October 25th, 2009

Are the iPhone and social networks making the classic Web and intranet obsolete?

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 3:25 pm

Categories: Business Models, Cloud computing, Customer Self-Service, Enterprise Web 2.0, Mashups, Open APIs, Radical Decentralization, Rich Internet Applications (RIA), Right To Remix, SaaS, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, The Social Graph, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform

Tags: Apple iPhone, Network, Information Technology, Social Networking, Smart Phones, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology

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

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January 13th, 2009

8 Predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2009

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 12:17 pm

Categories: Blogs, Business Models, Cloud computing, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Community, Convergence, Crowdsourcing, Customer Community, Customer Self-Service, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Web 2.0, Enterprise Wikis, Innovation marketplace, Lightweight Service Models, Mashups, Network Effects, Prediction markets, Rich Internet Applications (RIA), SOA, SaaS, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social media, Social networks, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA), Wikis

Tags: Web, Web 2.0, Information Technology, Industry, Business, SOA, Technology, Organization, Prediction, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

We are starting 2009 off in a particularly inauspicious economic climate, though as we’ll see, important opportunities also exist. 2008 was a very tough year for many businesses and industries and it’s almost as hard to see how things could get worse as it is to understand how things can get better. To survive and thrive, organizations will be looking to make the most of what they already have while gearing up to weather an unknown landscape of challenges this year. These concerns frame up the majority of my Enterprise Web 2.0 predictions for this year, though not all.

I predict a rebuilding year for most organizations, with a few that will use innovative new ideas to break out with major successes.Before we review what’s likely to happen this year, let’s take a quick look at 2008’s predictions:

I led off my list last year with the pronouncement that SOA was becoming lighter weight and more Web-oriented, which was largely borne out. Last summer’s numerous online debates about things like Web-Oriented Architecture and the future of SOA eventually culminated in some bold conclusions by industry leaders such as Anne Thomas Manes who went as far as to declare SOA dead as of a few days ago, being eclipsed by “mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on ’services’“. It’s clear that SOA isn’t really dead however, but evolving markedly in response to years of experience as well major business and technological changes in the industry.

My predictions for little progress on enterprise search and for growing security concerns around Enterprise Web 2.0 also seemed to do well with many IT leaders expressing frustration in both fronts in my discussions with them throughout the year. The rise of social networking in the enterprise, the adoption of Enterprise 2.0, and the use of mobile applications in business also scored well with numerous surveys and research showing impressive uptake.

Other predictions didn’t fare as well or their outcome is unclear or hard to determine. These include significant early adoption of tools to take the unstructured information in blogs and wikis and mine them, the rise of Microsoft Silverlight in the enterprise (though Adobe AIR seemed to do fairly well), significant early adoption of collective intelligence applications/decision support, and a push by IT for governance budget for Enterprise Web 2.0 systems and applications. I also missed out on predicting the advent of cloud computing, one of the year’s biggest news stories.

Finally, two of last year’s predictions in particular are going to be much bigger in 2009 than in 2008. These are the shake out of Enterprise Web 2.0 vendors and the uptake of enterprise mashups, more on those below.

As for 2009, I predict a rebuilding year for most organizations, with a few that will use innovative new ideas to break out with major successes. With the large network effects that have been built online over the last few years by the major internet players, we will have fewer fast growth businesses in the major categories, but there is still plenty of room for major new products in industry sectors and classes of data that haven’t seen wide penetration online yet. This will also include, as we’ll see, areas that have only partially thrived online traditionally, like real estate and investment banking, that now must be completely transformed and remade, as the downfall of these industries leaves a large vacuum that must be filled by something.

8 Predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2009

1. Tight budgets will drive the adoption of low-cost Web 2.0 and cloud/SaaS solutions. This seems like an obvious prediction but how it plays out will be very interesting. This could end up actually helping the smaller Enterprise Web 2.0 players as companies look to get away from the big-ticket, enterprise-class offerings from major vendors like IBM, Oracle, and others. But in reality, once enterprises make the decision to move to platforms for wikis, enterprise mashups, cloud services, SaaS enterprise apps, and so on, they may find the one-stop shop of pre-integrated solutions from entrenched software providers more than they can resist. Make no mistake, however, IT shops and businesses alike will be looking to cut costs and I expect a lot of IT and business downsizing to happen in a surge of “Economics 2.0″.

2. Online community and 2.0 technologies become a priority for most organizations. The early data from our IT and Business Outlook Survey for 2009 shows these two areas as

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September 6th, 2008

The WOA story emerges as better outcomes sought for SOA

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 2:04 pm

Categories: ATOM, Ajax, Business Models, Customer Self-Service, Encouraging Unintended Uses, Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Web 2.0, Global SOA, Governance, JSON, Lightweight Service Models, Mashups, Network Effects, Network effects, Open APIs, REST, Radical Decentralization, Rich Internet Applications (RIA), Right To Remix, SOA, SOAP, SaaS, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, Tolerance Continuum, Web 2.0, Web as Platform, Web services, Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA), Widgets

Tags: Web, Business, SOA, Organization, WOA, WOA Story, REST, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, Middleware

Over the summer the enterprise IT blogosphere was swept up in a conversation around the concepts that many are calling Web-Oriented Architecture, or WOA. A different way to think about service-oriented architecture, WOA extolls a different but related set of technologies, in particular how to apply them in specific ways to connect our systems together into the solutions we need to take on our daily business challenges. WOA offers the exciting and fast-growth promise of the Web 2.0 world, while SOA has been seen as struggling and encountering low engagement in most organizations.

For those just joining the conversation, SOA is the most common set of top-level organizing principles and technologies that enterprises use to organize and connect their IT systems. However, SOA is increasingly in the firing line for less-than-stellar results and lack of business alignment. Few promising solutions for this have emerged lately, with the increasingly notable exception of WOA. WOA describes a compelling new focus that can address many existing SOA issues, but is sometimes at odds with traditional IT and business thinking.

Along with different technology emphasis, WOA offers a compelling new perspective on service uptake and consumption and offers potent ways of thinking about business models that can directly drive innovation and growth. Even better, we can now point to existing WOA success stories, albeit most of them in the online world. In short, SOA (of which WOA is a part) hasn’t looked this interesting in years. But like most new ideas, it inevitably faces challenges from the old guard.

For its own part, far from being a boring, back-office story about plumbing and infrastructure, SOA has actually seen better results than most of the enterprise architecture models that came before it. However, these returns have been fairly lackluster compared to what most business were actually looking for and what SOA practitioners wanted and were actively trying to achieve, certainly when any measurements of the ROI were taken. My detailed WOA overview last April tells the story: The Burton Group ultimately concluded earlier this year that “that SOA is not working in most organizations” based on extensive conversations with clients.

I’ve covered this territory a number of times in the past, most notably with an in-depth exploration of What is WOA?, but the story remains the same: WOA is being driven by the widespread success that lightweight Web services — and particularly their use in open APIs — are having on the open Web. The broad lesson that has been dawning on the enterprise architecture world this year is that this is what’s actually working in terms of what SOA has been trying to accomplish, but with a uniquely different approach.

Explore several WOA success stories and how they are driving SOA.

The tide seems to be turning in terms of the industry’s perspective of WOA as well. Respected SOA expert David Linthicum recently asked “SOA out, WOA in?” and seemed to think it was, noting it will take a long time, like SOA did, to make inroads in the enterprise despite its widespread adoption on the Internet. ZDNet’s own Joe McKendrick recently noted that “WOA wins hands-down over SOA in popularity contest” and Dave Rosenberg recently discussed WOA on CNET and took it as a forgone conclusion. And this is a key point: Many organizations I talk to are already using some WOA to some degree on the ground today, it’s just not being promoted like traditional SOA is, thereby missing the benefit of the support, documentation, guidance, management, and infrastructure/tools support needed to fully flourish.

We have started to see traditional organizations begin to offer WOA-friendly services to the world at large. For example, the World Bank recently opened its Web API to developers using the increasingly popular Mashery service, which allows an organization to outsource their WOA. Of course, WOA can be used solely inside the firewall but some of the most interesting scenarios involve integration with business partners, on demand in a very agile, lightweight fashion.

And in the end, this is the challenge. The use of WOA on the technology side is only interesting if there is support for the business for the scenarios it encourages. You could convert all your Web services from SOAP or REST and be fully ready for the resulting stream of consumer and enterprise mashups, API customers, and hundreds of new business partners, but not if you’ve not redesigned your business a bit. This is also one key reason WOA isn’t synonymous with REST. WOA is architecture, both technical and business, while REST is a style building WOA services. The implications of WOA also go beyond REST to include other Web-oriented scenarios such as widgets, browser-based interfaces, and so on.

WOA entails both technology and business change

Unfortunately, many businesses have not yet absorbed the lessons of the Web 2.0 era and still look at the Web simply as a way to deliver Web pages. This limited view and understanding of the Web’s potential means that most organizations do not have it on the radar to link themselves together in the enterprise-wide and Web-wide ecosystems of creation and integration that WOA can enable. SOA has always been about connecting systems and people together and — at long last — we have a clear path to potentially wonderful outcomes in terms of unintended uses. This includes the ability to access business opportunities inside of time windows which would previously have been unattainable with our traditional, heavyweight SOA models. But only if we truly change the way we think about how to leverage the network.

One last thing, it’s important to remember that no small system can sustain contact with a large system for very long without being fundamentally changed by it. This is what is happening with businesses (the small system, no matter how large) and the Web today (the big system.) The intrinsic nature of the Web is driving major changes in how we create network-based products and services and is inexorably turning us into Web-oriented businesses. Businesses that want to be successful on this network without understanding its fundamental nature and capabilities are only delaying the time it takes to reach the full potential the Web offers.

In this way, WOA often describes network business models (such as open Web APIs) that often seem very foreign to non-Internet businesses but are powerfully aligned with the way that the Web works. These models are almost certainly essential to be successful and flourish in the modern competitive landscape on our networks today. In this way, too many organizations will ignore adding a WOA aspect to their SOA work until it’s too late and the ability to generate strong network effects in their industry is greatly reduced.

WOA is just one of a set of transformative new distribution models for network-based systems.

So how do organizations start down this route to investigate the WOA way of doing SOA and seeing if it works for them?

Like many aspects of Web 2.0, WOA is not complex or overly expensive, it’s a way of thinking about interacting over the network and all the classic SOA principles still apply, which just create and expose them differently.

1. Learn about WOA. Study the technology (HTTP, REST, syndication, open Web APIs, widgets, metadata documentation, Ajax, mashups, JSON, etc.), as well as the business and implementation side, including partner ecosystems, developer support sites, monetization, and chargebacks.
2. Adapt WOA to your organization. Every organization will have a landscape of existing SOA approaches and technologies that WOA approaches will need to be added to. Furthermore, WOA does little good unless you’re willing to use it for what it does well: Provide the fuel for RIA-powered portal applications, enterprise mashups, your public APIs, and so on. Begun working through how WOA security will work in your organization (inline or through HTTPS, for example) and other key starter issues that are (hopefully) already described in your SOA governance documents.
3. Conduct a pilot. Validate the items in #2 with a small pilot. Select a mashup platform that works well for your organization and try it out. WOA enables SOA to be used in a much more agile, open, and effective manner, with the right tools involved but only in an environment that supports it all the way through the “stack” from browser, server, database, development tools, and management infrastructure.

What are your thoughts on WOA? Will this finally be where the rubber meets the road for many SOAs?

May 15th, 2008

Mashups turn into an industry as offerings mature

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 10:16 pm

Categories: Blogs, Cost-effective scalability, Design Patterns, Encouraging Unintended Uses, Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Web 2.0, Enterprise Wikis, Global SOA, Governance, Identity, Lightweight Service Models, Mashups, Open APIs, Products, Rich Internet Applications (RIA), Right To Remix, SOA, SaaS, Situational Software, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, Tagging, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Web services, Widgets, Wikis

Tags: Web, Industry, Mashup, JackBe, Lotus Mashups, MashupHub, Mindtouch, Itasca, Serena, Mashup Exchange

There were a great many product announcements at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last month, but it was the number of announcements around Web-based mashups in particular that received a large share of attendee and media attention. By my count there were at least nine significant announcements in this space, many around the business flavor of this emerging new type of ad hoc Web applications. These are often referred to as enterprise mashups and the growing number of offerings in this space run the gamut from Web widget assembly platforms for end-users to data-only swizzlers and remixing applications created specifically for IT professionals.

Penetration of mashups in the enterprise is just beginning as their benefits begin to be understood.One thing is now clear in this burgeoning new industry; that there is genuine interest in being a leading provider of enterprise mashup tools as organizations begin getting serious about applying them to make the development of Web-based business solutions faster, more commonplace, and less costly. One significant open question continues to be how long it will take for rapidly evolving mashup techniques to move into enterprises, which have been falling behind developments on the fast-pace of the consumer Web for a number of years now and are just now beginning to make inroads into some businesses.

And its a space that is expected to grow into a serious one in the next five years. A widely covered new report from Forrester estimates, however, that this space is expected to grow into a $700 million a year industry sector by 2013, or about 1% of the entire software industry, depending on how you define mashups and which types of tools are included.

For awareness and understanding of the fast-growing world of mashups are significant challenges as IT practitioners, business strategists, and software vendors attempt to grapple with what’s facing up to be the biggest challenge of all: The habits and expectations of the larger part of a generation of workers who don’t yet realize mashups are poised to change many things about the software landscape on the Web and in the workplace. Generational changes can be difficult for businesses to embrace successfully, and while evidence that mashups are remaking the business world are still very much emerging, they certainly hold the promise.

Figure 1: Mashup Tools and Platforms Circa 2008

However, the continued proliferation of high quality Web parts and open APIs, especially in the last couple of years, has offered compelling sourcing options for enterprise mashups is the making the expanding Global SOA compelling as local IT resources for building and improving business solutions. Combined with the consumer Web’s intensive focus on ease-of-use to gain adoption, and this has paved the road for low barrier, low cost effective assembly of software mashups instead of the time consuming and expensive design and coding of largely new applications. In this sense, mashups are probably the next major new application development model as well an increasingly popular approach for achieving better ROI with service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Mashup Standards Emerge: Read how a number of new mashup standards have appeared recently.

But while the life of the average Web developer has been greatly improved by the

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April 17th, 2008

Web 2.0 success stories driving WOA and informing SOA

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 2:40 am

Categories: ATOM, Ajax, Blogs, Business Models, Business Process Management, Convergence, Design Patterns, Encouraging Unintended Uses, Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Web 2.0, Global SOA, Governance, Mashups, Network Effects, Network effects, Open APIs, Orchestration, REST, RSS, Rich Internet Applications (RIA), SOA, SOAP, Situational Software, Social Software, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Web services, Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA), Widgets, Wikis

Tags: Web, Web 2.0, SOA, Organization, Enterprise, WOA, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, Channel Management, Middleware

The striking contrast between the stories that we’ve been hearing lately about the slow going of SOA initiatives in the enterprise and the vibrant and rapidly growing ecosystems similar to them on the consumer Web has been generating a lot of debate and discussion in the enterprise IT community recently. This discussion was brought into sharp relief when ZDNet colleague Joe McKendrick recently reported on Burton Group’s Anne Manes stating that it “has become clear to me that SOA is not working in most organizations“, based on a wide ranging study they performed.

It’s become clear that the SOA world will have to change some basic assumptions.This is just one data point of many recently showing the continued shortfalls we’ve experienced in trying to get our enterprise systems to work together in the ways that we would like. Organizations clearly want to leverage high levels of interoperability to seize new business opportunities, innovate on top of existing assets, and properly leverage the extensive landscape of software, data, and infrastructure that most organizations have accumulated in large quantities over the years. But we are still having a great deal of difficulty doing so and SOA investments are just not reaping the types of return on investments that most businesses would like to have.

Looking for answers on how to improve SOA

This has driven a search for new models since there’s little question that the core ideas behind SOA seem to be the right ones. Rather, it’s been how we’ve gone about designing and implementing SOAs that appears to be at the crux of the issue. As we look at the most successful examples of SOA actually working, we keep being drawn back to the Web itself, with companies such as Amazon and their highly successful Web Services Division (with hundreds of thousands of business consumers of their global SOA), Google and its numerous and varied open Web APIs from Google Maps to Google Data, eBay and billions of dollars in listings it generates through its public SOA, or the rise of applications like Twitter (which gets 10 times the use through its APIs than from its user inteface) and applications that are primarily used via their SOA presence. Then there is the increasingly widespread adoption by millions of users of a sort of “visual SOA” with Web widgets and gadgets as well the rapidly growing story of software mashups, aka composite applications in the SOA world. There are many more SOA-ish success stories like this on the Web, but few in the enterprise.

John Musser’s ProgrammableWeb remains the best directory for finding all the APIs that Web companies have contributed to the Global SOA. Over 700 APIs are listed currently.

So if so-called Web 2.0 companies — which value participation almost above all else, both from consumers and organizations that want to integrate them into their offerings — are seeing highly desirable levels of adoption and significant ROI, how can this help understand how to improve our efforts in the enterprise? Most new Web 2.0 applications start out life with an API since getting connected to partners that will help you grow and innovate is a well-known essential for success online today. Despite years of SOA, we still don’t focus on consumption and openness as fundamentally essential characteristics to building an internal partner ecosystem that have beat a path to your door to use the services you are offering to them to build upon.

One big issue, as I’ve written about in the past, is

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January 3rd, 2008

12 predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 2:58 pm

Categories: ATOM, Ajax, Blogs, Business Models, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Convergence, Design Patterns, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Web 2.0, Enterprise Wikis, Global SOA, Governance, Hype, Lightweight Service Models, Mashups, Open APIs, Prediction markets, Products, REST, Rich Internet Applications (RIA), SOA, SaaS, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, Social media, Social networks, Structured Content, Two-Way Web, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA), Widgets, Wikis

Tags: Social Networking, Web, Application, Software-as-a-service, AJAX, Information Technology, SOA, Organization, Enterprise, Mashup

The worlds of SOA, SaaS, and Web 2.0 have been swirling around each other for a couple of years now and in 2008 we’ll finally see these gel into a practical, modern vision of next generation enterprises. And a variety of forces are coming together to make 2008 the year that enterprises refit themselves for the 21st century.

The driving forces for change this year will be the aging of existing IT systems, the rise of up-and-coming new approaches such as highly capable new Web-based applications, mashups, collective intelligence powered business software, Web-oriented architectures, and last but certainly not least, social software. These are providing the raw materials to use upon the freshly cleared canvases many organizations are readying for themselves as many organizations begin to retool and upgrade. Even the IT foundations we’ve come to get so used to, such as the operating systems we’ve used for years, have recently evolved and not always in the direction we’re going. If nothing else, the ever-advancing computing environments of the workplace and the Web are encouraging us to move to newer and better models out of sheer momentum.

But the changes we’ll see happening in our organizations won’t just be ones that are imposed by necessity, many of them will be driven from the bottom up as we see more and more grassroots IT solutions sprouting up from the trenches of Web-savvy workers, while many existing initiatives, including traditional SOA efforts, intranets and portals, CRM, decision management, and many others get recast and sometimes entirely reinvented using the lessons we’ve learned from the Web 2.0 era over the last two years, with the leading factors being the large scale shift of control to users, lightweight new application types proven in efficacy and scale on the Web, and social computing with Web technologies.

1. SOA finally goes pragmatic, Web-oriented, and lightweight. We’ve heard this prediction before but in 2008 it will be one of the items front and center for IT departments for a variety of reasons. Many of the ponderous, heavyweight SOA initiatives still in existence will finally refactor their design principles and then their architectures to be much more lightweight and RESTful. The classic SOA principles will still apply but changes in how they are realized inside organizations will just reach the tipping point in 2008. One key driver is that organizations are increasingly tired of waiting for ROI on their SOA investments and the demand for change is pushing IT leaders to search for new, more effective approaches. Web-orientation has enabled SOA on the greater Web on a vast scale and gained credence for a critical mass of the SOA community.

Read about ongoing story of Web 2.0 and SOA convergence, which will be well under way by the end of 2008.

The bottom line: If a Web service/open API can’t be consumed in the browser, it will find itself relegated to the deep end of the back office, if not retired outright. That’s not to say that the infrastructure for SOAs is getting simplier or that browser consumption is the ultimate litmus test, it’s not. And as we’ll see below, high velocity, large scale governance will be required to get any use out of these new highly distributable models for projecting content and functionality to any point in the enterprise.

Pervasive syndication for enterprise data, particularly with ATOM and sometimes two way, will also be a bright spot this year but will remain a largely emerging story until 2009.

2. Enterprise search will remain broken or highly limited in most organizations. I’ve covered previously the many reasons why search can’t work in the typical enterprise without enormous effort and consequently this won’t be fixed for most organizations this year. However, good enterprise search is necessary to leverage the fast growing and woefully under-leveraged information warehoused in the vast acreages of most enterprise data centers. Workers are still left with literally no choice but to pull their information from the Web or sequentially rummage through various silos to piece together what they need instead of putting a few keywords in an enterprise search engine and scanning the results. The unfortunate news: The penetration of local search engines into enterprise data will only improve a handful of percentage points this year.

3. Security will become a major concern as Web 2.0 apps and SaaS make the edge of enterprises increasingly porous. In 2008 users will self-provision themselves with consumer Web applications across the firewall, more and more business information will be found out in the open in enterprise wikis, workers will spend more time in public social networking sites, and the very pliability of mashup-based applications will make it unclear where data comes from and where it’s going. This will make security around next generation platforms become a Read the rest of this entry »

December 27th, 2007

The top Enterprise Web 2.0 stories of 2007

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 3:21 pm

Categories: Ajax, Blogs, Business Models, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Design Patterns, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Web 2.0, Enterprise Wikis, Gadgets, Global SOA, Hype, Mashups, Network Effects, Network effects, Open APIs, Prediction markets, Products, Radical Decentralization, Rich Internet Applications (RIA), SOA, SaaS, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social media, Social networks, User Generated Content, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Web services, Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA), Widgets, Wikis

Tags: Concept, Google Inc., Web, Mobile, Network, Platform, LinkedIn, Idea, Fact, Business

Over the last year, we have witnessed the continuation of the steady movement of the mostly consumer-driven Web 2.0 phenomenon into the workplace that began as a trickle in 2006. Blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, social networking, end-user mashups, and even prediction markets saw their largest entry yet into businesses and institutions around the world. The platform wars may start to return in 2008 as Web 2.0 ideas taught companies how to turn an open platform into competitive advantage.The more technical side of Web 2.0 also began to see maturity as businesses started to rethink their service-oriented architectures to be more Web-like and the rich Internet application industry added many major new building blocks and platforms that push the envelope in terms of the kinds of interactive experiences the Web is able to deliver.

Last year’s Enterprise Web 2.0 watch phrase of “consumerization of the enterprise” was clearly evident in workplaces large and small this year, yet we also saw significant new shifts in the way we look at online platforms of all kinds to communicate, collaborate, be more productive, and innovate. You may recall that the Web 2.0 mantra of 2004-2006 was often focused on emergent uses of networks to harness collective intelligence and provide next generation user experiences on the Web. And like each successive generation of innovation on the Web and elsewhere, most early attempts to capitalize on these powerful new ideas were relatively unsuccessful, though the success stories (which resulted in half of the top 8 sites in the world at the moment) resulted in both superior products for the Web community to use and useful new techniques we could use to improve our own results.

In 2007, we also witnessed a new pragmatism as the Web 2.0 hype began to die down, the success stories emerged, and the non-so-successful continued to inform the industry with the lessons needed to navigate the rocky shoals of product development on the Web today. We also began to see Enterprise 2.0 make real penetration in business as well as social networking finally get some corporate respect and validation as a functional business tool that can bring tangible benefits to the workplace.

Read here for a recap on what Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are generally defined as.

2007 was also a year of innovation in the mobile Web space. The iPhone proved that mobile Web devices were still capable of near quantum leaps in improvement and innovation, Twitter demonstrated what was possible in the realm of truly network-oriented social software on mobile devices, and Google dramatically improved their mobile Web applications with innovative capabilities throughout the year, particularly with Google Maps Mobile. However, while the iPhone isn’t quite ready for enterprise use yet (though it will likely get their soon), both Twitter and Google Maps Mobile have become poster children for mobile consumer apps that have had successful cross-over to the business world as enormously useful tools in day to day work.

But a contrarian might say 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 »

August 27th, 2007

A checkpoint on Web 2.0 in the enterprise, Part 2

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 7:18 pm

Categories: Ajax, Architecture of Participation, Blogs, Business Models, Collective Intelligence, Convergence, Cost-effective scalability, Crowdsourcing, Customer Self-Service, Design Patterns, Encouraging Unintended Uses, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Web 2.0, Gadgets, Hype, Lightweight Service Models, Mashups, Network Effects, Network effects, Open APIs, Products, RSS, Radical Decentralization, Rich Internet Applications (RIA), Right To Remix, SOA, SaaS, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, Social networks, Two-Way Web, User Generated Content, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Web services, Widgets, Wikis

Tags: Web, Web 2.0, AJAX, Network, Ruby On Rails, Idea, Product, Business, Amazon.com Inc., Semantic Web

A new survey of the personal use of Web 2.0 applications by CIOs emerged late last week and provided another interesting, if high-level, datapoint about the future of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. Carried out by CIO Insight, the survey reported the usual trends like high rates of use of wikis, blogs, and RSS, as well as a few unexpected outliers, like 39% of CIOs listen to podcasts.

More than one large company has discovered that external customer communities provide better support to their own customers.Like most surveys, however, the questions tend to be leading and prevent unpredicted trends emerge naturally. Consequently, the numbers in this survey look somewhat different from the larger, more intention-based results from McKinsey’s global Web 2.0 survey earlier this year.

In terms of current trends, Silicon Valley proper has for the most part become thoroughly bored with the Web 2.0 meme despite the largely superficial presence of the most powerful Web 2.0 concepts in many online products and services.

At the same time, mainstream business is just now getting ready for Web 2.0 adoption and are beginning to incorporate the underlying technologies, platforms, and concepts into their IT departments and lines of business, though they too are often focusing on the low hanging fruit. But pilot projects now abound in businesses large and small around the world and even some concerted large-scale Web 2.0 projects and Enterprise 2.0 rollouts are under way in leading-edge organizations. Business and IT leaders on the sidelines continue to seek early results and evidence of what works and what doesn’t when it comes to applying Web 2.0 to their respective situations.

Surveys do help paint a picture of what’s taking place in the large marketplace and, judiciously used, can help us make better decisions. Unfortunately, most of the current crop of Web 2.0 surveys appear to be focused on specific technologies and applications of Web 2.0 instead of the deeper and more disruptive business models and approaches.

For example, crowdsourcing is just one example of how to use the fundamental power of the global Web to change the size, scope, and even the very nature of an organization’s productive output. Yet crowdsourcing hasn’t made the cut in any of the Web 2.0 surveys I’ve come across so far despite its proven game-changing potential.

A fairly well known story, crowdsourcing in the large in its earliest form has already shown that it can disrupt an entire, established industry. I’m talking about the rise of open source software, one of the early and effective proofs that crowdsourcing could be applied to a tricky business problem — creating competitive software cheaply by using virtually free labor capacity on the Internet — resulted in a nearly unending stream of high-quality, innovative products in the form of application software, databases, and even entire operating systems.

The crowdsourcing link above takes you to Wikipedia and will list many innovative examples of how organizations are taking it beyond software creation and enabling large communities of people on the Internet to generate outcomes that are often impossible in any other way. This is one of the more dramatic and powerfully business models that Web 2.0 makes possible when one tries to harness collective intelligence, one of the core ideas of Web 2.0 and probably the one most rife with long term implications for business and society. Yet only the McKinsey survey above cited this prospect in any recognizable way in its survey.

The point I’m making here is that Read the rest of this entry »

July 26th, 2007

A checkpoint on Web 2.0 in the enterprise

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 7:47 pm

Categories: Ajax, Badges, Blogs, Business Models, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Convergence, Crowdsourcing, Customer Self-Service, Design Patterns, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Web 2.0, Enterprise Wikis, Gadgets, Governance, Mashups, Network Effects, Network effects, Open APIs, Products, RSS, Rich Internet Applications (RIA), Right To Remix, SOA, SaaS, Situational Software, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, Social networks, Structured Content, Tagging, Two-Way Web, User Generated Content, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA), Widgets, Wikis

Tags: Software, Web, Web 2.0, Product, Business, Enterprise, Dion Hinchcliffe

For well over a year now we’ve seen reports and announcements from a major industry analyst firms and others tracking the movement of Web 2.0 ideas into the enterprise. Gartner, Forrester, McKinsey, and many others have all weighed in on the trends or made recommendations, sometimes cautious and sometimes optimistic, that organizations should start heading down the Web 2.0 path. And public interest in Web 2.0 in the enterprise is widespread too, not in the least exemplified by the fact that Web 2.0 trends of all kinds — business and consumer both — are tracked closely here in many blogs on ZDNet.

This reflects the fact that the majority of productive power is on the edge of our networks and always has been.We’ve also seen that the term itself has moved from passing familiarity in the leading edge of the technical community to nearly universal recognition in both IT and mainstream business circles. That Web 2.0 is a complex topic there is little doubt since it’s often described as a grab bag category of the latest ideas and movements that include — but are by no means limited to– wikis, blogs, RSS, podcasting, content tagging, mashups, and social networking.

The big question? What do you really need to know today about Web 2.0 in the enterprise?

Reducing all of these ideas into an underlying set of principles is what people like Tim O’Reilly have been doing for several years now. It’s generally understood by most people that the Internet has changed considerably in the last half-decade and that those changes have reached a tipping point that’s enabling brand new business models, unleashing a wave of innovative products, influencing public behavior on a large scale, and in particular, resulting in entirely new types of online businesses. But as I discussed in last year’s discussion on Web 2.0 reductionism, trying to get at the core motive force behind things as disparate as rich user experiences and collective intelligence is no small task.

Fortunately, we are indeed as an industry starting to get a handle on how all the pieces of Web 2.0 fit together. For instance, it’s now clear that having hundreds of millions of people globally connected together pervasively via one single high speed two-way network (aka the Internet) will result in many of the things we’re now seeing in the marketplace. It seems a fundamental new widespread focus on leveraging that two-way aspect of the network deeply in our online products, as well as increasingly playing to the fundamental strengths of the network that is the Web, is teaching us invaluable lesson after invaluable new lesson for our businesses. The result is that the living laboratory of the Web is now the source of the greater part of our innovation in business these days. Today’s World Wide Web is a larger ecosystem and with far more brainpower and activity that any single organization could ever hope to match.

Web 2.0 Transforms The Business Landscape

The story of Web 2.0 began with things like open source software, which is nothing more than entire products created ad hoc by volunteer armies of contributors that now outnumber — by virtue of the sheer capacity the network — the world of commercial software efforts. It’s not lost on careful watchers that open source software tends to be more feature rich, secure, and bug free that commercial software, despite being created by thousands of loosely coupled, self-selected contributors. Since then, this idea of commons-based peer production of products on the global Internet has spread through just about every other type of product that can be delivered over the Web from marketing, advertising, collaboration, news, customer service to banking, investment, fund raising, disaster management, and dozens of other types of business and civic activities. This reflects the fact that the majority of productive power is on the edge of our networks and always has been. We’ve tinkered for a couple of decades to build good networked software that took advantage of this fact but we didn’t yet have enough knowledge of the best techniques for creating them. That things like peer production are now moving to the center of the design of online products finally shows a maturing realization that our older, more traditional views of networked applications were just not effective as they could be.

Combine the rise of peer production with the Web growing up into a true software platform as part of the rise of rich user experiences and SaaS. Then witness the movement of the Web out into the world in the last few years and exploding into thousands of types of new Internet devices, mobile and otherwise, that deliver — and just as importantly if not more — capture value in every corner of the globe and in every conceivable setting.

An overarching and compelling new business vision

And while there more trends beyond these that are driving Web 2.0, the upshot is that the productive capacity of the world is increasingly wired into the Web and can be leveraged by building online products that encourage the close cooperation and involvement of those at the edge of the network. You can get now people on the Web en masse to build innovative software applications or help you accumulate vast and almost infinitely rich databases of information and even foster enormous online populations for which you are the preferred intermediary and of which you can tap the combined intelligence.

It’s this more comprehensive and integrated vision of Web 2.0 and its ingredients consisting of Read the rest of this entry »