The original seven principles also included a statement as to the core characteristics of a Web 2.0 enterprise, and were;

1. The Web as a Platform


2. Harnessing Collective Intelligence


3. Data as the next Intel inside


4. End of the Software release cycle


5. Light weight programming models


6. Software above the level of a single device


7. Rich User Experience

With the core competencies for a Web 2.0 company defined as;

• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability


• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them


• Trusting users as co-developers


• Harnessing collective intelligence


• Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service


• Software above the level of a single device


• Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

Enterprise 2.0, is a definition generally credited to Professor Andrew MacAfee of Harvard Business School who first used it in 2006, (directly after the Tim O’Reilly fully defined the Web 2.0 Meme Map), to describe an Enterprise with a business model and business architecture based on these capabilities. This led to the development of the entire school of thought across Business Schools around the need for Business Model Innovation, driven by the new Technology Innovation. With time and practical experience gained by early adopters this has led to the ‘Interactive’ business model definition of using Web 2.0 technologies to create ‘collaboration’ during the product creation, sales and sourcing phases with the view to profiting in specialised markets, created by and accessed, through Web 2.0 communities. (I am planning to do more on ‘Interactive’ in a later post)

By contrast the term Agile Enterprise was originally linked to using Agile Software Development methods in support of a constantly changing, and evolving, organisation that gains its competitiveness through its ability to change. The key definition and Architecture models are usually credited to Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom who authored the book ‘The Starfish and the Spider’ in which they describe a decentralised organisation which shows the characteristics below. Many thinkers now believe that these same characteristics can be applied to an Enterprise 2.0 Interactive Business model hence the over lap in the use of the terminology and the reason for including the term here.

• Projects are generated everywhere within the organisation or from outside the organisation


• No one is in direct hierarchal control


• Removal of anyone unit does not affect the overall organisation


• Participants function autonomously providing scalability


• Roles are amorphous and ever changing


• Knowledge and power are distributed with intelligence spread evenly


• Working groups communicate directly and not hieratically


• Key decisions are made collaboratively, on the spot, and on the fly

Business Technology, (as opposed to Information Technology), was proposed by Forrester Research in a research paper in 2006 directly following the Harvard Business School introduction of the concept of Enterprise 2.0. By definition such an Enterprise would be built on a combination of both Business and Technology in a manner that would not allow the separation of the two skills, importantly the technology used, as well as the manner in which it is used, by the Enterprise is different to the technologies, and business use, made of Information Technology. Forrester obviously connected this to both Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 topics in the manner of the key bullets above. What is more important is why they believed it necessary to do this, and they have refined this in a succession of reports with increasing detail.

The essential argument is that the term Information Technology, IT, was introduced around 1990 to differentiate the technologies, architecture, and the business use, of PCs, Servers, and Networks from the previous generation of Mini and Mainframe terminal based applications. IT has played a very significant role in the internal operational capabilities of Enterprises, but Business Technology, or BTech, is as much about external business winning as internal collaboration so together with the technology represents a new and different generation. Does that mean there is no relationship with IT?. Of course not! Just as IT has a relationship with Mainframe and (still some) Mini applications so does BTech have a relationship with IT in order to administer the same necessary business commercial processes that it current runs.

BUT what is this and how should it be done is a big question, and one that all the current major technology vendors with their customer base on IT are determined to use as their way forward into BTech. Too many of the current CEOs were around in the shift to IT and remember many previous leaders disappearing as they failed to make moves to change; Digital, Prime, Wang, to name just a few.

The other challenge in all of this is how exactly do you treat the Web as a platform and run ‘services’ between enterprises, and this brings up the industry’s huge focus on Cloud Computing, and leads to some very unusual partnerships such as the just announced HP, Intel and Yahoo initiative.

Plenty of challenging stuff in all of this!!! Plenty of open issues too, and therefore this post is intended to provide a starting point for some interesting discussions !!

In short both devices make the multi media life style, as opposed to what I would call the home use of a PC a reality. If you are using one of these devices with in excess of 100Gb of storage, always on Internet and wireless connectivity will it change what you do on the over the Internet and in using the Web? The only possible answer is yes, as you will no longer think about many of the current constraints that cover the use of digital media.

Exactly what will be the impact on the internal enterprise provision of ‘technology’, (meaning traditional IT systems and the new wave of Internet Web based technologies), driven by the expectations of users comparing things with their home systems? Stephen Abram on his Stephen’s Lighthouse blog reckons that expectations are being driven by what users see, and get, when they visit the top web sites. As he says it’s a pretty good argument and he then goes on to publish what are the top 50 sites.

The topic gets a little more scientifically examined by the centre for User Interface Engineering, and I really recommend you to take a look at their work when considering how you are constructing any screen interface. What all this is building up to is that all of us industry professionals with our views on the provisioning of business supporting technology are still thinking inwardly and around the way that we have delivered applications. The people who are going to be using our solutions, are not thinking the same way, and therefore we can expect them to not be too impressed with our views of what they want.

Just think on the storage issue for a moment, why at home can you have so much, why is your e mail account effectively unlimited, and then why is it all such an issue at work? When we can answer that we get to first base, but in looking at the way user expectations are growing and changing second base is a long way further on. Most significantly of all they will be blurring our part of the solution with the other businesses that they are collaborating with.

And, in this piece, I haven’t even touched on building business solutions to win business competitively from customers. There it’s going to be a case of exceeding the user expectations in comparison with competitors or losing the business. Finally don’t lose sight of that comment its not a simple case of survival of the fittest but the most able collaborator in the market being the most likely to win.

As always, thoughts and/or comments are greatly appreciated.

This issue:

• Has Apple helped create the real Web 2.0? [psfk]
  Is Apple breaking away from today's browser centric applications to be the first to create the user centric web?
• The Web that time forgot [The New York Times]
  More than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where “anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.”
• Gartner identifies top ten disruptive technologies for 2008 to 2012 [eHomeUpgrade]
  Agree or disagree?
• Pixar's tightknit culture is its edge [Signal vs. Noise]
  As the pace of change increases, and companies increasingly hand once core elements of their business to partners, it's a companies culture that provides its edge.

Katiushka Borges is Senior Advisor for Capgemini UK.
She is a communications specialist, journalist, psychological profiler, NLP Master business trainer, CXO executive coach and ‘half a geek’.

"I’ve been working for at least 20 years trying to understand what make business leaders succeed by choosing to ‘put myself in their shoes’. I have tried all sorts of fine pairs, styles and shapes to understand what makes them tick.
Early this year, I decided to try on ‘the shoes of the most influential CIOs’ that are now leading the way. What an exciting experience!
These new CIO shoes felt like a glove with wings, so I decided to walk the path of this new generation of amazing CIO leaders and pay respect to them as they can inspire us all!
Please take a look at their leadership styles, and notice what has changed from the role of IT Director to the new influential CIO.

What has changed?
CIOs sit at board meetings and what they have to say is listened to, by the CEOs and other board members, who know that linking technology with business growth is the way to go!
They seem to be focusing more on technology and innovation than ever before, and they are managing all the functions more holistically across the companies they work for.

How can we build a portrait of common qualities and preferred communication styles to identify what drives them to succeed?
I went inside their heads, like the experience of opening a portal…a door or a window into their minds. If you have seen the film ‘Being John Malkovich’, you know what I mean.

Once I put their shoes on, I applied a ‘Strategic Personality Profiling (SPP)’ method I developed over the past 20 years with the motivation to understand “the difference that makes the difference”! SPP is based on rigorous research criteria and systemic analysis of publicly available data (press, video and podcasts), language patterns, values and beliefs.

I used some of the principles of Modelling Excellence, based on what Richard Bandler and John Grinder (creators of NLP) developed around what makes people excel at what they do, and how that can be duplicated.

How can we see through their eyes, listen through their ears and tap into their minds?
I wanted to understand their driving force, their ways of looking at technology and how they are now behind the wheel of business growth.
Please come with me on this journey to understand what makes them, in my opinion, the business leaders of today.

5 key findings:

1- Empowering leadership styles
Every move in their career has allowed them to better integrate lines of business and functions to drive efficiencies. They like to support and empower their teams towards collaboration and success.

2- High achievers
They are successful not only because they have achieved every goal they set out to achieve but also they have moved out of their comfort zone to engage, communicate effectively and manage complex organisations. They love challenge.

3- Strategic Innovators
They have driven business innovation and taken the step of strategically aligning IT to the business; by not only delivering at an operational level but also by keeping projects on track.

4- Well balanced communication styles
They shared preferred communication styles, such as Kinesthestic (can do approach – hands on –make ideas tangible - grab and deliver – fix and solve – material results) and Auditory Digital (Auditory in a Visual sense, which means they connect ideas in their head like a flowchart that integrates both audio and visual components into events - information in a structured way).

5- Valued board members
Excellent at understanding the importance of sitting at a board table and talking business. Self-assured of the role they need to play in driving business growth in a holistic way, by connecting all the dots and all aspects of the business.

10 Key personality indicators to model their power to influence

The key qualities, including values and beliefs they share:

1. Proactive, honest, determined, hard-working, and confident.
2. Intellectually active, their minds are quick and agile.
3. Business and customer focused.
4. Energetic and rigorous thinkers. Every action should be considered thoroughly and every move should have a very clear purpose.
5. They bring expertise and knowledge from other sectors to drive business change, with an understanding of what can and cannot be done.
6. Good at translating ideas into action with unity of purpose.
7. Great skill in commanding attention when they present their thoughts to others. Creative use of metaphors, communication is important to them.
8. Ability to influence others and get them aligned to focus and work towards a common goal. They coach and empower their teams.
9. Focused on ways of using technology to grow the business and reduce costs. Strong drive to excel and succeed.
10. Innovative and strategic. Open to listen to new ways of doing things that bring ‘material results’.

Walking in someone else’s shoes is not easy. However, keeping a pair of ‘fine shoes’ like these handy, might help us understand ‘the difference that makes the difference’. Voila. Vive la difference!"

Any comments or questions, please add a comment to this blog or email katiushka.borges@capgemini.com

We now follow the ‘scent’ of the topic that interests us jumping from site to site and skimming the text looking for instant recognition of the key facts that we seek. He has much to say on how to create readable content that will be easy to assimilate and gets the maximum across in the minimum number of words to suit this behaviour. All good stuff, and for those of us who are trying to maximise the use of online to ‘market’, ‘inform’, or whatever, worth following so here is the link, and following his advice I didn’t provide the link till I had made you read the above!!

BUT here is the controversial point – he doesn’t believe in Blogging! Quote; ‘such postings are good for generating controversy and short term traffic …. but they don’t build sustainable value’.

However I believe there are two vital points to consider; the first is the old adage that ‘people buy people’, or in this medium readers want to identify personally with a Blogger(s) who they think will be reflective of their role and interest. Hence why this is the CTO’s blog, though we could have made it CIO/CTO’s blog in terms or readership.

The second is the real punch line; it’s getting near the point that technology companies can’t afford the cost of marketing their ever changing product portfolios! Remember the proud statements; ‘half of our product portfolio didn’t exist eighteen months ago’, now think of the cost of conventionally preparing and marketing all the conventional launch collateral. Well try this statement from the Financial Times; ‘IDC research shows that worldwide average vendor revenue growth will be 5.7 per cent in 2008, while the average sales and marketing cost envelope is growing by 7 per cent. Every dollar of new revenue that a vendor earns, costs more. Or in other words, the return on investment of marketing is declining.’

Seems to make it pretty clear that we are all going to have to work harder with our colleagues in sales and marketing on our approach to building our online customer experience, and that links back to the previous blog on this topic in checking for overall effectiveness of using a web site.

John Furneaux is a colleague at Capgemini, who I’ve recently started to converse with on Socio-technical thinking. John kindly offered to write a guest post on an interesting – and more to the point potentially useful – evolution in search. Hope you enjoy.

ps – these posts from 2007 might also provide interesting additional context… ERP where E is the World and Sandy.

Cuil bursts onto the semantic search scene - John Furneaux

Ten years ago an unnamed portal owner told two guys from an internet start-up called BackRub (who were trying to sell a superior search technology) that “as long as we're 80 percent as good as our competitors, that's good enough. Our users don't really care about search”. 10 years later, I think the Google duo have made their point.

So can anyone challenge Google with superior search results? There has certainly been no shortage of attempts. But with its prodigious computing resources, unmatched brand equity and dominance across multiple search verticals (maps, images, news etc.), Google will surely retain the same dominion over web search for the foreseeable future that Microsoft has for so long held over the desktop.

Enter semantic search. A search engine guided by crawlers which identify the meaning of the pages they retrieve, not solely their data content and keywords. ‘Meaning’ in this context is not about vast leaps in artificial intelligence, but the ability to glean structured facts from unstructured data, like the location of an earthquake strike from a news article.

The latest venture into this space is Cuil (pronounced “cool”), the launch challenged, slightly bizarrely branded and even ridiculed brainchild of ex-Googlers which sought and received unprecedented launch publicity in its first live 48 hours. So what does it offer more than its rather macho claim of a larger index than any competitor?

Does this represent a stronger proposition for users?

While the layout and aesthetics may prove popular according to taste, the other features are perhaps misguided. If I’d wanted to know about ‘Companies of France’ (one of the associated categories) I could have typed in ‘french companies’. If I’d wanted a picture related to Capgemini, I’d have clicked ‘Images’ for my search in Google, a split second effort. So why is Cuil so exciting? Because its attempt to understand my query demonstrates again that the semantic web is far from stuck in the dreams of PhD researchers, but is impacting real-life working services. Following in the footsteps of Hakia, it reminds us of the approaching new paradigm, a shift as starkly different from the status quo as was the move to Google’s search from Yahoo’s directory.

The first impact of this shift is for individual users requiring information. The key here is in the question which precedes each internet search. Nobody wants to know “apple pie recipe”. That’s the query they construct to answer the question “What’s the recipe for apple pie?”. In this way, searching is currently a four step process. Take a question (“What is the tallest building in London?”), convert it to a query (“tallest building london”), choose a result (Wikipedia article on ‘Tall Buildings in London’) and scan for your answer (One Canada Square). A fully-functional semantic engine in comparison will take its criteria from the question itself and use its structures of meaning to provide more relevant information.

This is the approach of Powerset, the search start-up recently acquired by Microsoft. Despite some promising progress, Powerset is perhaps not there yet, as it currently operates only over the Wikipedia domain, which is metadata rich in the first place. In this new world where ‘search’ engines actually answer questions and are therefore actually more like ‘retrieval’ engines, the Google approach of offering vast numbers of links to places which might hold your answer could start to look decidedly retro.

The second - perhaps more dramatic - shift will be for the enterprise. Once these metadata-rich services are constructed, they will be accessible through any number of widgets. Take an example task such as data cleansing – to spot erroneous surnames in data fields, a widget could identify those entries which return abnormally low matching results when compared with the surname list built semantically from sources across the web. Or perhaps it might use the aggregation of data items identified as song titles from social networks as well as blogs and websites to identify not just keyword trends (like Google Trends) but real insight into global trends in music by album, compilation, artist or genre. Or might it support product development by trawling blogs, forums and comparison websites identifying the specific functionalities which users appreciate most by gadget type. In essence, disparate information on the Internet will actually be accessible as if internally held.

The bottom line for Cuil? It’s no Google-killer (although who really knows…): but the increasing raft of semantically oriented search engine competitors from the ground up might start to make the search marketplace just that little more varied, and perhaps even a little more Cuil.

This post is based on collecting, and collating, a wide variety of views and is my attempt in one quick post to provide an ‘ah ha’ moment that may help others. I believe there are three key elements that are delivered by Business Technology, BT, and it’s the first two that create the reason for the third being the break through that is already starting to drive business models, and therefore will lead to technology architecture.

That leads to the second element, that of ‘Collaboration’ where by the flexibility of people leads to changes in the way a business can be administered, but without disturbing the existing IT procedures. In a Long Tail business model the one size fits all procedures of existing IT clearly won’t work in terms of the engagement model with the resulting numerous external markets. Here Web 2.0 technology can provide capabilities to link ‘events’ with ‘people and expertise’ to provide answers that can then lead to an action, that hopefully finally leads to a sale which can be recorded in the existing IT systems.

What both of these illustrate is the third element; ‘Interaction’ between people, and between processes. This leads me to suggest that the Business Model, Business Architecture and the Technology architecture are all based on shifting to an ‘interaction’ based environment. In terms of the Business Model we currently understand the terms ‘proactive’ and ‘reactive’ in respect of choosing when to change our offerings, but in respect of a largely static environment. The launch of a new offering is assumed to be the beginning of another period of stability during which the new offering will maintain a competitive position in the market.

Our choice is whether to ‘proactively’ drive the market change for everyone; Apple iPod as an example, or ‘reactively’ catch up with an MP3 player under our own brand, such as Samsung. However, in Long Tail markets the key seems to be to ‘interact’ with the potential customers to decide together how to come up with an ‘optimal’ deal for both parties. Think low cost airlines for choosing flight times, costs or destinations, or since I used the music industry, Radiohead with its offer to allow its fans to choose how much they paid to download its latest album. This same principle shows up time and time again in a wide variety of markets.

Now if that is the value proposition for Business Technology, BT, in terms of creating new markets, new revenues, even new products, then it needs the Business and Technology architecture models has to support this. And that’s a really big topic! Actually it’s the topic for my new white paper that I am planning to write over the next six weeks when business life is a little less hectic here in Europe! So any contributions and thoughts on this are welcomed!

Since a post I made in February on how the IT industry might have inadvertently corrupted the word ‘system’ – I appear to have been getting quite close to what might only be described as a personal ‘Dreyfus Moment’.

For those of you familiar with the Pink Panther films, you might recall how the Chief Inspector Dreyfus character develops an increasingly obvious twitch, and is eventually driven mad by the folly of Peter Seller’s Jacques Clouseau. I call this ‘The Dreyfus Moment.’ I think many us approach moments like these in our professional lives and for me I seem to be developing my twitch in response to the term ‘IT System.’

The encounters seem more regular than ever these days - a little cruelly but perhaps entirely predictably precipitated in my own universe by the post complaining about the term in the first place - and usually begin along the lines of….

• ‘The IT system cost too much because…’ or
• ‘The IT system failed because…’ or
• ‘The IT system isn’t doing what we asked…’ or
• ‘Unlike the old one, the new IT system will deliver x, y and z!’ where x = cost efficiencies, y = new business value, and z = on time and on budget

My perspective is that the term isn’t helpful. Worse, the term itself can help us take our collective eye of the ball. Because I don’t think there’s one ‘IT System’ in the world which doesn’t have at least one person interact with it (directly or indirectly) at some point.

And if there is this interaction, the thing that will help us with cost and value is not the IT System by itself, it’s the ‘PEOPLE IT System’. (Describing this several times in a single day can lead one dangerously close to the Dreyfus Moment!) And where people are involved, we need to think about the system in equal measure from the point of view of the people and the technology. And if we really did that, we might not look to the IT System alone to address many of the organisational issues.

Taking a dose of some perspective inducing medicine as I write this (coffee in this case), the term IT System is of its time and has been adopted with good reason. IT System is synonymous with the real world delivery of IT in business and fits perfectly the description Andy provides of Information Technology in comparison to Business Technology.

And perhaps it is because of late ‘IT’ has seemed to be having counter-productive effects and ‘BT’ has seen to be gaining momentum as a way to support the business in the connected world that my own twitch has developed.

So if IT and its application through IT Systems described the pre-Web world, which concepts might we turn to for helpful context as we seek to apply Business Technology? I’m keen to see how the business architecture discussion progresses through Andy’s posts – specifically around the ‘bottom-up versus top-down’ approach – and to provide a little complement to the discussion I wanted to introduce the Socio-Technical Systems concept to it specifically. To my mind, ‘Socio-Technical Systems’ perspectives are helpful – perhaps in fact critical - for BT because they:

• recognise the interaction between people and technology
• recognise the interaction between society and people behaviour
• and therefore work well as an aid to understanding the Web model

The term is in use by folks engaged in the Web Science Research Initiative and one can see why.

As we understand more the step-change represented by Business Technology, the hope has to be the industry gets to grips with the step-changes of why and how Business Technology gets adopted, and why and how BT works well and not so well. And my twitch tells me it is not by thinking IT Systems first.

We were here some twenty years ago, and many of us built our careers on the last paradigm change around the introduction of Personal Computing and the whole shift in technology and working practice that this introduced. It was this shift in, well just about every aspect of computing and its use, which led to the term Information Technology, or IT, being introduced in the early nineties to cover this entirely different environment. The point of introducing the term was to separate the new technology environment built around PCs, Networks, and Client- Server architecture from the previous generation of computing technology.

There is a similar argument today that says using Web based technologies in the enterprise is sufficiently different both for business purpose and technologies applied that it too should have a different name to prevent confusion. Forrester Group, as far as I am aware, first proposed this back in 2006, and followed up with a detailed analysis in May 2007. Since then it has become more widely recognised and adopted.

“Business Architecture” is an architecture that structures the accountability over business activities prior to any further effort to structure individual aspects (processes, data, functions, organization, systems, applications, etc.). A Business Architecture arranges the accountabilities around the most important business activities (for instance production, distribution, marketing, etc.) and/or the economic activities (for instance manufacturing, assembly, transport, wholesale, etc.) into domains.

That works for IT, but what works for BT? Firstly what comes first the technology architecture as in the case of client-server leading to business architecture of ERP, or the Business innovating its working practice as in the case of the PC at initially a personal level? Right now I think we are at the personal level moving to the department level in much of the Web 2.0 based adoption, and we are just starting to grasp the enterprise level consequences with the MashUp playing the role of the spreadsheet.
A colleague has just written an excellent white paper on deploying MashUps at Enterprise level that demonstrates the value of this move clearly. But what is the real Business Architecture that is the value from Business Technology? Your thoughts are welcomed and I will be posting mine next week.