It never ceases to amaze me how new ways of working emerge when information and services, from many different sources, are available to anyone, anytime, anywhere.

What’s really fascinating is that these new ways of working aren’t the preserve of the corporate strategists - communities of people, both as employees and as individuals, are often generating them. In fact, the IT we use as an individual is often more sophisticated than the IT we use at work.

The world is exponentially more connected and each connection fuels more connections. This level of (increasing) connectedness is unprecedented. At the same time, we are witnessing an unprecedented level of ‘business-technology fusion.’ People and machines, business and IT, are becoming fundamentally fused (even without the science-fiction, recall the last time you left your phone at home and for most it feels like a part of you is missing!)

How might we view our changing world? Here are some concepts I’ve collated from the great and good over the past months. Whether one agrees with the specific definitions or not, what each of them describes in spirit is an undeniable reality and the onward march of each is inevitable:

• Co-value creation (I use this quite a bit)
• Exponential globalisation
• Collaborative innovation
• Prosumerism (a personal favourite!)
• The long tail
• Connected everything
• No frontiers automation
• New business model innovation
• Information centricity
• Interaction centricity
• Mashed up corporations
• World 2.0
• Supply to demand chain, and
• Unbundled everything

While these are all useful strategic concepts they are more of an effect than a cause. And so for the balanced view we should peek into the cause too.

How might we describe the cause? I like to use the phrase ‘Information & communications technology society’ to describe the shift in the macro-environment and to my mind there are three causal trends:

#1 Everything and everyone becoming connected
#2 People and machines becoming fused
#3 Product-based to service-based economy

The intriguing aspect is that each of these is opposite to the culture baked into many business models in use by mature organisations today.

I’d actually go further and say successful 21st century business and government is based on a business model which has all of the 3 trends considered foundationally, and which understands that people are people:

This picture emerged from a stimulating conversation I had recently with Ken Olisa, and I’d love to hear your views.

I have been working with SAP NetWeaver and the developing Business Process Platform since 2003. In that time I have seen the emergence of a rich and increasingly complete SOA-enabled software platform. Despite some interesting development around Enterprise Architecture in that time, I wonder whether much has changed in typical SAP implementation projects?

The potential of the Business Process Platform is substantially different than yesterday’s CRM, ERP, SCM etc. platforms. Delivering SOA-enabled business content on a rich infrastructure offers the possibility of some very different deployment models for business solutions. Too often I find that the SAP team within the client organisation acting as the sole custodian of SAP solutions and that the Architecture Team (if one exists at all within the customer’s organisation) seen as the ‘enemies’ of the SAP team. Too often the Enterprise Architects are not even interested or engaged sufficiently in guiding and shaping the development of those SAP deployments within their business. If they do try, then they tend to operate out of their old-fashioned custom developed software paradigms. We are also frozen into the old way of very large-scale project deployments of business solutions – when, in fact we could be moving to a more rapid finer-grained deployment and enhancement of business capability.

How can we pull the world of the Enterprise Architect together with that of the SAP practitioner?

I wanted to share this post with you. Chris is a leading industry figure and a close colleague. We’d be fascinated to hear your views on Chris’s idea of an Index of Convergence.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I did when I read it.

Index of Convergence – Chris Yapp

Thirty years ago this month I took delivery of a Decwriter II and an acoustic coupler. It could deliver 110 baud and on a good day 300. I sent my first email! We often talk about the exponential change and the rapid innovations in IT. Certainly I’ve seen over my career moves from hundreds and thousands to Mega, Giga and Terra on the one hand and down to the nano on the other.

Yet last week, I was talking to a client who was still struggling to make a business case to upgrade from office 97 meet financial hurdles. If we really were making exponential change surely this wouldn’t be so hard?

The shift in fees, announced back in February 2008, certainly helps volume sellers at the expense of individuals selling their unwanted items, as they; on one hand lift the eBay cut of the transaction from 5.25% to 7.25%, whilst offering volume discounts of up to 40%; on the other hand they reduce the listing fee by up to 33%. Both moves that favour, and presumably encourage, the business seller, hence my comment is this a game change in the business model?

The old definition was pretty clear and linked to the technology and the needs for interconnection between applications, and systems which were inherently separate vertical stacks. But now I see it being used to cover a much wider range of topics, and most, if not all, of them relate to what I would describe as ‘business’ activities. Take a look at Oracle Application Integration Architecture, AIA, to see what I mean the Oracle definition now includes Business Intelligence as an example.

Users are increasingly recognising the value of a MashUp to combine this mass of unstructured content found on the Web into a focussed view that suits their requirements. Maybe we should coin the term ‘structured presentation’? A well built MashUp is truly a satisfying experience, producing the same feelings in the user as I think the spreadsheet must have produced when they first experienced it. Freedom to do what I require the way I need it to be done.

However there are a couple of concerns;

Just a bit of warm bonding with an audience. There’s nothing like it.

But admitted, during the recent Go Open conference in Oslo, I saw an excellent example of what the Open Source is donating to the real world. I have written about it before, but the XO ‘100$ laptop’ of the One Laptop Per Child foundation still manages to inspire more and more people. After Håkon Wium Lie, the brain behind the Opera browser and a true IT Rockstar in Norway, had showed a XO during his speech, the podium was swarmed by people that just wanted to touch and feel that small, very green-painted wonder machine.

Although the XO is not an open source community initiative (others are responsible for that), it does run completely on free software, which obviously helps to keep the production price low. The OLPC initiative is extremely relevant, as it aims to educate the children in our world, and I encourage all of you to donate to it and tell it to others.

By the way for those not keeping up with the news so called ‘white knight’ AOL has now gone off and bought a search company, albeit perhaps not a general search engine, but a more focussed one. Meantime other names are being quoted, or speculated, as being interested, and the list now includes Google, (of course), and News Corp. At some stage all markets become mature and consolidation occurs, witness the recent main software vendor’s activities in buying up smaller companies, but this is usually a sign that innovation in the market, or the products, is now slow and revenue growth needs to come from this route.

The principle part of his argument was related to a comment by Greg Mankiw, a Harvard professor with one of the world’s most widely read economist’s blogs, that he was disabling the comments section as it was taking too much of his time to respond to all the posts. Actually if see the original view it was that ‘poor quality’ and ‘inappropriate’ posts were becoming a big issue. I can relate to that as we are continually receiving posts asking for jobs, but I was interested because I have been seeing another reaction to commenting on Blogs. In my case I see more comments by direct personal emails then I see as publicly posted comments, and at the same time the number of readers continues to rise suggesting (I hope!) that the content is at least reasonably interesting.

The thing is, the way they package technology into solutions that touch the heart of their clients is simply unmatched. And the rest of the IT industry can learn from it. Take for example the new Time Capsule product: when I was in London last weekend (unexpectedly enjoying snow and some things happening around a torch) I witnessed it life for the first time in the Apple Store in Regent Street and I bought it immediately trough the Internet when I returned home. It essentially just happens to be a backup device, but it is wireless and looks like a piece of art. It works in the background, in real-time synchronised with one or multiple computers (best of course Apples, equipped with Time Machine software, but even Windows PC’s will do) and it comes with half a terabyte of storage (or a full terabyte, if you want to backup your entire neighbourhood).

In our new vision document TechnoVision 2012 – much more about it soon on this blog – we introduce the concept of Invisible Infostructure: an information-rich business and technology infrastructure that is virtual, remotely managed, self-configuring and delivered as a utility, thus almost perfectly invisible to its users. This device fits perfectly in that vision, but then again, who want this little cutie to be invisible…

Seduced by The Apple again. How do they do it? And how can we copy it to deal better with our everyday business / IT challenges at work? For the very, very first time in my life I consider making a backup to be a cool activity. That’s a monumental achievement. Period.

First of all, some of the successfully innovating retailers pointed out that innovation can only flourish on a foundation that is stable, effective and rationalised. As one of the discussion partners said “if you explicitly want to reserve one day a week for all of your employees to be involved in innovation, that is something you must be a able to permit yourself first”.

Another introduced the concept of an Ocean of Calm as the state a company must achieve, before it can innovate over and over again. An almost ZEN-like approach that actually resonates very well with the findings of our recent CIO Survey 2008: companies that are using IT in the most innovate way are also the companies that control and manage their existing IT infrastructure and business applications much better than average

Secondly the conclusion was drawn that – sadly – real breakthroughs in innovation in many cases only occur in a time of crisis. It takes a lot of persuasion to change the organisation and people if they don’t really have to. And although increased transparency in strategy, measures and results certainly helps (it sure did for C&A, winners of the Connect Retail Award 2008), sometimes there is nothing left than to happily embrace crisis as the trigger for transformation.

So it’s the Crisis, Hurray, Crisis! once more. It’s probably just what has to happen before you enter the Ocean of Calm.

It really does seem that the old model of dog years to mark Internet progress has re asserted itself as the speed of answers to posted thoughts and ideas seems to be going ever faster. I guess you may have read the MySpace announcement of a revenue earning business set up with the big music labels in competition to iTunes? If not then you can find a selection of posts. The official site is pretty worthy, and dull, to get the vibes on this from, so if you missed it the news report from InfoWorld is a good place to catch up, but some of the blogs are more interesting and the readwriteweb site carries a particular one that brings me to my point, with a comment on this being beneficial to the ‘long tail’ of music more than the mainstream acts.