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- Enterprise SOA without Enterprise Architecture – hunting for treasure without a map?: Guest blogger - Jonathan Ebsworth
- It's okay Cyber Storm II has passed
- The Index of Convergence - Chris Yapp
- Are eBay – changing their game?
- What is the definition of Middleware these days?
- Extract, Transform and Load – now available for MashUps
- My Laptop, Your Laptop
- Exit Yahoo – an early end to technology innovation?
- Blogging is maturing and that means changing
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My Laptop, Your Laptop
It’s something I particularly like to do when speaking at Open Source conferences, where the sentiments every now and then just tend a bit too much towards the politically correct. Open Source is Free, Green, Saving the World and – most importantly – helps us to battle the dominance of the You-Know-Who guys. Yeah. Right. In these cases, it always seems appropriate to dedicate a few minutes to the important work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation at the beginning of the presentation.
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.
Blogging is maturing and that means changing
I am normally rather cautious about Nicolas Carr blogs as he does seem to like to go for the controversial, and sure enough some six months back he posted one about Blogging in which he questioned its value. A sort of ‘Does Blogging Matter’ to paraphrase his original controversial publication ‘Does IT Matter’. Strangely enough his premise was that maybe successful Blogs are too popular, and take too much effort to maintain.
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 Semantic Web may be becoming more likely with RDF
In recent posts I have touched on the challenges of too much content, too little context, together with the further challenge of the sheer number and types of devices that will create and use data http://www.capgemini.com/ctoblog/2008/03/communications_convergence_or.php. I was even pretty provocative about whether master data has become an IT department distraction that is slowing down business requirements for ‘better’ and ‘faster’ decision making by using content in a more personal manner http://www.capgemini.com/ctoblog/2008/03/master_data_has_it_become_a_ba.php. So I think it’s about time I got a little more positive about at least one potential solution.
Seduced by the Apple: not so invisible infostructure
Did I ever tell you that I am sort of a hardcore Apple fan? Nah, probably not.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.
Social Networks think again about business models
Some time back I commented on the fact that advertising cannot be the revenue earning business model for every activity, and in particular I wondered if Social Networks really had yet found the answer to this question, especially after FaceBook got hit for its ‘novel’ approach to ‘understanding’ and promoting its members' interests to advertisers.
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.
Sector as a Service with Utilities versus Online Products
I have been struck recently by how many times I have been in conversations about what I think I can best describe as the ‘removal of value’ from products, or at least the failure to create a sustainable business proposition. Most alarmingly most of these stories are connected with new markets and the delivery of products as ‘services’, the very change that the new technologies are being adopted for by the business world. The one that sparked off this Blog piece was an interesting story in the Ecconomist.com about Online Social Networks, with the sub title ‘Social Networking will become a ubiquitous feature of online life. That does not mean it is a business’.
The point was that every new ‘service’ even if it pulls in millions of people does not necessarily have a business model, and that advertising cannot be the revenue generator for everything. The comparison point was with mail services, once seen as a key new market with Microsoft buying Hotmail, and various other big names making their own acquisitions, but today nobody has a business model generating revenue from what is still a free service, albeit now enormously upgraded in terms of amounts of storage, etc, to levels that would not have seen feasible five years ago. Why persist with providing it at all? Answer, because it is cheap to operate and keeps the millions of users within the brand and websites of the operators. So to be successful it’s the old rule, something to grab attention, a supermarket might call it a loss leader, and something else to create revenue and profits.
The Ten Top Trends in Identity Management
Last week saw the publication of a survey, well as I warned a week or so back, it is the time of year for surveys, but this one was first of all on any interesting topic and second was by a German company thus giving us a European perspective rather than the usual USA perspectives. Kupplinger Cole published their report in German but a few moments with Babel Fish gets a perfectly workable translation into English, or indeed any other major language.
Communications, Convergence or Context as a driving force
The use of the term ICT to represent the addition of ‘Communication’ capabilities to ‘IT’ seems to be slipping into articles and slides. Interestingly this also happened in the late eighties through early nineties as part of the adoption of ubiquitous networking, but then it went away again. Actually this is to me just an extension of convergence, itself another term that has been around for a long time.
The history of technology is one of convergence as previously separate functions and devices merge, today the phone and PC is one example, as is the TV and the Media centre for another, but what started my thinking on this subject was looking at the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium. The mission statement is and I quote; “The Convergence Culture Consortium (C3) explores the ways the business landscape is changing in response to the growing integration of content and brands across media platforms and the increasingly prominent roles that consumers are playing in shaping the flow of media”.
Now what intrigues me about this is that’s it not just technology elements in the convergence, but business and culture too. Okay so it’s not new that technology transforms business, or even culture, but it’s the scale of this transformation that intrigues me. Add the amount of material being created; some one muttered to me that we are creating the entire library of the USA congress every eleven minutes the other day. And this leads me to what I think the C in ICT should stand for; and it's ‘Context’. I find this an under appreciated area which seems to be lost in the ‘semantic’ debate.
MashUp Camp 6.0 - 17th to 20th March
Just had to mention this, and to point people towards the truly unique event that MashUp camp has become, plus the amount of high grade material it generates. There are several urls that will give you a load of information, comments, opinions and everything else from some of the best people on the topic so I can only recommend taking some time for some detailed reading time. The home page can be found at www.mashupcamp.com/
In the presence of such eminently qualified people I don’t feel able to comment in a meaningful way on their views, but I am extremely interested in the way that their behaviour has, and is, changing through the use of MashUps, and other Web 2.0 technology. Go and look at how the event is run; now compare this with other industry events, or even how meetings are held in our enterprises. The whole format is based on participation in an active sense of people proposing collectively, and choosing personally, how to interact with other people to create the most value.
Technology Populism versus Worthy Development equals Twine
We all know the concept of ‘watching a train wreck in slow motion’, but I am not sure what the opposite effect is called, however this week I suspect that is what I have been watching. At one end of the track has been the publishing of a new report by Forrester, one of the most respected analyst firms, in my opinion, entitled ‘Technology Populism; risks and rewards’; pretty self-evident what it's about. A good comment on this report and aligned topics can be found at the readwriteweb, which I find an interesting site generally.
The other end of the track and coming towards the Populism was an event last week in Atlanta by the TTI Vanguard group, one of those fascinating groups that have a board of some seriously smart and experienced people, and are focussed on disruptive change by technology. Not sure how long they will keep up the proceedings of the event on their site, but this was all about ‘Smart(er) Data’, and some pretty details looking into the whole notation that data and relationship has to get changed in the ‘Google’ generation.
Again I don’t want to go through the event in detail, better you should read the details for yourself, but pick out the comment that ‘data acquires its reputation from the search engine’ and the subsequent comments on structure, versus a picture is worth a thousand words, etc. It’s all about context, and my belief is, based on asking people I meet who read my blog posts, that you are using me as a context filter. The links I have just given would not be immediately apparent to a search engine, but may be useful if you are following my own trail of exploration through how these new technologies are changing things. If Web 2.0 is anything it’s about people and relationships adding value to content.
That leads me to Twine, currently still under trials, and a move to introduce another generation to Social Networking, to which I should perhaps add a little history and say that MySpace, Facebook, etc, did grow out of an earlier generation that stretches back more than ten years. What seems to have made it happen for them was a mixture of timing, in terms of people, web use, broadband, etc, but most of all execution. So Twine is at this stage an interesting development with a long way to go!
Twine attempts to bring semantic understanding built around learning your interests, and actions, to then automatically organise information, and relationships for you. Just pause for a minute and reflect on the populism, which also means creation of data/content, the point above around needing to know more about the data origination, and consider just how much of … well everything, that’s going to produce. Keyword searches are not going to be enough, nor tagging either; we are going to need a lot more help then that. So if the above is happening, and I think we all know it is, the new log jam won’t be bandwidth, it will be ability to comprehend. That’s what interests me in Twine and developments in Semantics, though I am not sure right now that I would want to adopt another populism and call it Web 3.0!
However if you go back to using a search engine then you will find an awful lot of blog comments on Twine, there is a good summary here, and even Nicolas Carr had something good to say about it, I suggest that you make up your own mind by visiting Twine yourself!
Change me
I have a theory. It seems that most people learn something in their early to mid 20s, and then spend the rest of their career happily doing the same thing over and over again. This might be anything ranging from developing a certain type of software application (thee tier Java web shops, COBOL transaction processing solutions, Zachman …) or IT desktop management and support through to retail management or running a typing pool. Once they’ve established what it is they do they just want to keep doing it, hoping that the world will remain as it was in their early adulthood.
People don’t like change, usually as change often forces them to redefine what they do, their role in an organization and the value they add. People are hired and rewarded for what they did last week, not what they might do next. Change also involves a lot of effort. If an IT department defined itself as an asset management function (buy/build application, install application, run application, retire application), then how will it react to the introduction of software-as-a-service? Salesforce.com, Workday and and the like will probably fall into the responsibility of the CFO or under general manager for a line of business, appearing as a line item for employee support costs rather than as a major CAPEX expense. What does an IT support department, defining themselves in terms of the certifications they hold, do when we decide to give up our reliance on owning the desktop and help employees buy their own PCs? People often think that change is a threat, forcing them to go back through the pain an effort of finding out what they will do for the organization going forward.
There is a lot of talk of Gen Y, digital natives redefining how we work and live our lives, and how this makes older generations redundant, or even irrelevant. This just doesn’t ring true; wasn’t the same thing said about about Gen X and (gasp) even the baby boomers. The current changes we’re seeing do not represent the final transformation of society. Who would have thought of smart phones 50 years ago (though they are scarily like the communicators for the first series of Star Trek)? Who knows what technology will look like in the next 50 years? While Gen Y has more than a whiff of the arrogance of youth at the moment (something every generation is guilty of), pointing out that many folk in the older generations are reluctant to change, just wait a decade or so when Gen Z (or whatever we end up calling it) arrives on the scene and Gen Y realizes that their digital native skills no longer matter. The world will have moved on, but most of Gen Y (or Gen X, or the baby boomers) will not have.
Our problem is that change has become a major business driver, and the pace of change has increased to the point where we are seeing radical change within a single generation. We’re all racing to find the edge that will get us on top of the competition. This ranges from small innovations, tweaking and optimizing our business or creating new product categories, through to wholesale market creation; remember that Microsoft came out of nowhere to blindside IBM in the 80s, and then Google did the same thing to Microsoft in the 00s.
If change is the driver in our organizations, but our organizations are resistant to change, then the biggest challenge we face in not technical but the strategy we use to manage change. It’s quite easy to define a technically and economically possible solution that would provide a boost to our business, or even deliver a step change in capability. But if we cannot get our organization to deliver and then adopt the solution, all our work will be for naught.
The first thing I think we need to do is realize that change is an ongoing processes, and so should change management be. It’s not a one shot affair where we hire some external organization to come in and transform us, and it’s not something we should only worry about every two to four years. The second is that we need to make change something our people want to do rather than something we do to them.
Wait and they will come, but don’t stop them first!
I got some interesting feedback on my post ‘Imagination in the use of Web 2.0 thrives’, of which one point was about the need to work differently when using Web 2.0. This pretty well crossed with two other events; the first was a really funny advert on US television which shows a father and son in a new car; and the second being sent a link to a blog on five questions a teenage kid might ask if starting work at your business today. You really need to read this, and then think long and hard about why we can’t answer all the questions. The only really response is ‘because that’s the way it is round here and we can’t change it’.
The blog comments were almost polarised between the ‘why would you not work in a Web 2.0 manner’ and a ‘where would you get the best pay off for adopting Web 2.0’. And there in lies the issue, a traditional enterprise with all its investments in IT and allied to that the ways of working, needs a reason to change, whereas a new start up business just wouldn’t be bothered with the need to build up all of this. I already know of at least two companies where the classical implementation of an Intranet has been replaced by using Facebook. Actually it wasn’t a question of replacing; these enterprises have cut the cost and time of building infrastructure out by going straight to a Facebook based enterprise. You can add to that the use of SaaS to build out the rest of their enterprise systems and the whole package is a generation different.
An answer that is really not going to be possible in a conventional enterprise, or is it? The more I have looked at what works and what is challenging the more I realise that it's less of a replace or integrate challenge and more of an add on a different capability. This quite frankly is the accommodation that we have had with each new generation of technology, and why the Mainframe not only lives, but its use still is being extended in many cases. If it works don’t bother to come up with an argument to replace it. The challenge is more subtle and it’s the reason why my CEO thinks I have become a business consultant, (no I don’t like that thought either).
What I have learnt after living through two previous generational shifts – Mainframe to Mini and Mini to PC – is that you can’t push the technology, you have to figure out the business value and allow the users who really want that value to ‘pull’ through solutions. That’s why I have kept focussed on this point, I know, and believe those of you reading blogs like this one, know it’s the right technology and due to its inherent rather simplistic nature are not deeply troubled by the technology deployment issues, but how do we get the Business to see the light and use it? Solve that one and then we get into the interesting details of what and how issues of pure technology.
My answer is let the ‘kids’ and the ‘aware’ got on with it, but by kids I mean the young professionals, those same guys with MBAs that pulled in the PC technology that last ‘changed the game’ are doing it again right now. And if we are facing a tougher year for all business activities in 2008 then in the search for new markets, cost savings, etc then the barriers to acceptance will just collapse. Why? Because whilst you still have the existing market activity it pays to carry on with what you are doing now, push away disruptive activities ,and optimise the current way of doing things; When the market isn’t there that’s when it becomes necessary to rethink things and consider really innovating. Just make sure in the meantime you haven’t killed off the ‘kids’ and their under cover activities with new ways of doing things.
The TV advert? Well the father doesn’t understand all the new features on the new car, but it doesn’t matter because the old controls are still there so he can still drive where he wants to go. His son can’t drive, but annoys him by knowing what everything is, Bluetooth, iPod link up, Satellite radio, GPS, etc. It ends with the father ordering the son out of the car to stop him playing with everything.
Mashups; Everywhere or Nowhere? – The Conundrum
It’s been a real MashUp month back since the beginning of December with new MashUp events appearing right across the world, and seems like a good time to review progress, which is considerable, if you know where to look. And that’s my first comment, those who are into the new World of Web 2.0 work and play in the Web 2.0 space, and that’s resulted in their being not much on Web 2.0, and MashUps in conventional articles etc. Think about it and it makes sense, why publish for those who don’t use or understand what you are saying?
The result of this is to really split and polarise reactions between those who say nothing is happening and those who say everything is happening. Also reminiscent of the arrival of the PC and the PC literate early users finding more and more things they could do and sharing applications, having a specialised press, etc. whilst the Mainframe and Mini boys never even saw the stuff. Remember good ole Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corp, a huge success story in the 1980s issued his view of ‘who on earth will ever need a personal computer ….’ ? Must have really hurt when Digital got acquired by Compaq one of those PC upstarts that was never going to be of any real value to an enterprise!
So let's start with as near mainstream as we can to help those who are still not sure if this stuff is real and can be used in an Enterprise in a serious way. So it makes sense to kick off with Serena who launched in December what they referred to as an Enterprise platform for MashUps. These guys have really got it with their web site split into two separate entry choices; Business User or IT User, and that controls the content you see and how you can play with the Serena MashUp composer tool etc. Very smart way of handling something where there are two such different interests and focuses. There are a series of standard business MashUp templates for areas such as HR etc., so it's pretty enterprise usable stuff, plus some really interesting areas on their site such as the Serena MashUp Exchange.
Taking a different but equally mainstream route is Jackbe who declare on their website that they; “provide user driven enterprise MashUp software. Empower your users to consume, create, customize and collaborate for better business results". Pretty much says it all, but reflect on the words user driven and think how that will sit with a conventional approach to provisioning user IT services. These guys go two steps further than Serena offering four ways through their site by adding; Systems Integrators and Industries to Business Users and Techies. Jackbe are focussed on MashUps that cross the Firewall i.e. allow external content to be mashed with internal content; just the stuff for trading markets better as an example. Again the tools, templates etc are all provided to get things started.
Jackbe and Serena are just two examples of the range of companies now looking to deliver Mashups, selected from a lot of players in this game now. Google, who can perhaps claim to have provided many MashUps with their base content from its Google maps are now offering the Google MashUp Editor to make it both easier to build a MashUp and to ensure the resulting MashUp is of sound, read Enterprise, quality. Hard to be in any reasonable sized logistics business today without seeing the result of this in the ability to track your goods.
Microsoft have entered the game, but as is increasingly common these days using a different name / brand, in this case Popfly, this is further reinforcing my point that you are either in the Web 2.0 world or not, and that means big companies changing their branding to reflect a different market place. PopFly is yet another approach to the topic and it's also combined with a community approach to sharing MashUp elements. The Site describes it as; "Popfly is the fun and easy way to build and share MashUps, gadgets, and Web pages. It’s made up of online visual tools for building Web pages and MashUps and a social network where you can host, share, rate, comment and even re-mix creations from other Popfly users."
Finally take a look at what you can do to add MashUps to Office 2.0 by going to see the MashUp list on the ITredux.com site. Btw I think this is a good site http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/EI/ to have a browse through as it’s supported by some large vendors including SAP, Google and WebEx (Cisco using another name!), and has a large variety of contributors and content. I reckon that SAP has certainly unveiled some stuff on this site for feedback before more conventional release. Once again confirming my point that you have to know where to look to know it's happening.
So in just four companies we can see how widely MashUps are spreading into the market; internally with Serena, externally with Jackbe; as a general tool through Google; or as a completely different environment from Microsoft. And of course this ignores so many other companies, web sites etc, just try searching on Google under MashUps to see what I mean. Oh and before you all hit me, yes I know IBM is a huge contender with a wide range of products and a pretty clear intention to be the leader in the whole Web 2.0 technology switch over. But the issue is just like the arrival of the PC, it’s only there for those who are involved, and for the others they can state perfectly accurately that in their world the MashUp hardly exists. So I will close with the wonderfully crafted remark of Mikko Kosonen the former CIO of Nokia at the European conference of CIOs in November 2006;
“most companies die not because they do the wrong things but because they keep doing what used to be the right things for too long”
Oh and btw do please feel free to post urls and details of the MashUps that you have found and can recommend.
Imagination in the use of Web 2.0 thrives!
I have just been invited by two ‘friends’, meaning good colleagues within the IT industry with whom I like to interact and exchange opinions, to join Dopplr which is a new and imaginative way to solve an interesting issue for people like me who travel widely and often. Too often I discover that I was in the right place at the right time to meet one of my Web 2.0 social ‘friends’ some time afterwards and we both quietly curse a missed opportunity for some real ‘face’ time.
Well now we can all publish our travel plans in such a way that our ‘friends’ who are members of Dopplr will know all about our schedules and we can see connection possibilities. I love it! It’s a great solution to an annoying issue. BUT and here is the big problem, it’s yet another community to manage and enter information into, and I am looking for the services of a ‘Community Integrator’. Yes I know there are work arounds and some clever things you can do, but that’s still hardly a scalable approach.
Right now the functionality of Dopplr and a number of other communities, some of which I have provided links for in past blogs, is at a level when it would be a real benefit in a large group such as Capgemini, but not if every community is separate and needs to be managed separately etc. I need all of them to be cohesively integrated together as a superset and for this to be linked to, what I guess is mine and most other peoples normal corporate working environment – Microsoft Outlook. At moment Web 2.0 is providing me with too much imagination and not enough consolidation to be corporately useful, which is a shame because I really like, and want quite a few of these new capabilities, but only if I can gain the advantage of integrated scale.
To me this is rapidly becoming the issue, the creation of a superset community which makes sure that a significant enough number of my ‘friends’ are linked up for us both to benefit regardless of the individual communities any of us may belong to for different capabities. And that takes me to an interesting opinion piece from Bruce Richardson and analyst at AMR, who in the midst of the boom about Facebook was courageous enough to ask the question of what the future for Facebook might be once the hype, or novelty factor, had worn off. It’s a good question, and to me begs the old answer; ‘get niche, get volume or get out’, to which is added the rejoinder ‘and remember niches always close up and squeeze you out, or open up and you drop out’.
Bruce suggests that when he looks at what some of the mainstream software vendors are doing about Web 2.0 and communities that the niche will move into mainstream and that Facebook will drop out. It’s a fair point and I certainly agree that the speed at which these guys are moving suggests that Web 2.0 type technology and capabilities will be firmly integrated, if not embedded, into their products by the end of 2008. And that will probably answer my plea for corporate integration, but to do what?
Is it really right to suggest independent free standing communities are not required? I don’t think so, in fact I think this whole area will grow as the ‘online’ village of users expands and expands, or put another way as more people choose to work as independent value creating or deploying experts how will they find each other and collaborate?. So I would expand Bruce’s comments to suggest that there is a need for a real over arching integration between communities built around specialist capabilities like Dropplr, or around specialist interests for collaborating and sharing expertise or content.
To me it could be like search engines, were Google is a super set search engine that many other specialist search engines use to power their own more focused activities. Maybe that’s where the future of Facebook, or MySpace, or Bebo etc. lies.
Bill Gates and the Second Digital Decade
Amazing to try to visualise events like Consumer Electronics Show, CES, without Bill Gates doing the keynote, yet as was widely billed his presentation this year was his last as a Microsoft employee. It was interesting to hear him say that as we enter the second decade of digital use the focus shifts from device convergence to becoming people centric (can you have people and machine convergence?). Whilst this is not exactly new, see my own post on the topic, it is a very profound change and one that we really have to accept as a whole environmental concept to be able to really understand the use, and value, of any single new element. Bill concentrated on some aspects, but the main one that interested me was his comments on how people will interact with devices, what he called ‘natural interfaces’.
This interests me because if you consider new interfaces, such as Wii, the physical translation of your movements into what is happening on the display, or even voice recognition, in terms of the current generation of technology, or more particularly IT systems, it’s easy to dismiss this as not needed and hype. But this misses the key point, this is not all about IT as we understand the definition of IT today, but about a new generation of applications, or more correctly services, that support how we work and play. For these new ‘things’ the current generation of interfacing, primarily by some form of mouse, is not good enough. Why? Because it’s about people interacting with people and events, maybe content and media, not people interacting, or more correctly transacting, with applications and computing.
We need richness about how we can interact, and flexibility about when, and where, in terms of devices, and location, that quite simply has never been called for before. That’s the whole point that Bill was making, and that people as consumers are grasping this, sooner and faster than any IT department simply because they need to do so, but the IT department doesn’t. Why? Because the IT department role in supporting the applications and computers in use in the enterprise today quite simply means that they have no need of such capabilities. So measuring the new interfacing technologies against the current IT environment encourages the belief that this can all be dismissed. Welcome to the world of Wang office automation in the late 80s, why would anyone need a PC to achieve word processing, email, etc? Because the entire environment shifted from data processing to personal computing, or IT as we know it today, and in that context a centralised mini computer based solution didn’t fit even if its direct functionality was fine.
So my contention is that we cannot wholly ignore this, even if we work at the heart of the IT department, because if our users decide that they want to change the way that they are using technology to support the way they both work and play, then it’s going to happen. And we will have to start to design new solutions to support users – the people centric solutions – and that brings us back into the need for new interfaces. Okay, but how do you practically cross this gap, which in reality probably means supporting the Microsoft based corporate interface of Windows? Tucked away in the Bill Gates speech and on the Microsoft stand is a possible answer; and it’s not that new, Microsoft has been developing it for a couple of years but now you can download it to supplement or enhance a standard Windows interface.
Welcome to ‘Origami’ which was also shown at CES last year as part of the drive to supporting a wider range of smaller devices by using new interfacing. Well, it’s now a really neat, and very fluid, way to make use of the wide, and getting wider, range of services, communities, media types and collaboration formats. Most important of all it can be downloaded free for users to try, or maybe I should say, give themselves a rich interface for their personal use over the top of the corporate IT environment that doesn’t call for it. You can download it here, and when you are using it, don’t forget to reflect on the new business markets that are being created by the availability of these technologies in consumer’s hands. Take a look at my post for an example of missing a whole market by not grasping this principle. During Bill’s presentation it was casually mentioned that the market for Mobile advertising that didn’t exist three years ago is now worth 11 billion dollars in 2007, kind of makes the point I made in the earlier blog piece even more powerful.
DAVOS and the power of collaborative innovation
I was surprised, gladdened, and then worried to find that the theme for the most powerful people in the world when they gather in the resort of DAVOS this year is ‘the power of collaborative innovation’. Looking at this issue from a technology standpoint, it’s great to see that world leaders have noticed the revolution in capability with the way people at large have grasped the use of web 2.0 technology, but are these great people too far away from being ‘hands on’ in using these technologies themselves to see some of the very real issues that are emerging? Do they use social networking sites, read, comment, and write blogs? I doubt it, so their observations must come from the direction of ‘controlled’ use in business, or government with clear definable benefit cases, whereas I feel that many of the issues that are emerging are actually social, and flow from factors they are barely able to grasp.
The two most influential books on the topic that it seems everyone knows, and I would expect to see the authors present are; The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, and ‘Wikinomics’ by Don Tapscott. Both assume the changes that mass collaboration and global communications will be a force for good, because it will be capable of being channeled towards appropriate goals. Presumably that’s the point of the discussions by the ‘leaders’ of our society, how to channel these new capabilities for the good of the countries, enterprises, etc that they represent. I hope they figure out some good positive moves, I can only be encouraged by what is already happening as people with imagination and a responsible attitude to society innovate. Some great and good changes are already underway.
There is the other side of the coin, those who don’t see society as something that they have any responsibly, and those who are already encouraged to use smart phone cameras to video themselves indulging in anti social acts for posting on web sites. Okay that’s recognizable and action is, or will be taken, to curb these activities. Slightly different, but also recognizable to control is that the Chinese already have a serious problem with addicted gamers who play themselves to death, or at least to the distraction of their social roles. This is also recognizable and action to curb that availability of sites after a gamer has spent three hours online is underway.
My worry is the ‘grey’ area that the availability of this huge amount of information is having on the population at large. I believe many of the Politician’s attending are self-confessed technophobes, difficult for them to perhaps comprehend how much any interested person can know find out about their behavior. Is this the basis for the apparent dissatisfaction with Politicians in so many countries? I think so. Worse I don’t think these guys understand that this may mean they need to change more than the way they behave; may be it’s less about democracy as we have defined it in terms of voting every few years to elect some people who will deal with issues that are invisible to the population at large, and more about continuous collaboration. That truly would be the power of collaborative innovation using the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ as defined by James Surowiecki to deal with the increasingly complicated issues which require complex solutions. Is it possible to do this today? The answer is almost certainly yes to the basic technical question, but it poses some very significant questions.
It’s not a question of if the people are educated enough for democracy, this question has already been answered with voting rights under the current model, but the real question is the quality of information made available and by whom. The Al Gore film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ dealing with global warming has been widely shown, and the UK Government decided to make it compulsory viewing for school children in school. A significant number of parents objected to this on the grounds that in their opinion the film has inaccuracies so they objected to these being presented as apparent educational ‘facts’ to their children. A court case followed and found that there were nine ‘facts’ that expert opinion could not sustain therefore the case was proven that presenting these as ‘facts’ was wrong.
This straight forward finding should have been an end to the matter, but the National Geographic magazine decided to ask an expert of their own and published an opinion by Eric Steig, an earth scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle that these ‘facts’ were true.
The reality is of course that all of these were in fact personal ‘opinions’ based on how individuals interpretation the underlying statistical ‘data’ to reach conclusions.
To me the real question underpinning DAVOS, and indeed society collectively and individually today, is about the accuracy of the information that is flooding into society and the capability of citizens to understand how to treat the ‘facts’ that they are presented with in forming their own opinions. Enterprises perhaps understand this better than Government and are increasingly learning that they have to update their own practices in face of these changes. Too many Governments have yet to grasp how to focus their current information and processes towards their citizens through the Web, let alone deal with this new generation of information hungry, highly demanding, citizens who will use the absence of ‘formal’ information to collect their own answers. The risk is that these may well be wrong, and their prevailing assumption that if it is found on the Web, or at least in places like Wikipedia, it must be true is highly dangerous.
Collaboration is a powerful capability that is supposed to have been one of the traits that separate the human race from other animals and has allowed the development of society as we know it today, and the attendees cannot help to be in favor of it. From the top down they can indeed set goals and encourage positive results, but from the bottom up these new collaborations may be built on straw if there is no answer to the question of collaboration using what information and from where. Am I advocating a global stamp for authorizing data? No not really, but a wider use of the current digital rights capabilities would go a long way to making sure that these powerful new collaborations both used and created authenticated information.
Maybe Global Warming would be a good starting place to unleash collaboration to solve the many problems, but the lesson of multiple opinions and versions of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ shows what is required in addition to the sense of purpose that DAVOS may well produce.
The difference between cost and value
If there is one question that has been common throughout my time in computing it’s been whether or not computers, or more recently IT, do add value to a Business. Nicolas Carr has been the most incendiary contributor to the debate some years back and today still an active contributor. However in my usual way I want to look at this topic in a different way, questioning whether we have reached a point in the evolution of computing and business that it's no longer about alignment, but total convergence. And if this is the case, are we really being radical enough in our thinking on how to use technology to create value, rather than reduce the cost of the current business processes.
Let’s just start with how I define value versus cost when talking about this topic; add technology to a call centre and handle more calls per hour with the same staff and it’s justifiable by cost reduction. Change the process with technology, make more sales per hour with the same number of staff and that’s value it is creating extra revenue at no extra cost. How do you do this? Better matching of the callers requirements with your products so they are more likely to buy; think of the online airline industry and flexibility in price, travel date, or time, now even destination, as perimeters for matching. Yup I know that this is done online, but it’s a handy well recognised example of rethinking not only the product, but the process on the assumption of total convergence. i.e. that the business processes are designed around the technology being pervasive, not an existing manual process being automated.
The result has been overwhelming success for the low cost carriers, reformation and enlargement of the overall market place for air travel, justification of the ‘long tail’ marketing concept, etc, etc. But when I look at this more thoughtfully what I see is a reversal of the existing process which started with a fixed product transaction, the ticket, and moved to a discussion, usually out of the agent’s earshot, as to whether or not this was acceptable. As it was usually out of the agent’s earshot then there was little ability to interact and influence the sale. The traditional transactional element of the product first, any interactional element second, and the role of IT based on automating the transactional element.
Let’s try this again with the payment of taxes to the state at the end of the year. The citizen files their return, the transaction, and then the tax authorities work out if it is accurate and acceptable, increasingly with the complications of taxes it's not, so then the interaction to sort it out starts. Just to make this worse we decide to make a single common transaction date so focussing a whole year’s work into a few months!
Given that we live more, and more, online, paying bills, making commitments, etc., why not file information into your return throughout the year, with the opportunity of raising any enquiries as they come up. Could be the tax payer, or the inspector, who sees an issue that needs some interaction to understand and correct, then at the end of the year the final transaction should be made as an accurate return requiring no further work.
Radical? Sure, but then all governments are talking about tax reform because it’s an over complicated expensive business to administer plus their citizens aren’t happy, and tidying up a process built on paper in a simpler age isn’t going to fix it, nor align with the big change in the way the world now functions.
Why would I claim this to be value? Easy, because real time online interacting has more chance of finding the errors, and collecting the correct tax, than retrospective analysis of a one off transaction that is historical and difficult to track. With the increasing number of ‘online’ activities meaning the amount of ‘paper’ is going down with the amount of ‘e’ to administer going up there is a sort of inevitability about this, at the citizen, or self employed level as a starting point. Incidentally, there are probably cost savings too in being able to support the increasingly complicated administrative structure of taxation in addition.
Have a think about it, and next Blog will extend this further and question how many products are in fact priced for cost recovery to the seller versus sold on the value proposition to the buyer.
A Practical Example of Applying ‘Communities’
I got an interesting opportunity to apply the thinking on creating and using communities that I and my colleagues have been developing. Quick recap on previous blogs on the topic; two parallel streams of activity are visible:
1) Social Networks
2) the notion of everyone and everything being available in a connected infinite Mesh spanning companies, countries etc. as opposed to the internal ‘Matrix’ model of a finite number of point to point links.
My argument is that the Mesh is creating Social Networks, and Social Networks are moving into Business use as a tool to help customers, employees, partners to share and work in a new collaborative manner based around ‘interactions’ to find optimal possibilities. These Web 2.0 technologies are people centric, therefore separate and different to current IT systems which are machine centric and based on the ‘transactions’ to create data. BUT we need to find a way of creating different social networks for different purposes and the purpose will both driven membership and the tools/capabilities required by the community.
The opportunity was a requirement by a government department to encourage children to adopt hobbies out of school with the view that this would decrease street crime and hooliganism from bored teenagers hanging round on street corners. The question was how to organise such an initiative and of course the ‘given’ was a traditional model of top down organisation. The alternative approach is based on the universal use of the web accessed through PCs and phones by teenagers today.
Applying the principles of four types of communities, each with its own and different reasons for existing, therefore requiring different and appropriate tools to allow the community members to work together. The top level community is created around ‘shared values’ and in this case the originators of the idea who are clearly motivated by high level social values. However this will need to be driven into the next level down of ‘shared goals’ where several communities may be created, say one of sports, another on music, etc and here the members of each will be working to decide how to create interesting and involving communities for their topic. The difference between the sharing of information and agreement on concepts in shared values area and the building of action plans in the shared goals community highlights the very different nature of each as well as the different tools needed.
The last two communities are easier to understand by going to the bottom of the stack and the community of ‘acquaintances’. This is where you are encouraging as many people as possible to join because its ‘fun’ with interesting stuff so you will introduce all the usual elements of a ‘social’ network to encourage the teenagers to join in with their friends.
Linking this to the values and goals communities is the crucial community of ‘shared interests’ which is where the ‘shared goal’ community creates the framework and content that encourages the involvement of from the open community of ‘acquaintances’. This the community of ‘shared values’ achieves its ‘goals’ through creating the ‘interests’ that will lead to participation from the broad uncommitted community of ‘acquaintances’. Hope this real example makes the point clearer and can help explore this in other industries types, etc.
Outsourcing the intranet
I’ve been thinking for some time that a logical conclusion to the plethora of free (or at least cheap) social web applications will be companies simply outsourcing their intranets. Delivering a few portlets (or Open Social applications) into iGoogle or Facebook would seem to solve the problem of connecting your employees with the business, and has the additional benefit of helping employees connect with other employees. However, I was still surprised when I woke this morning to find that Serena has adopted Facebook as their intranet. The technically feasible has entered the realm of the possible.
People;- Profiles, Communities and Mesh Working
I wanted to develop two previous Blog pieces and tie them together, as in my mind; (at least!), thanks to discussions with others my thoughts are becoming clearer. The first piece was an introduction to the conceptual idea of Mesh Working; and if you want to know why I used this term see Wikipedia on Mesh Networking.
My view was that, unlike the closed point to point matrix working environment that the PC Network had introduced, what we could now utilise was an infinite ‘Mesh’ of People, and content, stretching from inside our enterprise to outside, from our working life to our private life. Our resources to address events, problems, issues, opportunities etc are therefore huge and will help to address the current stress we feel in trying to address an increasingly dynamic world through our limited, finite resources.
The more I thought about this the more I realised that my original comments on navigating be means of search engines and blogs were not enough. We need to find and join sustainable communities to bring this to an understandable human friendly model. This brings me to my second post on a discussion that took place one evening at Oracle World and led to trying to define communities by what their members wanted to share.
By putting the two together I think I am really now starting to see a picture of the new Enterprise 2.0 world where the benefits of Web 2.0 Social environments and tools can be applied to the Business World. The first business requirement is ‘awareness’ of the enterprise, its brand and its products, and if I understand my marketing colleagues correctly this means associating the values with needs and benefits. In my simple mind that means being referred to by members of a shared interest community, i.e. for those interested in outdoor sports the topic of the best waterproof clothing, or sun block if you are lucky enough, will be a natural interest. It’s not just advertising in the community space, but using a more interactive and targeted medium to inform. A good piece on what to consider when choosing suitable waterproof clothing is both helpful, and assuming that your product is of good quality, likely to help in bringing its benefits into the buyers mind. When online means too much choice, then help in establishing the criteria for choosing is indeed welcome.
At the next level the example of Threadless, a community of shared goals whose members want to create and wear unique, and relatively personalised, Tee Shirts is instructive. This is a business model based on using the size of the Mesh, and its tools, to allow individuals to find what they are looking for, in drawing together enough people to make a viable business in a specialised niche. It is based on the interactivity, and creativity, of the community to decide on the products that they want to buy. Is this Customer Relationship Management, CRM? I don’t think so, or at least not as we know it today, it’s the next generation, something more on the lines of Customer Interactive Relationships, CIR, for want of a better name.
The last Community type is bound together by shared values, and the best example for this would seem to be consumers seeking to support ‘Fair Trade’, or ‘Ethical Business’. You can find companies offering Fair Trade produced clothes fairly readily but that’s not building a community. The nearest I was able to find by a quick search was http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/get_involved.htm where there is at least the opportunity for the consumers buying the products to get involved with the producers, but I am pretty sure that if I spent more time I could find a better example.
My conclusion is that in both goal and value driven communities the driving force for the business comes from the community and its shared purposes, more than from the individual products themselves. And at this point, with thanks to those who mailed me with comments on the previous Blog on communities, (you seem to be shy as I get more comments by direct mail than as posted comments!), I would like to add the community that I missed; that of location. Funnily enough I had have been meaning to comment on cell phones and micro Blogging as a kind of personal RFID, (watch this space!), and the other on how I choose which events to go to. But I had singularly failed to see these in the context of my made up title of Customer Interactive Relationships, or CIR.
The context of where am I, and doing what, has an enormous set of possibilities to interactively offer me products and services to enhance my current experience. However this would be a product push of the type I have identified above as not being the driver of the purchase, so I have concluded that this is an additional factor to my belonging to one of the above communities. Please only offer me a product that has my community interests, goals, or values associated with it, don’t just clutter my in box with unwelcome offers.
For any marketing types out there who are Facebook users and want to see the kind of tools that I think will be around to help you understand the make up of a community I suggest you load Socialistics. It’s a Facebook app that lets you slice and dice the various statistics of your ‘friends’.
This is a really big topic and I am pretty sure I have only scratched the surface of it, so looking forward to seeing what posts come back, don’t be shy, as the mails I get are invariably very good thinking and should be posted and shared.
Half Baked or Mashed?
This was a must read title of a piece in Information Week that gave a considered view of the wisdom of mixing Enterprise IT and the Internet. It’s a longish piece totalling seven pages, but well worth reading, and contains several polls of Information Week readers to provide breakdowns on what is happening. It’s the interpretation of these polls that I want to draw attention to as I am not sure that I agree with some of the interpretations that the author Andy Dornan made, though overall this is, to me at least, an excellent piece of work.
The fundamental point behind the title is the question concerning whether mixing Enterprise IT and the Internet is a recipe for disaster, with the key question being should MashUps, beautifully described as the ‘long tail’ of SOA, be built, and used, by ordinary employees beyond the visibility / control of enterprise IT. Well put it that way to any CFO, or CIO, and I think we can guarantee that the answer is going to be NO!
But hang on a minute, what’s the enterprise attitude to spreadsheets? After all aren’t spreadsheets just a form of MashUps, only limited to numerate data? Yet CFOs unflinching run their business upon them, and the degree to which they are both checked for the validity of the data in the cells, integrated into the ERP systems, even backed up, is shall we say often slightly dubious. The answer is probably the degree of risk is understood by the CFO, where as with MashUps the risk is not understood. Even more fun is to probe to find that many CFOs were the ‘problem children’ who first caused problems to their enterprises by introducing the disruptive influence of PCs and Spreadsheets.
Who today are the prime users driving the use MashUps? My experience suggests that it is front line staff working to understand complex information from multiple, and usually, external sources about the market. Not very often, if ever, are these MashUps currently intended to be connected to the precious transaction procedures that the CFO and CIO are naturally concerned to protect. I would therefore argue that MashUps based on external views are, and should be, disconnected from internal enterprise IT to make sure that the perceived risk doesn’t even exist.
Seems that quite a few of those polled in the article were thinking this way with 15% saying they already had end users using MashUps, and a further 26% planning, or considering, allowing this. Add in the question of developing internal web based applications that make use of data from publicly accessible web sites, (not necessarily MashUps of course), and 26% say they already use such applications with another 41% developing, or planning, these developments. So seems that there is a strong consensus for the need to use external content internally, and the question is how, i.e. should it be part of IT controlled applications, or in user controlled MashUps.
Unfortunately this nice simple segmentation is just about to be broken apart by IBM with its message of ‘second generation SOA’ meaning users able to build MashUps based on the extraction of content and / or process reporting from internal SOA systems. At first look this is equally safe as IBM is offering highly controlled access to approved internal content so again the risk is contained.
However the danger point is what happens when someone figures out how to combine the internal use of MashUps with the external use of MashUps, or as feeds into the carefully developed internal Web Apps, now we have something to worry about! Not a problem that’s going to go away if we ignore it either. IBM is just the first mainstream vender to formally announce this capability. There are start-ups out there already able to offer this and expect to see all the mainstream vendors doing the same.
Now is the time to make it clear to your users what is permissible and what is not, and using network based tools to see what, and who, is going on in your Enterprise.
Innovation is hitting the top of the Hype cycle
Meaning most people using the term don’t understand what it means in terms of being relevant to whatever they are doing, but know that right now you have to claim to be using ‘innovation’ in your role, project, business unit, etc. Amazingly I saw an article that reported 75% of people claimed to be ‘innovating’ currently, which if you define innovation as doing something you have not done before is possibly understandable, but is unlikely to be true to the original use of the term that started the current hype cycle.
Who am I? – A credit card is one possible answer
There is a continual chattering on the topic of identification, with the ability to prove who you are varying slightly with the type of transaction. There are a series of possible solutions in contention for high value transactions at the moment, but the more numerous low value transactions have not been quite so obvious. However, in the offline ‘traditional’ world there seems to be a growing number of simple, but very workable solutions being put into use that rely on your use of a credit card. There are positives and negatives to this approach, and it’s true that if you steal a credit card then all of these implementations have no defence against you using the stolen card fraudulently.
BUT, and it is a very big “but”, all of these solutions are inherently about low cost everyday transactions where frankly the amounts involved are too small, and the activities too mundane for it to be likely that any thief is going to get too excited by using a stolen card. In any case on notification of being stolen the card would be cancelled and the thief would be risking being caught. It’s the low sums of money involved that make this interesting, the credit card is effectively acting as a digital token issued by a validating authority, the credit card company, and containing the necessary unique details necessary for the transaction.
Radiohead leading, or destroying, the music industry
I have blogged already on the term ‘Innovation’ meaning innovation of your business model, as opposed to trying out a wide range of minor activities around technology that you have not tried before. Well this is a quick topical piece on the innovation of Radiohead this week who broke the accepted mould on how to sell music in form of either CDs or downloads by offering ‘free’ downloads. Rather than describe ‘what’ they have done I suggest a visit to their web site.
My interest is in the impact of their business model innovation and how that is based on increasing the use of multiple technologies to increase what is becoming known as ‘intimacy’, in this case the vastly improved ‘interaction’ between fans and the pop group. There was a massive amount of coverage throughout the industry on the Radiohead innovation, and it really boiled down to two messages:
- 1) its highly destructive of the music industry or,
- 2) its highly innovative in an industry where the value proposition has shifted.
The first point is pretty obvious a cry to maintain the status quo in an industry where falling sales in CDs have not been off set by rising revenues from paid for online downloads. Though there was a great quote from another group that asked if they gave away their music would the plumber give away his time if their house boiler broke down.
It’s the second point that is interesting; because it might be the music industry today, but I am pretty sure it will be a lot of other industries tomorrow. I believe it to be a combination of the ‘long tail’ effect of making more and more specialised markets that appeal to different sections of the potential market, and, the change in what represent value in a world driven more by interactions based around Services, than by distribution of products. However one last comment on the music industry around Prince and his sell out event in London at the O2 centre where he played to bigger grounds for a longer period than would be normal. In the lead up to this a leading British national newspaper gave away free a CD of Prince’s new album. So once again what was considered the product that raised revenue through distribution, became a free item with the goal of encouraging more people to get ‘involved’ with Prince and his music leading to increased sales for a live event. The event was just that, a high value/cost ‘event’ or perhaps we should consider it as a service for one evening only.
If we return to the Radiohead offer of ‘free’ downloads, what is truly innovative and worthy of some real deep thought, is the fact that you are offered the opportunity to pay, in fact to choose how much to pay. This break through that they describe as an ‘honesty box’ is more properly the opportunity for a fan to decide on the value of the offering to them individually. (I suspect that underlying this is the thought that a real fan would not cheat his/her favourite group on the basis that will destroy their future). This is a very advanced version of the low cost airline industry proposition of deciding on the value of a seat on a given flight with a potential customer on line. However its even smarter than that because the music industry is losing the ability to sell copies of the music as user see sharing as a social principle of the new world. Why fight this when you can change your model and your value proposition?
Let’s go back to what is really being sold, or more crucially what people are choosing to buy, and that’s the ultimate example of a ‘long tail’ approach. That’s what I believe should make us all think very very carefully about the Radiohead innovation, and make us keep a very careful eye on what happens next in one of the first industry sectors to really be moved into the new market models.
The link to technology? Actually everything about this is driven by the new technologies and I don’t just mean the distribution of music cheaply on line, I mean the social networking, video, blogging interactive world that creates and unifies entire communities in a shared value model that leads to different behaviours and values. Is your business really thinking about how new technology is changing the market enough? Does it even know enough about this kind of change and the technology that makes it possible to be able to think through what they could do? That’s something to really consider!
MashUp to get the USA election debate you wanted
I can’t believe this site – you just have to go there. What you are looking at is the very first online candidate debate where you get to decide how to match up the issues and the performances. To quote from the site:
Welcome to the first online debate. Charlie Rose interviews the candidates, but you get to compare them. Step 1, pick as many candidates as you want; Step 2, pick one issue. Then, watch your MashUp. Don’t forget to vote for who you like best.
How great is that? The comparisons that you always wanted, but could never get are all there for you to make. This makes some of my previous blogs about my hopes that the new online world would really change politics by making it possible for more people to participate more fully in a more transparent process look good. Actually to be truthful I really didn’t see the possibility to compare debates in this way, instead I thought more of virtual worlds permitting a return to the old ‘on the stump’ meetings.
Now I have seen the ‘art of the possible’ from this site it gets me thinking; I have already blogged on how I see the MashUp as the new ‘killer app’, meaning that just as the spreadsheet allowed the user to create a personal view from excessive amounts of numerate data, so the MashUp allows the user to achieve the same effect from the overwhelming amount of ‘Content’ available.
Winning Ideas and R&D are now Outsourced
Cisco has started a competition asking for your best new ideas on what capabilities you would like to see Networking products and services provide. Pretty serious prize of $10,000 for the winner, but all the ideas once submitted become the intellectual property of Cisco, so not really a good trade for your best idea for a start-up that’s going to make you rich! Or is it? Arguably it’s a low risk approach for an individual who is not entrepreneurial and will provide the satisfaction to see your idea developed, and may be even a hire to work on its development.
I also heard about today about the sale of a start-up that had been gaining ground steadily for the last few years to one of our global leading technology vendors. When a colleague told me about the sale I replied it was not a big surprise as the technology advisory board had had a key senior person from the acquiring company as a member for a while now. That’s happening more and more; big vendor is interested in this developing capability, or maybe market, or business model, and works with start-up to help them prove a market exists and then buys.
Hang out at the best events this autumn
You know the problem, back from the summer break, and now the invitations to the various trade shows are rolling in, too many of them to go to all of them, but must get some feel for what is happening… Used to be reasonably easy when there were a handful of well known mainstream shows, and maybe a couple of major vendor events. Now there are new events appearing, and disappearing, as fast as products arrive and depart, and just so many of them as well. Go to the wrong event and it’s really rather lonely as the handful of attendees all seem to be members of some ‘in club’ talking amongst themselves.
What’s needed is the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ to tell you where everyone else is going and using their choices to help guide your own, and here it is at "Upcoming Yahoo". The site is for all type of events, with a series of categories to help, but strangely enough there isn’t one for IT, or Technology. I did briefly consider that we might fit under ‘education’ or maybe even better under ‘comedy’. Why is it strange? Because if you use the choice button ‘most popular’ events regardless of type, then today more than half of the top twenty are technology events.