The Ninth Type Of Deadly Waste

Even with the troubles of product defects at Toyota, the Lean methodology derived from the Toyota Production System is still valid. The simple fact is that Toyota has strayed from their own path and ventured into the world of mass production ways of working. With disastrous effect. The plan that Mr Toyoda has presented basically comes down to a renewed, and more strict, focus on the customer and on quality. And even though many people still view Lean as only applicable to manufacturing, it still moves up in the world of services. And rightfully so.

One of the key features of Lean is eliminating Muda, or waste. The continuous improvement is aimed at finding waste in an organization and remove it. In literature and practice, seven types of deadly waste are identified (unnecessary transportation, excess inventory, unnecessary motion of employees, waiting, over production, over processing, rework), and structurally removed from operations. In some circles, an eighth type of waste is acknowledged, as being the underutilizing of human talent. I think we can identify and remove a ninth type of waste: excess use of resources.

For this ninth type of waste, you just have to look around you to find vivid examples. It ranges from excess use of energy by leaving machines or lights switched on when not necessary, extra long meetings with too many attendees who do not all need to be present, excess use of paper by printing everything you need to read. But the example I want to go into a bit deeper is more hidden, but is relatively easy to eliminate: excess use of data storage space.

Most of us are used to communicating with our colleagues through email. We send important documents, messages and requests by mail to the recipients, meanwhile copying our managers, co-workers and anybody else that we think should be interested. Every time we send an email, what we actually do is create a digital copy that consumes storage space. If it is a short message to one person, it might not seem that much. But just look at the last 25 mails you’ve sent. The average distribution list probably contains at least 4 people, the average message contains the complete mail chain, and 1 out of 4 messages probably contain an attachment. An example calculation of the direct storage space needed could be as follows:
- message size: 50 KB
- attachment size: 1 MB
- storage size needed: 5 times 1.05MB = 5.25 MB.
Then take into account that you probably send/receive about 20 messages like this per day, and just imagine that you work in a company with roughly 80.000 employees world wide. Factor in the datatraffic and backup storage costs, plus the energy used for all of this. I didn’t dare…

But how can we do this different? Imagine a world where we have as centrally hosted messaging platform. And next to that, a centrally hosted document repository. As a cherry on the cake, we also have a system that allows us to talk to eachother directly with information stored only in memory, unless we indicate we want to save the conversation. Doesn’t really sound futuristic, does it? This world exists, and is often referred to as Enterprise2.0. But whatever nametag you put on it: we don’t use it enough. There are platforms that allow centrally hosted group discussion within a closed network. Yammer is an example, but Lotus Connections is as well. And there are many other solutions like that. Next to that, most companies have a document repository at their disposal. Ranging from a shared network drive to fully open source knowledge management systems of the Drupal type. On top of that we have Office communicator, GoogleTalk, FacebookChat, Skype and many other instant messaging solutions, that often support voice over IP as well (say goodbye to a large chunk of your monthly phone bill).

So, in my last post on this platform, as I am leaving Capgemini with a small tear in my eye, I would like to call on you to think before you mail. Please consider to use that internal or external social media platform like Yammer or Twitter more, and centrally store your documents and just communicate links. Either through a microblogging platform or instant messaging. Eliminating the waste of excess resource usage can be so simple. Just do it!

Arjan Tupan is a Transformation Manager at Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or LinkedIn

Posted by Arjan Tupan on February 23, 2010

To search or to find? That is the question

There's more information on the Internet than one could apprehend in a hundred lifetimes, and it's growing too - and (most of the times) kept up-to-date. Different organisations, places and networks holding that information make it hard to get it all together, so how to make that information homogenous, and uniformly accessible?

Can it be done? Should it be done?

Over the last decade we went from data to knowledge.The World Wide Web has linked companies and consumers in the last decade. This inspired the more shy organisations to build intranets, where only company people would find each other
That was about linking data: the same things could be done in a new way
Then web shops came. Forums. Peer to peer networks for sharing ever legal and not so legal delight. All that came and became mainstream so fast that the inter-intra move didn't even have time to "happen".
That was about connecting, and information: more or less new things were done in new ways
In the last few years, social networks conquered the digital earth: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. Such a different kind of behaviour, it was absolutely new. It was using the infrastructure already laid out (computers, networks and people using those) to build upon.
That was about sharing information, acquiring knowledge: entirely new means to an entirely new end.

Meanwhile, WikiPedia was born. An unprecedented source of information with more than 14,000,000 articles in more than 260 languages.
Stats in monthly unique visitors for all that: LinkedIn 15 million, Facebook 130 million, Twitter 55 million, WikiPedia 60 million.
That's a lot of data, information and knowledge. And it's all out there. Wait, where?

Yes, it's all out there, pretty much. Google helps us in finding it, almost real-time. We've seen some struggles with Facebook that treated their data as a walled garden, but they're slowly opening up too. With Google starting to index books, video and other content, all knowledge in the world starts to become available online and realtime.
But it is scattered all over the place, in different forms, behind different doors: not uniform or homogenous. It's very diverse

The Integration theme: overcoming diversity

Integrating applications, departments and companies has shown this same theme over the last decades: diversity in form, location and accessibility has to be overcome.
The European Parliament shows how that can be done: introduce an intermediate language (or two, in that case), support different communication channels, and facilitate-by-translation.
That works very well for all: the focus and attention remains on the "stars" themselves, the highly specialised participants. Like business shouldn't be bothered with IT, they aren't bothered by the linguistical barriers and can just move in and out.

There's a big precondition to all that though, which is that the semantics are agreed upon beforehand. In the European Parliament somehow magically, changing semantics are picked up by all parties involved. Now how does all this work in the World Wide Web?

The first WWW problem: different format
Structured versus unstructured versus semi-structured. HTML, text, .doc, .PDF, Facebook updates, Tweets, it's all different. However, search engines make all of that transparent. After all, there are only so many syntaxes around. Of course, visuals like video and images are an entirely different topic, but even those are magically informated by Google
The second WWW problem: different location
Is it on the web, or behind a company firewall? Does it need authorisation? Only what is openly available can be searched. And it doesn't matter whether it is located north, east, south, west, or orbiting around earth. Search engines make all of that transparent too
The third WWW problem: different languages, dialects and typos
It still takes too many rules to perfectly translate a language to another one. English is widely present though, and there are as many typos and spelling errors made by native speakers as by foreigners. All that has to be taken into account as well. Luckily most search engines do. They suggest correct spelling if you search something and misspell it. They'll even include misspelt search results

The real WWW problem: different semantics

The biggest problem is (changing) semantics. Wikipedia spends pages and pages on disambiguation explaining the differences between one word or acronym, and the other. The word web, for instance, can have entirely different meanings in different contexts. Even if, across all different forms, locations and languages, you are looking for the word web, what is the context you want to place it in? Heck, you might not even know that yourself...
The best example of how vivid a semantic discussion can be is the initial discussion around  E2.0 and Social Business Design

The possible solution: autonomous tagging

Tagging is a way of labelling a piece of information with a single word or phrase. Tags are decided upon individually by humans, in relative isolation. There is no central, global tagging system where one can pick their tags from. Although tags now also are a form of language or at least communication. If information were to be tagged, these tags could be translated or related, and form connections across all diversities.

What if there were a tag knowledgebase much like today's Wikipedia? Where tags are maintained, explained, etcetera? This would be the ultimate source of metadata, making it possible for the Single Source of Search to be conducted. Its interface could be defined and plugged into, and it would be the single source of truth for the Semantic Web
Bots could crawl the entire Web tagging information whether it's HTML, PDF, Video or images or whatsoever

In my last post I explained about the position and quality of humans versus machines. This very complex and dynamic terrain is definitely something that needs to be explored and maintained by humans first. When that's succesful, we might be able to automate that, and skip to the next level: wisdom

Thanks to Paolo Saitti for asking a few nasty questions and giving a few nasty answers at the same time; here they are:

Tagging however will require certain semantical and cultural alignment. The level of knowledge also dictates the detailedness of search. SQL Server is too generic if you want to find something about SQL Server 2008 Service Broker - but you need that level of knowledge to be able to know the difference!
At the basis, agreed semantics are needed. Human beings simply call it a dictionary. The traditional dictionary experience is quite enlightening: new words spring up from informal usage, often from jargon language. This is the dynamic and "democratic" evolution of natural languages. As they become (very) common, the compilers of the dictionaries decide to include the new terms in the "official" language. Here an upper authority is required to provide a formal unambiguous definition for the new word.
Distributed, informal, continously evolving tagging (a bottom-up process) is enough for human interactions. On the other hand we'll need a formal, robust and agreed tagging dictionary with a consistent effort to develop and maintain it (a top-down process) in order to build semantic applications exploiting contents over the web.

Martijn Linssen is Enterprise Integration Architect within Capgemini. You can find him on Twitter. Paolo Saitti is Enterprise Software Engineer within Capgemini. You can find him on Twitter

Posted by Martijn Linssen on February 16, 2010

Getting a grip on Data

Recently, I was called in to advice on a dispute concerning the delivery of the required data to a Business Intelligence environment from one of the source systems. The problem was that there was not enough time in the weekend to run both month-end closing and the BI-feed. On the table were increase processing-power, separate environment and redesigning the extract software. No-one considered cleaning up the source system. There is data in there dating back to the early 70s, not fitting current business nor business rules and still we do not think about cleaning it up.

Can't complain really. I seem to be doing the same thing at home. At the beginning of the year, I take some time out to organise all the paper mail of the year before, put them in nice stacks and subsequently punch holes in them and place them in binders. The binders get full and after having put much too much into a single binder, I go out and buy a new binder. I have a full overview of all my spending of 1975, if your interested.

The trouble is: no one is interested. Ok, maybe on a cold, rainy Sunday morning I would like to stroll down memory lane, but does that justify keeping it?

"It doesn't eat bread." my father used to say to my mother when she urged him to clean up his junk. Leave it alone, it doesn't cost any money.

And along the same lines, companies seem to react to cleaning up the source systems: it's going to cost us a lot more money to clean it up than to buy a few more disks. Unfortunately, the cost doesn't end there. Especially the older systems require that 'everything' is read when doing monthly processes such as premium runs and invoice runs. The old data is a dead-weight that is constantly present. This means that besides the storage, you also need to invest in processing power. Add a CPU, more internal memory.

Storage needs to be backed up and consequently we have to buy some more auxiliary storage as well. Plus the time it takes to copy that old data that has been copied so many times already.

No wonder the weekend is too short.

After my vacation last year, I came back with 2,500 pictures at 2,5 MB average. Add to that the 3,500 pictures of my fellow vacationers, that is a lot of storage. Now, the sane thing to do would be to select a few good ones and keep these as the reminder of a great vacation. Well, I did select about 300 and copied them to a separate folder, downsized these to another folder and then uploaded them to my webpage. Companies do the same: copy some data from one system to another, do a bit of aggregation perhaps, or cleaning, and then copy them to yet another system. And much like me at home, we keep the original and the copies. And then we back it all up to auxiliary storage.

At the beginning of 2009, I had 2,6 Terabyte of hard-drive storage at home. At the end of 2009, it is 5 Terabyte. Copies, back-ups and back-ups of back-ups, just to be sure that that picture I will probably never watch again, will be preserved.

The structured data in our source systems, although massive, isn't even our biggest problem. It's the email, the documents and the web pages we have created. Emails, with or without attachments, are joyfully send to long lists of addressees. Forward it and you have another copy in your outbox. People reply, hey presto! more copies. And what happens when the administrators warn you of your mailbox size? You complain and ask for more or you move them to your archive. A lengthy email discussion between a few people amounts to staggering storage consumption and after a little while non of the new replies hold the complete story. Are we at least considering tools like Twitter and Yammer as alternatives to email discussions? These are scary tools for the person who wants to be in control. How do you make sure that that interesting discussion will still be there when you need it again? At least with email, you've got my own copy, which you will not delete. Ever!

The trouble with discussions and knowledge bases is that they tend to grow old. A discussion about the new version of ToolX is set in a time-context: "it is the best tool on the market" is only valid for a short time. The evaluation of the latest Smartphone is interesting, but not after 2 years. We've moved on. We do not want to see old evaluations pop up when we search for Smartphones. Who cares what was hot in 2005? But as long as its on the system, it will keep appearing, blocking our view of what we are looking for. 2,000 hits on a search? Please, that's not helpful at all. It will take me another weekend to get through those!

Outdated data is very costly: not only does it frustrate our searches, our Data Quality measurements and our computer power, it also frustrates our ability to progress, to innovate and to be agile. We are forced to make amendments to brand new systems because otherwise we can't move the old data in. This in turn opens these new systems to new data imperfections. The introduction of a new system is a perfect opportunity to get rid of old data. We take that opportunity hardly ever. "Who decides what can be discarded?" and "how do we prove that the conversion worked when we don't convert everything?" are the main reasons not to take the opportunity. We rather just move everything over first and then we will start a project to do the clean-up. A pity we had to corrupt our brand new system and a pity the clean-up project never gets started.

Yes, there are some conversions that change or clean-up old data so that it fits in the new system. But is that always a good idea? Changing old data distorts the little value it had left. Repairing 29th February 1991 into the 28th isn't preserving old data, it's corrupting it.

And it doesn't help us getting through the weekend.

Action is called for. For me and for the companies. We need someone to stand up and take control, get a grip. At home, it is simple: that would be me. I will decide which data can be declared obsolete (Data User), I will set up rules to identify which fall into that category (Data Owner) and I will clean it up (Data Steward). For older papers with value, I will also decide whether paper is still the best medium. If necessary, I will transfer it into an electronic document and shred the paper. I can apply the same principle for my electronic archive. Any document only once it its original format and one back-up.

In companies we can do the same thing. we appoint Data Owners and Data Stewards. If we already have appointed them, we probably need to give them more power so that they can make the difference. Set boundaries for personal storage such as email. Personal storage are nothing more than other copies of Company data. Introduce a use-by-date for data, urge Knowledge Workers to clean up outdated information, select the right tools for discussions and try to get rid of attachments in emails. There are much better ways to share documents. Set targets to get rid of at least 10% of outdated data every year.

And be open about this. Share (preferably not through email) what you are about to do and why. Make sure we are all in on it.

Lets try to bend the curve of ever increasing storage by getting rid of outdated data. But let's not make it a project. Let's make it a way of life. A culture. Let's be sure that we can easily identify data when it is outdated and let us remove it. Let's get our weekend back. After all, wouldn't it make more sense to use that processing power to generate more business rather than pumping old data around?

Let's get a grip.

Posted by Henk van Zuilekom on January 19, 2010

Wiki- A collaboration tool for hyper knowledge management

Wiki is emerging as one of the most promising Enterprise 2.0 technologies for knowledge management. If the content is going to change continuously, and produced collaboratively, use of Wiki is highly recommended. If you want a group of members to work together specially to create content, Wiki would be a great way to coordinate and collaborate.It is a website that lets its users create, edit, and link a collection of articles. It allows the content and the structure to be changed by a community of users even that community spread across geographically whatever thousands of users they could be.

Here is a video which explains the basics of a wiki .We made use of similar kind of videos at Knowledge Management awareness campaigns in different locations on Wiki. Popular example of a Wiki is Wikipedia a user created & editable knowledgebase which has grown into world's largest encyclopaedia online.

Wiki can be limited to a firm by installing a wiki platform inside the company firewall. Click here for a Wiki guideline document authored by me. Specific emphasis is on what and where, rather than how is made. Markup Syntax for both Media Wiki [Engine for Wiki at our KM2.0] and JSP Wiki [Engine for TeamForge wiki] is also covered

There are many Wiki engines available both in proprietary and open source versions. I like MediaWiki, DokuWiki,TiddlyWiki and PhpWiki.You can get the feedback and compare the features of variety of Wiki engines at following sites: Comparison of wiki software or Wikimatrix

Most of the Wikis offer "What You See Is What You Get" kind of editors for which you don’t need to have markup language knowledge like html and special markup languages. A new version of Wiki page gets created for each time it is edited and saved.

You may be thinking, how it is different from blog and discussion forum. In blogs, only the author can edit their article/thought (others can just comment).In wikis, anyone can edit the original article unlike blogs and discussion forum. Wikis don’t contain chronological posts unlike blogs rather it can track version histories. Blog posts are permanent in nature where as wiki's content is a perpetual work in progress. In my opinion, it can change the way we browse and read online content. Simple chunks of content make every one most interesting to read.

One of the features I like most in Wikis is its ability to organize itself organically. It can create a content structure based on our inputs i.e. users can create a flexible ontology on their own and options to enable or disable site structure. Knowledge can not only be stored and retrieved, but also developed and enhanced at Wiki is the beauty of Wiki!! .Ease of use and contribution will exponentially lead to higher participation.

"Categories" concept at Wikis almost replaces "tagging". It helps in reducing redundant content and also helps in search on similar subject artefacts

Community based development of content and sharing of documents can make the document management and Web content management into a unified knowledge management tool which supports a practice rather than process. Intuitive navigation and simplicity in content creation makes Wiki to prefer as an easiest Knowledge Management tool

Wikis are anarchistic in nature in the sense it has no power structure. Because of this nature no user owns the Wiki and its content. All users can have similar permissions but it differs from Wiki to Wiki. Most of the Wikis contain sypos [system operators] that possesses additional functionality for vandalism reversions.

I felt Wikis are most useful for both Information management and knowledge management on creating following things:

• Online user guidelines [Documentation for a product]
• Yellow Pages for corporate
• Glossaries
• Mind Mapping
• Project Management
• Client’s thoughts/opinions/reviews
• Group email
• Collaborative software development
• Ideas Management
• Knowledge bases
• Corporate Intranet

Praveen Veeramalla is a Knowledge Management Consultant within Capgemini.You can follow and connect with him via Twitter.Currently, he is also doing a part time doctoral research on Knowledge Management

Connect!! Collaborate!! Enhance!!

Posted by Praveen Veeramalla on January 11, 2010

Playing Together is Sharing Together (Part 1)

How to mix Business Intelligence and Social Media to enable decision making

Children are constantly learning. First they crawl than they learn how to walk. And the same happens with playing. At first they start out doing this alone and they find it difficult to share toys with others. They want to keep those fun things themselves. But in time the children learn that playing together is more fun. And that playing together also means that you have to share your toys with others. This increases the fun and before you know it you have a new best friend. We have an expression in the Netherlands which goes like this: “Playing together is sharing together”. This Dutch rime helps children share their toys with other children while playing. As an adult the world looks pretty much the same. We also find it difficult to share our toys, let alone enterprise data or corporate analyses. However sharing can create enormous advantages and will increase your Return-On-Information. In this article we look at the role of corporate information (or business intelligence) and how social networks (or internet social media like twitter) can help decision making. Perhaps in the near future a manager will publish his or hers corporate data on the net with a $50 reward for the person that comes up with the best solution.

Read more

Posted by Jorgen Heizenberg on January 4, 2010

Does eDisclosure / eDiscovery really equate to eDisaster?

According to the British Computer Society’s Information Security Magazine, eDisclosure is a time bomb waiting to happen, and the key question for many organisations should be: "how ready are we for any potential fall-out?"

This excellent article claims that the astounding growth of Electronically Stored information (ESI) means that Security and Search / Accessibility, not Storage, have become the biggest challenge for most organisations. However, due to an increasingly stringent regulatory and legislative environment, we are witnessing a definite increase in the number of requests for ESI, or eDisclosure, by regulators and the legal process. It also predicts that “eDisclosure related investigations, prosecutions and fines are likely to become more common”. So just what is eDisclosure, and what does it mean for most organisations?

First of all, Disclosure is, according to the UK Crown Prosecution Service, “one of the most important issues in the criminal justice system” which requires that “…full disclosure should be made of all material held by the prosecution that weakens its case or strengthens that of the defence”. In other words, all relevant material information must be disclosed by both sides in order to ensure fair-play, and in the case of electronic information this is referred to as Electronic Disclosure or eDisclosure (Note: This is also known as eDiscovery in the USA).

Secondly, The repercussions for any organisation caught out by eDisclosure could be rather severe, as it is often commensurate with those accruing from major information management / compliance risks, which may result in significant costs and fines; charges of non-compliance; and damage to reputation and stakeholder / customer confidence. So what can organisations do to address this very real challenge, and to mitigate the associated risks?

1. Build and Increase Awareness– there is a surfeit of information about eDisclosure online, and a simple Google or Bing query will throw up loads of links. (Note the most relevant links are not necessarily those of solution vendors). Also there are several high-profile conferences and events that take place each year on this topic, (e.g. see the upcoming Information Retention and E-Disclosure Management Europe)
2. Improved Data Governance – this should go without saying, but the number of enterprises that are lacking in this particular area is quite alarming in light of reported incidents of data breach / loss. Most organisations and their CxOs need to raise the profile and priority for a holistic information security / management strategy that encompasses ALL aspects of information risk (e.g. compliance and risk management, information audit, security and access control / monitoring), and that’s just for starters.
3. Investigation of Solution Options for eDisclosure (i.e. Build, Buy, or Services) - Several vendors may claim to do this, but the key is to find one/s that address not just eDisclosure, (which really boils down to good data management, search and retrieval capabilities), but also all the relevant / impacted areas as listed above under Data Governance. In addition they must include policies and provisions for new technologies / usage scenarios (e.g. Cloud, Blogs, Wikis, plus Social Networking Media e.g. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube etc.)

In conclusion, and in line with a previous post about Data Loss, eDisclosure is a BIG topic that affects all legal, legislative, regulatory, enterprise and technology stakeholders alike; therefore the right solution/s (including IRM like capabilities for access tracking and control) must be equally wide-ranging and fundamental in order to be effective.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jude Umeh is a Snr. consultant / Enterprise Architect within Capgemini, as well as Author, Blogger and Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS). Jude is something of a rights management evangelist (when provoked), and you can follow / connect with him on Twitter

Posted by Jude Umeh on September 1, 2009

Tech predictions 2009: Information filtering and behavioral targeting are the new gold

Clay Shirky mentioned it some time ago "It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure". And he is right, currently there is so much information that it is hard to filter it correctly to come to the information you need (Well it is not hard to filter it, it is hard to find a filter that fits your needs). Not only will you have this issue in your RSSreader or your inbox, you'll also experience it when visiting websites.

Not only website visitors will experience this issue, website owners will experience related issues. Due to the fact that the visitors cannot find the information they are looking for they will either stop looking and do nothing or will contact the organization of the site via another channel that is more expensive (a call to a helpdesk costs approximately 7 Euros for the helpdesk owner). The result however is a bad user experience for the visitor. Visitors will either not visit the site again and will try to find another more userfriendly site or they will only use the more expensive channel. Both results are not pleasing for neither the owner of the website (resulting in more costs and perhaps even lower revenue) nor for the visitor (bad user experience and wasting time on another channel than he initially prefered).

Therefore information filtering as well as behavioral targeting is the big thing for 2009. It will enables the visitor to get to the information he needs within the amount of time he wants to spent to look for this information. By customizing the website in run time on the personal needs of the visitor the site owner is able to create a nice you experience and the website owner will save money by having less phone calls and perhaps even earn more money due to the fact the visitor is seduced by some products he really could use that pops up thank to behavioral targeting.

Posted by Rick Mans on November 21, 2008

Pick Your Fight: Browser War versus ISP “3 Strikes” Battle

It’s like a tale of two conflicts, where one tale concerns the renewed fight for browser supremacy (brought on by yet another brand new mega-hyped challenger); and the other deals with the never-ending tussle between music labels and illegal file-sharers (with Internet Service Providers, or ISPs, caught smack in the middle). It remains to be seen which battle will eventually come to be perceived as the good fight, but for now, which of the main protagonists would you rather be: the music label, the ISP or the web browser maker?

One key point of note, to my mind, is that both fights are intrinsically linked to the exceptional growth and ubiquity of the Internet, and ever-increasing bandwidth / connectivity for users and electronic devices. Both battles are also centered on the need, by some parties, to control access to certain resources (e.g. online information or media content), but that is where the similarity ends and the outcome / impact on the end-user begin to emerge.

On the one hand, this so called browser wars are ostensibly a good thing for the consumer, due to the beneficial effects of innovative companies trying to out-do each other for increased browser market share. The result is a win-win situation for both consumer and victor/s of the browser wars. On the other hand, when ISPs start monitoring, throttling bandwidth, and perhaps disconnecting, their users on suspicion of illegal content downloads, it becomes less clear as to who the likely winners and losers could be. Is it: the end-users, the ISPs, the record labels, or all / none / some of the above, (and to what degree do they win or lose anyway)?

It also makes one wonder if / how the lessons and outcomes of one battle can be applied to the other? For example, what if browser makers were forced to start targeting their users for possible prosecution, based on browsing habits and consumption of copyright-infringing content (e.g. illegal use of logos, text, images, videos and audio), will they really stand a chance in their particular battlefield? I think not, given the fact that user privacy, via so called private browsing mode, is now being touted as a must have feature by some of the major browsers makers. So what is the likelihood that future ISPs might seek to push privacy as a selling point for their services in order to attract those users who have been, or do not wish to be, stung by legal notices or prosecution? That would be most interesting to see.

In conclusion, it appears that one fight could help open up the field for competitive innovation, with great opportunities for both winners and end-users, while the other fight now seems more and more like a defensive rearguard action that could end-up stifling the more innovative go-to-market models necessary for survival in a changing environment. I leave it up to you to guess which is which.

Posted by Jude Umeh on September 21, 2008

Hypertext Markup Love 5

I think it was at least 10 years ago that I bought a book concerning HTML. The thing I remember most of this little book was that is contained a warning concerning the use frames in websites. Not a warning that you are probably completely clueless and you should not have a keyboard when you are planning implement frames in a site, but a warning for the fact that not all the browsers were supporting frames at that very moment of writing.

It was indeed a rather old book, however I fell in love with markup. Markup is the solid base of websites, all the other things (CSS, Flash, Silverlight, other plug ins etc) are just some fancy paint on the solid building. Off course the paint is important, however without a building there is not much to paint. Building buildings is more interesting to me than doing some paint jobs with fancy shiny paint.

Currently my markup loves is reviving since HTML5 is being specified. HTML5 does contain so much good elements, functionalities and other technologies that were missing since the introduction of HTML4 (almost 10 years ago in December 1999).  I will give you five good reasons why you too should be in love with HTML5 and why you should use it:

1. Clearer structure
   HTML5 will offer you a clearer structure to create a page with. Instead of ending op in a severe case diveritus (use the div element for nearly everything with caring about semantics) you could use elements like Section, Article, Aside, Nav, Figure, Header and Footer. Your page will become far more semantic using the elements.
2. Video, Audio
   Video is on great demand (every hour 13 hours of video is uploaded on Youtube).  HTML didn't had native support for playing video and audio in sites. There was the object tag, however it still required a plug in to get things to work. Another great thing is that you can easily offer alternative formats for e.g. video's and that can you style the video tag as you can with any other element.
3. Offline web applications
   With a native implementation you are no longer dependent on one vendor based plug ins (Google Gears), which is great, since more vendors result quite often in more innovation. And innovation is good for HTML as long as it is using open standards and is not proprietary. It really opens a new way of working (Gears is currently paving the path), you can now work when you want, where you want independent of connection.
4. User interaction
   Isn't it a great idea that you can edit browser pages without the need of rich text editors like tinyMCE of FCK editor? Isn't it even greater that you have some elements that will enable a track changes functionality in webpages? Off course it is nice that you can drag and drop items in web pages, however the nicest option is the native Undo functionality (for someone with my typing skills it is really great). Again a standarized functionality that currently implemented via many plug ins (that have a hard time to manage cross browser functioning).
5. Communication
   One of the limitation of e.g. AJAX is that it is by default single domain (with some tweaks in a browser you could make it multiple domain). However HTML5 offers by default cross-document messaging, which is great and offers again a great set of opportunities. Besides that also server-sent events, Web sockets, and channel messaging are great new features.

I bet you are also in love now with HTML5, it is only a pity we have to wait another 14 years before it is a real recommendation. However in the meanwhile we can flirt with it in several browsers.

Posted by Rick Mans on September 18, 2008

Rent-a-ranter

My favorite podcast just finished their final, what they refer to as ordinary episode: LUG Radio . The podcast is hosted by four British blokes (Jono Bacon, Stuart Langridge, Chris Procter, and Adam Sweet) who admittedly swear and joke a lot but also discuss Linux and other open source related topics with very refreshing insights. That's all over now of course. They bailed out. Don't they say that only all good things come to an end? (wink,wink,smile)

In that final episode they were discussing whether - in their own words - "Pundits should fuck off". Their definition of a pundit is someone who writes or talks authoritatively about subjects without actually being an authority on that subject. In short: someone who pontificates. Listen to the episode yourself if you want to know what they concluded. One interesting question that came out of this discussion was whether good bloggers are just good at articulating things and not necessarily knowledgable about the subjects they write about.

Now I might be venturing on very thin ice here, but I actually like to write about subjects that fascinate me. And I am always fascinated by the things I don't fully understand yet, but am trying to understand. So my blogs are often thoughts that I am saying out loud, hoping I can spark some thoughts in other people's heads too. Does that make me a pundit? I'll leave that up to you (be gentle...).

Last week, Eiso Kant posted an entry on his blog with the inviting title: "Is blogging dead?". His point is that "blogs are often no longer about the integrity of the content but the number of backlinks it receives, the number of page views and how high it ranks in Google". I admit, these things matter much to me too, but you actually need to write about someting that is valued by others to achieve all that. That's the beauty of Web 2.0!

The thing that triggered me most was a response by Eiso on a comment to this blog entry, where he wrote:

"I have been at the head of a project where we hired article writers to populate blogs. When we paid them we didn’t ask for great articles, neither were we looking for the best writers, we were looking for cheap keyword rich content."

So if I am understanding correctly, you can rent a ranter for populating blogs. These people actually get paid to provide mediocre content. I have tried www.rent-a-ranter.com but it doesn't exist yet. So here's your chance!

Posted by Mark Nankman on July 17, 2008

Wall Street Journal: Most Corporate Blogs Are Unimaginative Failures

Gosh, I sure hope we are making a good attempt at not being a boring a corporate blog here! According to the Wall Street Journal most corporate blogs will bore you to death. Fortunately, the author of the article provides some good hints and examples of good corporate blogs. Let's copy their style and we should be safe. ;-)

I would really value your opinion of our blog now, dear reader. Did I just see you suppress a yawn?

Posted by Mark Nankman on July 1, 2008

Milking the web

The web has become a very lively place. Around the globe, people are happily sharing all sorts of experiences with any subject you can think of. There now is an enormous collection of thoughts, opinions, stories and conversations that you can draw from when you are selecting a car, finding a suitable mortgage, finding the best hospital for treating your mother's heart condition, purchasing top quality roasted Guatemalan coffee beans or finding out personal information about someone you are thinking about hiring.

I use different web resource types (blogs, search engines, feeds, ...) for finding out about different subjects. Moreover, the resource type that I use for finding out more about a subject depends on my connection with the subject. This is visualized in the picture below. I call it my web usage spectrum.

The horizontal axis marks the favourableness of subjects. On the left are the subjects that I don't care much about and on the far right are my favorite subjects. The vertical axis marks the frequency at which I use certain web resources for finding information about subjects. At the bottom are my least used resources and on top are the ones that I use all the time. The length of the boxes inside the graph says something about the universal usefulness of a resource. It is by no means exact nor did I collect any statistics.

I wish to stay abreast with subjects that I am strongly connected with. For that I am relying on resources that I value and trust. As you can see in the graph, I follow these resources using syndication and collaborative tools. For less favourable subjects I take a more traditional, pre-Web2.0-approach.

My web usage spectrum is highly subjective and reflects how I prefer to milk the web. I adapt it every now and then when I learn new tricks. Usually an adaption leads to an improvement in the quality of the information I find, the time I need to find the information or the amount of fun that I am having.

My guess is that my web usage spectrum is not unique and probably sub-optimal. I know that it is tweakable but I am relatively slow at adopting new tools (I am skeptical and allergic to change...). For example, I was only very recently convinced of the use of twitter (you can follow me here).

This all poses an interesting question: How do you know if your spectrum is optimal in the sense that you use the right resources the right way? One approach to answer this is to compare your spectrum with other spectrums. So please share with me: how do you milk your web?. What does your web usage spectrum look like?

Posted by Mark Nankman on July 1, 2008

Internal blogs matter

Like many other companies these days, Capgemini has an internal blogging community. I used to write frequent posts on my own internal blog, but I have been passive for over 6 months. The reason is that I do most of my blogging out in the open these days, which is already taking up much of my time.

I must also admit that I had another reason, besides being too busy blogging elsewhere, for pushing aside the internal blog-o-sphere: the fact that it is only visible from within Capgemini. But I have changed my mind after reading this post on the "Go Big Always" (GBA) blog by Sam Lawrence. I am very much inspired by this post. Thanks for waking me up, Sam!

The internal blogging community of Capgemini is fairly large. People from all over the globe are active in this community. There are blogs that focus on development methodologies, on specific technologies and products, on right shoring experiences, et cetera. However, I am not sure how actively other employees read these blogs and benefit from their contents.

Most people at Capgemini (at least as far as I can see) use good old e-mail for finding and sharing information. They simply direct a question or item of interest at an e-mail group. This usually results in quick answers too. On the other hand, people also complain about receiving too much generally directed e-mail that pollutes their e-mail boxes. Maybe we should use e-mail for specifically directed information only, and use the blogs for generally directed information. That would take a rather large collaborative effort in our case.

But would that really solve anything? Moving information from e-mail boxes to RSS feeds doesn't make much difference to me. I still have to read them, and I still won't have time enough to do that (the number of feed subscriptions I have in my RSS Software exceeds 80...). For me personally, podcasts form part of the solution. I listen to them while I am commuting or mowing the lawn (if I had one). The podcasts that aggregate news and information are usually the best ones.

So, I can only conclude boldly with this: All Capgemini personnel should get iPods. Depending on your role, your skills, your position and your ambitions, your iPod will be automatically synchronized with what you need to hear. We'll probably need to be a little bit further in the development of the third version of the Web to really make this work...

Posted by Mark Nankman on May 12, 2008

Wikimania

Warning: this blog post has an extremely high link density.  When I wrote this, there was no article on "Link density" on Wikipedia yet. Feel free to create that article yourself. As of version 2.0 of the Web, everyone is allowed and entitled to do just that. In 1995 (long before the term Web 2.0 was coined), Ward Cunningham made this possible with his simplest online database that could possibly work. He was recently interviewed on the FLOSS Weekly Podcast and his original WikiWikiWeb is still online.

Probably because of its inherent simplicity, the wiki has become immensely popular. To give you an idea of this popularity, here are some crude statistics:

• Google yields almost 300,000,000 for "wiki",


• WikiEngines lists 147 implementations of the simplest online database,


• The most popular wiki engine MediaWiki has been downloaded 16,456 times in the last 2 months (also see the figure below),


• Wikipedia (based on MediaWiki) currently has 2,301,479 articles in the English language,


• Wet Paint, one of the most popular wiki hosting sites, has registered over 810.000 wiki sites.

Now you might think: "So, wikis are hot. Thanks for the stats, but what's in a wiki for me?" A wiki has proven to be a simple and effective tool for building a database of collective knowledge of a group of people. Fruits of a wiki range from solutions to problems to ideas for new products. The added value of a wiki lies in the possibilities that it creates for harvesting collective intelligence (crowd wisdom) and for collaborative innovation. Tim Hyer excellently explains this. I have much trust in the wiki model too. Some time ago, I even played with the idea of applying that model to a country's civil code. Thinking of adopting a wiki yourself, but not entirely convinced yet? Then watch this 21 episode movie series about wiki adoption (Blip TV).

The wiki certainly seems the easiest way to add collaboration functionality to your website. All you need to do is choose a wiki engine, style it to your company's style guide and your done, right?. Well...not exactly. You will first need to choose a wiki engine. There are quite a lot of wiki engines that we can choose from, but fortunately, there is the Wiki Engines wiki that provides us with a nice top 10 of wiki engines. You could start by picking a wiki that you can deploy in your back office. There are, of course, more selection criteria. Selecting a wiki engine is just like selecting any other software package. The Wiki Choice tree might ease the selection process.

Once you have launched your wiki, how do you make it work? We all expect to see a flourishing community, but how are you going to convince people that they should submit their knowledge and ideas? In order to grow a wiki needs fertilization (generating interest) and cultivation (monitoring and moderation), so point out a Champion. A wiki, like any other social site, requires substantial investment before you can reap its fruits. Will there be any return on your investment? What does a wiki cost? Maybe you will find answers to these questions at the International Symposium on Wikis (WikiSym) (the WikiSym website is, of course, a wiki).

Finally, here's a list of 12 wiki's that actually work. How is your wiki doing? Are you reaping fruits or are you still investing?

Posted by Mark Nankman on March 25, 2008

BI and Financial Risk Management

I'm sure we're all acutely aware of the current financial market problems as a result of sub-prime lending and the the down turn in the economies in many countries resulting in bad debt.

We could look to better intelligence to predict the market down turns, to look for the early triggers in the economy to help spot the warning signs and to help manage the situation. Complex mathematical models that give varying levels of probablistic outcome would have shown the shifting nature of the risk. We've also had increasing levels of legislation and regulation to identify individual risk and fraud and general improvements in risk determination at the Business to Consumer level. And yet after all these things we've seen a financial service market in near melt down.

What has surprised me most in this current period of crisis is the seeming lack of understanding of corporate exposure to risk through institution to institution trading. It appears that financial institutions may have been deeply concerned with the individual risk of a customer transaction, they've not had a suitable handle on the bigger and as events have transpired, potentially organisation crippling decisions they've been taking.

How many companies are looking back at their balanced scorecards and their array of metrics and rethinking which ones are really important to survival? I hope most of them.

Posted by Jonathan Gibbs on March 20, 2008

iPodification obsolete?

Ron Tolido wrote that iPodification leads to nothing (quite literally) eventually. Until then, we will unfortunately have to carry around all our cumbersome gadgets. Sure thing, they are indeed getting smaller and smarter, usually right after you bought one, rendering your new precious obsolete (no matter how long you wait).

In the impressive 6 volume epic "Reality Dysfunction" Peter F. Hamilton writes about a far and dazzling future where people have the ability to have themselves genetically customized. They have genetically enhanced senses and can even digitally (for lack of a better term, I use digitally, because surely, digital computing will become extinct) record experienced senses for later replay. These senses are shared on a universe wide web. This same medium is used for telecommunication. Messages are e-thoughts with attached e-experiences. A nice example of a compelling nothing that iPodification could lead to.

In the mean time, iPodification is taking some very interesting shapes. Take the iPodified baby for example, or Levis' iPodified jeans. But mostly, iPodification means making "digital stuff" portable. I don't know how to put that better. The digital stuff can be anything: books (have a look at Podiobooks), maps, movies, language courses, schedules, music, e-mail, news, directories... Some of that stuff is expected to be there when you need it, even if you don't know you are going to (context bound stuff, like local maps and directories, and ads too because without them there is no business case).

In short: Based on your current situation, your iPod should intelligently synchronize itself with a personalized repository of digital stuff. Wait a minute, were we talking about a PDA or an iPod? The boundaries between gadget categories become blurred. PDA's entertain you while helping you navigate and iPods are organizing your life while you are dancing. How applicable does that make the term "iPodification"? Has iPodification become obsolete already? Help me find a better word!

Posted by Mark Nankman on March 11, 2008

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure”

A quote often used and with various theories on its origin, some attributing it to Dr. Deming although others claim him to be misquoted. Irrespective, the simple reality is that a lot of executive management is done “to make the numbers”; which is fine so long as the numbers you’re trying to make are still relevant.

Industry measures like churn and average basket size all grew out of historical models and operating principles, but today we’re in a rapidly changing environment where some of these historical principles are being overturned. For instance we have the long tail that challenges the traditional view of the market, and the importance of customers is changing from a simple basket size or repeat purchase model with the advent of cross selling within an ecosystem.

While companies who wish to be agile and change the rules of the game might be suitably led from the top, execution can be hampered by the slowness of change in the way businesses measure themselves, coupled with Market analysts still wanting to see traditional measures to gauge underlying performance which can rapidly translate to impact on the share price. Maybe we’ve seen the consequence of not having these measures to fall back on. Was the dotcom boom and subsequent bust based on not really understanding the underlying measures that these businesses needed to conform to? Having one hand on the fundamentals of a business, even when trying to change, seems to be a pretty sound foundation, but an organisation should not let these dominate, they should be scrutinised and reassessed, and they should reflect how the business needs to be, not how it once was.

Posted by Jonathan Gibbs on December 4, 2007