In other places I’ve seen the headline ‘Google threatens Microsoft SharePoint with cloud collaboration’ which suggests Wave is ‘just another’ ‘online’ collaboration package. I’ve also seen statements suggesting it is ‘Twitter on steroids’. All of these comments relate to an old way of product comparison, based around features and functions. Pushing aside my preconceptions, my starting point is somewhat different. From my perspective, Wave relates to changing working practices and the need for tools to support new ways of working which in turn are being driven by new trading conditions. Of course there is also a personal lifestyle scenario to it; hence the link to Twitter, but this is a business blog so I will stay with the business use scenario.

What the networked PC brought about was a revolution to this working environment - starting with the tearing down of walls between departments, in favour of optimising the end-to-end process across the enterprise. One of the aspects to make this work - and still further reduce cost flexibility in working practice - was matrix working. If you think about it, you will realise that there’s no way you could make such a flexible work arrangement without the support of email. In fact, you can and should argue that implementing email is a necessity for a matrix organisational model. However, even with matrix working, there is enough structure and stability for the various members of an enterprise to know to what, when and with whom they should be communicating (especially as in the beginning it’s still likely to have only been an internal environment). In fact, the norm was a point-to-point communication, involving just the sender and the receiver - free of all the copies that have become all too familiar.

Email was and is a great mechanism for supporting the administration of standard business processes and procedures. From it, people have defined roles and can therefore have a directory with this information to assist further in making the person, role and responsibility explicit. All of this assumes a great deal of stability in the organisation and its tasks, with a limited need for some supplementary clarification between participants.

Fast forward to today with the internet, then look at email in its new and uncomfortable role of connecting to other people in different organisations. As the web of personnel gets more and more complex, structure and organisation become much more fluid and changeable. The tremendous change in dynamics destroys the ability to have a structure and a meaningful directory. It’s way beyond the capabilities of email and business models based around Enterprise 2.0, (and for that I take the most popular definition meaning a dynamic and reactive online business using Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing). Email just cannot cope and we are all overwhelmed by the copied emails that are sent around the enterprise in the hope of finding just one recipient who might know the answer!

What we need is a way to combine relevant elements such as who is involved in what areas, with what the current event is. The objective being to get the right people with the right knowledge, experience or interest, to participate in the currently required task. This is not the same job as email sets out to perform. The metaphor I like to use compares this difference to the train for moving a large number of people over a set route at set times, versus taxis offering freedom for individuals to go where they need to go when they need to go, singularly or in small groups. I think we can go a little further into this to gain a further insight by trying to bring to the people issue of Web 2.0 into the same understanding we have seen in Web 1.0.

In Web 1.0 we learnt to understand the global nature of the content available to us on web sites and how to use search engines for ‘categorisation’. We also knew that we needed RSS to track the frequently changing information that was important to us. If we look at Web 2.0, we can see something similar. Communities provide the categorisation aspect and help us find the group of people sharing interest in the topic; but at the same time, if someone is uniquely important to us then good quality micro blogging is the equivalent of RSS. The challenge is that we usually need the people and the content to be connected plus the ability to have a recognisable trail of activity etc.

I think that’s the challenge that Wave sets out to address. But in so doing, it must address all of the pieces and so functionally it can be compared to everything else, whether that’s Twitter on steroids, a challenger to SharePoint and collaboration tools or lastly a new email system. For me, the challenge is to concentrate on how people and content want and need to interact across the entire internet, both for business and social reasons, then evaluate what Google Wave brings to this scenario. At the enterprise level that brings about the question of how we are organised to work effectively in today’s rapidly changing and dynamic environments. One thing is for sure and that’s Wave is worth studying as it gets refined over the next year, as it might just turn out to be a key capability for support new fluid business models.

Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries. Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.

Now let’s go to a more recognisable new capability which I think in its own way creates a game changer and - unlike Wolfram|Alpha - was a pretty low-key announcement so you may well have missed it. Cordys is the latest company for Dutch serial software entrepreneur Jan Baan who seems to have been in the right place at the right time for each new wave of technology or capabilities. The announcement was made under the title of ‘Cordys enables business process automation for Google Apps’ and once again it takes some digging around to really understand what is a most interesting new capability.

Google Apps provides a wide range of collaboration tools covering everything from Gmail and Google Calendar, through to office productivity tools for producing documents and slides. But it aims at personal productivity and interactions and is therefore effectively ‘unstructured’. This prevents Google Apps from handling other enterprise tasks which require there to be a ‘managed workflow’, and are usually considered to be ‘structured’. Cordys’ Process Factory provides the capabilities to build workflow over Google Apps thus opening up a whole range of new possibilities. Not only that, but it runs from the ‘cloud’ environment and doesn’t require anything to be installed at the user’s site. This opens up the possibility that - as far as I can tell - it could also support intra company workflow too.

The best place to get a ‘look and feel’ is at the Google marketplace, which by the way, I suspect a lot of people don’t know about. It is well worth spending a few moments to see what else is around. So, Cordys may not have the excitement factor of Wolfram|Alpha but it certainly rates for me as a usable breakthrough that takes Cloud Services another step forward.

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.

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.

"This week the hotly debated topic of climate change will be discussed as key European policy makers come together in Copenhagen for the World Business Summit on Climate Change. The summit, attended by world leaders and energy experts including Ban Ki-moon, from the United Nations; Al Gore, former US Vice President; and Connie Hedegaard, Minister of Climate and Energy for Denmark, will aim to develop policy and innovative business models to drive a sustainable transformation of the economy and stimulate job creation alongside low-carbon solutions.

A recent Capgemini study (“Long-term sustainability orientations for businesses”) looks into this topic and measures how during the current economic downturn, many companies are focusing on short-term decisions in order to overcome day-to-day difficulties, particularly in regard to sustainable development. However, it is important for businesses not to lose sight of the long-term impact of their decisions, especially because the present short term economic signals are not indicative of future challenges They should continue to invest in energy savings and in decreasing their CO2 footprint as well as in lower consuming products (as the Light Emitting Diodes to replace the incandescent bubbles). However,because of the presently low energy prices and of the lack of available project financing, the Return On Investment on these needed improvement projects is too long. This is why Government’s support to boost these investments in industry and tertiary businesses should be decided.

Our planet’s population is growing rapidly in developing countries and these populations have legitimate aspirations for better standards of living (for example there are currently around 1.6 billion people in the world who have no access to electricity). So, one can expect that, after the crisis is over, worldwide energy demand will go up again. Thus, it is vital that the reduction in energy consumption in developed countries aims at compensating partially for the increase in the developing ones."

Colette Lewiner, Global Leader of Energy, Utilities & Chemicals, Capgemini

The starting point was John Jordan in his excellent blog called ‘early indications’, which re-examined the case for offshoring work from the USA. He argued that the original case had been purely financial, but with time and scale it seemed that the original calculations were incomplete. John started with the base financial calculation, which assumes a savings of $400,000 per job, per year, and points out that for 3,000 workers, that means over $1 billion a year in cost savings – a point at which the case would seem to be irresistible to any hard pressed enterprise with active shareholders.

The second piece was again from a good and consistent source on this topic namely Bob Kennedy, author of the book ‘The Services Shift’, who has maintained a kind of running commentary on the whole topic, but chose to make his end of April piece around the political consequences of offshoring, something not in John’s eight factors. Bob again identifies that with time and the global downturn, the topic of offshoring jobs has become a hot political subject, but concludes that, in spite of the pressure from workers and unions, nothing has happened yet. Bob states this is because of the simple reason that politicians find it nearly impossible to regulate global trade without harming their own economies, and in particular, find it very had to define the ‘services’ element of trade.

The third new piece on the topic is about manufacturing rather than services, but it introduces the key question in the light of the changing set of circumstances already identified. The piece that I am quoting from is a detailed paper examining the issues of ‘far shore’, and again I urge you to visit http://www.logisticsmgmt.com/article/CA6649196.html and read the full paper as it takes all of the arguments and puts them together. So what is it that caught my eye? Quote: Are we implying that far-shoring is no longer a viable strategy? Not at all. The point is that worldwide economic problems and changes have drastically altered the cost dynamics associated with manufacturing and distribution network strategies. So much so, in fact, that companies may no longer assume that far-shore operations are less expensive in the long term.

So new factors are in play that didn’t affect the first wave of offshoring and might now take some of the appeal out of continued offshoring, but at the same time, they all seem to agree that overall the trend will continue. But does it have to be all or nothing in this question of where to place work? There is a hidden thread in all three pieces, and that is the technology shift, meaning that increasingly you can coordinate pretty complex elements into a cohesive outcome, and that’s the argument for ‘right shoring’. When you buy from IKEA and get several packages that together make up the product, this is a kind of ‘right shoring’, as each package comes from a different company with the expertise on that particular part (okay, no jokes about IKEA and flat pack at this stage, as it clearly works well given their growth around the world).

In the services industries, we have few of the limitations, and we should take a long look at how to move to phase 2 of the requirement to find the right place to do the work. We can use all of the factors identified, plus some new ones around localised markets with their own differentiations, to be accommodated with the mainstream work. With the rise of ‘services’ and ‘clouds’, the delivery shift towards ‘everything as a service’, XaaS, to say nothing of new pressures on economies and costs, now does seem to be the right time to revisit the topic.

It’s not just the consumption side either, it has changed the software development side too, by introducing a ready market place for anyone who has a bright idea and given them a route to market complete with revenues. With more than 35,000 apps on the site already, it seems that this message has sunk in, and therefore real innovation is being unleashed too. Sometimes it’s frivolous at one level, but shows something pretty important at another such as ‘bumping’, which was the one millionth downloaded app, www.bumptechnologies.com being the ability to bump two iPhones together to initiate an exchange of information.

Perhaps the real innovation is in the iPhone itself as, in a typical Apple, manner it redesigned the feature/functionality mix, including adding sensors for motion, etc. that have driven some of the really ‘off the wall’ downloadable apps. All in a form factor to fit in a male shirt pocket which according to one colleague is the real test for a modern device. Unless shirt pockets are getting bigger i don’t think that quite explains the other statistics around devices, starting with the relentless fall in PC sales and the equally relentless rise in Smart Phone sales. If I remember this correctly then the curves say that there will be more smart phones in the world than PCs in a couple of years. However, I reckon by then this will be a meaningless comparison, hidden away in the current statistics for PC shipments is – and I quote – the sweet spot of small form notebooks already propping up the figures for PC sales.

The market is shifting towards personal devices that are small and mobile, and yes that means lighter note books for those who need more capabilities, or smaller and lighter sub notebooks, web books, or whatever else you like to call them for everyone else. All of these are fundamentally built around mobility, wireless access, and the web as a ubiquitous support environment, so it’s not too surprising to see that a number of manufacturers are making noises about adopting Google Android as the operating system for these devices. What this might mean is speculated upon in some detail at Venture Beat but what all of this really adds up to is that the definition of the PC over the last twenty years is not going to be sustainable as the number one device in use by people.

Does that translate into the death of the PC? Most certainly not as there will continue to be a large number of desktops which for good reason are fixed and wired in, and may be have to run a full specification standalone OS for personal working, but the growth is not likely to be here. The challenge at the enterprise level is firstly the provision of thin clients in a way that permits governance and secondly to understand how these devices will get used from a personal software consumption point of view. (As I said earlier I will pick up on the software side in my next post which will feature the growing interest in ‘situational apps’, which you might think of as the new spreadsheets in terms of how they are used).

You can start to get to grips with the whole technology of thin clients at http://quocirca.computing.co.uk/2009/03/size-zero-computing-when-thin-can-be-good.html and how it has changed in various areas over the last couple of years to allow the spread of work between client and server to be better balanced, the ability to shift from each client needing a unique virtual machine to a handful of VMs serving a large number of clients, etc, etc. My closing point is that the people are choosing how to personalise their ‘experience’ in the use of software and devices, and all the signs indicate this will accelerate, so the only rational move for the enterprise MIS department is to figure out how to deal with this by updating themselves on the new forms of thin clients for the enterprise side of the equation. Reading the post I have listed may surprise you to see how it’s changed!

Unfortunately, consolidation can sometimes mean huge, centralised databases and expensive IT projects with the potential to consume large amounts of money and take a long time to deliver anything. Even once the results are delivered, sometimes the ongoing management and maintenance can be an issue. All of this is before we even address the issue of whether the data can be cleaned and consolidated, if the various departments will cooperate for common good, at what they will probably consider is at the expense of the services they deliver, etc, etc.

Personally I think it’s time to turn the argument around and start allowing eCitizens to decide how they use ‘services’ both in terms of the value the government delivers and in the use of ‘services’ meaning the technology. My simple illustration is that if a relative dies I want to follow a single integrated process to carry out necessary steps and have no interest in what, where and how all the government departments and their systems/databases deal with this information.

Governments think databases; Citizens think process! (And private sector thinks customers)

It might have been a issue around the limitations of technology some years back in the age of applications, but it most certainly isn’t a limitation currently as we move to ‘services’ delivered via a common ‘infostructure’ of the Internet and Web. The issue is organisational, where in government are the equivalents to the new roles we are starting to see in large enterprises, which are based on being in charge of an end-to-end process and the resulting effectiveness that this delivers. Sure you need to keep the departmental focus on doing the specialised aspects of each task area, and its’ associated systems, but it’s how they deliver within the consolidated and integrated process that is the value statement.

Will this deliver more for less? I don’t know without a detailed case study, but as it should ensure each department is fed the same data, at the same time for incorporation in their systems and databases, at this level alone of data entry and error handling it should be a saving. Certainly it should have the right effect on the voters in terms of the perceived value they are getting from their government.

We are moving towards this in the private sector as the leaders in customer care and relationships learn how to create stronger links with their customers, and the customers learn how to get better value from their supplier. Really good online experiences, what Capgemini calls the ‘You Experience’ are now visible in a number of sectors as the game changers that have driven new market shares. In fact you can call it a kind of ‘democratisation’ of the relationship between the consumer and the seller as it moves towards shared information leading to better ‘wins’ for both parties than the old ‘push the product’ distribution model where one size fits all, and strong marketing will convince the consumer to buy.

I have written this about eCitizens and eGovernment but it all applies to any business model, and even to internal delivery of services from the IT department. We need to shift from the provisioning of applications that suit the way the computer works to the ‘users’ who are informed that they must do what is required of them, towards thinking of them as ‘consumers’ of services from within the business. And that means both adopting and using ‘service oriented architecture’, SOA, to connect the existing applications to building and deploying through a full services model to achieve this goal.

The challenge is not technical, it’s around business organisation and structure, so it applies to more than just the IT department. Most of all, though the real challenge will be the rising expectations of citizens as they increasingly experience a new relationship with many of the major corporations who supply them with life services in every field from entertainment to travel, financial services to their work place experiences. Increasingly privatisation is taking over roles and services that were the preserve of government-provided public services. Currently governments are still monopoly suppliers of many unique services and have created their own expectations and measurements of the quality of service, but for how much longer will politicians feel able to ignore the voting citizen’s views?

I won’t argue with that belief, and indeed I have touched on this point before in posts on the topic of what exactly is cloud computing. The choice of the term ‘open’ is an interesting one as the word has many connotations, and after reading the manifesto, I am not certain which ones apply, so I tend towards the thoughts expressed by Guy Barrette on his blog on this topic. On the positive side, the introduction as to the reason for the manifesto makes a lot of sense. It starts by saying the topic has reached a fever pitch with no clear definition, and then states:

One thing is clear; the industry needs an objective, straight forward conversation about how this new computing paradigm will impact organisations, how it can be used with existing technologies, and the potential pitfalls of proprietary technologies that can lead to lock-in and limited choice.

This document is intended to initiate a conversation that will bring together the emerging cloud community (both cloud users and cloud providers) around a core set of principles. We believe that these core principles are rooted in the belief that cloud computing should be as open as other IT technologies.

So in fact the publication of the manifesto has already succeeded in one of its objectives; it has started the conversation about the principles! To pick up a point from Ron’s post on Intel Xeon 5500 vs. Open Cloud Manifesto, we have the IT vendors suggesting that Clouds should be an evolution from the existing IT environment probably with an emphasis on ‘private’ clouds in existing data centres, and we have the web-based services vendors saying that the answer is a revolution to the everything-as-a-service, XaaS, from shared or public environments.

Personally I think they are both right; i.e., why should current IT applications require the revolution when the evolution of ‘use with existing technologies’ would seem to be more sensible. But I do believe we are underestimating the development of a new generation of business capabilities, (Business Technology), that are fundamentally external by nature and therefore are best enabled by public clouds. My evidence for this is based on the way that the SmartPhone market has been both evolutionary around email, contacts, and voice with some internet access on one hand, and revolutionary around the internet and services, with voice on the other driven by the Apple iPhone model.

The ‘office apps’ led by email are the logical ‘internal’ evolution of providing existing services onto new platforms, i.e., Blackberries and Smart Phones in general, as it is still around the same basic business drivers and issues of security and cost. By comparison, the iPhone is the revolution driven by a huge range and market based on external services delivered as ‘services’ through the Apple App store, and using the Internet connectivity functionality primarily. The users decide what services they wish to consume from this new world on a pull model, whereas the Enterprise pushes the use of email off its existing email platform to the same user.

So to me the ‘hype’ and ‘confusion’ on clouds is at least partly explained by two very different communities focussed on two very different uses apparently using the same term to explain both things! No wonder Clouds seem to be the answer to all questions, and it may be the Open Cloud Manifesto will succeed in clarifying at least one of the topics!