isn’t waiting for a federal mandate. Earlier this week, the nation’s first ever CIO, Vivek Kundra, urged the use of Web 2.0 approaches to address the needs of government and citizens at the Management of Change conference in Norfolk, Virginia. Kundra outlined several important areas where he believed Web 2.0 can help improve government: connecting with citizens and their ideas (social computing), routing around the horizontal and vertical silos surrounding government data (open APIs), and tapping into the potential savings of low-cost new software applications and processing capabilities (SaaS and cloud computing.)

Among the three areas, Kundra’s perception that citizens were a true peer group in the process of governing seemed to come through clearest:

“We’ve got to recognize that we can’t treat the American people as subjects but as a co-creator of ideas. We need to tap into the vast amounts of knowledge… in communities across the country. The federal government doesn’t have a monopoly on the best ideas.”

That the global, pervasive network known as the Internet can directly connect citizens with their government is obviously an idea well-aligned with Web 2.0 ideas. Not that the vision for something known as Government 2.0 is a new one. It goes back to the very beginning of the Web 2.0 discussion. But with a new administration in place in Washington and a passionate CIO that by all appearances is progressive and understands the modern IT era, the timing seems to be ripe for a remaking of government and perhaps even democracy itself.

Fixing what isn’t broken?

Our democracy is not quite 250 years old and its mechanisms have largely served us very well over the years. That we currently have representative government is for a variety of reasons, not the least of which were that the vast distances in our large country used to make wide-scale direct democracy difficult and that considerable expertise and knowledge were perceived to be required to make important government decisions. The Internet, however, with its ability to make any distance equally close and to let us research virtually anything in real-time, has seemingly erased the need to impose such constraints on how we govern ourselves.

But of course there is more to the story. The state of government today is also still very much a “we the people” vs. them, the government. There is a distance between us and our government, at least for most of us, that is reminiscent of paternal days of old when getting involved, unless it was your local assembly, was something that few people had the ability to do. Government was for people who could join it and make a career of it, and many have indeed dedicated their lives to public service. Now, however, there is the means to enable many, many more to be involved and to potentially create a government that fits us and serves us, in our time, better than it can in its present form.

We should also not forget the classic sayings that “bureaucracies exist to perpetuate themselves” and “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, which are old chestnuts for a reason. The roots of these concerns occasionally need tending to as well.

In short, events of the last couple of years and vast changes in our modern society seem to urge some essential improvements upon our government, if only we had the means:

Improving Government 1.0

• More transparent and accountable. Too much government information is inaccessible from the citizens that paid to create it. Much more than just raw data or collated statistics, which is increasingly opening up already, its the very deliberations of the government machine; the decision making, who made them and why, as well as the actual actions taken, all of which are often far too closed to the governed, yet affect us so profoundly. Make no doubt about it, like Web 2.0 was to the rest of society, opening up daily activity to the daylight is a sea change and governments around the world, never very comfortable with scrutiny or criticism to begin with, will be seriously challenged in an era where their constituents have as much power as they do to communicate. It’s also true that too often the information that is intentionally kept from coming to light that is the most significant. I’m not talking here about secure or classified information; there is information that simply must be kept highly circumscribed for security reasons (though that too is often overdone). For an example of a move in the right direction, OpenSecrets.org is an excellent example of transparent and accountable government information, while Data.gov is also a good start, but only a start. Globally visible, persistent government activity is the enabler here, and Enterprise 2.0, which will be used much more internally within government at first over the next few years, is part of the answer.
• Less expensive, cumbersome, wasteful, and heavyweight. Our current government is largely a construct of the 20th century, when most of the growth and development of the federal government as well as our state and local governments took place. This is a traditional paperwork and hierarchy-driven system where, despite impressive adoption of Web 1.0 as well as numerous bright spots (some dramatically so), far too many of the cowpaths have merely been paved. The way we run our government must be reinvented for a world that has gone decidedly connected, digital, and is increasingly ready to be directly participatory. Not only can the way we interact with citizens and within government be made enormously better and more lightweight, it could cost dramatically less with the application of new technologies and social structures. And as we saw with the rise of nearly revolutionary open business models 10 years ago on the Web, engaging the greater world on the public network is often the best, easiest, and cheapest way to accomplish things, if only we have the freedom to fundamentally rethink the way we do things today. With the federal budget skyrocketing and no end in sight, dramatic means will be required to cut costs sooner rather than later, and some of the more powerful aspects of 2.0 will likely be the answer.
• Not as impersonal and imprecise. Not many people have a regular, meaningful relationship with their government other than paying their taxes and obeying the law. Most of the time, we are a government statistic instead of what we really are: living, breathing citizens. And while the debate on large vs. small government will probably never be over, a new form of government that is far more direct and personal is coming. The very nature of how citizens can connect with, engage, and gain mutual value from our government is changing because of the Internet. With 2.0, the government’s ability to provide a customized experience to each and every citizen so that the services that are provided, whatever they end up being over time, are exactly what we need, right when we need them, often powered by the rest of us. And mass customization is likely just the beginning; Facebook groups and political online communities began to help us self-organize but the legislation of the future as well as national decisions will increasingly be tailored by us and for us in a form of modern digital gerrymandering to fit us like a glove, potentially overcoming at long last the winner takes all tyranny of traditional democracy. E-mail gave us ability to reach our representatives instantly, but social tools, online community, government tools powered by collective intelligence, and participatory citizenship will change our civic lives a great deal more. In the very near future, for better or worse, our relationship with our government is almost certainly going to be closer, more personal, dynamic, and custom fit.

A quick glance at this list shows that it tends to parallel

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October 30th, 2007

Significant workplace inroads for Enterprise 2.0?

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 8:33 pm

Categories: ATOM, Architecture of Participation, Blogs, Business Models, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Customer Self-Service, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Enterprise Wikis, RSS, Radical Decentralization, SaaS, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Software, Social media, Social networks, Structured Content, Tagging, The Long Tail, Two-Way Web, User Generated Content, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Wikis

Tags: Web, Workplace, Social Media, Enterprise 2.0, Wiki, Hyperlink Infrastructure, Dion Hinchcliffe

According to a random poll I recently conducted on Facebook, just over a quarter of 300 respondents — 27% of them in all — answered in the affirmative that they are provided with an easy way at work to post on a blog or put information on a wiki. I often ask this same question to gatherings of people whenever I get the chance these days and have been getting roughly the same answer for the last few months. Businesses are apparently starting to take Web 2.0 for a more serious spin.

Blogs and wikis may finally be seeing fairly widespread “business approved” adoption in the workplace.A year ago, accessibility to blogs and wikis in the workplace was less than half this number in my informal sampling. The growth trend seems clear and appears to be increasing. So while this data might be fairly unscientific, I suspect the number is pretty accurate, and social media, aka Enterprise 2.0, is finally making some measurable inroads in the workplace despite a few open concerns about these mediums.

Facebook as a measure of social media in the general workplace?

Of course, Facebook users in general are probably more digitally literate than the average population, will look for blogs and wikis on the local Intranet to use, and thus some say they may be more likely to gravitate to workplaces and jobs that would provide an environment with familiar tools. However, one odd breakdown in the demographics of the poll is that the youngest group, 18-24 year-olds, reported the least access to social media. Perhaps it’s because this group also includes a great deal of students or that entry level workers don’t have as much computer access as workers farther up in the hierarchy.

Poll respondents were also pretty sure when they weren’t being provided with these tools with only 21% reporting that they didn’t know if they were being offered them. A whopping 52%, just over half, said that they had no social media tools offered to them in a way they could access.

The poll question was also carefully posed to uncover if tools were being “brought in the back door” by workers using the hundreds of free social media platforms out in the Web with their browser at work, or if the workplace itself was providing enterprise blogs and wikis. In my opinion, this makes the 27% “yes” number almost surprisingly high. But, while some respondents may not have parsed the question clearly, the trend is strong enough to stand on it’s own:

Blogs and wikis may finally be seeing fairly widespread “business approved” adoption in the workplace.

Getting good business outcomes from social media while managing downside

While blogs and wikis continue to show the potential to greatly improve collaboration, create higher levels of knowledge retention, and generate more reusable business information over time, it’s also probable that Read the rest of this entry »

October 16th, 2007

The 10 top challenges facing enterprise mashups

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 2:58 pm

Categories: Ajax, Badges, Business Models, Collaboration, Convergence, Customer Self-Service, Design Patterns, Encouraging Unintended Uses, Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Web 2.0, Gadgets, Global SOA, Governance, Lightweight Service Models, Mashups, Network Effects, Network effects, Open APIs, Products, RSS, Rich Internet Applications (RIA), Right To Remix, SOA, SaaS, Situational Software, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, The Long Tail, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Web services, Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA), Widgets, Wikis

Tags: Spreadsheet, IBM Corp., Mashup, ProgrammableWeb, Dion Hinchcliffe

The promise of remixing existing online services and data into entirely new online applications in a rapid, inexpensive manner, often referred to as mashups, has captured the software industry’s imagination since the release of first major example, HousingMaps.com, in early 2005. Since then, mashups have offered the potential to finally make widespread software reuse a reality, enable SOA initiatives to achieve positive ROI, and radically drive down the cost of application development while satisfying large applications backlogs that plague organizations almost everywhere.

Applying mashups in a business settings is often referred to as “enterprise mashups” and recently we’ve finally begun to see the tools emerging to bring real mashup capabilities to consumers, business users, and IT professionals.

However, though anecdotal evidence seem to abound — there are a good number of stories about businesses creating isolated mashups here and there — and mashups are again getting placed on hot tech trends lists for 2008, we’re clearly still not yet seeing the flood of mashup-based apps inside of organizations despite their consistent and steadfast growth on the consumer Web.

ProgrammableWeb’s mashup graphs (left of page) currently reports that over 2,400 mashup-based apps currently exist.

The public Web of course has been a global laboratory for innovation for 15 years and it’s not surprising that experimentation and creativity in such a large pool of resources of people and services would generate some interesting outcomes like the several thousand mashup applications currently available. But the question has been: Where is the same result inside our organizations? Those same organizations that often desperately need software to solve a business problem for which software simply isn’t available — at least without extensive customization — because the typical business problem’s unique, situational nature. In previous posts I’ve discussed how spreadsheets are often the only end-user development tool available to the average person to meet this need today.

So what exactly is holding back enterprise mashups from becoming a more popular phenomena inside our organizations? This has been in contrast to many other aspects of Web 2.0 inside the enterprise, where openness, network effects, and radical power and simply are often driving extremely fast uptake and adoption of new apps and technologies. By many indications, mashups — particularly in the enterprise — have so far fallen short of their potential and the question is why?

I’ve discussed this with a various people in the mashup community and analyzed a number of the leading mashup platforms and have boiled the outstanding challenges down to Read the rest of this entry »

July 23rd, 2007

A bumper crop of new mashup platforms

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 12:49 am

Categories: Ajax, Business Models, Cost-effective scalability, Customer Self-Service, Design Patterns, Encouraging Unintended Uses, Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Web 2.0, Enterprise Wikis, Gadgets, Global SOA, Governance, JSON, Mashups, Open APIs, Products, RSS, Rich Internet Applications (RIA), Right To Remix, SOA, SaaS, Situational Software, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, The Long Tail, Two-Way Web, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Web services, Widgets, Wikis

Tags: Web, Platform, Mashup, Dion Hinchcliffe

While application developers tend to roll their eyes at the concept of end-user mashups, they remain one of the more promising new trends in software development this year. And while it’s certainly true it’s early days yet for mashups, the tools that enable them remaining rather limited, seems to be changing as I regularly come across compelling new mashup platforms as well as upgrades to existing ones that show what will be possible soon. And for now, as evidenced recently in the McKinsey Web 2.0 in business survey where 21% of organizations globally said they are using or planning to use mashups, there appears to be considerable demand for mashups at the enterprise level even though the majority of existing offerings are primarily aimed at the consumer space. Is this disconnect resolving with the current crop of offerings? Let’s take a look.

In today’s mashup world, the apparent business potential of highly accessible and easy-to-use mashup creation tools like Yahoo! Pipes and Microsoft’s PopFly is still undermined by their apparent lack of readiness for the enterprise. Mashups could theoretically allow business users to move — when appropriate — from their current so-called “end-user development tools” such as Microsoft Excel that are highly isolated and poorly integrated to much more deeply integrated models that are more Web-based and hence more open, collaborative, reusable, shareable, and in general make better use of existing sources of content and functionality. Remember, business workers still spend a significant amount of time manually integrating together the data in their ever increasing number of business applications. Tools that could let thousands of workers solve their situational software integration problems on the spot themselves, instead of waiting (sometimes forever) for IT to provide a solution, is indeed a potent vision.

So what’s typically missing from today’s mashup platforms to make them both useful and desirable in the enterprise? While no one knows for sure, since mashups are just starting to be considered seriously in many organizations, it generally boils down to 1) deep access to existing enterprise services and data/content repositories, 2) SaaS-style Web-based mashup assembly and use, 3) assembly models that are truly end-user friendly with very little training required, 4) a credible management and maintenance story for IT departments that must support a flood of public end-user built and integrated apps, and last but certainly not least, 5) mashup products that address important questions about mashups and enterprise security. None of these are particularly easy to solve, which is most likely why mashups haven’t been more prevalent before now.

This latter issue of security — in terms of reliably securing applications that are created largely out of other services and applications — can’t be understated and will likely determine whether an mashup platform can even be considered for adoption in a given organization. This is particularly crucial since the Global SOA, the vast landscape of open functionality and content on the Web, now provides a truly massive yet rather security-challenged set of source of material for enterprise mashups. The question here is whether Web apps that are assembled by users — and not developers or security experts — and that combine capabilities from a wide variety of sources including the open Web can ever be made safe enough for most businesses? That’s an important open question and one that few of the mashup platforms listed below spend much time addressing.

Are mashups really a major new development model? Read a detailed discussion.

The answers to these questions will inevitably shake out as the existing mashups products get applied to real business problems and the industry collectively learns what capabilities and approaches are needed for them to be successful. And I don’t expect it will be a one size-fits-all either; mashups can be approached many different ways, from the pure service mashup models of RSSBus and Kapow’s RoboMaker to the innovative yet very end-user friendly wiki model that IBM’s QEDWiki takes.

I’ve been been tracking many of these new or evolving mashup platforms and thought I’d compile my take of the leading players in the mashup space today, particularly given the number of new or significantly upgraded products in the last few months. To make the cut, all the products listed below had to allow live integration of functionality or content (data) over a network, provide an easy-to-use development model that is theoretically accessible by end-users, be available in at least beta form, and either consume and/or produce Web-based applications and services. Using this refined selection model, you’ll see this list looks a bit different from last year’s round-up of mashup platforms. Yet despite the removal of a few products, the list is bigger than Read the rest of this entry »

February 25th, 2007

Tracking the DIY phenomenon Part 2: Mass customization, mashups, and recombinant Web apps

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 6:22 pm

Categories: ATOM, Architecture of Participation, Badges, Business Models, Design Patterns, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Web 2.0, Gadgets, Global SOA, Lightweight Service Models, Mashups, Open APIs, Products, REST, RSS, Right To Remix, SOA, SOAP, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, The Long Tail, Two-Way Web, Web 2.0, Web services, Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA), Widgets

Tags:

In my last post, I took a look at the recent proliferation of Web widgets, which are modular content and services that are making it easier for anyone to help themselves to the vast pool of high value functionality and information that resides on the Web today.  Companies are actively "widgetizing" their online offerings so that it can actively be repurposed into other sites and online products.  And as we discussed in the last post, it's believed that letting users innovate with your online offerings by letting embedding them in their own Web sites, blogs, and applications can greatly broaden distribution and reach, leverage rapid viral propagation over the Internet, and fully exploit the raw creativity that theoretically lies in great quantities on the edge of our networks.

DIY on the Web is looking to be a major trend; Newsweek recently speculated that 2007 will be the Year of the Widget. 

Looked at this way, letting thousands and even millions of users build Web sites and apps out of your Web parts and then monetizing it with advertising, usage fees, or subscriptions sounds great in the abstract.  But one of the big outstanding questions is if widgitizing is mostly useful for gaining fast user adoption and market share, and not for building the fundamentals of a viable, long-term business online.  While this last question is still very much an open one, part of the answer will come from the way that the consumption side of DIY develops.  The question is this: Are environments emerging that will enable rich and sophisticated DIY scenarios that are usable by most people?

So while my last post looked at the recent growth of available Web parts, now we'll look at the consumption side of the DIY phenomenon.  Specifically, beyond the simple copy-and-paste of snippets of HTML, what is the current state of capable tools that will let all of us assemble useful apps beyond the widget encrusted dashboards that are most likely outcome possible today?  Because without tools that enable real integration between all these portable Web parts, services, and feeds, we don't have useful new software, we just have fancy information displays.

Like the emergent, DIY usage currently being explored and increasingly embraced with Enterprise 2.0, the idea of DIY is to get developers and IT departments out of the demand loop and letting users self-service themselves.  Like spreadsheets and desktop databases have been used for years by end users to build simple apps, with the rise of reusable, portable Web parts and feeds allows the assembly of an entire spectrum of Web apps that don't require true software development skills.  Given the right tools that guide users down the right paths (palettes of pre-tested, approved parts, built-in security, versioning and configuration management), DIY might become a major force for leveraging the largely untapped The Long Tail of software demand, instead of becoming a giant support headache for public Web companies and internal IT departments.

Of course, what I'm referring to here is

Read the rest of this entry »

January 29th, 2007

Big software firms take aim at Web 2.0

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 8:08 pm

Categories: ATOM, Ajax, Architecture of Participation, Business Models, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Convergence, Design Patterns, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Web 2.0, Hype, Mashups, Products, RSS, Rich Internet Applications (RIA), Right To Remix, SOA, SaaS, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Tagging, The Long Tail, User Generated Content, Web 2.0, Widgets

Tags:

While 2006 was a big year for Web 2.0 in the consumer space, it was barely on the radar in the enterprise world.  That didn't stop volumes of press coverage, speculation, and debate about how applicable Web 2.0 technologies — from Ajax to social networking — would actually be to the business world.

However those in the enterprise who wanted to go ahead, experiment, and conduct pilot projects to see how Web 2.0 concepts work for them were largely stuck with very consumer-oriented Web 2.0 applications to try out.  That's because until recently, the major software makers that supply the application platforms that run the vast majority of the business world haven't had applications that specifically focused on Web 2.0 patterns and practices, things like social networking, tagging, mashups, architectures of participation, and so on.

The consumerization of the enterprise was predicted to be one of the significant trends of 2007 and a quick look at this list of applications confirms that it will indeed be a key story this year.However, in the last couple of months quite a different picture has emerged and the world's largest software companies have taken clear aim at the Web 2.0 product space with announcement after announcement.  IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and Intel all have significant products, often many of them, targeted at offering the modern consumer Web experience to workers inside the firewall.  And far from being a me-too play with the rest of the industry, the truth is that as popular as open source is getting — particularly in the Web 2.0 community — many business customers still prefer solutions that play well with the mountains of enterprise IT applications and back-end systems that currently run the business.

And with approaches like Enterprise 2.0 heating up including the cutting edge topics like the emergence of mashup creation tools to build a visual "face" of service-oriented architectures (SOA), it turns out that Web 2.0 applications aimed at the enterprise must deal well with formal services integration, enterprise search, information security, single sign-on, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, and a laundry list of other enterprise issues.  These are all topics that the aforementioned firms understand well and are actively addressing in most cases with these new products.

Adding "enterprise context" to Web 2.0 tools require some work but doesn't have to be daunting.  Read overviews of how to provide this for blogs and wikis. 

It's also true that these are uncertain days for many of the big software firms.  This is partially because the world of software is becoming increasingly commoditized while the expectations for how software should be hosted is also moving rapidly from installed native applications to online Software as a Service (SaaS).  There's also a sense that enterprise systems have become too complicated, unwieldy, and slow-moving compared to their nimble brethren out on the Web.  New Web applications have continued to adapt and evolve out on the Internet quite quickly in comparison to traditional IT, essentially ushering in the Web 2.0 era itself.  It was no accident that the Web 2.0 Summit's theme last year was disruption and opportunity, and so it's concomitant on software companies to adjust to the industry and evolve. 

The Web 2.0 strategies of these new applications are as interesting and varied as the companies that have come up with them.  It's worth taking a look at the big Web 2.0 enterprise apps being announced so far.  To get a good feel for the this next generation of enterprise apps, here's a round-up of the latest Web 2.0 software plans of the industry's top software firms.  In no particular order:

SAP announced last week that it would be adding Web 2.0-style collaboration capabilities in many of its projects.  While SAP's specific Web 2.0 plans are the least defined of all the companies in this, a couple of notable points are the specific implementation of widgets, small bits of mobile code that can be added to a Web page by a user and provide data or functionality from back-end systems.  The emergence of end-user widgets on the Web was one of the more interesting

Read the rest of this entry »

January 19th, 2007

Enterprise mashups get ready for prime-time

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 4:23 pm

Categories: Ajax, Collaboration, Convergence, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Web 2.0, Global SOA, Governance, Lightweight Service Models, Mashups, Network Effects, Open APIs, Products, Rich Internet Applications (RIA), Right To Remix, SOA, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, The Long Tail, Web 2.0, Web services, Widgets

Tags:

Last year we witnessed the rise of consumer mashups on the Web, with hundreds of individual mashup-based Web applications being released in 2006 alone.  I covered this phenomenon in detail in my year-end mashup wrap-up, but now this innovation in software development is gearing up to move inside the enterprise as a raft of tools get ready to provide the tools to make it possible.  What will this mean for IT departments and end-users?  Let's take a look.

The motivations for mashups are quite different inside of organizations, where application backlogs and demand for more software that will improve collaboration and productivity are often rampant.In decades past, the new ideas in computing originated in the enterprise world and trickled down to the consumer world later on (things like databases, computer networks, file servers, and so on).  However in the Web 2.0 era, for reasons too complex to go into here, new ideas and approaches are germinating more on the consumer Web than from the enterprise space.

Mashups are example of this kind of hacker-style creation that emerged from the laboratory of the Web; new high-value applications created out of the raw pieces of other high-value apps.  The technique of using the browser itself as the location for rapid, on-the-fly integration of functionality (widgets) and services showed how easy integration could be done on at the point of consumption with simple Web technologies like XML, Ajax, and Javascript snippets.  From an enterprise perspective, it gave a lot of people pause to see how easy it could be done (Paul Rademacher's HousingMaps.com being the original example), compared to the methods used by formal and costly enterprise application integration and service-oriented architecture projects.

Mashups aren't just browser-based integration, but can be server-side too.  See my recap of the different mashup styles.

However, though mashups are technically easy to create and generate somewhat useful Web applications, it's a technology solution that may currently be ahead of a real business problem to solve.  At least on the Web that is.  Monetization and building workable business models around mashups is something of a struggle, particularly when many of the API and widgets suppliers are currently unwilling to provide much in the way of Service Level Agreements that would make it possible to safely rely on a supplier.  Some content suppliers (notably Yahoo!) even have draconian daily metering restrictions while they figure out if competing sites will sprout up and take way their users by leveraging Yahoo!'s own services.  So while mashups are a very interesting technical solution on the Web, there's still some work to do before successful businesses can be build around this model.

However, the story completely changes for mashups when it comes to the enterprise.  The motivations for mashups are quite different inside of organizations, where application backlogs and demand for more software that will improve collaboration and productivity are often rampant.  If this state of affairs is true, far from having too much software, most enterprises don't have enough to satisfy demand, despite the prevalence of mountains of existing enterprise systems, many of which are underutilized.  The arguments for letting users self-service themselves with end-user application tools and getting IT out of the critical path for the backlog of simpler applications are extensive and I won't belabor them long here.  The two primary arguments are The Long Tail of Enterprise IT demand as well as the potential to provide IT solutions that will deliver on the promise of something called tacit interactions.

There is a third argument emerging as well; namely that

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December 27th, 2006

Enterprise 2.0: Ten Predictions for 2007

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 12:09 pm

Categories: Architecture of Participation, Blogs, Business Process Management, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Customer Self-Service, Design Patterns, Encouraging Unintended Uses, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Enterprise Wikis, Global SOA, Governance, Hype, Network Effects, Orchestration, Products, SOA, SaaS, Social Networking, Social Software, The Long Tail, User Generated Content, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Wikis

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I explored the rise of Enterprise 2.0 this year in last week's year in review post, but 2007 will likely prove to be a much more intriguing year for the trend. The demand side of Enterprise 2.0 seems to be driven from a variety of sources that likely include a "long tail" of demand for on-the-fly IT solutions as well as the promise of enabling high value, collaborative problem solving (tacit interactions). But is the real story more complicated than a couple of causal roots?

As it turns out, it's precisely this particular sweet spot that makes Enterprise 2.0 so interesting: Enterprise 2.0 platforms can provide highly general purpose, freeform, do-it-yourself (DIY) tools that have the potential to solve an entire group of related and overlapping problems in collaboration, knowledge management, SOA adoption, self-service IT, and even overall worker productivity that have been plaguing IT and business for years.

It doesn't hurt that Enterprise 2.0 has been modeled after what seems to be working so well on the Web these days. Consequently, Enterprise 2.0 is largely driven by the apparent large-scale success of simple, effective software models out on the World Wide Web including the power inherent in fully leveraging the output potential of the users of IT systems via social media, as demonstrated by Web 2.0 applications on the Internet from Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, and hundreds of others.

But web applications like blogs and wikis are just the beginning of the Enterprise 2.0 story and many other types of applications can be created out of the patterns and practices outlined by McAfee's SLATES capabilities model (search, linking, authoring, tagging, extensions, and signals). Unlike telephone, e-mail, and even instant messaging, the information and collaboration captured by Enterprise 2.0 apps is non-interruptive and highly leveragable since day-by-day interaction by users contially nuleaves discoverable artifacts behind that reflect the ideas and work conducted within business processes conducted under the aegis of these tools.

Read about how Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are related models for creating effective networked Web applications. Includes more details on the SLATES concept.

However, as I wrote in my year in review, there remains open questions about whether the tools themselves and the behavior they encourage

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November 5th, 2006

Web 2.0 definition updated and Enterprise 2.0 emerges

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 4:19 pm

Categories: Architecture of Participation, Business Models, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Cost-effective scalability, Customer Self-Service, Design Patterns, Encouraging Unintended Uses, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Lightweight Service Models, Mashups, RSS, Rich Internet Applications (RIA), Right To Remix, SaaS, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, Social Computing, Social Software, The Long Tail, Two-Way Web, User Generated Content, Web 2.0, Web as Platform

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The annual Web 2.0 Conference starts this Tuesday and with it comes an important update of the vision of the next generation of networked applications.  Thus, the major event during the leadup to the conference is not the pending renaming of the conference to the Web 2.0 Summit, but the issuing of the most complete articulation yet of what exactly Web 2.0 is, something which the industry has frequently struggled with.

Written primarily by John Musser (of the terrific Programmable Web site) along with support from Tim O'Reilly and the O'Reilly Radar Team, the new 100 page report — titled Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices — was published late last week and is available immediately.  As most readers here know, O'Reilly Media originally introduced the term in 2004 and followed it up in 2005 with a  widely read seminal five page essay that attempted to describe the successful design patterns and business models emerging on the Web today.  This new report, probably not given as much fanfare as the original essay due to it being a commercial report, is a significant improvement on the original articulation of Web 2.0 in a number of ways.

First, the report dives deep into the specific market drivers that are reshaping the Web by what the techniques that are seen to be working on the most successful Web sites today.  These drivers include the 1+ billion connected Internet users, the mass proliferation of online devices, users that are fundamentally more engaged, the mashup ecosystem, and much more.  And the report specifically quantifies all of these trends by introducing plenty of specific background documentation, something which earlier descriptions of Web 2.0 clearly lacked.

Second, the report explores and deconstructs five common myths about Web 2.0, something that often plagues people that are trying to earnestly apply Web 2.0 techniques to their own products and services.  My favorite was the myth #3, "It's only about user participation" that goes into why user participation must drive actual downstream reuse or it fails to derive any real value or actually trigger network effects.  The upshot is that misconceptions about Web 2.0 techniques abound (such as it's all about Ajax or that you must have a community) and these really helps address many of them.

Third, the report is notable in that it marks

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