Category: ATOM
July 24th, 2009
First impressions of Google Wave
After spending a few hours using an early version of Google Wave today, it’s clear that in its initial incarnation it won’t be ejecting existing enterprise collaboration tools from the workplace any time soon. It’s not that it isn’t impressive, far from it, however Wave’s complex interface and open-ended feature set provides an unexpectedly steep learning curve, particularly from a company that is famous for simple, powerful user experiences.
That said, Google Wave holds considerable potential for bringing next-generation Enterprise 2.0 capabilities to organizations looking for best-of-breed solutions.
For those that didn’t see the unveiling two months ago, the vision of Google Wave is one of online communication completely reinvented for the possibilities — as well as the expectations — of the Facebook/Twitter era.
After all, e-mail itself is decades old and even highly successful Web 2.0 communication tools like blogs and wikis have gotten somewhat long in the tooth, at least in their most common forms. With browsers capable of doing more than ever and tight integration with existing information assets becoming more and more critical to users, Google Wave attempts to up the ante by combining many of the features and capabilities we come to expect in modern Web applications.
These advancements include truly social conversation, simultaneous multi-user editing, connection to external Web/intranet apps through extensions and embedding, and much more. In fact, as we’ll see, Google Wave has virtually all of the key ingredients to comply with my FLATNESSES mnemonic for identifying effective, Enterprise 2.0-capable applications.
The end result is something that comes across as a distinctly sophisticated Web application clearly made up of many elements that sometimes behave somewhat unpredictably precisely because it’s designed to be highly extensible and freeform. Admittedly, my experience was with the developer sandbox for extensions, but this is exactly the intent of Google Wave: to be the center of integrated communication and collaboration in a dynamic and immersive yet safe experience.
Here are some of the observations I made during my use of Google Wave. Note that this is an early version of the software that will undoubtedly be richer and more complete upon release, though experience shows that Google rarely makes major changes to products once they are shown to early audiences.
Observations on Google Wave
- The basic interface looks a lot like Gmail. This is generally good since Gmail is widely used and understood by millions of people. The biggest obvious difference is that the inbox/content area that takes up most of the page in Gmail is now split in half, with a list of waves on the left and an active wave on the right. The rest of the page is taken up with a Contacts pane, just like in Gmail, and some standard boilerplate links on the upper right. In fact, it’s so consistent with the Google experience (including Google Accounts) that it seems quite likely — to this author anyway — that Google Wave capabilities will be added to Gmail at some point. Upshot: Other companies can and will make their own front end editors/viewers for waves and this user experience has few surprises. It is very much what you’d expect from Google with a user interface/navigation consistent with their other applications.
Screenshot of Google Wave: Strong similarity to Gmail - Google Wave works better with groups of contacts.While this seems obvious, the issue is that online conversations tend to work better when they can involve a wider range of people than just those that you think of immediately. The tedium of starting a wave is that you have to add all the participants than you’d like to have in it. Auto-joining groups are supported at this time in a fairly interesting fashion (if slightly unexpected, see below in robot participants), but will be critical to create easily and quickly en masse in order to make Google Wave useful and time efficient. One potential issue: Supporting cross boundary waves and simultaneously supporting Google Accounts, Active Directory, and other user account databases. This will be a complex issue for enterprises that want to
September 6th, 2008
The WOA story emerges as better outcomes sought for SOA
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
April 17th, 2008
Web 2.0 success stories driving WOA and informing SOA
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
January 3rd, 2008
12 predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008
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 »
October 30th, 2007
Significant workplace inroads for Enterprise 2.0?
According to a random poll I recently conducted on Facebook, just over a quarter of 300 respondents — 27% of them in all — answered in the affirmative that they are provided with an easy way at work to post on a blog or put information on a wiki. I often ask this same question to gatherings of people whenever I get the chance these days and have been getting roughly the same answer for the last few months. Businesses are apparently starting to take Web 2.0 for a more serious spin.
Blogs and wikis may finally be seeing fairly widespread “business approved” adoption in the workplace.A year ago, accessibility to blogs and wikis in the workplace was less than half this number in my informal sampling. The growth trend seems clear and appears to be increasing. So while this data might be fairly unscientific, I suspect the number is pretty accurate, and social media, aka Enterprise 2.0, is finally making some measurable inroads in the workplace despite a few open concerns about these mediums.
Facebook as a measure of social media in the general workplace?
Of course, Facebook users in general are probably more digitally literate than the average population, will look for blogs and wikis on the local Intranet to use, and thus some say they may be more likely to gravitate to workplaces and jobs that would provide an environment with familiar tools. However, one odd breakdown in the demographics of the poll is that the youngest group, 18-24 year-olds, reported the least access to social media. Perhaps it’s because this group also includes a great deal of students or that entry level workers don’t have as much computer access as workers farther up in the hierarchy.
Poll respondents were also pretty sure when they weren’t being provided with these tools with only 21% reporting that they didn’t know if they were being offered them. A whopping 52%, just over half, said that they had no social media tools offered to them in a way they could access.
The poll question was also carefully posed to uncover if tools were being “brought in the back door” by workers using the hundreds of free social media platforms out in the Web with their browser at work, or if the workplace itself was providing enterprise blogs and wikis. In my opinion, this makes the 27% “yes” number almost surprisingly high. But, while some respondents may not have parsed the question clearly, the trend is strong enough to stand on it’s own:
Blogs and wikis may finally be seeing fairly widespread “business approved” adoption in the workplace.
Getting good business outcomes from social media while managing downside
While blogs and wikis continue to show the potential to greatly improve collaboration, create higher levels of knowledge retention, and generate more reusable business information over time, it’s also probable that Read the rest of this entry »
May 17th, 2007
The story of Web 2.0 and SOA continues - Part 1
It’s nearly the middle of 2007 already and I’ve had occasion to sit down and look at where Web 2.0 and SOA software models have evolved lately. Partly it’s because we’re now seeing some of the bigger software companies seriously embrace lightweight SOA recently, and it’s also because we’re continuing to see more clearly that Web 2.0 and SOA really are largely (but not 100%) the same concepts that merely lay on different — if fairly different — parts of the software continuum. Here’s the latest on this story.
For those not up-to-date on this trend, the fact that these two big conceptual foundations in the software business overlap extensively — and somewhat unexpectedly — appears to be a pretty important subject for a number of reasons. One is that SOA is the dominant design paradigm in business software today, with most software development projects using some subset of it as their primary organizing principle. The core principle of SOA is the decomposition of software into sets of services which can be used and composed into new applications that have a very high level of integration and reuse.
The second reason this convergence is important is that potent ideas in Web 2.0 have been mapped back from what seems to be working best on the often unruly, much less-organized, but considerably larger Web. Web 2.0 is more of a pragmatic extraction of what actually works best in online product design than a rigorous a priori engineering exercise. That both have arrived at largely the same endpoints on their own, but with very different priorities and focus in some areas, should not be understated.
SOA and Web 2.0 have also crossed over considerably around Rich Internet Applications and Ajax. Read ZDNet’s Joe McKendrick recent post for the latest on this story.
I’ve written in the past about the considerable overlap and convergence of these two popular software models. From my contrived or converging article exploring the early possibilities to my first Venn diagram showing the similarities and differences, it’s been clear that Web 2.0 and SOA are closely related. Understanding the exact demarcations and differences between the two, however, is driven by a couple of realizations. One is that from a product design perspective, understanding the advantages and disadvantages of each method prescribed for creating your software can dramatically effect what an online product can do in the market or for your business internally. Go with traditional SOA and you’ll be able to leverage the advantages that its design center confers. Go with Web 2.0 ideas, and you’ll be able to take on a different set of challenges and be successful in a very different environment and for different reasons. But make no mistake, it’s fairly clear that choosing one of the other can really matter to a project’s or product’s ultimate success.
Both conceptions do make one very important assumption, that all software is part of a larger ecosystem bigger than itself. This idea has been with us for a while, ever since distributed computing. But the focus of software ecosystems has continued to move around over the years, from computing, to services, to data itself. What’s the real core? What’s the most important aspect of our applications? The O’Reilly concept of Web 2.0 tells us that data is one of the most important parts of our software applications these days, and this is backed up by citing one world leading product after another that took this idea seriously. SOA tells us that services are the center of composition. That services in a SOA also transport data is also important, but the focus in traditional SOA tends to be much more on the seams of our IT systems than what makes them the most valuable overall. These may be seemingly academic distinctions but the ongoing struggle of SOA implementation in many organizations and the runaway success of many a Web 2.0 application hints that this may indeed be some very important hair splitting.
To show how SOA and Web 2.0 line up when compared to each other, I’ve included in the diagram above my most recent update depicting the overlap and convergence of the ideas in Web 2.0 and SOA. It paints a clear picture of what the two have in common and how they are different as well. Note: No depiction like this could be complete and this is very much a work in progress. For this version, I’ve recently added security and monetization as two core aspects that SOA and Web 2.0 share, but with varying degrees of importance (SOA cares more about security, Web 2.0 cares more about monetization of products and services.)
Another important item: The bottom of the overlapping circle contains a cryptic Read the rest of this entry »
May 5th, 2007
Enterprise 2.0 as a corporate culture catalyst
I've only recently had a chance to catch up and read Tom Davenport's post a few weeks ago about his skepticism of Enterprise 2.0's ability to wreak significant cultural and hierarchical change inside organizations. Those of you tracking the Enterprise 2.0 story know the drill, namely that applying Web 2.0 tools and platforms inside organization may or may not — depending on who you are talking to — improve the way we collaborate, run our businesses, and even potentially tap major new veins of previously unexploitable worker productivity. I myself tend to be a bit biased because I'm very close to many uses of these technologies and their use in the field. And that's shown me that if one trend stands out clearly above the fray, it's that most organizations are rapidly embracing these tools today, either from the top-down or at a grassroots level, and often both.
Viewpoints like Tom are entirely right on however if we were looking at tools that are hard to use, highly complex and overspecialized, and required significant resources and special skills to acquire, deploy, and maintain. But this is entirely not the case in this wave of software applications that seem to systematically address virtually all the barriers we've seen in the past to getting new tools adopted, rapidly providing immediate value, and broadly used. One of the most important reasons for this is simply that the constantly evolving Web has continually refined and guided through competitive pressure — and other feedback loops — the design of sites until we have hit upon very effective models for collaboration and communication. These include the now-ubiquitous blog and wiki but many others as well including mashups, roaming Web desktops, and highly-customizable SaaS apps. Applying these to the enterprise is now extremely easy for anyone to do, highly applicable in many if not most business situations, and certainly last but not least, very inexpensive.
But as Tom goes on to note, the real obstacles to applying Web 2.0 platforms inside our workplaces may very well be our corporate cultures. Cultural impedance is something that's also inhibited many otherwise highly useful and potentially beneficial IT initiatives including SOA, BPM, EAI and others. The gap between what's technically possible and what the corporate culture is willing and able to accept — must less actively encourage — is often wider than many people automatically assume. Clearly the exciting things happening on the Web today from the explosion of user-generated content, ad hoc collaboration in the large, rapid self-service global information discovery via Web search, and collective intelligence stories like Wikipedia are outcomes that many would like to replicate inside our enterprises.
And the very openness of Web 2.0 platforms, the control and power that must be handed to
April 27th, 2007
A tale of two Web 2.0 conferences and mashups
I've just come off a whirlwind conference tour that started in San Francisco last week with Web 2.0 Expo and ended with the Web 2.0 Kongress yesterday in Frankfurt. I was fortunate enough to be able to speak at both conferences and it was fascinating to see the differences in focus between the two events, as well as some of the apparent trends they had in common.
Given the estimates of the size of the crowd at Web 2.0 Expo, anywhere from 10,000 to 16,000 people depending on who you talk to, there's little doubt it was one of the leading events this year around the next generation of the Web. In contrast, the Web 2.0 Kongress was a smaller and much more business focused affair with a lot of focus on integration and SOA. Yet it was abundantly clear at both, based on my conversations with numerous attendees, that we're now well clear of the early hype of Web 2.0 and much more on how to exploit the opportunities that it maps out for us.
Another key trend I saw was the attendance of mainstream business people who were very much in evidence at both events, something that I've noticed has been increasing at Web 2.0 events lately in general. I met attendees from major corporations, federal and state government, and many others from medium to small size businesses. And a good percentage of them were business people and not from the technical side of things. This doesn't come so much as a surprise if we take into account indicators such as the McKinsey global survey on Web 2.0 which I covered in my last post.
The boundaries of the Web are blurring
The other hot trend, besides of course of just about anything social to do with the Web, that was explored at both events was
February 25th, 2007
Tracking the DIY phenomenon Part 2: Mass customization, mashups, and recombinant Web apps
In my last post, I took a look at the recent proliferation of Web widgets, which are modular content and services that are making it easier for anyone to help themselves to the vast pool of high value functionality and information that resides on the Web today. Companies are actively "widgetizing" their online offerings so that it can actively be repurposed into other sites and online products. And as we discussed in the last post, it's believed that letting users innovate with your online offerings by letting embedding them in their own Web sites, blogs, and applications can greatly broaden distribution and reach, leverage rapid viral propagation over the Internet, and fully exploit the raw creativity that theoretically lies in great quantities on the edge of our networks.
DIY on the Web is looking to be a major trend; Newsweek recently speculated that 2007 will be the Year of the Widget.
Looked at this way, letting thousands and even millions of users build Web sites and apps out of your Web parts and then monetizing it with advertising, usage fees, or subscriptions sounds great in the abstract. But one of the big outstanding questions is if widgitizing is mostly useful for gaining fast user adoption and market share, and not for building the fundamentals of a viable, long-term business online. While this last question is still very much an open one, part of the answer will come from the way that the consumption side of DIY develops. The question is this: Are environments emerging that will enable rich and sophisticated DIY scenarios that are usable by most people?
So while my last post looked at the recent growth of available Web parts, now we'll look at the consumption side of the DIY phenomenon. Specifically, beyond the simple copy-and-paste of snippets of HTML, what is the current state of capable tools that will let all of us assemble useful apps beyond the widget encrusted dashboards that are most likely outcome possible today? Because without tools that enable real integration between all these portable Web parts, services, and feeds, we don't have useful new software, we just have fancy information displays.
Like the emergent, DIY usage currently being explored and increasingly embraced with Enterprise 2.0, the idea of DIY is to get developers and IT departments out of the demand loop and letting users self-service themselves. Like spreadsheets and desktop databases have been used for years by end users to build simple apps, with the rise of reusable, portable Web parts and feeds allows the assembly of an entire spectrum of Web apps that don't require true software development skills. Given the right tools that guide users down the right paths (palettes of pre-tested, approved parts, built-in security, versioning and configuration management), DIY might become a major force for leveraging the largely untapped The Long Tail of software demand, instead of becoming a giant support headache for public Web companies and internal IT departments.
Of course, what I'm referring to here is
January 29th, 2007
Big software firms take aim at Web 2.0
While 2006 was a big year for Web 2.0 in the consumer space, it was barely on the radar in the enterprise world. That didn't stop volumes of press coverage, speculation, and debate about how applicable Web 2.0 technologies — from Ajax to social networking — would actually be to the business world.
However those in the enterprise who wanted to go ahead, experiment, and conduct pilot projects to see how Web 2.0 concepts work for them were largely stuck with very consumer-oriented Web 2.0 applications to try out. That's because until recently, the major software makers that supply the application platforms that run the vast majority of the business world haven't had applications that specifically focused on Web 2.0 patterns and practices, things like social networking, tagging, mashups, architectures of participation, and so on.
The consumerization of the enterprise was predicted to be one of the significant trends of 2007 and a quick look at this list of applications confirms that it will indeed be a key story this year.However, in the last couple of months quite a different picture has emerged and the world's largest software companies have taken clear aim at the Web 2.0 product space with announcement after announcement. IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and Intel all have significant products, often many of them, targeted at offering the modern consumer Web experience to workers inside the firewall. And far from being a me-too play with the rest of the industry, the truth is that as popular as open source is getting — particularly in the Web 2.0 community — many business customers still prefer solutions that play well with the mountains of enterprise IT applications and back-end systems that currently run the business.
And with approaches like Enterprise 2.0 heating up including the cutting edge topics like the emergence of mashup creation tools to build a visual "face" of service-oriented architectures (SOA), it turns out that Web 2.0 applications aimed at the enterprise must deal well with formal services integration, enterprise search, information security, single sign-on, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, and a laundry list of other enterprise issues. These are all topics that the aforementioned firms understand well and are actively addressing in most cases with these new products.
Adding "enterprise context" to Web 2.0 tools require some work but doesn't have to be daunting. Read overviews of how to provide this for blogs and wikis.
It's also true that these are uncertain days for many of the big software firms. This is partially because the world of software is becoming increasingly commoditized while the expectations for how software should be hosted is also moving rapidly from installed native applications to online Software as a Service (SaaS). There's also a sense that enterprise systems have become too complicated, unwieldy, and slow-moving compared to their nimble brethren out on the Web. New Web applications have continued to adapt and evolve out on the Internet quite quickly in comparison to traditional IT, essentially ushering in the Web 2.0 era itself. It was no accident that the Web 2.0 Summit's theme last year was disruption and opportunity, and so it's concomitant on software companies to adjust to the industry and evolve.
The Web 2.0 strategies of these new applications are as interesting and varied as the companies that have come up with them. It's worth taking a look at the big Web 2.0 enterprise apps being announced so far. To get a good feel for the this next generation of enterprise apps, here's a round-up of the latest Web 2.0 software plans of the industry's top software firms. In no particular order:
SAP announced last week that it would be adding Web 2.0-style collaboration capabilities in many of its projects. While SAP's specific Web 2.0 plans are the least defined of all the companies in this, a couple of notable points are the specific implementation of widgets, small bits of mobile code that can be added to a Web page by a user and provide data or functionality from back-end systems. The emergence of end-user widgets on the Web was one of the more interesting
An internationally recognized enterprise architect and business strategist, Dion Hinchcliffe has been working for two decades with leading-edge methods to accelerate project schedules and raise the bar for software quality. You can follow Dion on Twitter.
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