Category: Identity
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
July 29th, 2009
Assessing the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace in 2009: Robust and crowded
Social software platforms, including services such as Facebook and Twitter, have become one of the primary channels for communication amongst consumers this year, even eclipsing e-mail in some parts of the developed world.
It was companies that either open sourced eventually or took open source and then made it enterprise class that often scored the best.The same however, can’t quite be said yet for the workplace. While the adoption numbers for social applications are still impressive in business (about half of all large organizations), actual adoption and use is lagging significantly behind the non-business world as organizations take the time to assess a range of issues with enterprise social computing, including appropriateness, security, control, management methods, and roll-out strategies.
However, given the widespread interest and popularity in social tools these days, it’s becoming a pretty safe bet that you’ll be seeing them in some form on a workplace intranet near you. The question is in what form? The choices of social tools these days can be daunting and are only increasing rapidly, with new entries appearing weekly and existing ones being upgraded often. What’s increasingly needed is a detailed look at what’s currently available in business-class social software and how it sizes up, which we’ll try to do in high-level form here.
As we’ll see, since last year’s marketplace map, there has been a veritable explosion in social applications that are intended for use in business settings, both internally or externally. These offerings have a surprisingly wide range of features and so in this post I will explore one of the broadest and most important categories of business social software, Enterprise 2.0, in detail. I’ve also included a pretty comprehensive map of the marketplace for 2009 as defined by the products that are available today (or are highly anticipated and soon to be released, such as Google Wave.)
Enterprise 2.0 software: Choice abounds
A wide range of software providers now proclaim that they make Enterprise 2.0 tools, or have adapted/extended what they make today in order to address this space in some way. This includes the full gamut of open source projects, commercial vendors, startups, and established Web firms such as Google.
In fact, during the course of the survey work, it sometimes seemed like every company making business-oriented collaboration and communication tools is now offering Enterprise 2.0 capabilities in some form. Overall this is a good sign for customers (because supply is most likely greater than demand) and though all new markets tend to shake out, we are no longer in early days with social software. This means that the majority of these products will likely be around for the medium to long-term. It also means that there is probably something available that will fit your specific choice of features, price, technology needs, standards support, and other requirements.
Click To View In Detail
The visual above can be clicked to view the gallery containing the full list of Enterprise 2.0-capable applications assessed in this survey.
There are over 70 major products on this list — many of them entire software platforms in their own right — with a wide range of Web 2.0 capabilities including blogs, wikis, forums, community, social networks, and social messaging. Every attempt was made to be inclusive while still adhering to the spirit of “emergent, freeform, social collaboration” tools. Also, a product had to be compelling and capable in order to appear on this list at all; all of the offerings that made the cut are solid products in my opinion. Literally hundreds of candidates did not make the cut.
Further Reading: The enterprise microblogging marketplace for mid-2009.
So, for example, a simple but popular microblogging tool like Yammer appears on the list along with the widely used, feature-laden Microsoft SharePoint suite. It’s important to note that these are very different applications in terms of
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
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 5th, 2009
Eight ways that cloud computing will change business
When a major change arrives on the IT scene it’s not always clear what the implications will be, if any, and so for large organizations a risk-managed wait-and-see attitude tends to prevail. Occasionally however some shifts offer cost savings, improvements to operations, or ways to tackle business problems that offer significant strategic advantage. The larger the benefit in one or more of these areas, then the more strategic the advance is and the greater potential it will impact the bottom line.
Cloud computing is quickly beginning to shape up as one of these major changes and the hundreds of thousands of business customers of cloud offerings from Amazon (Amazon Web Services), Salesforce (Force.com), and Google (many offerings, including Google App Engine), including a growing number of Fortune 500 companies, is showing both considerable interest and momentum in the space.
Cloud Computing: A delicate balance of risk and benefit
To be clear, there are currently unanswered questions and inherent challenges — even some major risks — in adopting cloud computing for more that so-called “edge” computing of minor applications and non-critical business systems. Notably, these include security of enterprise data that stored in the cloud, risk of lock-in to cloud platform vendors, loss of control over cloud resources run and managed by someone else, and reliability.
On the other side of the coin are some benefits that can potentially change the game for many firms that are willing to be very proactive in managing potential downside. These include access to completely different levels of scale and economics in terms of the ability to scale very rapidly and to operate IT systems more cheaply that previously possible. Easier change management of infrastructure including maintenance and upgrades (cloud vendors extensively virtualize and commoditize the underlying components to make them non-disruptive to replace and improve) as well as offering improved agility to deploy solutions and choice between vendors, particularly when cloud interoperability becomes more of a reality than it is today. Cloud computing also offers an onramp to new computing advances such as non-relational databases, new languages, and frameworks that are designed to encourage scalability and take advantage of new innovations such as modern Web identity, open supply chains, and other advances.
In fact, cloud computing holds the potential to dramatically change the businesses that adopt it, even if the technologies are only used internally. While these possibilities are only now starting to become clear, we can get a decent sense of these now:
8 ways that cloud computing will change business
- The creation of a new generation of products and services. The economics of cloud computing lets innovative companies create products that either weren’t possible before or are significantly less expensive than the competition (or just more profitable.) This part of cloud computing is an arms race and there are short windows of opportunity since competitors can often put the economic advantages of cloud computing into their product formulations fairly quickly once they see that it works for you. Where it gets interesting is that many business ideas that required prohibitive amounts of computing power, scale, or radically new business models (the aforementioned open supply chains and Global SOA) but couldn’t be implemented due to existing technical limitations or cost-effectiveness, can now be realized. Every improvement in storage, processing power, or technology enables innovations that weren’t possible before (high speed Internet, for instance, made products like YouTube possible) and cloud computing makes these opportunities unusually accessible. Smart companies will take notice.
- A new lightweight form of real-time partnerships and outsourcing with IT suppliers. Companies that did traditional outsourcing of their IT services a few years ago already know what this feels like; a large part of what used to be in-house is now being done somewhere else and changing anything is hard. But unlike traditional outsourcing of IT, cloud computing will provide agility and control that traditional outsource cannot match for the most part. Don’t like your cloud vendor? Unless you negotiated a long-term contract, you can often switch far easier than changing IT outsourcers. In fact, many cloud computing relationships consist of nothing more than a cancel-at-the-end-of-the-month commitment and corporate invoice. For many companies, this will actually be improvement over what they have now and give them choices they perhaps never had when everything required internal execution or to go through the outsourcing supplier relationship.
- A new awareness and leverage of
June 1st, 2009
Twitter on your intranet: 17 microblogging tools for business
Ultimately, if you want to use the right tool for the job, you’re probably going to need a specialized microblogging platform.So you’re bitten by the Twitter bug and want to bring the social messaging experience to work in order to connect with and share information conveniently amongst your colleagues. Perhaps you’ve even obtained permission to try out microblogging in trial form on your local intranet. You sit down and begin to see how you can adopt social messaging internally. It goes slowly at first…
As a Web-based consumer application, you quickly discover that while Twitter itself is a terrific environment, it isn’t very usable yet for businesses because of it lacks a variety of capabilities needed to fully work on the local intranet (details on this below). You wonder what other options exist to bring microblogging to the workplace in a business-friendly manner. Plenty, it turns out.
As we’ll see, choosing one carefully will be key to the long-term success of your experiment.
With the recent growth of Web 2.0 tools in the workplace (to about half of all organizations today), this scenario is becoming more common. The good news is that the broad success of Twitter over the last year has led to the introduction of a whole series of business-focused microblogging applications that bring many (though not yet all) of the necessary enterprise capabilities to the microblogging world.
What exactly is microblogging?
Read the rest of this entry »
March 19th, 2009
Sharepoint and Enterprise 2.0: The good, the bad, and the ugly
Depending on which numbers you look at these days, about a third of all companies right now are using Enterprise 2.0-style tools to enable collaboration and management of their knowledge. This is in stark contrast to just three years ago when the only tools most workers could count on for communicating with others and sharing knowledge was e-mail, the phone, and if they were lucky, an instant messaging or content management application.
It increasingly appears there is no such thing as Enterprise 2.0-in-a-boxToday’s worker landscape is a surprisingly different place with the rising use of Web 2.0 applications such as blogs and wikis and other applications. Use of public social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook are practically commonplace these days, even if not quite ubiquitous (a good percentage of companies still block access to these in fact).
And the Enterprise 2.0 landscape continues to change: The increasingly popular Twitter service has become almost trendy to use in some business circles, though it currently predominates in PR and marketing for the moment. This has given rise to a new generation of enterprise-class social messaging applications such as Yammer and Signals are used behind the firewall these days, though these are not reaching even double-digit percentages of adoption yet. Mobile devices especially have become rich multi-channel collaboration consoles for communicating in just about any way you prefer including voice, e-mail, SMS, chat, Web, social messaging, and pretty much anything else for which you can find an installable application. There seem to be countless choices when it comes to communication and collaborating in today’s workplace.
But when it comes to Enterprise 2.0 in particular — and you can read my most detailed explanation of exactly what the concepts of Enterprise 2.0 are here — the software solution that most organizations seem to reach for today in an almost knee-jerk reaction is Microsoft Sharepoint. In fact, last summer Forrester predicted that Sharepoint would “steamroll” the Enterprise 2.0 market despite “taking heat from some observers about SharePoint’s wiki, blog and social networking functionality.“
These concerns about SharePoint’s ability to be an effective Enterprise 2.0 platform is one I hear echoed a lot with practitioners I talk to. In spite of this, I correspondingly hear that SharePoint is in fact what most organizations are planning on using when it comes to 2.0-style collaboration and knowledge management. Why the apparent disconnect between the perceived suitability (which we’ll dissect in a moment) and actual use? Part of it is SharePoint’s stunning penetration in the software business. The recent adoption statistics for SharePoint should be sobering for anyone planning to provide competing tools:
55% of organizations have implemented or are considering implementing SharePoint (Global Intranet Trends 2009 report - 227 participant organizations)
46% of those companies using social media on the intranet are using
SharePoint(Intranet 2.0 Global Survey – 430+ participant organizations)Only 47% of organizations have a defined governance model (Intranet 2.0 Global Survey)
70% use at the department level; only 38% use it at the enterprise level (AIIM)
In other words, SharePoint is already in most organizations today: Leading Enterprise Web 2.0 firm Jive Software’s CEO Dave Hirsch has gone on record in the past saying that “around 80 percent of our customers have SharePoint”. In the most recent authoritative number I could find, an estimated 85 million end-user licenses of SharePoint were in customers’ hands over a year ago and that number is likely a good bit higher today. This paints a fairly clear picture of a workflow and document management market leader that is highly entrenched, already paid for in many cases, and most likely to make the top of the short list of any Enterprise 2.0 initiative.
Microsoft SharePoint — often referred to these days as MOSS, for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server — is certainly one of the most respected and widely used platforms of its kind. It has a truly extensive set of capabilities which Microsoft typically categorizes into five major groups: Portal, search, content management, workflow, and business intelligence. Like most popular CMS and community platforms these days, SharePoint also has open architecture that ensures that almost anything that is perceived as missing can be supplemented by acquiring one of the many 3rd party addons or by custom development of what is needed. However, all products, especially very complex ones, have their own strengths and weaknesses and this is where the good and not-so-good begin to become an issue.
When Harvard’s Andrew McAfee first identified what was seemingly unique about Enterprise 2.0 compared to traditional collaboration and knowledge management tools he coined a mnemonic known as SLATES. This mnemonic forms a checklist of properties that seemed integral to successful Enterprise 2.0 implementations (based on successful early case studies). I originally covered the properties of SLATES back in 2006 when Enterprise 2.0 first arrived on the scene when I said it had the potential to “free your intranet” and it remains an excellent description of the key elements for successful social software. This was back in the time when I could ask technical audiences as collaborative conferences if they had access to blogs and wikis at work and virtually no one would raise their hand. Now they all do.
Specifically, for this discussion it’s blogs and wikis that remain the focus of Enterprise 2.0, despite there being more advanced types of applications that also qualify. Mostly this is because they are by far the most popular social tools in the enterprise, though social networking is also becoming increasingly important. It’s from this perspective that we’ll look at how SharePoint measures up to the ideal and practice of Enterprise 2.0, which can drive a variety of benefits such as higher worker productivity, improved knowledge retention, cross-functional innovation, and even as a corporate catalyst. That is, if the software you are using actually enables such scenarios in a widespread manner.
I should also be clear that SharePoint can be used to do a lot more than
August 1st, 2008
Enterprise cloud computing gathers steam
The days when organizations carefully cultivated vast data centers consisting of an endless sea of hardware and software are not over, at least not yet. However, the groundwork for their eventual transformation and downsizing is rapidly being laid in the form of something increasingly known as “cloud computing.” This network-based model for computing promises to move many traditional IT capability out to 3rd party services on the network.
The promise of cloud computing has captured the industry’s imagination this year for two big reasons. The first is the growing realization that cloud computing can successfully be used to strategically cut costs and drive innovation. And the second is that current offerings are getting very close to being ready for prime-time use in enterprise environments.
When Web behemoth Google officially entered the cloud computing arena back in April of this year, the space became a hot topic in IT circles almost overnight, despite the long history of availability from major vendors such as Amazon and Sun as well as a number of pioneering smaller vendors such as 3Tera and Egenera.
Other major IT players include IBM, Dell, HP, Intel, and Yahoo are all making serious investments in cloud computing research or major infrastructure Om Malik reported this week. ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley is also tracking Microsoft’s movement in this space with project ‘Midori’.
Why was Google’s entry a signature moment in cloud computing? Most likely because it brought the necessary critical mass to an industry which was growing steadily but had yet to break out into the mainstream. Google has a well-known reputation for globally scalable applications that can reliably service millions of concurrent users while successfully controlling costs and efficiency in everything from power and bandwidth to storage and processing power. So when they claimed that anyone can now “build scalable web apps on top of Google’s infrastructure” it received considerable attention.
Cloudy IT: Increase efficiency while innovating
The twin challenges of driving the high costs of information technology down while providing innovative new solutions to improve the business are two forces that often come into direct opposition in the modern IT shop. Businesses must keep costs down to stay competitive while at the same time investing in new ideas that will offer compelling new products and services to those same customers.
These two objectives come into opposition since new spending (on things like R&D) is usually required to successfully innovate while at the same time the pressure is on to provide the same services for less than it cost last year. Companies have come to expect to reap the cost dividend from trends such as Moore’s Law, outsourcing, and year-over-year productivity improvements.
Interestingly, it’s at this very intersection of issues that cloud computing appears
July 25th, 2008
Twelve best practices for online customer communities
One of the more significant Web 2.0 trends in business this year has been the advent of the Web-based customer community, where groups of like-minded individuals focus around a brand or a set of product and services come together and interact online. Far from the cynical marketing ploy that it can sometimes seem, customer communities often sprout up on the initiative of passionate customers. Successful examples of this include XMFan around XM Radio, HDTalking for Harley-Davidson, and IKEAFANS on IKEA products.
It’s imporant to note that the communities above are vibrant, active, and absolutely not affiliated with the businesses that the communities are focused on. As a result, business are increasingly realizing they can reap benefits by attempting to foster these communities themselves, rather than hoping that a group of users will do it on their own. While this can be a risky proposition — garnering an active community of users successfully is still more art than science at the moment — the rewards are increasingly clear for those that are successful.
Numerous studies over the years have underscored the benefits of customer communities, ranging from the 2001 McKinsey-Jupiter Media Metrix showing that “customers of web community features generate two-thirds of sales despite accounting for only one-third of a site’s visitors” to the brand new Deloitte study recently highlighted by the Wall Street Journal that showed that over a quarter of community initiatives increased sales even while most business-sponsored customer communities struggled to achieve critical mass in terms of users.
Despite the growing body of research and studies, exact numbers for customer communities are still pretty hard to come by yet it’s clear from a number of sources that business are beginning to get community religion en masse. A couple of recent examples that demonstrate the kind of customer community initiatives that are emerging include Hyatt’s new Yatt’it community for frequent travelers and the decidedly back-from-near-death Member’s Project by American Express. Both are highly produced and attractive-looking communities, especially compared with the three successful grassroots communities I listed at the beginning of this post, but are struggling for customer engagement and participation nonetheless.
Deloitte’s Tribalization of Business customer community study is getting a lot of attention. View a Slideshare summary of the findings.
What then is the secret formula for building successful communities for your customers? Certainly there are well known success stories to examine for clues. One good example is Dell’s online community which it famously used for a corporate image turnaround last year and remains one of the most highly regarded and highly trafficked customer community properties. Another is SAP’s various customer communities, with over a million registered business and technical users and a high degree of participation.
What can we learn from these success stories and a rapidly emerging set of business practices? Quite a bit as it turns out. I’ve taken as as many lessons learned as possible from the available outcomes of customer community efforts, as well as my hands-on experiences, and the synthesis forms the list that you see below. Please note that like any of my lists, it’s not exhaustive, and you are welcome to add your own in Talkback below.
Best Practices for Online Customer Communities
1. Put the needs of the community first. Communities exist to serve the needs of their members, and in customer communities businesses can elect to become close-knit participants in good standing or keep the community at arm’s length. The most vibrant communities such as Dell’s or XMFan have a good relationship with at least a few key leaders in the sponsoring organization. But making sure the community has truly free rein to serve itself — even if it ends up recommending competitor’s products in some cases or becoming a venting zone for
May 15th, 2008
Mashups turn into an industry as offerings mature
There were a great many product announcements at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last month, but it was the number of announcements around Web-based mashups in particular that received a large share of attendee and media attention. By my count there were at least nine significant announcements in this space, many around the business flavor of this emerging new type of ad hoc Web applications. These are often referred to as enterprise mashups and the growing number of offerings in this space run the gamut from Web widget assembly platforms for end-users to data-only swizzlers and remixing applications created specifically for IT professionals.
Penetration of mashups in the enterprise is just beginning as their benefits begin to be understood.One thing is now clear in this burgeoning new industry; that there is genuine interest in being a leading provider of enterprise mashup tools as organizations begin getting serious about applying them to make the development of Web-based business solutions faster, more commonplace, and less costly. One significant open question continues to be how long it will take for rapidly evolving mashup techniques to move into enterprises, which have been falling behind developments on the fast-pace of the consumer Web for a number of years now and are just now beginning to make inroads into some businesses.
And its a space that is expected to grow into a serious one in the next five years. A widely covered new report from Forrester estimates, however, that this space is expected to grow into a $700 million a year industry sector by 2013, or about 1% of the entire software industry, depending on how you define mashups and which types of tools are included.
For awareness and understanding of the fast-growing world of mashups are significant challenges as IT practitioners, business strategists, and software vendors attempt to grapple with what’s facing up to be the biggest challenge of all: The habits and expectations of the larger part of a generation of workers who don’t yet realize mashups are poised to change many things about the software landscape on the Web and in the workplace. Generational changes can be difficult for businesses to embrace successfully, and while evidence that mashups are remaking the business world are still very much emerging, they certainly hold the promise.
Figure 1: Mashup Tools and Platforms Circa 2008
However, the continued proliferation of high quality Web parts and open APIs, especially in the last couple of years, has offered compelling sourcing options for enterprise mashups is the making the expanding Global SOA compelling as local IT resources for building and improving business solutions. Combined with the consumer Web’s intensive focus on ease-of-use to gain adoption, and this has paved the road for low barrier, low cost effective assembly of software mashups instead of the time consuming and expensive design and coding of largely new applications. In this sense, mashups are probably the next major new application development model as well an increasingly popular approach for achieving better ROI with service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Mashup Standards Emerge: Read how a number of new mashup standards have appeared recently.
But while the life of the average Web developer has been greatly improved by the
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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