The Enterprise | On Web Strategy | Dion Hinchcliffe

Are We Building Businesses? Or Are We Building Platforms? Yes.

October 18, 2011 4 Comments

A couple of days ago I saw a tweet go by from Michael Cote, referencing some work I did a few years back that tried to articulate the full notion of where Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) was going. I had been exploring the subject as Google and Amazon had recently been busy expanding their offerings in the space.

I was struck by how well the early depiction held up, given the evolution of the industry since then, including the arrival of new innovative players at the time (Heroku and CloudFoundry) and the struggles of some of the originals (Bungee). I wouldn’t add or change much about the breakdown, other than to update it around the edges and add some examples:

But as I looked at this, it also occurred to me — as our focus much of the time in business these days is about strategies to deal effectively with the latest disruptive tech — that it’s up to us to have an abundantly clear vision of the big picture of what we’re actually aiming for as a whole. This is particularly true now since the choices we make today on how we build and evolve our businesses will either lead us to 1) break out of the box and thrive or 2) just make incremental improvements that are unlikely to propel us towards a sustainable and successful future.

Key to this discussion is this question: Are we building businesses? Or are we building platforms? Of course the answer to both is yes, but most of us still possess a very 20th century notion of what a business is.

We think of business in very solitary, disconnected terms, where partners can’t rapidly connect with us and integrate their supply chains, where we can’t even readily reuse and build upon what we have ourselves, and most of our data and systems are closed off from us and each other. Unfortunately, we now live in a new time and this is no longer an option. Those days are definitively over. Steve Yegge’s epic and widely discussed rant recently about how Google doesn’t get platforms (and how Amazon does), shows the new chess board that next-generation enterprises must be playing on:

That one last thing that Google doesn’t do well is Platforms. We don’t understand platforms. We don’t “get” platforms. Some of you do, but you are the minority. This has become painfully clear to me over the past six years. I was kind of hoping that competitive pressure from Microsoft and Amazon and more recently Facebook would make us wake up collectively and start doing universal services. Not in some sort of ad-hoc, half-assed way, but in more or less the same way Amazon did it: all at once, for real, no cheating, and treating it as our top priority from now on.

But no. No, it’s like our tenth or eleventh priority. Or fifteenth, I don’t know. It’s pretty low. There are a few teams who treat the idea very seriously, but most teams either don’t think about it all, ever, or only a small percentage of them think about it in a very small way.

It’s a big stretch even to get most teams to offer a stubby service to get programmatic access to their data and computations. Most of them think they’re building products. And a stubby service is a pretty pathetic service. Go back and look at that partial list of learnings from Amazon, and tell me which ones Stubby gives you out of the box. As far as I’m concerned, it’s none of them. Stubby’s great, but it’s like parts when you need a car.

A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product.

It’s this last sentence that’s the clicher:

A platform beats a product every time.

In our deeply connected, social, mobile, cloudy, consumerized, and data-driven world, that’s what we must be creating, whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or an Internet startup. Only those with a clue about this will survive the 21st century for very long. Getting there requires real discipline, no cheating (read about Jeff Bezo’s mandate in Yegge’s post above), and minimal compromise. It must be a top organizational priority, especially if you’re a large organization and/or you control large, strategic data sets.

Unfortunately, outside of the Web community, most companies don’t understand how to platform their business, or the urgency. But do it they must if they expect to compete with the new wave of digital native enterprises that will otherwise eat their lunch. Otherwise expect to be run over by Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, and a new generation of platform companies that get it.

For a deeper discussion, please read the “Big Five” IT shifts today, and the 10 strategies I recommend to deal with them and for a detailed exploration of the specific technology and adoption challenges in particular. For specifics on how to platform your business, I recommend Running Your SOA Like a Web Startup and Open APIs Mature Into A Next-Generation Business Model.

Filed under Analysis, CoIT, The Enterprise, The Web

Social Business Moves to Workflow, Manufacturing, and Money

September 26, 2011 1 Comment

I receive e-mail frequently from PR people promoting the latest IT tools and new Web applications. These days a common thread I see is the addition of social features to software to make it easier for users to share information and collaborate with others. Personally, I believe it’s largely beneficial to 1) find ways to take advantage of the social graphs that users have been building in recent years, and 2) add the techniques and channels of the social world to make traditional software more effective and usable in general.

However, in reality these relatively minor tweaks are just the proverbial paving of the cowpath through the addition of limited social features such as collaborative sharing, persistent chat, and perhaps some deeper integration with activity streams. Unfortunately, these actions easily fail the imagination test, which is essentially this:

If you could completely rethink your work in a social business world, what would it look like? How would it be better?

To me, this is the fundamental question that organizations must be asking themselves today. Yet, I also think they should do this while going about the aforementioned incremental improvements such as adding basic social layers to their IT landscape. One reason is that this will happen inevitably as more and more enterprise applications and platforms add social computing features and companies proceed along that vendor’s upgrade path. So, while social impinging around the edges of enterprise applications is worth dealing with from a strategic perspective, it’s going to happen largely whether organizations plan for it or not. As such, it’s not likely to make a huge competitive or qualitative difference in the way most businesses perform. That is, unless they start the process of deliberate and strategic social business transformation, such as what IBM and a few other large organizations have begun.

This process of social business transformation will require both advances in social technology — such as the innovations below — as well as changes to the way we do business. Fortunately, one of the great attributes of the larger social business community is that it generally focuses as much on the business and cultural changes as it does the enabling technology. Some of the best discussions I’ve seen on the people aspect of the transition to the social enterprise are from folks like Luis Suarez, Sameer Patel, Stowe Boyd, and JP Rangaswami, who are just part of a much larger conversation about how we remake our organizations for the 21st century.

So, while there are certainly some companies not tracking the sea changes in the world right now in terms of the way we are globally transforming the way we live and work, we’re also continuing to see fascinating next-generation innovations in social business. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Rethinking Workflow, Manufacturing, and Money in Social Business Terms

In just the last week I’ve encountered several fascinating offshoots of the mainstream social business thread. Social business frequently focuses either on social engagement externally or internally on collaboration and social interaction between workers. This is a limiting view, but it’s also where most of the activity and uptake is today. However, as more and more business leaders and entrepreneurs become digital natives, I’ve theorized that the power laws and principles of social business will encourage them to rethink their traditional modes of business. At the same time, Web startups and large software vendors often put themselves out 2-3 years ahead of the market by predicting where their customers will arrive once current trends reach a mainstream tipping point. Then they adjust their product roadmaps to align with this schedule. The combination of these two trends is starting to give us some interesting new possibilities.

I say possibilities, because unlike social collaboration or Social CRM, the outlook and growth potential for these innovation is still unknown. However, it does give us a sense of what’s coming next in social business.

Social BPM

Last week while I was speaking at Sibos, I had the pleasure of speaking on the phone with Sandra Moran from OpenText Metastorm, a leading workflow/BPM product that recently announced the addition of social computing features to its capabilities. Metastorm now enables workers to engage in real collaborative process design, takes advantage of social profiles to locate needed expertise to plug workers into processes in essentially real-time, and has matching dashboards to provide BPM and social analytics. OpenText had this to say about the new social capabilities, which Sandra told me is now available to over a thousand major customers as a standard part of the Metastorm suite:

These new product enhancements help organizations successfully implement business process improvement initiatives by empowering users to become more engaged and productive. Metastorm’s social collaboration tools provide businesses with a highly personalized workspace and unparalleled access to top contributors, enabling them to drive innovation and increase collaboration and improve efficiency among employees. These tools help employees find other people within their organization with specific skill sets required to help them complete their work. Companies can also route work to the most appropriate employee based on individual skills and workload – ensuring the most cost-effective strategy for work allocation.

I think this is significant for a few reasons. For one, I find that there’s often not enough focus in social tools in collapsing the walls between business processes and social conversations. They often run in parallel, side-by-side, even when they are being used simultaneously for the same piece of work. Putting social in the flow of work in highly process-intensive environments should lead to some interesting outcomes. I pressed Sandra on if there was leverage in Metastorm of existing social graphs and networks, and she indicated there was. What remains to be seen is how easy it will be to integrate the resulting BPM environment with an enterprise’s other social business efforts.

I’ll be exploring the social features of Metastorm in more detail soon on ZDNet, but I think the combination of social computing and BPM has genuine potential. This isn’t the first time social and workflow have been connected but I think it’ll be impactful given their large customer base and how central and useful the features are to the product. I’m hoping to revisit how their customers are faring in a year or so to see what the result has been. I currently believe social BPM technology, combined with the right business and cultural changes, will help companies attain a higher than average level of social business transformation.

Social On The Shop Floor

Earlier this month Derek Singleton over at the Software Advice blog wrote about social manufacturing, what you could call a new subfield of social business that’s focused on improving how companies turn raw materials into finished goods. Discussing Kenandy’s new announcement for improving the efficiency and productivity of supply chain manufacturing, Derek wrote:

Creating accessible and actionable inter-shop floor communication can only work if an entire supply chain and other manufacturers are members of, and logged into, Chatter. In short, it requires organizational change for effective use. While manufacturers using Kenandy wait for that changeover, Chatter can be a useful tool for project management. For instance, the engineer of an aerospace job shop could notify shop labor that they’ve just finished designing the wing component of an aircraft. The job shop could then begin building the wing while the engineer finishes designing the other components they’ve been contracted to build. This has great implications for just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing – as it frees up labor to work on more value-added activities rather than waiting for the completion of another phase of the production.

In my workshops at Enterprise 2.0 Conference in years past, I’ve had manufacturers and assembly line managers come up to me to say that social tools have been moving into their area of the business, but it’s mostly been horizontal tools or very focused niche solutions. We’re now seeing broader and more strategic use of social tools with the arrival of solutions such as the Kenandy social manufacturing platform, which has garnered attention in the New York Times. I’ll be exploring this further in coming months to see whether social manufacturing leads to tactical or substantive social business transformation.

The Rise of Social Currency

Finally, at Sibos itself last week, I participated in Innotribe, a social media event inside the main financial services conference that explored various aspects of social media in financial services. For a more in-depth look, I wrote up a detailed exploration of the event on ZDNet on Friday. One of the more interesting and visionary topics at the conference was the subject of social currency, the transformation of the very concept of money in social world where reputation, trust, and openness are prized much more than information control, the latter which is how the financial industry is mostly structured to leverage for gain today.

As an experiment, a social currency called Reputone was actually in use at Innotribe, see picture right. In fact, peer-to-peer monetary systems such as Bitcoin were a hot topic at Innotribe and for good reason, it represents a major shift of control in how banking, money transfer, and investment will work in the future. If Paypal was the first generation of digital money, then Bitcoin is the Web 2.0 version. From their Web site:

Bitcoin is a new digital currency that enables instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world. Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority: managing transactions and issuing money are carried out collectively by the network.

Mark Shead recently provided a good overview to Bitcoin concepts and is worth taking a look at. In the final analysis, Bitcoin falls a bit short of being a true social currency, in that it doesn’t have an explicit capital mechanism based on social graphs or other means that leverages the intrinsic worth of social status and reputation. That doesn’t mean it should be watched closely as money and social reputation appear ready to get deeply intertwined and Bitcoin is at the leading edge of digital currency at the moment. This is a subject that warrants a lot more exploration as companies such as Facebook look at making their global platforms far more relevant from an economic perspective. For additional insight, David Armano posted some useful insights on social currency recently on his Harvard Business blog.

I’ll be exploring all of these concepts in more detail in coming months as social business continues to evolve. I would love your questions and feedback on this emerging social business topics below.

Filed under Analysis, Social Business, Social Graph, Social Media, Social Technology & Standards, Strategy, The Enterprise, Trends and Statistics

Exceeding the Benefits of Complexity? A Fractal Model for the Social Business Era

September 12, 2011 10 Comments

Over the weekend my friend and industry colleague JP Rangaswami wrote an insightful post that pondered how we have gone about delivering on customer experiences as connected to our back-end capabilities. Specifically, he explored an issue that is increasingly challenging many of the large-company CIOs I speak with these days: That the present rates of change demanded of the accumulation of 20-30 years of legacy business systems is greatly exceeding the ability of our enterprises and associated software “stacks” to deliver on them, particularly as cloud, social, and mobile dramatically transform computing today.

The problem lies in our classical views of enterprise architecture and business architecture both. But JP puts it more poetically:

Development backlogs are endemic, as the sheer complexity of the grown-like-Topsy stack slows the process of change and makes it considerably more expensive to change. The stack has begun to fossilise, just at the time when businesses are hungrier for growth, when the need to deliver customer-facing, often customer-touching, applications is an imperative.

Which makes me wonder. What Tainter wrote about societies, what Shirky wrote about companies, are we about to witness something analogous in the systems world? A collapse of a monolith, consumed by its own growth and complexity? As against the simpler, fractal approach of ecosystems?

This fractal aspect of user systems, Web 2.0, and SOA is one that I deeply explored in the 2005-2007 timeframe, and my ideas on this even made the cover story of the SOA/Web Services Journal at one point. This is when we began to see successful, composite systems sprouting up “in the wild” that were eminently natural and highly successful, such as Amazon’s, Flickr’s, and many others. Innovative new open API-based businesses had definitively emerged and shown us — in fact, virtually proved to anyone willing to observe — that business/technology ecosystems could be routinely produced that were far more successful than the ones virtually any traditional business had managed to produce for itself internally with methods like SOA. It was clear something important and new was happening and we tried to learn from it.

The signature lesson in this time period was that being “in the business” of ecosystems, at multiple levels, was the key to resilience, growth, and sustainability. It’s still a far cry from how most organizations are structured today, but I do see the first hints that this is starting to change. Companies like Best Buy and Sears have been getting the message among the old guard firms and looking at integration, partnership, and engagement as an open network activity.

The Web has also shown us that complexity, as important as it is to address and resolve the many inherent vagaries of dealing with the real world, is largely the enemy, whenever it exists needlessly. Our assumptions of where the complexity should be, in the transports for example, was wrong. It was in the ecosystem itself and we paid dearly for half a decade (and running) based on that misapprehension. But we’ve learned. SOAP usage has almost completely shifted to REST, complex WS-* stacks have largely moved on to simple standards and methods like Web-Oriented Architecture.

But technical discussions obscure the very important truths about what we’ve learned in the interim between the “aha” moment when we realized that what was happening so successfully “out there” was something that would make us just as successful inside our organizations, for internal and customer-facing needs both. After all, this holistic ‘integratedness’ — usually triggered via our connections to the Internet — was a part of our businesses increasingly and we simply had to realize this and engage as Internet natives. But back then, Andrew McAfee worried that focusing on the plumbing was the wrong emphasis to have on the exciting changes taking place, and he was largely right from a communication perspective.

However, building fractal architectures that addresses the old and the new isn’t as easy as just deciding to cast off the old, less effecive ways, as JP notes:

What I’d established in my own mind was a growing belief that the issue was to do with rates of change and costs of change. Vertical integration paid off when the rate of change was low. Networked small-pieces approaches paid off when the rate of change was high.

We are clearly living in times of much greater rates of change. Unfortunately, the old systems, the old architectures, the old business “stack” is often running the core of the business. It’s usually deeply vertically integrated, and not made of small networked pieces, loosely joined that are truly agile, deeply harness innovation on the edge, and turn IT into a profit center instead of a cost center.

So, while I have a lot more to say about this, because I believe that social business context will be at the root of the future of our how we design our products, services, processes, and workplaces, below are a few basic rules you can take away that if you stay true to, can indeed help you make the transition to the future. Note that customer and worker experiences are outside the scope of this, this has more to do with the new business stack below the social layer:

4 Ways to Create Sustainable Business Ecosystems

If resilient, networked, recomposable, open business capabilities are the future of business and IT architecture, getting there then requires a substantial change in stance:

Open Your Business Stack. To everyone, internally and externally, generally in the order of the systems and data that are most often requested for integration. Make it easy for anyone to onboard themselves and use the simplest and most egalitarian technology possible to deeply connect the world to your business. Self-onboarding is crucial because it enables the killer asymmetric business advantage of systems that respond to external engagement best: Export most of the change effort to outside your organization and impose it on those that wish to participate and integrate with you. Enterprises that close the “clue gap” with Big Data will have an enormous advantage.
Go Into the Business of Ecosystems. Stand behind your open supply chain: Invest in it for the long term, market it, evangelize it, support it, and stand behind it like your customers — again, internally or externally — will be building world changing products and services from them (if you do this, the track record is that they will.) Be fair and generous with your IP and enterprise data; you are under-utilizing it by several orders of magnitude until you do this, leaving much or even most of the potential of your business on the floor. Worse, until you treat it like a business, you won’t get external contributions to enrich your ecosystem that will drive down the cost of change while greatly increasing the velocity of new solutions and local adaptations.
Begin Fractal Reconciliation of Your Classical Systems. While hanging a trendy Web API off an ancient COBOL accounting system might be a step in the right direction, long-term success will mean going well behind the API. The existing business/IT landscape must be converged and rationalized so they themselves are made of “networked small pieces” that are faster to change as well as more resilient and responsive to being so much more connected (and therefore useful and valuable) to the world.
Spin Up New 21st Century Business Models. All new possibilities, many of which will be foreign to non-digital native firms, are reachable once you have created a fractal enterprise stack. Dominating classes of data, metered business knowledge, all new monetization methods, and more become possible once the three transformations above have started.

Unfortunately, after having advised and directly assisted many large companies in doing much of what I’m describing here over the years, it’s clear that most organizations are at a major disadvantage in making this transformation. The organizational will required is actually quite low, since most of this is fairly easy to do now with cloud technologies, increasingly capable technology partners, and the latest development stacks. Instead, it’s the understanding of how important it is to kill excessive complexity and focus on ways of thinking about business and technical architecture that will propel companies into bright futures.

We must leave behind vertical integration and radically collapse the size of our seams (APIs) in our businesses, while radically increasing the number of useful endpoints such that we look at them as the very fundament of our enterprises. The benchmark for success is how many others are depending on your ecosystem for their own success. Starting now, the activity in your organization must be focused on optimizing for growth of this number. That is the only way we’ll ensure we’re building businesses that are the most relevant, meaningful, and valuable to us going forward. The enterprises that don’t simply won’t survive in their present form. I believe that much is at stake here. Unfortunately, the “cultural gap” John Hagel wrote of back when this conversation started between the enterprise crowd and the Internet crowd is still much too large and is still hindering the move forward for many organizations.

I look forward to continuing this discussion and exploring just how much we’ve recently learned about the future of business and enterprise architecture.

Filed under Analysis, CoIT, Enterprise Architecture, Network Effects, Strategy, The Enterprise, The Web, Web 2.0

Dreamforce 11: Live Blogging the Benioff Keynote

August 31, 2011 10 Comments

I’m here at Dreamforce 11 right now in Moscone Center in San Francisco. Salesforce made major announcements last night about Chatter, their social business platform, that is now more Internet facing.

I once called Chatter an enterprise social operating system and these announcements make it even more true now. Expect that this will significantly improve their positioning in customer engagement as their CRM tool is probably the top product in the space. The move connects their core strengths to social computing even better than Chatter did before, while putting them into the Social CRM business in a significant way.

The new Chatter now has customer groups and social analytics features and more. Larry Dignan did a good round-up of the changes and additions this morning on ZDNet.

It’s very clear with the prominent focus on social business this morning that Salesforce definitely wants to be seen as the social enterprise leader. They’re working very hard to position themselves as such. The confab certainly confirms no small level of market enthusiasm: There are huge crowds in the streets and tens of thousands of folks here.

Though sales automation was Salesforce’s original focus, they are very much moving to become a full spectrum social business enabler. It’s a story all social business practitioners should follow closely and this is a pretty major series of announcements, not just for the products but because the messaging will be heard far and wide in boardrooms and the C-suite.

Liveblogging and analysis of the Dreamforce opening keynote

You can watch it live here and I’ll do some real-time analysis here, so refresh as often as you like. Note: If it’s in quotes, it’s very close to exact wording, otherwise it’s a paraphrasing of the speaker.

9:03 – The keynote is about to start with Marc Benioff on stage shortly.

9:11 – Still hasn’t started yet but they announced it will shortly.

9:14 – Salesforce’s Peter Coffee is announcing a Hawaiian themed opening ceremony, saying Marc Benioff has great appreciation for the state and its culture.

9:19 – Music montage, Benioff is not on stage yet.

9:23 – Benioff is up: “You are now part of the largest technology industry event.” Says 45,000 people in attendance and 35,000 people online.

9:24 – “Salesforce.com was born cloud and have now been born social.” “We want to delight our customers with something new. We’ll look at how Salesforce is helping organizations become more social.” Mentioning Twitter’s #df11 hashtag to follow everything.

9:26 – Talking about the transition from mainframe, to client-server, to cloud. Multi-tenant vision of shared services. Talking about their new philanthropic model. Took 1% of equity, profit, and employee time and put it into a 501(3c).

9:28 – Talking about the evolution of computing, from mainframe, to mini, client/server, Desktop/Cloud computing. Mentions Steve Jobs, everybody claps. “Entering new era, an exciting new era”. Not thanking IBM, not thanking big companies, we’re thanking Facebook that’s creating change and transformation, an “Arab Spring” in business.

9:32 – When will we hear a “corporate spring”, when customers rise up and demand that organizations listen? That’s the social revolution that’s coming. E-mail has eclipsed social networking users. Look at how Facebook is eating the Web. Now it’s all about Facebook.com/yourcompany, your company, your project, etc.

9:33 – It’s not just about social, it’s about mobile. Mobile apps are used now more than Web browsers. Tablets and smartphones are taking over.

9:35 – It’s not just about consumers, it’s about the enterprise. “So, what’s happening, what do we need to be thinking about?” This social revolution has created a social divide. Your customers are social and employees are social. But are our companies? Our are enterprises social? This has really been on my mind since we last met.” It doesn’t matter if you’re in Japan, Russia, or the United States.

9:36 – We want to help organizations bridge that social divide. I’ve traveled more in the last six months than the last six years. This transformation is so important we need to find a new answer. “Think about this:” We’ve been looking for best practices, modeling the success stories, finding the companies breaking through and ask them when they are doing.

9:37 – We’ve come up with a 3 step process. First it’s about the database. You can learn more about your customers than ever before on the network. Step 2, we want to create an employee social network. We’ve been talking about that for several years now. We launched Chatter last year. We’ve learned from you that we need more than that, we need collaboration. It’s not just about another island of collaboration, or island of data, it’s about integrating all your business processes and workflow and applications into that employee social network. Including the sales force, the customer service organization, and including custom applications.

9:39 – Step 3, which was a huge wakeup call. Our really incredible customers were creating product and social networks. Including customers in the social network. It blew us away. We saw you doing this in social marketing, listening, analyzing, deeply in the network. In other words: Social analytics and social business intelligence (my take on this.)

9:40 – We have to step up. Want to excite you, inspire, and look into the social enterprise and take you through the door, a door we’ve locked ourselves. Now he’s talking about Salesforce and the cloud.

9:41 – Your project is portable, your data is portable. Everyone can participate.

9:44 – Discussing their social enterprise research from around the world. Says that their vision of the social enterprise “is inspired by you.” Telling the story about using social networks, travel, and their organization. How in his recent trip to Boston, they talked extensively on their network about their plans, yet the hotel knew nothing about what they discussed. “Delighting customers means knowing who they are and what they like.” Getting that customer database so that they have a great experience when they use your products.

9:46 – We have to get back to our data models, back to the core. Introducing Dan Darcy, VP of product development. Showing a contact record in Salesforce. “Your contacts, they’ve gone social.” The new social customer profile builds an entire picture. Name, picture, where they are geolocated, what apps they use, what deals they are involved in, what customer service issues they have. A deeply integrated view.

9:47 – Says social contacts is really exciting, the crowd claps. Talks about giving everyone the tools to really “delight their customers.” Takes everything from Facebook, Twitter, and public information and streams it into Salesforce. As of today, everyone can go into Database.com, with APIs, OAuth, and start working with this information.

9:50 – You can choose where your data is. It doesn’t have to be in our datacenter, it can be in your data center with the new data residency option (DRO) for those that store sensitive data and it is compliant with many corporate and government policies. Now you have the ability to keep it where you want. Note: This has been a major sticking point for many companies.

9:51 – This sets us up to for something really amazing, really critical. Inspired by Facebook, LinkedIn, and all these networks out there doing collaboration. “Why do I know more about those strangers on Facebook than my own family or employees?“

9:53 – Let’s look at some stories about Chatter. CEOs on Chatter: “This is a change that is going to last forever.” “The conversations really focus around our customers and products, all in one location. How they’re thinking and interacting and that we’re moving in the right direction.” “Instead of wondering how such-and-such is going, now someone whips out an iPad, and says let’s find out.”

9:54 – “It’s a wonderful place to be. I can see using Chatter to really drive changes in our top line.” “Companies that don’t have this collaborative and competitive advantage will fall behind.” “Wherever I can, I can very effectively communicate with 18,000 people in our company.” “The biggest impact in the next 5 years for companies effectiveness will be the use of social media.”

9:56 – Dan claims Chatter has become the leader in employee social networking. “We’re excited to make a series of new announcements” (so far everything that’s in Larry Dignan’s post.) Including Chatter Now, screen sharing for collaboration. We’ve learned that the key to success with social collaboration is integrating social into workflow. Collaboration is not an island. (Note: Great stuff that’s spot on with current Enterprise 2.0 effectiveness discussions.) There is even Chatter for SharePoint.

9:58 – Introducing Kraig Swensrud, Salesforce CMO, to demo the new Chatter features. “Chatter has really started to bridge the divide between different departments.” New features are coming in the Winter 12 release. Sharing stories from meeting rooms, people chiming in, and streaming information back into the meeting. Says customers wanted an open system, says APIs are available for social integration. No word on OpenSocial support (yet.)

10:00 – The Chatter activity stream shows what’s going on in the entire company, “it’s never overwhelming, can be drilled into, filtered.” You don’t have to spam the whole company with questions. You can post something and “the answer finds you.” This is crowdsourcing. Chatter for your entire company means you don’t have to fumble around and find the right system. Including ambient IM, hyperlinks, file sharing is part of Chatter, a killer app we think.

10:02 – We have an amazing social collaboration happening inside our company. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could bring our customers into this process.” Can create customer groups, “user empowerment”. Looks like normal Chatter groups. Shows a group with 12 employees and 3 customers. Says it’s happening today, just with legacy technologies to share proposals, marketing, working on RFPs. It differentiates you as a business to connect with them this way. Customers don’t have access to private and secure company info, just what’s in the group.

10:04 – Kraig is talking about mobile social apps to customers, says all their capabilities work on mobile devices. Demoing the app now. Now showing Chatter working on Android Honeycomb, very cool. “This is the new world of social collaboration, the face of the new social enterprise.”

10:06 – Now going back to Marc. “Now customers can be part of your Chatter network.” They are firewalled off from all your other information. Just introduced Neil Young and is talking about how he’s using Chatter to collaboration and produce his next film. Also using it on their new Hires for the Masses product and more.

10:10 – “Now we’ve been talking about collaboration. But there’s another key part of building your employee social network.” Has been traveling around and getting inspired by his companies. Talking about Groupon visit and seeing the energy level, growing at 22,000%. The way they achieved it by hiring as fast as possible 5,000 sales people. The level of communication and collaboration, planning, logistics is amazing. $750 million in revenue, constant collaboration and building custom apps to support new capabilities.

10:12 – Talking about 150 new features. The big ones are social contacts and social sales. Now they are announcing Data.com, access leading providers of data including Dun and Bradstreet to connect it into the CRM process.

10:15 – Benioff is discussion how HTML 5 is going to revolutionize the mobile user experience. Pinching devices to access fields. They are announcing touch.salesforce.com. All these apps are going to run natively on HTML 5, including all the apps customers have already built are going to be brought forward. Note: I think this is a very smart move to improve user experience on Salesforce.

10:17 – Kraig is back and talking about Salesforce sales features. “Under every deal is Chatter.” Includes support for pricing approvals, sales strategy, mapping out the organization and influencers and decision makers.

10:18 – “Of course, everything is now mobile. This is what you’ve been asking for.” Showing a demo of the new touch site. Looks like a native iPad experience, but is not, all HTML 5. Showing how well the user experience works on touch-based tablets and smart devices. Everything apparently runs in this new interface with little to no rework.

10:20 – Now looking at social customer profiles. “What if I don’t have the information about the customer yet?” Shows how new Data.com services might have what you need. One-click integration of external social information from their partnership with Dun and Bradstreet. Then you can see who they are and what they’re talking about in external social networks. Salesforce clearly understands big data, social media, and the strategic value of data use.

10:22 – Talking about bring the customer into social meetings in Chatter to collaborate and discuss. One final new aspect, everything is integrated in real-time including mobile, so messages are immediate everywhere. Get an immediate Chatter notice “that someone has exceeded their sales quota” right when the order is booked.

10:25 – Marc introduces the president of Verizon Business, Bob Toohey, to talk about shaping the social enterprise. “Need the flexibility to create the B2B to C in a very simplified way.” Benioff asks him how their customers are becoming social. “They want to know more about their customers. They want identity management. Customers want to be able to say I want the flexibility to integrate everything and make it work.” Hints at predictive analytics.

10:27 – Now Marc is talking about the customer they are going to profile this morning, carefully selected so they can learn from it. It’s NBC Universal. Now showing video of talking about NBC Universal’s social enterprise experience.

10:30 – NBC Universal video concludes. Marc: “It was only a couple of years ago that we made a strategic decision to get involved into the customer service business.” Says it’s their fastest growing product line.

10:31 – Talking about Zynga, with 30,000 customer service cases per day. Over 1,000 representatives online. $597 million in revneu, 392% annual growth. Marc’s calling it a “new age company”. Now mentioning Bank of America handling over 1,100 tweets requesting support per day. Twitter.com/Bofa_Help. “An incredible story about a modern bank becoming a social enterprise.”

10:33 – It’s not just about banks. Now talking about airline KLM’s 130,000 Twitter followers, reduced first call resolution rate to 1 hour. KLM’s customer service is “deeply integrated into the social universe.” KLM has taken this “to a level I’ve never seen”.

10:37 – Marc asking if the CEO understands the need to become a social enterprise. Does the C-suite understand? Does the board understand? Do our employees understand? Announcing Chatter Service to enable customer service and taking “the Service Cloud even higher.” Community feeds, suggested knowledge, crowdsourced answers, agent escalation and much more.

10:39 – Kraig is back out showing off Chatter Service in the Service Cloud. “It all started with Twitter. When Twitter started amassing users, everything was public.” Instead of contacting the company, customers just post, hoping that someone will help them in hundreds of millions of users.

10:40 – With the Service Cloud, customer service gets plugged into the social conversations. Showing a live demo of real-time streams of YouTube and other social media and route the issue right into the service center to resolve the problem proactively. Talking about taking all the “paradigms of the social world and plug it into your organization.” Exploring Cirrus computing story with an example of how it all works, including cross-posting resolutions back out to Facebook and Twitter.

10:43 – “Helps you service your customers in completely new ways.” Call center can’t be left behind. “Of course, we’re integrated into telephony”, including the social profile, right when they call in so the agent knows what they are doing and what their concerns are. The knowledge base will recommend the right answer and relay it to the customer via e-mail or telephone. But in a social world we can do something better. Can even do Facetime service to iOS devices. And he’s showing it live.

10:47 – Marc is back and talking about Avon, BMC, Kelly Services are running social apps on Force.com and others creating “breakthrough apps”. Very interesting: Now Facebook’s CIO Tim Campose is talking about how they use Chatter and “have been able to adopt it across the board”. 70% of Facebook’s internal apps run in the cloud and most of them use Force.com.

10:49 – Now Parker Harris is on video from the show floor talking about the exhibits and campground. Continuing to talk about Facetime integration. Invites those to come in and see how all the technologies discussed integrate together.

10:54 – Marc is talking about Step 3: creating a customer social network. “The customer social network has been a real eye-opener for me.” It started with their acquisition of Heroku. Has the Heroku team stand up. Says that it now runs Java, not just Ruby. Talking about Disney’s dynamic social communities. Games, vacation communities, photo sharing applications. ESPN, Best Buy, and Warner Brothers are all doing this and using Heroku technologies. Now with Heroku with Java and frictionless scale, availability immediately. Brings 6 million Java developers right into their social platform.

10:57 – Talking more about social marketing. Now having MC Hammer standing up in the front of the crowd. Now MC Hammer is actually saying pretty good sound bites about how the wall is coming down in enterprises. Social universes can be used to see if products “really resonate.” Relating his experiences with crowdsourcing ideas in the music industry, and using betas to strategically validate ideas with customers. What’s working, not working, and making changes dynamically based on social feedback loops.

10:59 – Marc is now bringing up the great (but now fairly old) story about Gatorade’s social media network operation center. Video is playing about their story.

11:01 – Here’s the exciting part of the confab for me: Discussing the Radian6 acquisition, social media analytics, and how it turns into social business intelligence. Half of the Fortune 100 uses Radian6 to analyze social media. “The beginning of the marketing cloud”. Demonstrating Heroku and Radian6 with a Disneyland app. Companies are creating social experiences and doing it on Facebook to create phenomenal customer experiences.

11:08 – Still demoing social customer experiences. “The next generation of listening and engagement. Marc is back up. “Most exciting part of the keynote. Going to talk about an incredible new capability.” A new product called “Product Social Networks”, will affect every company in the world. Showing a video about the Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts about how to create a “consistent feel for customers regardless of how they were accessing the brand.” For any CEO that is skeptical, she says “You have to [do this]. You have to have a social enterprise. Otherwise I don’t know what your business model is in five years.

11:12 – Now Angela — who is actually here — is up talking about the borderless enterprise is the future. Talking about the Burberry Community vision. They want to bring together their “great customers”, suppliers, partners, into a social enterprise. “What is the next step?”, asks Benioff. “How do you plug all of this back into the existing infrastructure?” says Angela. None of that goes away, Salesforce is an addition to plug it all into to optimize the social enterprise. As a global luxury brand, and the brand is the #1 asset, is what they’re selling before they sell anything else. The opportunity to take Chatter and brand it completely as Burberry is the key for them.

11:17 – “It’s not about channel, it’s not about technology, it’s about wherever the customer goes.” – Angela. She looks at the audience, “you are the social revolution.”

11:19 – Marc is talking about Toyota and the social enterprise. Relating the story about Toyota Friend, and how they are using that as the first part of their transition to the social enterprise. Connecting dealerships, customers, distributors, support centers, and even vehicles together socially. “Get your cars running on these social networks.” Now they are going to show Toyota Friends actually working so the user can see the charge level, maintenance cycle, tire pressure, interior temperature, etc. All information streams to you in a chatter feed (great stuff showing how devices and sensors can be social as well.) Connects to the whole family of cars and can be extended out to Facebook, Twitter, and so on.

11:24 – Continuing the Toyota Friends demo. Not just for customers, dealers, but also internal employees of Toyota. Marc’s back up, saying “this is happening to companies all over the world.” Discussing Enterasys and how they redesigned their products to be social. “Their switches are social.” Users receive real-time alerts.

11:26 – Coca-Cola is now being featured on how their rewards, events, and other communities including food service, mobile payments, and other capabilities to brought into a single social enterprise experience. Marc is now standing by a vending machine and uses his iPhone to get a loyalty point for standing in front of the machine using geo-location. “It starts to have a relationship with me. We can bring the offline world online and increase customer intimacy.”

11:27 – Bringing up the CTO of Coca Cola, Alan Boehme, and talking about the vision for Coca-Cola and the social enterprise. Where have you said “wow, this has really opened up for me.” Over 700,000 partners and colleagues around the world. Their big challenges: Who’s know who, who knows what, and who know who that knows what.” Technologies that bring people together creates major opportunities.

11:29 – Marc is taking about a new social enterprise license agreement so that per-user pricing delivers every product for every employee. Alan inspired them to create the new social enterprise licensing agreement.

11:31 – Wrapping up now, talking about transforming and “igniting” organizations around employee social networks, customer social networks, and product social networks. Eric Schmidt, Vivek Kundra, and Metallica are all coming up today and tomorrow.

Summary: Overall an impressive amount of messaging and pretty spot on for the most part. We definitely get a better sense of where their social strategy is going as well as the larger outlines of how they’ll be going to market with this. Frankly, I’d be worried if I were a lot of social software vendors, because of the deep cross-product integration, opening of the platform, and the sheer number of key, strategic features now operational for true social business. If I were a CIO considering the social enterprise, I’d now be including Salesforce in my short list. I’ll be analyzing this more on ZDNet, the Dachis Group Collaboratory, and elsewhere soon.

Filed under Analysis, Social Business, The Enterprise Tagged with CEO, Marc Benioff, Salesforce

Sunday Musings: New Social Business Research, Plus Disruptors of Tomorrow’s Enterprise

August 29, 2011 1 Comment

All in all, it was a good week for the exploration of big ideas in social business. PWC’s Technology Forecast quarterly published an epic 68 page examination of the future of collaboration in the enterprise. For those without the time to read through it all, Sameer Patel wrote a great overview of the contents today.

Standout areas of focus in this report include 1) an emphasis on dealing with exception handling as the norm in collaborative environments, 2) an underscoring of the central role of the CIO, which is something I’ve seen as key for success in social business, and 3) last — but certainly not least — positioning social media to directly support ongoing business processes. Says Sameer:

One thing enterprises have learned is that siloed, standalone consumer Web-style microblogging or social networking tools rarely work well inside an enterprise. Social technology that’s embedded in the enterprise application environment to offer collaborative support to specific business processes, or explicitly targeted at unifying all communications and collaboration, can be much more useful.

If you’re not sure about this, the importance of connecting social business to workflow was clearly driven home this week in the discussion that Laurie Buczek sparked in the Enterprise 2.0/Social Business community. See the comments and pingbacks in the link for details but it’s clear the social media for its own sake just isn’t enough to drive significant business impact.

For me, it’s become abundantly clear that smart social business initiatives — and the ones that will ultimately have the most success — will focus on connecting their efforts directly with 1) meaningful line-of-business activities and/or 2) transforming and integrating the most important horizontal functions like the intranet, content management, and document management.

But PWC’s report and Laure’s noteworthy post were not the only significant happenings this week. Earlier today Ray Wang published an engrossing and significant overview of 43 Use Cases For Social Business. Maps like this are important to help those trying to understand how to apply social media to various parts of their business. Ray’s use cases cover the gamut of the following areas:

Public relations/ marketing (PR/MA). Key impacted business process: Campaign to lead
Sales (SFA). Key impacted business process: Lead to deal
Service and support (CSS). Key impacted business process: Incident to resolution
Projects (PBS). Key impacted business process: Kickoff to delivery
Innovation/ product life cycle management (PLM). Key impacted business process: Concept to production
Supply chain (SCM). Key impacted business process: Sourcing to acceptance
Human capital management (HCM). Key impacted business process: Hire to retire
Finance. Key impacted business process: Invoice to payment

I DM’d Ray and indicated I felt that this was just a start on where social business will have an impact and he agreed. The list is light on general purpose workflow/collaboration, but then again Ray’s view here is actually connected to specific business activities, as per the previous discussion. We should also keep in mind that Ray’s perspective is based on actual data gathered from those engaging in social business, which makes it particularly invaluable as a look at ground truth. I especially liked his chart on the top 20 use cases based on the responses of over 100 early adopters:

Ray and his team has been doing some great research lately and I look forward to watching what they put out next.

The Disruptive Business Landscape Adds Big Data, Algorithms

As enterprises get backed farther into a corner by the constant changes swirling around them, there’s been a lot of speculation about the root causes of disruption at present. Everyone knows that cloud, social, mobile, and now increasingly big data, are to blame, but are they really the whole story? Not by a long shot in my book and Michael Fauscette agrees.

Citing the usual suspects, Michael took a fairly deep dive this week into the additional forces that are remaking the way we work and operate our businesses and came up with some gems that paint a fairly complete picture. I’ve taken a shot at describing the macro changes several times in the last year or so, but Michael’s list has a great perspective. Be sure to read it yourself, but Organic Business Networks was the one that resonated most with me.

For my part, I think the BBC’s When Algorithms Rule the World adds the final item of serious competitive disruption to both our lists. Will we truly be smart enough to rule over them while only reaping the benefits? I worry that we won’t and that few of us are putting enough thought into the implications of big data and the analytics that will pervade just about everything we do. Next-generation enterprises will be ones that own their classes of data while being able to maintain the highest leverage over what they know that others don’t. See my discussion on closing the “clue gap” between what most enterprises can do today, and what tomorrow’s leaders will be able to do.

Finally, as Web technology continues to provide an ever-growing force multiplier that’s placed into the hands that master it, I’ve been exploring one of the new leading edges of social business: The process of extracting strategic intelligence from the knowledge, connections, patterns that become much more visible when organizations become social. It’s a topic that’s growing central to the discussion of ROI as well as attaining long-term competitive advantage. You can see all the details at Harnessing Social Business Intelligence: Nine Strategic Uses and Social Business Intelligence: Positioning a Strategic Lens on Opportunity.

At Dreamforce in San Francisco this week

I’ll be in downtown San Francisco for Salesforce’s massive and increasingly influential Dreamforce 2011 conference from Tuesday onward. Expect pictures, videos, and blog posts in my Twitter feed as we see what they have in store for the social enterprise. I’ve been having discussions with a number of Salesforce partners this week that are announcing innovative and intriguing add-ons and support capabilities for Chatter and other elements of company’s growing and increasingly impressive ecosystem. I’ll cover as much as I can here and elsewhere. It’ll be a great week of conversations and moving the thinking forward in this fast moving space, even as social business tries to keep pace with social media.

Filed under Social Business, The Enterprise, Trends and Statistics

Putting Social Business To Work

August 24, 2011 24 Comments

A great post yesterday by Laurie Buczek brought home for me a key issue that I’ve been pondering lately, namely how surprisingly disconnected some social business efforts end up becoming. We know many of the reasons this happens: Not-invented here, political fiefdoms, integration challenges, the tendency of many applications to turn into silos easily, etc. However, social media in the enterprise is about connecting deeply to those around us to improve the way we work. It’s certainly not about isolation, yet that sometimes becomes the state of affairs. How we organize for social business determines much of our success, as emergent as the process is. As Laurie said in her post (her emphasis):

The big failure of social business is a lack of integration of social tools into the collaborative workflow.

I should be clear that it’s not social business as a concept that’s the problem here. It’s that social must be connected to the day-to-day work that takes place. Unfortunately, most work today is done through existing systems that aren’t very social. If we’re lucky, we can forge a link to a piece of enterprise data from within a social tool, a basic requirement for social collaboration. But more likely we have to manually copy information from the systems of record in order to collaborate on it. Even more likely, the social business environment just becomes a parallel silo that’s not connected to the business and is used for light conversation and status updates instead of meaningful, high value line of business activities.

Yes, many large ERP, CRM, and HRM vendors including Oracle, Salesforce, IBM, Saba, and many others have either added or are otherwise incorporating social layers in their products that can help address this. But this is not necessarily the same as making our businesses fundamentally or more meaningfully social. Such duplication of social tools has its own silo issues and ultimately, rolling out social software on its own does not in itself produce results. No, the ladder of social business maturity requires more from us than that.

Instead we need to wrap our businesses in social in a more ambient and deeply connected manner. To work, this must be more than for example merely adding threaded conversations to our systems of record. It’s about weaving collaboration into everything we do, efficiently and simply. The good news is that there’s now hope to readily address what Laurie was referring to and connect social to workflow. With recent advances like real, mature, standardized social integration with OpenSocial 2.0 — with widespread support by enterprise software makers for the first time — there’s a genuine opportunity, right now, for us to connect our daily departmental and enterprise-scale work activities en masse to an overall social fabric that enables real change, real results, and real ROI.

Note: I do not think pure technology can ever be the full answer to this issue. But whenever we have a means of much more easily putting social in the flow of work we must go well beyond paper strategy and employ them.

So it’s up to us to see the importance of doing this and making it happen. Want social business become just a fancy chat tool in your organization? Don’t put social business to work. Do you want to unleash untapped worker potential, including cognitive surplus, peer production, and collective intelligence and all the big strategic buzzwords? Then put social business to work. The big lesson here: Failure to connect social business to work on the ground will pretty quickly result in limited value. We are now in the possessions of techniques to avoid this and we must use them.

See my writings on connecting business software to systems of engagement, social networking applications, and social app stores for more details on this subject. The Social Business CIO Shortlist can help as well.

Filed under Social Business, Social Media, Social Technology & Standards, The Enterprise

Ten Aspects of Web 2.0 Strategy That Every CTO and CIO Should Know

September 14, 2008 Leave a comment

Over the last year I've worked with organizations around the world that are attempting to grapple with Web 2.0 and the growing external marketplace pressure being exerted for the change and transformation of their businesses. Along the way, I've been fortunate enough to be able to identify and assemble a working list of some consistent recurring issues and themes around Web 2.0 strategy. I've provided them below at a high level. Your comments and additions are very welcome as we try to frame up a consistent picture of what's happening in the marketplace.

It used to be a little surprising how long it's taken for Web 2.0 to begin to have serious impact on or even high-level interest in the business world. However, the ideas have had staying power and have also largely been validated; there are now fundamentally different and very powerful new models for engaging with customers, designing our products, and applying technology in general to our business that are proven and have growing bodies of knowledge. The Web has become the single most important driving force in many fields of endeavor as well as the leading source of both innovation and potent new modes for communicating, collaborating, socializing, and working together. It's taken a few years but businesses are now feeling the change in the air.

The Web 2.0 Transformation and Change Management Process for Business and Enterprises

However, as I've said a number of times in my various discussions of Web 2.0, the power of the network has deep roots in some profound shifts in society and culture, particularly the singular move from push-based systems (the 1.0 era going way, way back until right around now) to pull-based systems (the 2.0 era from roughly a few years into this century and going forward). That this shift is well under way is clear if you look at the sudden explosion of the blogosphere, social networking, social media, open source software, online communities, and peer production in virtually all things. The good news (or bad news, depending on how you look at it) is that despite the remaking of more than a few industries already — including media, software, advertising — this shift is only just beginning.

This all raises the question of how to make the transition from 1.0 to 2.0 safely and non-disruptively with your business largely intact, perhaps even with a superior competitive position. That this transition can actually be accomplished by most businesses is still far from clear though some early transitions have met with varying degrees of success. This list represents some of what we've learned so far about 2.0 transformation but it's something that strikes at the very heart of most businesses today: The rules for success are not-so-gradually changing and the marketplace is driving it in an often-subversive grassroots, bottom-up way. The question now is no longer about "if" but increasingly about thriving long-term, period: What are you willing to do to adapt to a new business world?

This list is aimed primarily at CTOs and CIOs since they are mostly likely to be located at the convergence of traditional business thinking and the wave of 2.0 change coming in off the network. However these ideas apply to anyone looking at how to embrace 2.0 transformation in their organization and take advantage of it. This is one of the most exciting eras to be in businesses since so many directions are in flux and the outcomes, players, and market leaders of the near future are far from certain. Those who can see the new opportunities clearly through the lens of 2.0 transformation not only have a fighting chance, but are able to seize them with once-in-a-generation ease.

Note: I've dropped the "Web" in Web 2.0 for this discussion because one of the big lessons is that many traditional business thinkers turn off when they hear the word, even though Web 2.0 design patterns and business models have truly profound implications across any business today. Consequently, hat the Web is driving most of these changes is being considered incidental for this discussion (though it's absolutely the opposite when actually executing on these new models.) Instead, this is targeted a discussion about the transformative models themselves (such as who creates the products and where, how they are used, who supports them, how are they remixed, syndicated, franchised, licensed, IP protected, etc) in a strategic businesses sense. At the core of this discussion is how 1.0 business models of the 20th century are very much being eroded, transformed, and frequently dethroned by the immense motive forces that lie in the pervasive, open networked systems we have today, which are taking us deeply into a very new place: the 2.0 era.

Ten Key Aspects of Web 2.0 Strategy

It's not about technology, it's about the changes it enables. While technology is a close second (and ultimately makes 2.0 business models possible), the real discussion is about the disruptive new opportunities it creates. Instead the discussion should be focused more around strategies such as harnessing millions of customers over the network to co-create products through peer production, engaging in mass customer self-service, customer communities, and open supply chains to thousands of ad hoc partners with open APIs. These are just some of the examples of using the network to create far richer and more profound results than could be created in the 1.0 era. Don't get caught up in the technology of 2.0 at first other than to understand the business possibilities it affords. Avoid technology-first discussions like the plague. Premature monetization discussions around 2.0 are also to be avoided, they tend to have a negative impact on process if done too early.
The implications of 2.0 stands many traditional views on their head and so change takes more time than usual. In the 2.0 world customers and partners have a much closer, more sustained relationship because of social interaction and tightly integrated online supply chains, to name just two reasons. The shift of control from institutions to communities of users takes a lot of getting used to. Just understanding how and why intellectual property is better covered by Creative Commons instead of copyright will take the legal department years (if not decades). Each part of the organization will have its miniature 2.0 revolution. These take time to happen and sort themselves out. This means getting these new ideas into people's heads is one of the first steps…
Get the ideas, concepts, and vocabulary out into the organization and circulating. If you're trying to affect 2.0 change in an organization, there's no better solution that exposing people to it. Demographics can be a problem in this situation depending on the industry. Younger workers tend to live and breath 2.0 while older workers may be aware of it but don't think it applies to them. I use point education where change needs to happen either first or quickly and then internal communities that bring the discussion of change, innovation, and transformation to the entire organization. Either way, learning and education around 2.0 are a vital trigger to begin change and should be started early and non-disruptively.
Existing management methods and conventional wisdom are a hard barrier to 2.0 strategy and transformation. You don't have to get far into discussions about the Perpetual Beta or Product Development 2.0 before existing management methods seem outdated, inflexible, and ineffective. This is one of the more difficult aspects of adopting 2.0 models and the implications is that we'll have to do a lot of rethinking how we manage businesses driven by 2.0 models, where the boundaries of organizations are less clear, the ownership is much more community-based, and the outcomes are far more diverse and spread out, making them less trackable, controllable, and directed. Overhauling management practices and techniques will be a core activity in a 2.0 transformation and will be hard to achieve quickly enough due to the Innovator's Dilemma.
Avoiding external disruption is hard but managing self-imposed risk caused by 2.0 is easier. The great fear than many businesses have is facing a fast-growth competitor that takes these ideas and either wrests away market share rapidly and aggressively or cuts them off at the pass with entirely new products. YouTube did this to the broadcast and cable industry, which responded with Hulu. Apple did this with iTunes to the recording industry and the blogosphere did the same to the newspaper industry. Other industries are next likely including the financial services industry, real estate, and others. Internally, however, risk management is still a challenge but is much more manageable. The big implication for this is that starting internally first with things like Enterprise 2.0 initiatives and prediction markets to learn the ropes on how to deal with unexpected outcomes and results can help organizations climb the maturity curve.
Incubators and pilots projects can help create initial environments for success with 2.0 efforts. Too much contact with the traditional support environment of an existing, primarily 1.0 organization makes it hard for 2.0 efforts to succeed; everything gets done in the traditional way instead of the new ways that are required. The traditional tools, processes, and skills just aren't there or are just too slow and burdened with unnecessary overhead. Creating dedicated incubators that are designed to use the strengths of the organization while being isolated from its weaknesses can help. Incubators are at risk of becoming too isolated however, and won't inform or change the greater organization unless care is taken to roll the lessons and capability back in.
Irreversible decisions around 2.0 around topics such as brand, reputation, and corporate strategy can be delayed quite a while, and sometime forever. Most organizations get paralysis around change and transformation because of concerns around decisions that can't be reversed. Concern over damaging the company's brand is one of the top issues I run into and it's a valid concern. The good news is that many organizations are discovering they can safely leverage the advantages of their organization (such as their extensive customer base to drive initial growth of 2.0 engagement and adoption of new products and services) without dragging their brand into it whatsoever. New 2.0 products from major companies are now often released under new brands entirely. This enables serious experimentation with 2.0 while taking little risk to the organization.
The technology competence organizations have today are inadequate for moving to 2.0. This is key if you're a CTO or CIO today; your organization is almost certainly not ready to handle the development, management, scalability, identity, governance, and openness issues around 2.0. If you're not sure, just ask your IT staff. Examples include cloud computing, open APIs, mashups, rich user experiences, Web-Oriented-Architecture, community platforms, Enterprise 2.0, 2.0-era computing stacks like Rails and Django, are all disciplines that are considerable in their own right, of rapidly growing importance to organizations in the 2.0 era. These are all likely to be things your staff needs to come up the learning curve on in significant ways and with the rate of change on the network what it is presently, falling behind is too easy to do. Note: The existing technology landscape of most organizations will have to change as well which is where Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) is getting quite a bit of attention today. And the Web products themselves have moved far beyond the model of the Web page and most enterprises are very far behind.
The business side requires 2.0 competence as well. This includes how to design, build, launch, market, support, and maintain 2.0 products and services as well as the ways that workers should use the tools and concepts to work together. I recently suggested that learning how to be effective in working within and directing communities of workers/users/partners to accomplish large-scale outcomes will be a vital skill in the very near future. All of this requires both a new perspective as well as a hard-headed effort at skill building and a re-orientation of existing work habits and processes.
Start small, think big. We have discovered that the leverage the network can give us is almost unlimited. It's ability to scale ideas, products, and communities of users as fast as they are able to is one of the aspects that makes it so attractive to business. 2.0 products tends to be very simple at heart, and though there is certainly challenges and complications growing, small ideas can become big very, very quickly. Getting to the right solutions, not-overinvesting (which leads to complication and heavyweight management and processes) and letting customers and partners take the seeds of great ideas and run with them is what makes sudden success turn into a large-scale success. On the Web, starting small, and thinking big can take you a long, long way. Read more about network effects driven by architectures of participation .

Please share your ideas around what else is essential in a Web 2.0 strategy below.

Filed under Social Business, Social Media, Strategy, The Enterprise

A Timeless Way of Building Software

January 10, 2006 Leave a comment

Most of my readers know that I’m a software architect by trade. I’ve been creating software large and small for over twenty years. And I’ve experienced movement after movement in software design from object-orientation in the 1980s and early 90s to component-based design, distributed objects, Web-based software, service-oriented architecture and too many others to even mention. I’m pretty jaded at this point because I’ve learned, in general, the problems that you couldn’t solve in the previous generation of technique are often only marginally more solvable in the next generation (which is invariably invented to "fix" the previous problems.)

Alas, a genuinely better mousetrap is really hard to find.

So in the end, if you couldn’t do whatever it is you wanted to do with the previous generation of technique, it’s actually not that likely you’ll succeed in the next. Certain software problems remain hard, and in general, it mysteriously happens to involve the juncture between technology and people in some way. To paraphrase this, I could say that the software and techniques get better fairly constantly, but people remain the same.

And please, bear with me because I’m going to try out a real zinger on you in a minute.

Because every once in a long while, something new and big actually does come along. Or at least something that looks new and big. One of the new and big things that came along about ten years ago was the concept of design patterns. It was pretty neat stuff. It said that despite the current technology we have, the processes that continue to evolve, there are certain timeless solutions to certain software design problems. It was a revelation at the time. And the writers of the book that explained this got both famous and very successful. Why? Because these design patterns really worked is why. And anyone who has read the books and has ever really built software recognizes these patterns. And what was strange was that no one really expected it. One day, we just had them. And the kicker was, they were always there, but now they were in our conscious thought and we had real names for them. My point: They were in our face all the time but most of us couldn’t see them.

We are in a similar place with the Web right now. We’ve done this Web stuff enough now that we are just beginning to see the design patterns. What works, and why, in a specific situations, bounded by forces. Some folks have had the hubris to give this next generation a name and to tease out these patterns. Some people are just now going aha, and some people haven’t got it yet, and most of the rest of us either aren’t ready for it or just haven’t heard of it. But, I will tell you this. It’s quite real. The best practices and design patterns of Web software are just starting to become understood. The strange part is, we’re discovering the same things over again. What’s old is new again.

Now, before you get all worked up or worse, I bore you and you stop reading, I will give you a nice list of the the forces behind these patterns. If you recall, design patterns are a solution to a problem in context. We are starting to get the context and even the outlines of the patterns of this "new" generation of software. But we have a long way to go still. The Web is a monstrously big space with big problems, and it’s not getting better. There are one billion of us out here now. Clearly understanding what it takes to create great software on the Web that is successful, useful, and vibrant will be an ongoing challenge for a long time. But it will get easier because we are codifying our knowledge of this exciting and huge place where we now find ourselves.

Comparing SOA, Web 2.0, and a Timeless Way of Building Software

Figure 1: The driving forces in modern software.
With a rough comparison between SOA
and The Timeless Way (Web 2.0 by any other name).

Now is where I’m going to hit you with a flight of fancy. I’m going to use Christopher Alexander’s opening chapter of a Timeless Way of Building and tailor it to describe this old-but-new way of building the Web and software for it. We are lacking for a little inspiration and this book in particular continues to sell upwards of 10,000 copies a year, 25 years after it was frst published. And Christopher Alexander, for those of you who may not know, was the person that originally discovered the design pattern. But it wasn’t for software. It was for creating great, timeless buildings. He was one of the first that realized that his field of endeavor has certain elemental, timeless cores, no matter the technique, building material, or the people. It was an amazing discovery that poured over into the software world with considerable success.

My assertion is that nothing has really changed in software, we might understand the forces better but they are almost always the same. People want software that does what they want, is available when they need it. They want software that grows with them, helps them, teaches them, and lets them do the same with others. They want software that gets out of their way, disappears, and is more convenient by far than inconvenient. And they want to pay as little as possible for it, but enough so that it’s worth it. They are willing to have software get right into the middle of their lives. If it’s the right software. And as long as we’ve had software, they’ve always wanted this. But now they might actually start getting it.

In any case, I don’t literally believe every phrase in this take-off, but I do believe the overall concept deeply and profoundly as a software professional. And I will continue to update the diagram above (clearly marked beta 1) until we have more of the forces in it. And some are definitely missing. Please, as always, leave any comments and suggestions for improvement below.

And now, without further ado, here is the The Timeless Way of Building Software, with sincere apologies to Christopher Alexander:

The Timeless Way of Building Software

Inspiration For The Next Generation of Web Software

There is one timeless way of building software. It is decades old and is the same today as it’s always been. And because it is timeless, it will always remain this way.

The great software of our time has always been created by people who were close to this way. It isn’t possible to create great software – software that is satisfying, and useful, and makes itself a natural extension of life – except by following this way. And as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to elegant, vibrant software which is itself timeless in its form.

It is the process by which the function of a piece of software grows directly from the inner nature of people and naturally out of the raw bits, the otherwise meaningless digital medium, of which it is made.

It is a process which allows the life inside a person, or a group of people, or a community to flourish, openly, in freedom, so vividly that it gives rise, of its own accord, to the natural order which is needed to be contained within it.

It is so powerful and fundamental that with its help you can create software that is as beautiful and enriching as anything else you have ever seen.

Once you understand this way, you yourself will be able to create software that is alive, that is intertwined comfortably with your life and the lives of others. You will design worlds where you and others will want to work, play, and co-exist together; beautiful places where you can sit and dream comfortably.

This way is so powerful, that with its help hundreds or thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people, can come together together to create software and community which is as alive and vibrant, peaceful and relaxed, as any living experience has ever been.

Without the central control of authorities and experts, if you are working in this timeless way, a genuine place will grow right from underneath your fingertips, as steady as the grass in the fields or the trees in your backyard.

And there is no other way in which a software which is fundamentally good can possibly be made.

That doesn’t mean that all ways of making software are identical. Quite the contrary. It means that at the core of all successful software and at the core of all successful processes of creation and evolution, there is one fundamental invariant feature which is responsible for their success. Although this way has taken on a thousand different forms at different times, in different places, still, there is an unavoidable, invariant core to all of them.

Take a look at the some of the great Web software like Google’s search page, Flickr or del.icio.us. They all have that unique, yet unhurried, grace which comes from perfect ease and natural balance. But what is it they have in common exactly? They are beautiful, ordered, harmonious – yes, all of these things. But especially, and what strikes to the heart, they live.

Each one of us yearns to be able to bring something to life like this. Or just be a part of it somehow.

It is a fundamental human instinct, as much a part of our desire as the desire to be part of something greater than ourselves. It is, quite simply, the desire to make a part of nature, to complete a world which is already made of mountains, streams, stones, buildings, ourselves, our living systems, and our increasing connectedness together.

Each one of us has, somewhere in our heart, the dream to make a living world, a universe, and place of our own for us to share with others.

Those of us who have trained as software designers have this desire perhaps at the very center of our lives; that one day, somewhere, somehow, we shall build a software experience which is wonderful, beautiful, and breathtaking; a place where people can go and live their dreams.

In some form, every person has some version of this dream; whoever you are, you may have the dream of one day creating a most beautiful place, virtual or otherwise, where you can come together with others and freely share your knowledge, learn, participate in your community or government, and otherwise conduct your daily interaction with the rest of the world.

In some less clear fashion, anyone who is concerned with communities and other large group efforts has this same dream, perhaps for the entire world.

And there is a way that software can actually be brought to life like this.

There is a definable sequence of activities which are the heart of all acts of software design, and it is possible to specify, precisely, under way conditions these activities will generate software which is alive. All this can be made so explicit that anyone can do it.

And just so, the process by which a group of independent people can make software become alive and create a place as real as any other can equally be made precise. Again, there is a definable sequence of activities, more complex in this case, which are the heart of all collective processes of software creation. And it is also possible to specify exactly when these processes will bring things to life. And once again, these processes can be made so explicit, and so clear, that any group of people can make use of them.

This process is behind the design of community built software like Linux, Apache, Wikipedia, and many others. It was behind the design of the great virtual places for people to live and work: the Internet, Usenet, and the World Wide Web. It was behind the creation of simple, satisfying software of the kind that powers the iPod, the Blackberry, and Firefox; of SourceForge, Wikipedia, and BitTorrent. In an unconscious form, this way has been behind almost all ways of creating software since the beginning.

But it has become possible to identify it, only now, by going to a level of analysis which is deep enough to show what is invariant in all of the different versions of this way.

This hinges on a form of representation which reveals all possible design processes, as versions of one most fundamental set of patterns.

First, we have a way of looking at the ultimate constituents of the environment: the ultimate "things" which a piece of software is made of. As we shall see, every piece of software is made of certain fundamental entities known as design patterns; and once we understand software in terms of its patterns, we have a way of looking at them, which makes all software, all of their parts and function, all members of the same class of thing.

Second, we have a way of understanding the generative processes which give rise to these patterns: in short, the source from which the ultimate constituents of software come. These patterns tend to come from certain combinatory processes, which are different in the specific patterns that they generate, but always similar in their overall structure, and in the way they work. They are essentially like languages. And again, in terms of these pattern languages, all the different way of building software, although different in detail, become similar in general outline.

At this level of analysis, we can compare many different software creation processes.

Then, once we see their differences clearly, it becomes possible to define the difference between those processes which make software vibrant, alive, and useful, and those which make them the opposite.

And it turns out that, invariant, behind all processes which allow us to make great software, there is a single common process.

This single idea is operational and precise. It is not merely a vague idea, or a class of processes which we can understand: it is concrete enough and specific enough, so that it functions practically. It gives us the power to make software and virtual communities live, as concrete as a match gives us the power to make flame. It is a method of a discipline, which teaches us precisely what we have to do make our software what we want it to be.

But though this method is precise, it cannot be used mechanically.

The fact is, that even when we have seen deep into the processes by which it is possible to make software alive, in the end, it turns out this knowledge only brings us back to that part of ourselves which is forgotten. Although the process is precise, and can be defined in exact scientific terms, finally it becomes valuable, not so much because it shows us things which we don’t know (though it may do that as well), but instead, because it shows us what we know already.

Of course, this way of building software has never be named. It’s not service-oriented architecture, or the personal software process, or agile methodology, or the unified process, or CMM, or any of the others. It’s the actual things that are conceived and done and worried about when software is created and used. For now, because all software is quickly becoming connected to all other software, and because the Web is becoming the place where more and more of the relevant software is, and finally because it is a more complete reconception of what we thought we knew, we’ll give it a name temporarily. An unsatisfying name, but one that we can remember for now.

We will call it Web 2.0.

What do you think? Are we at a place where we can really identify the design patterns in Web 2.0?

Filed under Enterprise Architecture, Social Technology & Standards, Strategy Tagged with "design patterns", "Timeless Way of Building", architecture, Christopher Alexander, complexity, components, framework, granularity, IT, library, models, openness, participation, patterns, practices, SOA, software architecture, standards, Web 2.0, web services

Is Web 2.0 The Global SOA?

October 28, 2005 2 Comments

Are we heading towards an architectural singularity in the software industry? Sometimes it looks that way. If you do a superficial comparison at least, Web 2.0 is all about autonomous, distributed services, remixability, and is fraught with ownership and boundary/control issues. And yet, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is all about, you guessed it, autonomous, distributed services, composite functionality, and is fraught with ownership and boundary/control issues. Sound similar, no?

It does seem that we have a classic case of fractal architecture on our hands. Is Web 2.0 actually the most massive instance possible of service-oriented architecture, realized on a worldwide scale and sprawling across the Web? The answer folks is, apparently so.

I’ve been thinking about this carefully for several weeks now as the similarities seemed to inexorably call to each other as I worked with each of them in turn (disclaimer: I’m a SOA architect by trade). Both Web 2.0 and SOA are already slippery, nebulous concepts yet there are unmistakable patterns within each that actually are very tightly related, though wrapped in slightly different cloth. Each encourages the liberation of the underlying functionality of software systems by providing open access to everyone that needs it. Both warmly embrace Web services and the aggregation of existing functionality into new solutions. And Web 2.0, according to O’Reilly, looks at Data as the Next Intel Inside, making large, back-end database driven functionality a core competency. SOA totally gets this as well. And both Web 2.0 and SOA provide the building blocks for creating people-centric processes starting at the scale of an organization and going up.

Granted, most SOAs are conceptually trapped inside an organization’s firewall or VPN. And Web 2.0 envisions the global Web as the stage writ large upon which to act out your grand visions of building collective intelligence and mashed up functionality. But scale is only one of the minor differences really, and not a genuine discriminator at all.

Do the linkages go deeper, to a more fundamental level? Are Web 2.0 and SOA different at their core and if not, how exactly do they relate?

I believe that there are at least two significant connection points. One is that Web 2.0 can be conceptualized as a global SOA. Two, that many traditional brick-and-mortar business that are currently using SOA as their architectural model will want to connect their Web/Web 2.0 faces up to their SOA. This makes Web 2.0 not just being the Global SOA but makes meeting smaller SOAs everywhere not just likely, but inevitable. Note that the respected industry analysis firm, Gartner, recently said that by 2008 that 80% of all software development will be based on SOA. And interestingly by 2006, Gartner believes that 60% of the $527 billion IT professional services industry will be based on exploiting Web services and technology. We’re talking serious convergence of focus here folks. If true, this means that more than half of all software development, SOA and otherwise, will revolve around the Web, inside or outside organization boundaries. All of this means Web 2.0 and SOA will meet each other both coming and going, and begin to become each other as well.

Web 2.0 = Global SOA? Why Should We Care?

But the real question really is does the relation of the two give us an advantage as we design and build Web 2.0 applications, services, and SOAs? One problem could be that many folks outside the IT industry just haven’t heard of SOA. And even then, there are vociferous arguments about what an SOA really is, just like there are endless debates about what Web 2.0 is. But in the end, there are best practices that need to cross pollinate here and SOA’s IT-bound sphere of influence isn’t really a factor. In fact, really only Web 2.0 designers (yes, you) will have to understand these techniques and their connections. Web 2.0 users themselves will generally be blissfully unaware of Web 2.0 as the global SOA.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Web 2.0 and SOA also have significantly divergent elements too. Web 2.0 emphasizes a social aspect that SOA is completely missing. And probably to its lasting detriment. SOA has much more central control, management, and governance while Web 2.0 is free wheeling, decentralized, grassroots, and with absolutely no command and control structure. Web 2.0 also talks about presentation, the front-end displayed to the user. SOA is largely silent on the issue of presentation though it certainly admits it exists. So SOA tends to be generic and faceless where Web 2.0 makes much of human/service interaction. They seem to need each other to be whole. Finally, Web 2.0 is almost too informal and practically calls out for discipline while SOA is mute and autistic in comparison, a technical virtuosity that wants to be social but doesn’t know how.

All of this makes me want to view one through the other to check basic principles. For example, SOA has best practices for building business processes into vast supply chains (so too does Web 2.0). SOA is also a mature view of software that eschews a technical view of information and data. And it identifies a motive force for these processes via something called orchestration. This is a concept that Web 2.0 does not have explicitly and could certainly use (an orchestration mash-up anyone?) though it is provided in some degree by its users. SOA principles also encourage creation of a common vocabulary across systems that is in the language of the domain (common definitions of customers, order, channel, product, for example). So it gets very close to addressing a big issue in software development today: That too many IT systems today tend to have technology myopia and ignore their most important elements… the people that use them and the way that they work. Web 2.0 gets this part even more right in all the significant ways. Web 2.0 embraces people, collaboration, architectures of participation, social mechanisms, folksonomies, real-time feedback, etc. All things that SOA, in its grey, dull, corporate clothes, does not, at least not explicitly. The complementary nature between the two seems clear.

So, I believe there are complementary synergies between these two powerful software approaches. One can very much be used to check and finish the other. SOA is both the "Mini-Me" of Web 2.0 (identical in almost every way but 1/8 its size) and a key archetype for it as well. Though admittedly one that lacks a few important ingredients. What is compelling, and I’ll talk about this in detail in future articles, is that Web 2.0 actually has powerful mechanisms that "complete" SOA (if you’ll allow one last Austin Powers reference.) Web 2.0 offers a face to SOA with numerous best practices for presentation, has emerging technical innovation like radical decentralization that is necessary for stability and scalability which SOA too often doesn’t address, and Web 2.0 identifies important techniques to immerse users into social processes that can make SOA data and services vastly more valuable.

Yes, so Web 2.0 is a global SOA, done right for the whole world. It’s big, it’s everywhere, and it’s here today.

Do you agree that Web 2.0 is the Global SOA? Post your thoughts below…

Update: Early stage VC investor Peter Rip had some interesting things to say about this article, including "Web 2.0 is a lighter weight version of SOA."
Update 2: Both Richard Monson-Haefel and ZDNet’s Joe McKendrick weighed in on this topic with good observations and commentary.
Update 3: This eventually turned into the SOA Web Services Journal cover story in Dec. 2005: Web 2.0: The Global SOA. This in turn led to March’s SPARK event with Microsoft on the convergence of Web 2.0, SOA, and SaaS.
Update 4: This topic (and related issues for Web 2.0 in the enterprise) has turned into a regular blog on ZDNet.
Update 5 in May, 2006: Om Malik writes a detailed piece on the future of Web 2.0 and is most sanguine about it for the enterprise, interestingly enough, and links to this post.

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