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Situational Software - The ‘Killer Application’ for Enterprise 2.0?

Ever since the spreadsheet was identified as the ‘killer application’ that justified the purchase of PCs for business use, the search has been on for the next killer application. Nowhere has this been more true than in the case of the Internet and the Web. Personally I reckon if there ever was a killer app for business it was the browser, which justified having an Internet connection. For me, the term Killer Application implies that the new capability is so uniquely valuable that you’ll invest in other by-products you don’t really want, just to get the Killer Application. What follows are personal choices to make the most out of the platform you now own.

This explains why a constant series of new but individual web capabilities don’t justify the term. However, Apple lays claim to the term for its iPod and iPhone purchases which were needed to get access to the iTunes Store and its App Store. Email is also a good example. Was it the Killer Application that changed working practices, or was it the other way round? You can hardly have matrix working without the support email provides, yet you can argue that cheaper matrix working justifies the business case for email, as it’s a necessity, enabling capability across an enterprise to support its working practices.

And this is what brings me to ‘Situational Software’ and ‘Enterprise 2.0’ as a definition of a business model and its associated working practices. We can thank Professor Andrew McAfee at Harvard for the origination of the term and its first definition, and for continuing to lead the dialogue that is refining the model. However, that’s not the topic for this post, and at the risk of upsetting those more knowledgeable than I, I’ll give my 101 definition so as to introduce my nomination for the possible Killer Application for Enterprise 2.0: ‘The ability to constantly and consistently interact externally with all aspects of the market from events, to customers, to suppliers, to partners, in a manner that allows opportunities to be identified and turned into optimised business transactions’.

Other aspects are also often referenced and can be summed up as selling ‘less of more’, providing increased differentiation and flexibility of products in order to flex to events and opportunities. This opposes the traditional business mantra of ‘more of less’. The business model approach could be summed up as an organisational model that takes matrix to new levels of extreme flexibility and the optimised use of peoples’ knowledge and experience. Without consciously adopting this model, many organisations are in fact moving in this direction already, perhaps hastened by the downturn in their traditional markets. And the traditional tool of email simply isn’t up to the job, hence the rising use of official and unofficial social networking tools.

There are of course ‘traditional’ collaboration tools, and jolly fine some of them are as well. But they also come with ‘traditional IT’ in terms of justification, time to implement and maintain, etc. At the same time their biggest virtue, structured working, is also their biggest weakness, for just as with content itself, the shift has been to unstructured working, and structured collaboration tools take too long to be changed for each new event and activity.

Enter ‘Situational Software’ as my nomination for the Killer Application to enable this kind of Enterprise 2.0 working. For more background on this, take a look here. What’s required is the capability for work teams to use their greater ‘Web’ technology know-how to produce their own working team environment as a constantly changing work space that suits the people and events that inevitably come and go. Simultaneously, at the enterprise level there needs to be a recognisable structure and connection to ensure that the enterprise can function properly and not risk falling apart: as indeed some enterprises did in the early nineties due to the way users drove PC adoption and use. Think spreadsheets. Users can build their own; project teams can build their own; but at the same time templates can be provided for the key elements so there is consistency across the enterprise. Even automatically undated links can be incorporated.

In Situational Software, it’s much the same as there are a number of vendors such as Zoho, Coghead, Caspio, Longjump, Rollbase, who supply the framework that enables users to rapidly and simply construct the working environment they need. At the same time, they can constantly adapt it, but the presence of the framework provides stability and reliability for the resulting environment and the standardisation of any core aspects to support enterprise requirements. The challenges are that - once again - it doesn’t fit either the business case, or the IT ‘rules’ as we know them. A project team can certainly buy and use with non IT project funding, and this is certainly happening, but this is normally hidden from the IT department. Most of all, it’s failing to provide the major advantage in a sustained manner for the enterprise by linking together and enabling these purchases to create a genuine Enterprise 2.0 business model working capability.

So I both advocate that we may have a new Killer Application defined in terms of a game-changing capability to working practice. It’s time to look at how IT adapts its role to enable this newcomer within its overall support for the business. Who pays for it? Now that’s the last part of the puzzle, for which my only answer is: the same budgets that now cover email, internet connectivity, cell phones and other tools of a modern business.

Posted by Andy Mulholland on June 1, 2009 | Digg this | Seed Newsvine

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Comments

# on June 1, 2009 11:56 PM, Held said:

Twitter, 12 seconds and other platforms that are coming out seem to potentially be the next "killer application".. only time will tell. The situational software doesn't have the killer app smell to me.

# on June 2, 2009 10:01 AM, andy mulholland said:

Yes i understand your comment and indeed commented myself back in January under the heading of 'Is Twitter the new Black Swan'. Certainly with the new functionality it deserves to be in consideration and may be that's the difference? i looked at the growth in situational apps from the PoV of the personal/group benefit in capabilities as well as the number of companies offering products into the space. Twitter has been, at least to me, more of a personal thing, but i would agree that is now changing.

# on June 2, 2009 4:01 PM, Jonathan Sapir said:

Andy, I have just published a book called "Power in the cloud: Building information systems at the edge of chaos" that deals with situational software and how to integrate it into your business. I agree (of course!) that this is the killer app. But to be really successful, the organization has to adopt a completely different mindset, methodology and support structure.

# on June 2, 2009 5:42 PM, andy mulholland said:

hi Jonathan
happy you add a url that points to your book if i can check it out first. happy to support anything that will add value and knowledge for us all, but need to check for the blatant advertisements!
what strikes me about this topic is the way a lot of non IT or techie staff have just quietly build this new way of doing things. Just seen the new Merrill Lynch review on clouds out today - impressive worth trying to get a copy - and the new Forrester report also just out. both say that they have been underestimating the speed and amount of cloud and web 2.0 technology in use by focusing too much on the traditional IT areas.
as you say - if your mind set doesn't have to support the way things are done now then its amazing what you can do in terms of time, cost and competitive capabiliies

# on June 2, 2009 8:40 PM, Jonathan Sapir said:

Andy - thanks for checking out the book. If anyone is interested, it is available at:

http://www.amazon.com/Power-Cloud-Building-Information-Systems/dp/0929652312/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243967891&sr=8-3

# on June 3, 2009 8:58 AM, andy mulholland said:

I am in the middle of reading the book now and i really do recommend it. couple of quick take outs that really struck home;

The new wave is all about moving capabilities to the edge of the enterprise and the IT dept wont like that as IT is fundamentally about centralism control.

We are moving from trains taking a full load of passengers on scheduled journeys to the flexibility of taxis to allow individuals to travel where they need when they need to go.

these and other 'truisms' make a lot of sense so thanks Jonathan a helpful post!

# on June 7, 2009 10:16 AM, Freddie van Rijswijk said:

Back in the nineties I participated in a Dutch Innovation Game with an idear for a mobile "killer" application called "MyIdentity". The idea was that the mobile application figured out the context of where the user was in using Time, Location (gps) and Buddies (using BlueTooth that was just released that time). It could share Interest among People in a certain Range (BlueTooth or GPS Cell) to notify if the Women of your dreams was nearby, your friends and it would automatically switch the context of the addressbook, agenda, etc using the context.

That time, besides Technology not being ready, I was also not ready to bring this idea into reality.

Seems that time has come :-) but it asks also for a new software lifecycle management to keep up with changes. Change cycles of minutes, hours but maximum a day instead of weeks or even worse months as the current standard is.

# on June 7, 2009 5:36 PM, andy mulholland said:

I remember someone that i respected a lot some years ago saying that figuring out what could happen with technology wasn't too hard, but figuring out when it would happen was very hard. Today i take his point to mean when parallel streams will all be ready to cross at the same time to produce a ideal innovation moment.

ie people's knowledge and wish to use, cheap devices, GPS accuracy etc all had to come together to make this a commercial market. But it isn't even that simple, its tens of streams and hundreds of options all happening super fast in small elements.

Thats the challenge that the 'innovation' market place is presenting to us all. TIME is the new key competence. Being right at the right time,and being able to execute in the right time, etc

# on June 9, 2009 11:23 AM, Keith Harrison-Broninski said:

There are multiple challenges for "Situational Software":

- Empowering effective processes by supporting workers without putting them in straightjackets that prevent them working properly (and force workarounds)
- Empowering people to be effective by making organizational goals transparent and rewarding them for using their brains
- Empowering managers to be effective by giving them visibility and the means to put resources where they are needed
- Empowering the organization to be effective by building an organizational memory and helping people use it
- Empowering IT to be effective by leveraging existing infrastructure rather than trying to replace it
- Empowering partnering to be effective by enabling cross-boundary connect-and-collaborate business models (shared services, the fifth economic offering, etc)

The only conceptual framework to address all this is Human Interaction Management (http://human-interaction-management.info), and the associated methodology Goal-Oriented Organization Design, which start from 5 principles that define work itself and go on to provide a complete structure for 21st century business. HIM software tools also solve the integration problems (http://rolemodellers.com/images/next_generation_business_systems.jpg).

As Information Age wrote (http://www.information-age.com/research/331761/276941/riding-the-fourth-wave.thtml):

"Three years ago in their book The Third Wave, Peter Fingar and Howard Smith, wrote what has since come to be regarded as a manifesto for radical business change based on business process management (BPM) technology. Now though, says Fingar, the time is already right to prepare for a new, and potentially even more radical, fourth wave of business automation – human interaction management systems (HIMS)."

# on June 9, 2009 6:55 PM, andy mulholland said:

Hi Keith

this is a wealth of information! thanks for the post and the links, really added a lot of value. It seems that we are both in agreement that we will see a change in 'how' we are working as a number of facets kick in. I have a further post coming on this around the launch of Google Wave, what email would look like if it was designed today.

much appreciated for your rich contribution

andy

# on June 10, 2009 7:49 AM, Keith Harrison-Broninski said:

Thanks Andy.

My general concern is that the business and (in particular) IT worlds will confuse communication with collaboration.

What we are seeing at the moment is better tools for communication, which can be highly counter-productive. Knowledge workers are already swamped with unstructured interactions, leading to what I call "network overload". Basex research in 2007 showed that such unstructured interaction consumes, on average, 28% of knowledge worker time, with an average cost of $840/person/month! The rise of yet more sophisticated communication tools - such as Google Wave - will only exacerbate this damaging trend.

Organizations simply cannot afford better communication, unless they first put in place a framework for better collaboration. At present this means HIM, since there are no alternative choices. However, HIM is a paradigm shift. "Human Interaction Management" does not just mean (somehow) managing human interactions. It means taking on board the 5 principles, and integrating them into the organization at all 3 "Levels of Control" (Strategic, Executive and Management) via the HIM methodology, Goal-Oriented Organization Design (GOOD). There's more about all this on the HIM site (http://www.human-interaction-management.info) - pictures, presentations, etc.

All the best
Keith

# on June 10, 2009 12:22 PM, andy mulholland said:

I am totally in agreement with you on the confusion between adding more ways to communicate versus improving the ability to 'scan, focus and act' as we say by properly tying together a whole slew of things in the way an enterprise changes its working methods to cope with new business models and dynamic global markets and events.

I had exactly this conversation last night as it happens with a younger colleague who didnt understand some of the barriers that are built into our management styles over the last twenty years and now hold back change to what he considered as a young 'digital' person to be obvious ways of working!

# on June 16, 2009 12:41 AM, niraj said:

Two definitions:
1. Enterprise 2.0 put simply is- The ability to work anywhere, anytime productively without losing the virtues of an office(collaboration ,meeting , etc)
2. And - http://blog.gandalf-lab.com/2007/10/collective-business-intelligence-and.html

# on June 16, 2009 11:15 AM, andy mulholland said:

hi niraj
I agree with your definitions from an internal enterprise looking out viewpoint but then there is also the outsied in viewpoint of how enterprise 2.0 is about interacting with customers. markets and trading partners.
to optimise your abilities to deliver in this much more dynamic and demanding market then brings in your second point about being able to rapidly understand options.
andy

# on June 29, 2009 2:44 PM, Ravi said:

Having worked in the capital markets space for nearly 10 years within Trading and Technology I am eager to push some new disruptive technology into this space and the current climate I feel would suit. Tradition lifecycle software methods have in a lot of cases been replaced with agile solutions especially in the Front office but the Middle to Back office functions that are of equal importance have lagged badly.

I have seen numerous examples where people are thrown at problems in these areas simply because it was quicker (and deemed initially cheaper) to do so.

This is where I feel Framework providers like the ones you have mentioned above can be positively disruptive. Imagine Business Analysts being able to construct and modify trade workflows with minimal if not zero changes to the code-base to accommodate Front office demands. I really like the "situational" concept which I see as value-add layer on top of the framework providers.

Question for you Andy - which of the Framework providers (if any) do you see standing out and actually gaining traction in the enterprise market? Or perhaps an easier question is what are the top qualify factors that will determine the winners and losers over the coming years?

Best Regards
Ravi

# on June 29, 2009 4:53 PM, andy mulholland said:

As you know from other posts of mine i am very concerned about this issue, it has clear past parallels, with the introduction of the PC when 'front office' value caused a similar adoption to occur with a result over a few years that business lost control. Then we had a reconsolidation around getting back centralisation, eventually with ERP etc.
Seems we are on track for a repeat of this!
hence your comments and questions!
So do i have a magic wand and a magic solves all product? Unfortunately no! but i do have a way of driving this into an enterprise that has been successful in the way it highlights the issues, and the benefits, but at the same time the risks and the need for a proactive governance framework.
The place to approach has generally been the CFO who on one hand wants and needs the business managers to be successfull in the new markets and so appreciates their initiaives, but on the other has the role and risk of ensuring audits and compliance are passed. of course in FSI this is often more than the CFO but the point is recognisable. The challange is to construct self managing APIs between front and back office that allow freedom and enablement but if certain controls are not met with not allow trades/contracts/orders etc to be processed.
this is my generic answer for a post and of course there is a more detailed in depth side to all of this but hope this at least provides the basis for an answer

regards andy