Category: Right To Remix
October 25th, 2009
Are the iPhone and social networks making the classic Web and intranet obsolete?
Many as-yet-unforeseen new developments will create enormous societal, cultural, and business opportunities over the next decade, just as long as we don’t make irreversible decisions down the wrong path. There’s been an important and relatively sudden change taking place over the last couple of years in the way that we interact with the Web. While direct access or search activity has been (and still is) the most common way that we access the content and applications of the Web, new ways have been rapidly growing and competing with how we work online, both at home and at work.
Thus these new models, exemplified by social networking sites like Facebook or mobile apps on platforms like the iPhone, Palm’s new webOS, and Android, will ultimately herald a change in the way that we work with our IT systems in the enterprise.
The once relatively unified world of the Internet, with a few major top-level types of access directly connected to it (browser, e-mail, IRC client, newsreader, etc.) and a few key sub-apps such as search that virtually everyone online used have been extended — as well as fragmented — into popular new channels into which users are now rapidly moving en masse.
That’s not to say that direct usage of the Internet (loading up and using sites and apps via the traditional Web browser) is going away. It’s still far and away the most common way to interact with the Web today and will likely be that way for quite some time, if not forever.
But real shifts in both online platform alternatives and in the mobile market are beginning to usher in foundational new usage patterns by users. These new channels — of which the latest generation of mobile apps and social networking platforms, which are often tightly integrated with the Web but are not truly one with it, are just the two biggest examples — demonstrate what is probably a generational transformation of the vital border between us and the Internet.
And this is the crux of the point: Where the point of user attention and interaction resides and who controls it is one of the most important conversations between us and our “preferred intermediaries”, a fancy term for who we like to work with to interact with the Web. This in turn has significant implications for enterprise intranets, our often clunky yet essential local “Web” in our organizations.
Why are these changes happening? There are at least two major reasons:
The first is that user attention on the Web has been moving to social networks, best exhibited by Facebook, which has been the single largest gainer of online usage in the last 3 years, over all other applications. Even e-mail has been eclipsed in many markets and only search remains more dominant. Social networks, which are platforms in their own right — just like the Web, but also have touchpoints well outside of it — have come into their own as competing yet codependent platforms that sprawl across the Internet, telecommunications infrastructure, mobile devices, and desktop computers.
The second reason is
September 24th, 2009
Creating a unified model for enterprise mashups
A unified mashup model can increase software quality, lower IT costs, and directly drive choice and innovation. I’ve written here over the years about software mashups; simple combinations of pieces of the Web that are rearranged into new useful forms. I’ve even called the approach a key to the future of software development. While mashups in the enterprise have been reasonably successful up until now — about a third of enterprises have them today — there have been challenges in enabling the same level of wide use and benefits that are currently evident on the open Web.
Fortunately, this may be about to change. Today marks the introduction of an effort by the new Open Mashup Alliance (OMA), a federation of interested parties in the mashup space that want to bring the benefits of standardization, consistency, interoperability, and a real marketplace to the world of enterprise mashups. The initial participants include a wide range of firms such as Adobe, CapGemini, HP, Intel, JackBe, Kapow, Programmable Web, Synteractive, and Xignite. Disclaimer: My company is also a founding member organization of the OMA. Note that anyone can become an OMA member, either as a company or a user and the principles of the organization are open and egalitarian.
Related: Joe McKendrick’s Enterprise mashup proponents start organizing.
What makes OMA especially interesting from my perspective is that it’s much more than a “high concept” strategic effort that will one day put forth specifications or technology that may or may not be useful to enterprises for creating mashups. Instead OMA sponsor JackBe, one of the world’s top enterprise mashups vendors, has generously contributed their existing and proven enterprise mashups model — known as the Enterprise Mashup Markup Language — along with a fully working reference implementation of an EMML runtime, as well as 50 working mashups.
Thus EMML exists fully today as one of the more mature enterprise mashup specifications available. It is robust, mature (it has been supporting production applications for several years), and now it is open for anyone to use via a Creative Commons license. And given JackBe’s technology roots in the Java community — their CTO is the respected John Crupi of Core J2EE patterns and Sun fame — it is free of proprietary technologies and formats. EMML also brings the leverage, speed, and power of domain-specific languages to the table as well.
The result is an open enterprise mashup specification and runtime model using familiar standards and/or community technologies such as XML, XPath, XQuery, SQL, JavaScript, and JRuby. Using the EMML reference guide, anyone can now create an EMML-compliant mashup runtime. This also means any EMML-based mashup is able to run inside any EMML-compliant runtime. The resulting mashups — because they are built with an open, interoperable specification — can now be published, shared, reused, and if applicable sold in a larger, standardized market. This creates the possibilities of a real enterprise mashup ecosystem and marketplace that wouldn’t happen of its own accord. The potential is not inconsiderable given that so far the enterprise mashups industry, lacking a consistent model (outside the browser itself, see below for further details) has been fragmented into a story of multiple competing vendors and technologies. This included IBM (Mashup Center), Serena (Mashup Composer), JackBe (Presto), and many others.
I’ve personally examined EMML and can attest that it’s a clean powerful design that includes potent capabilities such as declarative data transformation, advanced procedural logic, parallelism, meta-data and much more. That’s not to say more can’t or won’t be done to extend and evolve EMML but it’s a credible start to create a consistent model and runtime artifacts for the design and operation of enterprise mashups across all the vendors that support it. At its core, however, EMML and its runtime is essentially an enterprise-class version of Yahoo Pipes.
While it’s also true that today’s announcement will certainly not hurt JackBe as the top provider of EMML tools today, I also know — based on my conversations with them lately and over the years — that 1) they are a startup company that is volunteering the output of their hard work and is unlikely to vault to market domination on this basis alone and 2) that they believe this effort is one of the best practical ways to help enterprise mashups gain critical mass and that 3) the benefit to them is by improving the conditions of the enterprise mashups industry as a whole. At least that’s my perspective.
Ultimately, the OMA creates a standardized approach to enterprise mashups that creates an open and vibrant market for competing runtimes, mashups, and an array of important aftermarket services such as development/testing tools, management and administration appliances, governance frameworks, education, professional services, and so on. Creating an ecosystem like this is only possible when the mashup industry is focused on heading in the same general direction instead of competing over individual technologies (notably, this is one of the reasons the Web works so well).
Enough of the mashup development and runtime process is left open with EMML that there is also plenty of room for differentiation. While EMML will indeed level the playing field, vendors also have plenty of room around the edges to offer additional capabilities for EMML-based environments including visual designer tools/IDEs, modeling systems, administration consoles, portfolio management systems, and so on.
In the larger view, there has always been the tantalizing possibility for
September 6th, 2009
How the Web OS has begun to reshape IT and business
These days in the halls of IT departments around the world there is a growing realization that the next wave of outsourcing, things like cloud computing and crowdsourcing, are going to require responses that will forever change the trajectory of their current relationship with the business, or finally cause them to be relegated as a primarily administrative, keep-the-lights-on function.
IT is going to either have to get more strategic to the business or get out of the way. Businesses too must grow a Web DNA. The proximal cause of this seems to be the growing domination of the global network that surrounds all businesses today: The Web. If you’ve read my writings here since 2006 you largely know what’s happening: Today’s highly evolved Web has grown far beyond its original roots in content distribution and communication. It has become a fully fledged platform for media (TV, movies, music, newspapers, gaming, etc. have been strongly disrupted by the Web and now largely reside there) as well as more strategic pursuits. Probably most significantly is computing in all its many forms. This ranges from low-level services such as raw compute power and storage to social computing, semantics, and collective intelligence.
But the advent of a Web OS is certainly not just an IT story. It’s also — and really mostly — a business story. Those who are trying to track the so-called “big shifts” in the 21st century, thinkers like John Hagel, are attempting to pin down the specific changes taking place in the world today. John recently noted that “we are moving from a relatively stable business environment to one characterized by rapid rates of change with ever more disruptions generating increasing uncertainty and unpredictability“. In this way, routinely transforming instability and rapid change from a threat (which it is to most businesses today) into opportunity is a core skill that organizations increasingly must be able to cultivate.
That much of the pace of change today is driven by the modern world’s pervasive and instant global flows of knowledge is largely due to influence of the Web and its billions of two-way touchpoints with nearly a third of the world’s population (including practically all of the developed world). In addition to ultra fast feedback loops that drive real-time action/response scenarios in the marketplace, the Web has also become an incredibly efficient, inexpensive, and easy-to-use delivery system for just about anything that an interface can be wrapped around.
This has created a new form of leverage in terms of the ability to change and adapt by tapping rapidly and deeply into on-demand resources (be they computing, data, or even people and ideas) in virtually real-time. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal noted that because of modern technology, particularly the Web, business “initiatives that used to take months and megabucks to coordinate and launch can often be started in seconds for cents.” Clearly, this is a brave new world, even if it’s one that’s still happening more on the edge than in the core of businesses today.
WOA = Web-Oriented Architecture
CC/SRR = Creative Commons/Some Rights Reserved
AOP = Architectures of Participation
It’s a world where scarcity practically doesn’t exist and access to abundance is virtually free. It’s also true that the business models of the Web OS are only emerging as well. While monetization is prevalent for those consuming or participating in the Web OS, there is also a real and ongoing concern that it’s also the modern version of sharecropping. That traditional management approaches often don’t understand the nuances of these issues and aren’t designed to take advantage of this modern economic landscape, much less compete with a growing number of businesses that do, is a whole side story I’ll explore when I’m able. But it’s one in which the Web OS is increasingly forcing a serious reevaluation of modern business practices as well as the very notion of how an opportunity is defined, identified, and targeted.
What is the Web OS?
While there are multiple ways of looking at the Web as an operating system, from cloud environments that mimic a desktop operating system to sets of services packaged together and bundled as an individual product to companies, the largest — and the most significant — is the idea of an overarching and emergent Internet operating system. The data, services, and even communities of the Web are now programmatic and can be incorporated and remixed into any other business or product at will. The concept of a Web OS isn’t new. But its arrival on the scene in compelling form with serious impact to the enterprise is.
Over the last few years, as open APIs, social networking platforms, cloud computing, open identity services, sensor-driven databases (such as with GPS and OpenStreetMap), or even people (example: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) have created open ecosystems in which anyone can participate, including business, both to contribute and to consume. The Web has become the ultimate outsourcing platform and one that is incredibly agile too, combined with economies of scale that are very hard to match. There are challenges too: Unpredictabilities and risks exist that must be dealt with both routinely and successfully.
But to perform well in this changing business environment organizations have to
August 11th, 2009
Pragmatic new models for enterprise architecture take shape
The best outcomes result naturally from self-organizing thought leaders in an organization that seek each other out and collaborate on shared solutions to their problems.Hear the words “enterprise architecture” and many people will turn away automatically. It’s not that they aren’t aware that technology drives so much of the modern world, they just think it doesn’t apply to what they do. The famous IT/business divide is too often kept this way because of mutual incomprehension, not-invented-here thinking, and apparently incompatible mindsets. However, this is beginning to change.
High technology continues to relentlessly pervade practically every aspect of today’s business world, prescribing what is potentially possible and often conferring enormous leverage when harnessed fully. But it has been the advent of the Web 2.0 era and its inexorable movement (some might even say infiltration) into the workplace that is making traditional IT — and the master planning version of it, enterprise architecture — an entirely new beast by popularizing simple, egalitarian tools and approaches that can be understood and applied more easily and quickly by a broad audience across most organizations.
Increasingly, in some IT departments and business units around the world, a closer new relationship is forming in which technology is deeply interwoven into continuous joint business processes of creation, change, and adaptation. Like so many grassroots tech culture movements, this one doesn’t yet have a formal name, but increasingly some are calling it emergent architecture.
The first seeds of this change began to be felt with advent of agile development processes a few years ago along with the subsequent rise of software mashups, and the popularity of user-distributable widgets, badges, and gadgets. These technology approaches combined with emerging business trends such as tacit interactions and pull-based systems driven from with bottom-up within organizations, particularly when co-existing with social computing and Enterprise 2.0.
The result: A new environment for creating technology-driven business solutions using different, more open communication channels with richer information and ground truth as well as significantly more adaptive technology elements often strongly influenced by the Web 2.0 world.
Meeting in the middle: Emergent Architecture
In recent years enterprise architecture has been moving from a discipline that provides top-down, a priori technology blueprints to the business side to one that articulates key, strategic possibilities and only the most critical high-level constraints (such as security standards) and then operates as a conductor, promoter, problem solver, and evangelist across the organization through the vehicle of a cohesive community to co-develop needed solutions.
When I wrote that most organizations were badly in need of a technology and software process “angioplasty” a few years ago, I highlighted the trends that will increasingly drive the agenda for new initiatives and projects when it comes to the strategic application of technology to business:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration (internal or external) over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
This is more true than it’s ever been and has been contributing to a growing discontinuity in the way that enterprise architecture will be conducted in the future. Going away are overly formal procedures, detailed technology prescriptions, complex software frameworks, and dreaded compliance checks. Replacing them are highly collaborative, adaptive processes, technology opportunism, simple (frequently Web-oriented) technologies, and dynamic — even spontaneous responses — to organizational and marketplace needs.
Enterprise architects of the near future will still dispense clear guidance that carries the requirements of the entire organization with it, but it will be appropriately broad and EAs will actively help tailor it to local needs across the organization. Self-service IT will become much more common as workers are comfortable using today’s extremely easy-to-use, adaptive, and flexible tools, many of them using Web 2.0 ideas such as simple, open architectures and malleable pieces and parts, especially open APIs, and even new, open business models such as crowdsourcing and community-based involvement.
While organizations such as Gartner are just beginning to map this trend, there’s increasingly little doubt that the infamous chasm that often disconnects IT and business is being crossed in many quarters by business users unafraid of today’s populist technologies combined with IT practitioners that strongly desire to solve immediate and important business problems. That today’s collaborative and communication technologies in the workplace are much more open, social and collaborative than they were even a couple of years ago are likely to be
August 5th, 2009
The future of enterprise data in a radically open and Web-based world
Like many aspects of applying Web 2.0 to the enterprise, the challenge is both in adapting the business and its thinking while successfully leveraging the latest delivery methods.In recent months, another significant front in the growing trend of open data has emerged, and with it a growing focus on what businesses can do with that most precious asset they’ve developed at enormous expense over the years: their data.
The advent of a new administration in the United States, which has been pushing to open U.S. government databases en masse, and a proliferation of open data initiatives in other countries — perhaps most notably in the U.K. — has put the often behind-the-times government world into the forefront of open data with such sites as data.gov, which the nation’s CIO Vivek Kundra has promised will have tens of thousands of feeds this year alone.
Open data holds up the promise of instant connectivity between arbitrary numbers of ad hoc partners while at the same time reducing integration costs, improving transparency, harnessing external innovation, and even (perhaps especially) creating entirely new and significant business models. I sometimes refer to these as “open supply chains“, and the term is highly descriptive when it comes to the potential for open data models to make cloud computing safe and interoperable, help journalists to do their jobs better, or create multi-million dollar new lines of business, such as Amazon’s well-known Web Services division.
All of this activity underscores the relatively lackluster track record of traditional businesses in understanding and managing the opportunities, risks, and rewards of open data. Despite some significant success stories there is an apparent — and perhaps widening — digital divide between the classical world of business and the online world.
Even the considerable investments that most large organizations have made in IT system interoperability and integration, particularly with such popular approaches such as service-oriented architecture, have produced famously lackluster results. My good friend David Linthicum, a leading SOA expert, has gone as far as saying that the lack of focus on data is a major part of the problem.
Taking a product focus instead of a project focus
For those that have embarked down the open data road to see where it leads, one thing seems to be clear: Exposing data — whether it is internally within an organization or outside to partners, or even the whole world — is a way of thinking about the very nature of the business, more than it is about achieving a one-off end goal. This is because open data seems to create immediate, close, and powerful relationships between the publisher and the consumer of the data, and leads to a series of unexpected outcomes. These relationships can be created with extreme ease with today’s methods over networks like the Web and though often speculative, a good subset of them form rapidly into important ones that can draw in new customers, identify new innovations, head off competitors, or just generate revenue. Witness Twitter and its hundreds of partners accessing the platform (and its enormous audience) through its API or Netflix and its impressively successful prize contest that opened up data selectively to dozens of high-value self-selected contributors as a leading example.
Read about emerging open business methods for more open data success stories.
In other words, in order to be competitive with the next generation of businesses, most organizations are going to have to look at open data for reasons involving efficiency, competitiveness, and long term health, particularly as open data enters their particular industry.
Enterprise open data options: Leveraging today’s Web best practices
But it’s still not clear to businesses the options they have and how they need to think about opening up strategic sets of data for reuse internally, with their partners, and indeed, with the rest of the world. Far from being a story about IT plumbing, open data is a way of doing business, forging strong relationships over the network with other organizations, customers, and potential customers. However, the success of the Web itself as a dominant global platform has made it the de facto channel for providing open data, even the networks internally to most businesses heavily use Web technology for their applications, intranet, and interaction with the rest of the world. This means opening data generally means opening it up over the Internet using Web technology and approaches.
So critically, being successful with enterprise open data requires
July 27th, 2009
Ten top issues in adopting enterprise social computing
Last week ZDNet’s Larry Dignan wrote an insightful post that analyzed the recent report from Charlene Li and the Altimeter Group/Wetpaint about early data that seems to show an intriguing correlation between social media engagement and corporate financial performance. The key finding was this:
To be specific, companies that are both deeply and widely engaged in social media surpass their peers in terms of both revenue and profit performance by a significant difference.
This report (details and copy here) is encouraging news for those embarking on applying social software to various parts of their business. But, as Larry points out, these numbers can be interpreted a number of ways. Many organizations would rather wait for best practices to solidify before climbing very far up the social computing adoption curve. So while there’s increasingly less question that there is genuine ROI in social media, the question still remains whether it can directly drive fundamental, bottom line performance in the average organization today.
This highlights a key conversational thread that came out of last month’s Enterprise 2.0 conference: Does social computing really deliver significantly better business performance? Or is it merely a minor incremental improvement?
Unfortunately, despite an growing body of encouraging case studies, evidence, and research, the jury is still out on total impact social computing will have on businesses. This return will even vary widely for many organizations for a number of reasons will explore below. At present, the uncertainty is simply because that there are not enough organizations that have incorporated social computing approaches (which encompasses the full range of social software as applied to business that include social networks and Enterprise 2.0 to things like crowdsourcing and social CRM) across their lines of business for us to get a complete enough picture. Even the ones that have done it, haven’t done it long enough to see what the results actually are.
Instead, as companies begin pilots and initiatives, we are seeing the first wave of issues cropping up as the larger cultural, IT, and business impact of social tools begins to be felt.
Sidebar: What is social computing? It’s the use of social software within and between organizations and any interested parties such as employees, customers, and partners. Social computing, as explained here, can usher in significant large-scale shifts in where productive forces and innovation come from. Organizations will all adopt enterprise social computing tools in slightly different ways and will generally proceed from ad hoc usage, often by applying widely available consumer tools at first, to more evolved open business models. As of this year, about half of all large organizations now have social computing tools deployed in some manner.
The following is a summary of the issues I’m hearing from practitioners in the field as well as from our clients and industry contacts.
While these ten issues with social computing are the ones I hear about most, your mileage will almost certainly vary. However, I believe them to be representative of where we are in 2009. Please note that these are by no means insurmountable obstacles and merely represent a good cross section of what early adopters typically encounter as they begin climbing the social computing adoption curve (see diagram above).
Ten top issues with social computing in business
- Lack of social media literacy amongst workers. Anecdotally, the farther a business is from the technology industry, the less likely that line workers will be familiar with the latest software innovations. Those who haven’t been maintaining blogs, updating wiki sites, using social networks, sharing information socially, etc. will require more education than those who do. Even the basics of netiquette as well as key techniques to get the most from social computing platforms such as encouraging the building of links between data, tagging information, or establishing weak ties over the network are often poorly understood even by frequent users of social computing tools. In short, social computing requires some literacy efforts in most organizations to achieve effectiveness, just like personal computing skills did a few decades ago.
- A perception that social tools won’t work well in a particular industry. There is often an assumption in many specialized industries — such as medicine or manufacturing, just to cite two random examples — that social tools won’t
June 13th, 2009
Running your SOA like a Web startup
One of the more striking differences between IT and the online world these days is the contrast between traditional enterprise service-oriented architecture and its equivalent on the Web, open APIs. More and more lessons are coming from the online space, providing key insights into how we might invigorate the way we open up our IT systems for maximum value.
SOA does not have the same business urgency and lacks critical focus in this regard in most organizations. So while some new data shows that 75% of all large enterprises will be using SOA by the end of this year (and 60% will even be expanding it), the most obvious successes with service-oriented approaches aren’t classical organizations at all. They are Web companies that offer APIs out of a basic need: To build a network of partnerships quickly and cheaply as well as tap into external innovation and inexpensive 3rd party investment.
A quick examination of Google News shows several useful new public-facing Web services (aka open APIs) that were announced this week, including one for Microsoft’s Bing as well as from smaller companies like School Loop, which just launched an API that “lets gradebook and assessment systems pull data–such as rosters and assignments–from School Loop and write scores into the School Loop gradebook for display to parents, teachers, students, and other stakeholders.” Both of these APIs let anyone, anywhere build applications that interact with and incorporate their respective capabilities.
These are just two typical examples of more than 40 new APIs that were released to the world over the last 30 days alone, according to Programmable Web’s API dashboard, currently the most reliable source for such information. This pace of release is fairly steady: A “global SOA” is growing up around us on the Web.
Joe McKendrick recently asked here on ZDNet if we needed an iTunes model for Web services. The reality is, it already exists — albeit in Web-friendly, simple form — and not in the failed visions of UDDI directories of yore, but in the pragmatic release of hundreds and hundreds of new APIs every year.
SOA and Open APIs: Close Cousins
Now, it’s also true that SOA initiatives in large companies generally don’t publicly announce their internal developments, so it’s much harder to get a sense of what is being created and used in most organizations. However it’s fairly clear that there are some significant differences and outcomes between these two approaches for open services, even as they ostensibly have the same goals on the face of it: To encourage interoperability between different business systems and enable opportunities that would otherwise be too difficult, expensive, or time-consuming to capture.
What’s especially intriguing about these two sides of the same coin are the innate assumptions that they make: SOA is usually an overhead effort (thought it can also be done on the ground) between IT and the business which ultimately allows businesses to achieve improved results and even serendipitous outcomes when it comes to the integration and leverage of existing investments in systems and data. The ROI is very often hard to measure and rapid improvements to the business are usually not the norm. SOAs also tend to be more inward facing and designed for internal consumption.
Contrast this with open APIs, in which the API is considered of primary strategic advantage to the business. The view is the investment in the development of an API is warranted because of immediate benefits that can be gained: increased reach to new customers on the network, tapping into external innovation, increased 3rd party investment, and a scalable model for 3rd party relationships. Interestingly, the bigger the organization, the more value an API has to offers to existing and potential partners, primarily because of the data tends to be richer and more valuable and/or the functionality it exposes is world-class through the success of the enclosing business. This is a vision where a service-oriented business channel (open APIs, not Web pages) often becomes the dominant channel for interaction with their customers as it arguably has for market leaders such as Amazon, Twitter, and others. Unlike most SOA efforts, APIs also tend to be designed for consumption by the broader world, though they are certainly used internally as well.
In would be a gross oversimplification to say that SOA is a technical approach to solving a outstanding set of business problems and open APIs are a business solution that uses a technical approach, but increasingly that seems to be the case. A couple of years ago I asked if it was the timing was right for businesses to open up to the cloud particularly since a near majority of CIOs were clamoring for it. For more enterprises, that just hasn’t happened, leaving strategic gaps in execution that has helped lead to the recent discussions about the possibility of the quiet death of SOA.
These points highlight a key difference between
June 8th, 2009
Reconciling social computing with the enterprise
Umair Haque wrote an impressive tract on his Harvard Business blog late last week about Twitter and how it changes the rules of innovation. It’s an incisive and challenging piece that well worth reading if your looking at cutting-edge business trends. It also helps surface what’s turning into an increasingly larger gap between what happens in the business world and what happens everywhere else.
It will sometimes be a challenge to find the right metrics that help you to drive decisions about your social computing behaviors that improve the business. Jeff Jarvis and Michael Arrington made similar points over the weekend about process vs. product, ostensibly about their particular industry (journalism) and how social processes are competing — often more effectively, though very differently — with traditional, non-social “product” creations, namely news stories. As we’ll see, you can find similar examples of this now in many other industries. The key point: The processes involved in how we accomplish our daily work are being transformed by social tools on the network. Along the way, the act of work itself is becoming more of a collective journey instead of a final destination as our individual work experiences become more open, collaborative, participatory, and social.
The net result is often better and richer outcomes, though the journey can occasionally devolve into a less-than-deterministic result that can be (for the time being) rather unsatisfying, though rarely does it come to a complete stop until everyone who wants to has a crack at it.
On the other hand, the classical way of working has been to create finished, perfect-as-possible outcomes (products, services, etc.) from opaque, unknowable, lengthy processes which outsiders, within or outside the organization, could not directly perceive, alter, or improve. As Jarvis writes of traditional work methods:
It is the byproduct of the means and requirements of mass production: If you have just one chance to put out a product and it has to serve everyone the same, you come to believe it’s perfect because it has to be, whether that product is a car (we are the experts, we took six years to tool up, it damned well better be perfect) or government (where, I’m learning, employees have a phobic fear of mistakes - because citizens and journalists will jump on them) or newspapers (we package the world each day in a box with a bow on it - you’re welcome).
The key point here is the broader changes we are experiencing today: The pervasive presence of social software and today’s highly open, interactive, and remixable Web embedded deeply into our personal lives is increasingly allowing us to experience a new way of living. And it’s one that bears less and less resemblance to the workplace all the time, with significantly differing behaviors, skills, tools, and expectations. This situation creates a delta that, sooner or later, will simply become untenable for many organizations. We simply aren’t keeping up with the pace of change, never mind that not all workers are experiencing the change of the modern world the same way or at the same speed. Media sharing sites, social networks, and social tools have become embedded deeply in a large percentage of people’s lives, just as long as we remember it’s not everyone.
This increasing distance between these two worlds creates a gap — a disconnect, even — that increasingly cuts organizations off from their most valuable assets (their people) and also exerts a subversive force on organizations as their workers help themselves to the tools of their own volition, bring their (and arguably better) new behaviors and processes to work, and try to get things done with them, whether that’s crowdsourcing, Enterprise 2.0, online customer communities, etc.
So what will happen? Will there just continue to be a growing chasm between the worlds of business and how we do things outside of work? Or will the gap just become too large to sustain, with an equilibrium shift suddenly taking place in some way that creates what I’ll call (for want of a better term), a social singularity.
Singularities are popular topics with tech audiences. Read about technology singularities and Internet singularities.
A social singularity would be embodied by a convergence of
June 3rd, 2009
Building a vision for Government 2.0
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
January 29th, 2009
Using Web 2.0 to reinvent your business for the economic downturn
We are very fortunate that, given the generational challenges we face today, we have tools that those that came before us could not possibly imagine.At this point it’s more than clear that 2009 will be a challenging year for a great many businesses. Most organizations these days are now actively engaged in activities that are taking a look at what they can do to make the best of the current economic situation.
Some business leaders will be looking at paring things back to the basics while a different sort will be looking at entirely new avenues to survive and thrive. The decisions we make now can greatly affect what happens to our organizations going forward.
The good news is that most enterprises actually have a fair number of compelling options right now if they are willing to think outside the box. While some might look at the social aspects of things like Web 2.0 as marginal subjects when things get tough, nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to the deeper implications of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. Many of the more transformational aspects of the 2.0 era now have extensive groundwork laid for them, are available in genuinely enterprise-ready solutions/pilots, and many have just been waiting for the right situation; the driving need for businesses to change and transform in the face of radically different business conditions.
Why is Web 2.0 particularly interesting right now for the enterprise? Web 2.0 has always been about making the most of the intrinsic power of the network and whatever is attached to it. This can be people (social computing and Enterprise 2.0), low-cost dynamic Web partners (open APIs and cloud computing), the world’s largest database of information, lightweight integration (mashups and Web-style SOA), or maximizing the value of the network itself (the network effects that everyone talks about), and much more. These collectively represent better, more efficient, and less expensive ways to accomplish things that we previously used to do without the network’s help or with methods that didn’t take advantages of how the network works.
Read this year’s Enterprise Web 2.0 predictions for 2009 for more perspective on this topic.
Fortunately, our businesses have become so thoroughly network connected that the inherent efficiency of most 2.0 approaches will now work just as well inside the firewall as outside, though there still remain a few differences.
So what does this mean to the harried businesses looking for new approaches to creating value in a chaotic and unpredictable time? How can this help in cutting costs or driving growth? Here are some practical ways that 2.0 approaches can help organizations grapple with the challenges of 2009. Though some of these have an IT slant, many of them are strategic approaches to Web 2.0 that most organizations can embrace across their lines of business to capture substantially better outcomes.
Note that the struggle with many of these, as with so much of Web 2.0, is that there is a major shift in control, a much higher level of transparency, and an openness that many businesses can be uncomfortable with. However, to organizations that are willing to overcome these largely political, cultural, and mindset challenges, significant opportunities are available for the taking, often for relatively modest investment.
Strategic use of Web 2.0 for growth and resilience
As always, this is not an exhaustive list, though it’s a good start, and only gives a sense of the possibilities. I pointedly left out important areas like mobile, despite prognostications like mine or others lately that it’s a hot subject; it is, it’s just not fundamentally transformative enough at this point. I am sure readers will contribute more below in TalkBack.
- Move to lower-cost online/SaaS versions of enterprise applications. - Face it, paying for yearly upgrades and new license fees is a major, recurring budget line item most organizations would like to eliminate now that most companies have a computer in front of every worker. Open source software is an option and is certainly cheaper up front, until the support costs and other factors come in. There are, in fact, numerous lower-cost options today for virtually any type of business software but unless it’s browser-delivered, or even better, externally hosted as SaaS, you can’t use the provider’s economies of scale to drive down the full range of costs from deployment of upgrades and technical support to hosting, backups, and management. In general, moving to SaaS for anything that isn’t strategic to the business is the best place to start if you’re trying out externally hosted apps for the first time.
Strategic applications might be more difficult to migrate to a SaaS model both from a customization and change management standpoint as well as from concerns about governance, reliability, compliance, and regulation. Retraining and data migration are a cost component in SaaS scenarios but are manageable in today’s increasingly online and data standardized world. How much will you actually save? The numbers vary, but recent reports say that moving to a SaaS version of your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system will save the average firm
An internationally recognized enterprise architect and business strategist, Dion Hinchcliffe has been working for two decades with leading-edge methods to accelerate project schedules and raise the bar for software quality. You can follow Dion on Twitter.
See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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