October 25th, 2009

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

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 3:25 pm

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

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

Many as-yet-unforeseen new developments will create enormous societal, cultural, and business opportunities over the next decade, just as long as we don’t make irreversible decisions down the wrong path. There’s been an important and relatively sudden change taking place over the last couple of years in the way that we interact with the Web. While direct access or search activity has been (and still is) the most common way that we access the content and applications of the Web, new ways have been rapidly growing and competing with how we work online, both at home and at work.

Thus these new models, exemplified by social networking sites like Facebook or mobile apps on platforms like the iPhone, Palm’s new webOS, and Android, will ultimately herald a change in the way that we work with our IT systems in the enterprise.

The once relatively unified world of the Internet, with a few major top-level types of access directly connected to it (browser, e-mail, IRC client, newsreader, etc.) and a few key sub-apps such as search that virtually everyone online used have been extended — as well as fragmented — into popular new channels into which users are now rapidly moving en masse.

That’s not to say that direct usage of the Internet (loading up and using sites and apps via the traditional Web browser) is going away. It’s still far and away the most common way to interact with the Web today and will likely be that way for quite some time, if not forever.

But real shifts in both online platform alternatives and in the mobile market are beginning to usher in foundational new usage patterns by users. These new channels — of which the latest generation of mobile apps and social networking platforms, which are often tightly integrated with the Web but are not truly one with it, are just the two biggest examples — demonstrate what is probably a generational transformation of the vital border between us and the Internet.

And this is the crux of the point: Where the point of user attention and interaction resides and who controls it is one of the most important conversations between us and our “preferred intermediaries”, a fancy term for who we like to work with to interact with the Web. This in turn has significant implications for enterprise intranets, our often clunky yet essential local “Web” in our organizations.

Why are these changes happening? There are at least two major reasons:

The first is that user attention on the Web has been moving to social networks, best exhibited by Facebook, which has been the single largest gainer of online usage in the last 3 years, over all other applications. Even e-mail has been eclipsed in many markets and only search remains more dominant. Social networks, which are platforms in their own right — just like the Web, but also have touchpoints well outside of it — have come into their own as competing yet codependent platforms that sprawl across the Internet, telecommunications infrastructure, mobile devices, and desktop computers.

The second reason is

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June 8th, 2009

Reconciling social computing with the enterprise

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 5:07 pm

Categories: Architecture of Participation, Business Models, Collaboration, Community, Convergence, Crowdsourcing, Customer Community, Customer Self-Service, Design Patterns, Encouraging Unintended Uses, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Grassroots Community, Hype, Network Effects, Network effects, Products, Right To Remix, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, The Social Graph, Two-Way Web, User Generated Content, Web 2.0, Web as Platform

Tags: Social Computing, Worker, Tool, Organization, Singularities, Social Networking, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Dion Hinchcliffe

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

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June 3rd, 2009

Building a vision for Government 2.0

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 4:49 pm

Categories: Architecture of Participation, Business Models, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Community, Convergence, Crowdsourcing, Customer Community, Customer Self-Service, Design Patterns, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Grassroots Community, Network Effects, Network effects, Right To Remix, SaaS, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, The Long Tail, The Social Graph, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform

Tags: Web, Citizen, Web 2.0, Vision, Vivek Kundra, Government, Vertical Industries, Dion Hinchcliffe

Government 2.0 isn’t waiting for a federal mandate. Earlier this week, the nation’s first ever CIO, Vivek Kundra, urged the use of Web 2.0 approaches to address the needs of government and citizens at the Management of Change conference in Norfolk, Virginia. Kundra outlined several important areas where he believed Web 2.0 can help improve government: connecting with citizens and their ideas (social computing), routing around the horizontal and vertical silos surrounding government data (open APIs), and tapping into the potential savings of low-cost new software applications and processing capabilities (SaaS and cloud computing.)

Among the three areas, Kundra’s perception that citizens were a true peer group in the process of governing seemed to come through clearest:

“We’ve got to recognize that we can’t treat the American people as subjects but as a co-creator of ideas. We need to tap into the vast amounts of knowledge… in communities across the country. The federal government doesn’t have a monopoly on the best ideas.”

That the global, pervasive network known as the Internet can directly connect citizens with their government is obviously an idea well-aligned with Web 2.0 ideas. Not that the vision for something known as Government 2.0 is a new one. It goes back to the very beginning of the Web 2.0 discussion. But with a new administration in place in Washington and a passionate CIO that by all appearances is progressive and understands the modern IT era, the timing seems to be ripe for a remaking of government and perhaps even democracy itself.

Fixing what isn’t broken?

Our democracy is not quite 250 years old and its mechanisms have largely served us very well over the years. That we currently have representative government is for a variety of reasons, not the least of which were that the vast distances in our large country used to make wide-scale direct democracy difficult and that considerable expertise and knowledge were perceived to be required to make important government decisions. The Internet, however, with its ability to make any distance equally close and to let us research virtually anything in real-time, has seemingly erased the need to impose such constraints on how we govern ourselves.

But of course there is more to the story. The state of government today is also still very much a “we the people” vs. them, the government. There is a distance between us and our government, at least for most of us, that is reminiscent of paternal days of old when getting involved, unless it was your local assembly, was something that few people had the ability to do. Government was for people who could join it and make a career of it, and many have indeed dedicated their lives to public service. Now, however, there is the means to enable many, many more to be involved and to potentially create a government that fits us and serves us, in our time, better than it can in its present form.

We should also not forget the classic sayings that “bureaucracies exist to perpetuate themselves” and “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, which are old chestnuts for a reason. The roots of these concerns occasionally need tending to as well.

In short, events of the last couple of years and vast changes in our modern society seem to urge some essential improvements upon our government, if only we had the means:

Improving Government 1.0

• More transparent and accountable. Too much government information is inaccessible from the citizens that paid to create it. Much more than just raw data or collated statistics, which is increasingly opening up already, its the very deliberations of the government machine; the decision making, who made them and why, as well as the actual actions taken, all of which are often far too closed to the governed, yet affect us so profoundly. Make no doubt about it, like Web 2.0 was to the rest of society, opening up daily activity to the daylight is a sea change and governments around the world, never very comfortable with scrutiny or criticism to begin with, will be seriously challenged in an era where their constituents have as much power as they do to communicate. It’s also true that too often the information that is intentionally kept from coming to light that is the most significant. I’m not talking here about secure or classified information; there is information that simply must be kept highly circumscribed for security reasons (though that too is often overdone). For an example of a move in the right direction, OpenSecrets.org is an excellent example of transparent and accountable government information, while Data.gov is also a good start, but only a start. Globally visible, persistent government activity is the enabler here, and Enterprise 2.0, which will be used much more internally within government at first over the next few years, is part of the answer.
• Less expensive, cumbersome, wasteful, and heavyweight. Our current government is largely a construct of the 20th century, when most of the growth and development of the federal government as well as our state and local governments took place. This is a traditional paperwork and hierarchy-driven system where, despite impressive adoption of Web 1.0 as well as numerous bright spots (some dramatically so), far too many of the cowpaths have merely been paved. The way we run our government must be reinvented for a world that has gone decidedly connected, digital, and is increasingly ready to be directly participatory. Not only can the way we interact with citizens and within government be made enormously better and more lightweight, it could cost dramatically less with the application of new technologies and social structures. And as we saw with the rise of nearly revolutionary open business models 10 years ago on the Web, engaging the greater world on the public network is often the best, easiest, and cheapest way to accomplish things, if only we have the freedom to fundamentally rethink the way we do things today. With the federal budget skyrocketing and no end in sight, dramatic means will be required to cut costs sooner rather than later, and some of the more powerful aspects of 2.0 will likely be the answer.
• Not as impersonal and imprecise. Not many people have a regular, meaningful relationship with their government other than paying their taxes and obeying the law. Most of the time, we are a government statistic instead of what we really are: living, breathing citizens. And while the debate on large vs. small government will probably never be over, a new form of government that is far more direct and personal is coming. The very nature of how citizens can connect with, engage, and gain mutual value from our government is changing because of the Internet. With 2.0, the government’s ability to provide a customized experience to each and every citizen so that the services that are provided, whatever they end up being over time, are exactly what we need, right when we need them, often powered by the rest of us. And mass customization is likely just the beginning; Facebook groups and political online communities began to help us self-organize but the legislation of the future as well as national decisions will increasingly be tailored by us and for us in a form of modern digital gerrymandering to fit us like a glove, potentially overcoming at long last the winner takes all tyranny of traditional democracy. E-mail gave us ability to reach our representatives instantly, but social tools, online community, government tools powered by collective intelligence, and participatory citizenship will change our civic lives a great deal more. In the very near future, for better or worse, our relationship with our government is almost certainly going to be closer, more personal, dynamic, and custom fit.

A quick glance at this list shows that it tends to parallel

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April 22nd, 2008

Enterprise 2.0 industry matures as businesses grapple with its potential

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 4:23 am

Categories: Blogs, Business Models, Collaboration, Customer Self-Service, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Web 2.0, Enterprise Wikis, Hype, Lightweight Service Models, Mashups, Network Effects, SaaS, Situational Software, Social media, Social networks, The Social Graph, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Widgets, Wikis

Tags: Software, Application, Information Technology, Industry, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 Industry, Enterprise 2.0 Tool, Self-service, Dion Hinchcliffe

Some of the big IT news over the weekend was the announcement that Forrester predicts that the Enterprise 2.0 space will be a $4.6 billion industry within 5 years. ZDNet’s Larry Dignan had the full breakdown yesterday on Forresters bullish outlook while Dennis Howlett immediately took umbrage with Forrester’s conception of the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace using a “loose definition and one that could be applied to any number of technology components from CRM through to supply chain management and pretty much anything between.”

Certainly that’s the challenge of pinning down something with a term that still doesn’t have industry consensus after two years, yet seems destined to be a vitally important space that our businesses are going to be moving to over the next few years. Enterprise 2.0 itself was originally defined by Harvard’s Andrew McAfee a couple of years ago in careful detail (early timeline) about something he called freeform, social, emergent software applications (such as blogs, wikis, but many others as well.) The enterprise software industry began carrying the banner ever since, applying Enterprise 2.0 to the next generation of countless marketplace offerings, often whether or not they were any of the things that seemed to make this new type of application unique and special.

Read The State of Enterprise 2.0, a thorough summary of this new software space.

The intent of creating this new term, however, was to capture a very significant change in the way that people use networked software, regardless of it was the genuine retooling of “big box” traditional IT software suites or the infiltration of subversive Web 2.0-style consumer applications across the firewall. Careful market segmentation for research tracking purposes and the debate over the inclusion of traditional, top-down IT systems into the definition of Enterprise 2.0 can be interesting exercises. But such efforts also miss the big picture and the long-term potential of this potentially potent new generation of enterprise software applications.

In my studies of Enterprise 2.0 adoption, there are two major methods by which these new applications take hold. The first is the traditional model where the IT department or some part of the business decides at a high level to adopt these new tools and begins the process of evaluation, acquisition, deployment, training and adoption. This is the traditional model that most IT large-scale software acquisitions still use today.

The other model is where individuals take it upon themselves to find the best solutions to a given problem at hand and solve them creatively and collaboratively at a grassroots level. This is becoming increasingly more common, particularly in organizations that are less strongly hierarchical and I’ve identified this story in many large organizations, from AOL’s stunningly rapid viral adoption of MediaWiki (the open source platform that runs Wikipedia) to the story of a large utility company getting ready to roll out Enterprise 2.0 only to find that the majority of departments had already adopted a solution on their own.

This second form of adoption is one of the hallmarks of this new model for using software to solve business problems and it speaks volumes to how different they are from the previous generation of applications. So it’s worth spending a little time understanding exactly why and how they are so different. To explain this, I often refer to Read the rest of this entry »

February 4th, 2008

openid: The once and future enterprise Single Sign-On?

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 4:40 pm

Categories: Active Directory, Business Models, Customer Self-Service, Enterprise Web 2.0, Google Accounts, Identity, Identity 2.0, LDAP, Lightweight Service Models, Live ID, Open APIs, Products, Radical Decentralization, SaaS, Social Networking, The Social Graph, Two-Way Web, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA), openid

Tags: Web, Site, Single Sign-on, Identity, Enterprise, Channel Management, Marketing, Dion Hinchcliffe

The decision two weeks ago by Yahoo! to support the burgeoning openid initiative, where users choose their preferred user account provider for logging into other Web sites, was a defining moment for the increasingly popular effort to bring order and sanity to the often confusing world of user identity on the Web. This major move by Yahoo! underscores how new models for user identity and security are becoming strategically important in the online world, and it also has long-term implications for the enterprise, as we’ll see.

Enterprises will be able to manage the growing problem of the proliferation of accounts created in external, off premises Web apps.There’s no doubt that Yahoo!’s addition of over 250 million accessible user accounts to openid, which can now be used to log into the thousands of openid-compliant Web sites, is a significant win for an initiative that is starting to reach critical mass. My own tests show that Yahoo!’s support for only the newer, more secure specification of openid greatly limits the number of external Web sites you can actually access with your Yahoo! account, however this issue will surely be resolved as more 3rd party sites adopt the new spec.

More interestingly, Yahoo! at this time does yet not allow 3rd party issued openids to be used to access its own Web properties. Why is this vital? Because it will fundamentally limit the usefulness of open Web identity, and openid; what’s the point of having an identity from your preferred provider — or as we’ll see below, from your workplace — if you can’t use it where you want to? This one way adoption of open Web identity is common among the major adopters in the space so far.

Provider-only support of open Web identity is going to be a major challenge for the movement until someone articulates the value proposition for allowing 3rd party authentication of accounts from other Web sites. Read Dare Obasanjo’s reasoning around this in the second half of this post.

Other major Web firms and software companies have been pursuing the grail of open — or mostly-open — Web identity for several years now, including most notably Microsoft and Google. Josh Catone over at Read/Write Web wrote yesterday about Microsoft’s stated intent to join the openid bandwagon, which will likely push the number of openid accounts well past half a billion, regardless of what happens with Microsoft’s acquisition play for Yahoo! This kind of scale of support will put open identity, and specifically openid, on the map and hopefully simplify and empower Web users around the world.

Open identity does push users into considering their Terms of Service of their provider much more carefully, since the’re making a long-term strategic decision with whom they’ll will invest with their Web identity, and whether they offer a good home for what may be their last new Web account ever. A quick examination of Microsoft’s Live ID (the open Web identity formerly known as Passport) shows how Microsoft has had to remake their service to be more open and friendly to users and businesses that support it. Expect that many of today’s identity providers will begin making their offerings more appealing for those shopping for their new Web super-identity. This will likely include, as we see, some enterprises.

What’s so important about open Web identity and how does it affect enterprise identity?

Well for one, when using openid sites that allow 3rd party identities, users need only Read the rest of this entry »