Category: Encouraging Unintended Uses
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 18th, 2009
Using social software to reinvent the customer relationship
The elimination of decades of inadequate communication channels will suddenly unleash a tide of many opportunities, as well as challenges, for most organizations.As Web 2.0 applications move more deeply into the strategic operations of enterprises, a unique hybrid of social software has emerged to help businesses deal with the giant sea of customers that awaits them on the other side of the network. While Enterprise 2.0 tools, primarily aimed at collaboration, are certainly part of this story, they often don’t help companies enjoy the full range of possibilities when it comes customer-facing social computing.
Enter the rapidly emerging Social CRM space, an area that’s become significant enough that there’s now a dedicated blog on the subject here on ZDNet by the terrific Paul Greenberg.
This year’s rise of enterprise social computing is opening a new front line in many businesses where the old ways of engaging with customers is no longer sufficient or even competitive. Many organizations I talk to these days are now evaluating the way social software seems to be altering the CRM landscape. In particular, Social CRM has recently come into its own as a leading model for this transformation. For comparison’s sake, online customer communities were a very hot topic last year in this same space, but as I pointed out then, it was surprisingly hard to create them repeatably. My sense is that Social CRM will be a more predictable, reliable model for applying Web 2.0 to customer relationships using many of the strengths of the community model.
Read Michael Krigsman’s 3 Big Reasons CRM Initiatives Fail
This is not to say that many of the social media tools that companies have deployed already aren’t good examples of Social CRM. Many of them are and this highlights a major discussion in the blogosphere last week sparked by SocialText’s Ross Mayfield, who posited that with Social CRM, the people are the platform. The key point here is that where online tools let customers have a social relationship with a business — in other words, interaction that is visible to them and other customers whenever possible — then some Social CRM is taking place. Without a fundamentally community-based relationship, you’re just back to traditional, one-on-one push management of customers. This latter model, a closed and asocial mode of customer interaction, is the very antithesis of Social CRM.
Social CRM: It’s all about people
For its part, Social CRM paints a vision of creating a deeper and more engaging community-based relationship with your customers, instead of the traditional approach of managing them, in a very Cluetrain Manifesto way. Part online community, part crowdsourcing, part customer service, Social CRM can create an emergent, collaborative online partnership with customers that can result in an array of improvements to business performance.
Far from being just for the benefit of the business however, with Social CRM customers tend to 1) be much more in control, 2) are in sustained contact with the organizations they care about, and 3) can use self-service, mutually visible participation, collective history, and peer relationships to assist each other as much — and often much more — than the classic CRM model ever could.
But like any composite, heterogeneous group of participants, Social CRM necessarily entails less deterministic control and outcomes. For example, these new Social CRM tools will let anyone ask a question publicly and anyone else in the community (customers or employees) answer it. Or provide a means to let new ideas flow in from the community in a very Dell IdeaStorm fashion. The question of who decides what the right “official” answer is, or which ideas will be selected and how non-employee submitters will be compensated are currently hard questions to answer for many organizations.
Then there is the challenge that by its very nature Social CRM is
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
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
April 12th, 2009
Determining the ROI of Enterprise 2.0
Despite recent statistics showing that Enterprise 2.0 tools have spread to about a third of businesses globally, there remain ongoing questions being asked in the enterprise software community about the real returns that they provide to businesses that deploy them.Many IT solutions create value only after traveling through an indirect chain of cause and effect. Certainly blogs, wikis, and social networks are popular on public networks, but does that translate to meaningful bottom line value to organizations? In other words, is Enterprise 2.0 truly strategic in the unique way that information technology can so often be?
This is a key question since actual penetration of these tools is almost certainly lower than the one third figure I mention above. Most organizations today, even the ones where the applications are available to employees currently, are not yet exhorting workers to adopt these tools en masse despite a suite of compelling arguments and a growing set of case studies. Even impressive citations such as the recent TransUnion Enterprise 2.0 case study that claims an eye-opening 50x return on investment (using the most basic ROI formula for calculating returns) are not yet initiating widespread inquiry.
Instead, while we’re seeing widespread interest and acceptance of Enterprise 2.0 in the workplace, there is still mostly a wait-and-see attitude amongst IT managers and business leaders at the moment. The reasons for this seem to fall into three general categories:
One is an broad wariness of a new horizontal information technology approach that purports to solve so many problems and will overlap extensively with existing solutions from e-mail and instant messaging to content/document management and knowledge management systems, to name just a few. Other related concerns are feelings that workers already have a lot of software to use today, that the tools already exist in the organization (see my Enterprise 2.0 and SharePoint discussion a few weeks ago), or that the available tools aren’t fully enterprise-ready yet.
A second set of issues is related to corporate culture and its fundamentally hierarchical nature, which seems anathema to the flattened, highly social nature of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. At this point, it’s becoming increasingly clear that in some tightly controlled, top-down organizations, culture is indeed an impediment to the use of emergent, social computing. Fortunately, there is now enough evidence visible in current case studies that many industries can indeed benefit from Enterprise 2.0.
The last issue is one that has bedeviled software and its strategic application to business since the very beginning, namely the
December 4th, 2008
The emerging case for open business methods
The Internet has been the genesis of countless useful business innovations over the last several decades. These include a globally unified e-mail network, the advent of search engines, the rise of rich user experiences and SaaS, and most recently cloud computing to name but a few. But perhaps one of the most far-reaching innovations was the Internet’s ability to enable the creation and organization of the open source movement, arguably the most important progenitor to most things 2.0 and perhaps eventually to business in general.
The business world of the next decade will look quite different from today and require different values and management styles to match.While open source itself is mostly closely associated with the creation of free software in the Internet age, the associated concepts of open collaboration and open information sharing has roots in the early scientific community, where the (mostly) transparent sharing of ideas and data was the most effective way to enable progress. Related trends such as open data and the Web 2.0 model of open content reflect the now widespread activity of open information sharing and exchange using primarily a commons-based approach, enabled greatly by pervasive world-wide networks such as the Internet.
Given the current size of the Internet, about 1.2 billion people, tapping into and unleashing the enormous productive capacity and latent knowledge at the edge of the network has become one of the most powerful and underutilized economic resources available to businesses today. Accessing this effectively ahead of the competition has been the explicit (though too often unstated) premise of countless Internet startups. It’s turned out that companies with a native “Web DNA” have the best perspective to see the fundamental potential here better than their traditional business counterparts. Most businesses still look at the network mostly as a secondary channel for activities such as value inputs, customer relationships, and worker communication and collaboration and not the most valuable one. This is primarily because they’ve traditionally had more dominant and important channels.
But this is starting to change. Through continuous and very widespread experimentation and endeavor, open models of communication, information, and even the creation of products and services, have emerged as a proven and highly effective way to directly drive business activity in entirely new and powerful ways. It’s largely thanks to things like open standards, open source, and open content (aka user generated content and peer production) which have tremendously challenged and even up-ended the old world models of proprietary formats, commercial software, and traditional media respectively.
All this might seem a familiar story but these methods, still too pent-up in a world of high technology and Internet businesses, have begun to spread beyond their origins in software and content and become an significant avenue of opportunity across all aspects of business, albeit involving both great rewards and significant challenges. Particularly in these trying economic times, open models have begun providing the crucial, raw ingredients for a fresh, new perspective in the way we look at how we operate our businesses.
Enterprise 2.0 is just one good example of the emerging intersection of many of these open trends combining open collaboration where anyone can collaborate with globally visible information sharing. It’s also one of the most immediately appealing models to most businesses since it doesn’t necessarily entail many of the risks and challenges that more external modes of open engagement would require. In other words, businesses today are generally comfortable with achieving objectives with the assistance of 3rd parties in an outsourcing or partnership model, but they are generally not as comfortable with using open sourcing or crowdsourcing to achieve the same objectives.
The reasons organizations are wary of more open and 2.0 models for sourcing work and information are many and varied but it generally boils down to four reasons:
- Lack of familiarity. Despite the extensive body of knowledge that has accumulated, particularly in the software and media industries, there is a broad lack of understanding of how open models work for those whose line of business lies outside the technology industry. These include how to start and successfully manage open business methods as well as the various governance, legal, and brand issues that open models involve, to name just a few. While many businesses are in fact evolving and expanding their Internet channel, most executives are not yet tracking how these open methods can potentially generate much greater value for less cost across their organization, something that most businesses would find very attractive right now.
- Poor evidence in their industry. Most organizations are medium-to-slow adopters or fast followers, not
November 4th, 2008
Open APIs reach new high water mark as the Web evolves
Late last week an important milestone for the Internet was quietly reached as the number of available open Web APIs crossed the 1,000 mark, according to the popular API tracking service, Programmable Web.
We are nearing the time when opening our supply chains across the Web isn’t just a good idea, it will be essential for competitive survival. While still seemingly small in number compared to the number of traditional Web sites that exist, open APIs have become an increasingly vital story for Web startups and traditional firms alike to cost effectively partnership, expand the reach of their products (and especially their data), and drive their network effect deeply across the Web.
It’s now almost uncommon to see a new Web product that doesn’t sport a shiny new API so that other online products can integrate the pieces they like into new experiences and offerings. In short, APIs allow a Web application or online business to have thousands of points of presence in other products, instead of just one.
Though APIs were pioneered by many of the original, successful firms on the Web including eBay and Amazon, which can both cite considerable returns for their efforts, it’s only been in the last couple of years that APIs have been taken seriously in a widespread way by the Web community and have become a new competency area.
In my discussions with many companies, one of the biggest obstacles to adopting APIs is a lack of understanding of what a non-visual Web presence looks like and how to build a business model around it. Business leaders are much more likely to understand investment in a traditional Web site, which they are familiar with and understand somewhat, than in an online software development kit, which is more developer-centric and which they are much less likely to fully appreciate, even though APIs can often have more strategic value than a Web site.
The good news is that emerging case studies and the impressive numbers from Amazon earlier this year are showing the the way and there has been a noticeable change in attitude and uptick in interest since cloud computing became such a big topic over the summer.
Yesterday, Programmable Web’s John Musser summarized some of the more interesting findings
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.
Subscribe to Enterprise Web 2.0 via Email alerts or RSS.
SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads
- Virtualization: Architectural Considerations And Other Evaluation Criteria VMware Of the many approaches to x86 systems virtualization available in the ... Download Now
- Why Isn't Server Virtualization Saving Us More? A Few Small Changes May Dramatically Increase Your Efficiency VMware Companies have rapidly adopted server virtualization over the past few ... Download Now
- The Impact of Virtualization Software on Operating Environments VMware Today's use of virtualization technology allows IT professionals to ... Download Now
Recent Entries
- Salesforce Chatter: Social operating systems emerge on the IT stage
- Enterprise 2.0: What do we know today about moving our organizations into the 21st century?
- Are the iPhone and social networks making the classic Web and intranet obsolete?
- Twenty-two power laws of the emerging social economy
- Community management: The ‘essential’ capability of successful Enterprise 2.0 efforts
Blogs From Our Sponsors
Most Popular Posts
- Salesforce Chatter: Social operating systems emerge on the IT stage
- Enterprise 2.0: What do we know today about moving our organizations into the 21st century?
- Are the iPhone and social networks making the classic Web and intranet obsolete?
Top Rated
Premier Vendor Content Whitepapers, webcasts & resources from our Power Center Sponsors
- The more you simplify, the more you save
-
When you transition from your existing Red Hat environment to SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell, you can recognize dramatic cost savings, perhaps as much 50%
- Learn more >>
- The best support in the Linux business
-
If Linux is going to power your mission-critical applications, you'd better have the best support known to business. Novell was rated the top provider of Linux technical support.
- Learn more >>
- Reduce risk. Reduce complexity. Increase reliability.
-
A simplified IT environment isn't just less complex. It's also more reliable. Standardize on a single Linux platform with SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell, and get the world's most interoperable Linux
- Learn more >>
- Keep Up With The Latest In Document Management with The DocuMentor.
-
> Doc delivers the scoop on today's enterprise content management, printer maintenance, and all other issues related to document management. It's the DocuMentor Blog.
- Learn more >>
Archives
ZDNet Blogs
- All About Microsoft
- The Apple Core
- Between the Lines
- BriefingsDirect
- Collaboration 2.0
- Dev Connection
- Digital Cameras & Camcorders
- Ed Bott's Microsoft Report
- Emerging Tech
- Enterprise Web 2.0
- Forrester Research
- Googling Google
- GreenTech Pastures
- Hardware 2.0
- Home Theater
- iGeneration
- Irregular Enterprise
- IT Project Failures
- Laptops & Desktops
- Lawgarithms
- Linux and Open Source
- Managing L'unix
- The Mobile Gadgeteer
- On Sustainability
- Rational Rants
- The Semantic Web
- Service Oriented
- Smartphones and Cell Phones
- Social Business
- Social CRM: The Conversation
- Software & Services Safari
- Software as Services
- Storage Bits
- Team Think
- Tech Broiler
- Technology and the Global Supply Chain
- Tom Foremski: IMHO
- The ToyBox
- Virtually Speaking
- The Web Life
- ZDNet Education
- ZDNet Government
- ZDNet Healthcare
- Zero Day
White Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads
- Gartner Webcast: Data Loss Prevention, Compliance Trends Trend Micro The regulatory environment is changing. Find out what companies need to ... Download Now
- ENTERPRISE SECURITY GETS SMART Trend Micro IT security professionals are increasingly more concerned about the ... Download Now
- ENTERPRISE SECURITY MUST GET SMARTER Trend Micro Internet security threats are always changing but what types of attacks ... Download Now
-
-
Smart Tech
Expert advice on innovations in healthcare and the green technologies that make it happen.
Find out more
-
Smart Business
Discussion and advice on management issues that revolve around making your world smarter and more useful.
More Smart Advice
-
Smart People
The best and worst moves in the management and strategy trenches.
Learn More
