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In the previous article User Experience Design in a Social Enterprise Environment: Connecting The Dots I covered how to look more holistically at the building blocks of a Social Enterprise to make it a single coherent experience.

In this article I will be looking at how to create consistency that extends beyond the corporate firewall and into the public web.

An equal brand experience for all

A difficult aspects of all social media initiatives is keeping a consistent brand experience in customer-facing environments. One of the more visible proofs of failure are employees posting something unfortunate via their personal social profiles or even via a corporate account.

But there are more deep-rooted issues as well:

• How can the visual identity be delivered through a Facebook page that only allows a minimum of graphic changes?
• How can a customer be sure the corporate Flickr account indeed IS the official account?
• How can customer expect the same consistent experience every time they get in contact with the company?

Brand education and corporate values are there to provide support to the marketing, PR and other customer-facing professionals so they can communicate the right message and shape the right brand perception, but it is no longer enough.

Today we all work in PR

Historically this type of brand training/ support was only relevant to people expected to interact with customers, but the world has changed and today every employee represents the company, not just the ones with job titles that say they do and not only during work hours.

It is the future of how we work. The lines of when we are at work and when we are not are increasingly being blurred and representing the company we work for everywhere we go is becoming part of our lives.

Some companies require employees to state on their personal social profiles that they represent personal opinions and do not represent the company, but this legacy clause do not face the reality: Everything an employee writes reflects on the company, disclaimer or not.

But without a sufficient understanding of the brand and the corporate values, how can employees be expected to convey the brand message accurately and consistently?

A brief introduction to the corporate values during the induction is no longer enough.

The Social Enterprise as the brand tutor

The Social Enterprise, being an ambient entity, can facilitate brand education like no other organisational structure can on an on-going basis. But in order to do so it is important to create a consistent user experience that conveys a unified company:

• Don’t settle for the default interface designs of the different systems. Modify it to create a coherent user experience across all systems.
• Apply the corporate visual design uniformly as much as possible across all systems.
• Ensure the design looks profesisonal and that it is consistent with the customer facing web presence of the company.
• Reinforce the corporate values, not just by slogans, but by getting senior management engaged with the employees. A simple “like” on a post from a VP or the CEO is a powerful steer.

Ongoing brand awareness education across all levels of the organisation is key to a great customer experience because all employees are familiar and comfortable with the corporate identity and can convey the brand in an accurate and confident fashion.

But what do you think?

Please share your thoughts and feel free to suggest a subject for the next article on how to make a desirable and productive user experience across the social enterprise.

]]> This post has not been written to discuss the legal aspects of the recent MegaUpload events. This post’s goal is presenting a high level and technical point of view of how MegaUpload was designed.

As you know, MegaUpload was a collection of websites allowing users to upload and download any file. MegaUpload information system is a pure cloud based solution. To propose services, to store petabytes of data or to bill – all have been done using cloud services. As the heart of these cloud services was Information management, I think it would be interesting to investigate, from a technical point of view.

Based on the MegaUpload indictment, some figures and some technical facts are really interesting.

Hosting capacity:

Carpathia hosting is a North-American cloud provider based in Virginia. MegaUpload was a customer of Carpathia and was renting about 25 petabytes of storage space and about a thousand servers (half of them physically located in the USA). It means an average of 25 Terabytes of storage per server.

Leaseweb is based in Netherlands and provided more than 600 servers to MegaUpload shared between the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and the US. Cogent communications was providing 36 servers in the US and in France. I’ve got no information about their provided storage capacity.

Compression techniques:

As most of the files stored were already highly compressed (video or audio formats), every time anew file was uploaded on MegaUpload, a unique identifier was generated through an MDS hash calculation to determine if the same file had been previously stored and avoid storing the same file twice (or more).. Note that MegaUpload gave the new upload a different URL from the URL given to the initial upload, so this compression by avoiding twin files was fully transparent for the users.

Information Access:

To allow internet users to find the stored files, websites have been created describing the content (name, kind of data, photos, name of the actors or singers …). In Business Intelligence we call it generating metadata and this is part of the presentation layer (like a Business Objects universe or the metadata description on Documentum).

The internet search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo were automatically indexing all this public metadata content, allowing users to find the right website and so the file location through a MegaUpload URL.

Billing:

As with all commercial internet websites billing is a mandatory component. There was indirect billing through the presence of advertisements on the MegaUpload websites and direct billing offered to the final users to improve their upload and download capacity (bandwidth and quantity of simultaneous downloads) with a subscription.

Apparently subscription represented 75% of the revenue, whilstadvertisement was about 25%.

The final billing relationship (payment) with customers, providers and advertising was once again purely done on a cloud mode, managed through Paypal, Moneybookers, Adbrite or Partygaming.

High level architecture design:

If you look at this simple high level architecture design, it looks like an information management public cloud based solution, with an integration layer, a storage layer, a presentation layer, a usage layer and, as it was an e-commerce web site, a billing layer.

As you may see, MegaUpload was a very primitive information system cloud solution. I’m sure there were also BI tools for internal usage (analyzing click streams and customer’s activity), but I have no precise information on it, maybe next episodes will cover this domain.

]]> Recently, I have picked a topic and am creating a view point on Social Media with an objective to addressing today’s challenging business environment, and how the emerging technologies (i.e. social media/social initiatives) can help enterprises overcome those challenges. In my initial research, I found a significant gap between “marketing and IT functions” for successful social collaboration because both the departments are unable to team up together in social media usage and customer engagement.

Traditionally, the marketing department has been centered on getting out the message via advertising or promotions. But in the current market environment, customers have total control over the corporate brands; therefore, marketing executives, have no choice but to adopt interactive marketing and plan to invest further in online tactics to deliver timelier, measurable communications to increase the quality of buyer responses. The changing role of marketing is moving its investment from media technology—marketing will shift more funds to their customer experience platforms to listen, monitor and manage customer traits.  Like marketing, IT is shifting to a primary or at least peer role in business. We all have seen many write-ups telling of the demise of the traditional IT department—transform now and be more aligned to business to stay ahead. So what are the current business demands, and to what extent do IT department needs to change?

In the digital era, consumers, equipped with their smart devices are used to having instant access to information and services, resulting in thousands of conversations happening everyday on the web that are sufficient to impact any corporate brands. In short, we have entered the age where customers are most empowered and have industry dominance. Now the question arises: are today’s CIOs/CMOs able to build stronger partnerships to move toward greater customer centricity?

Let’s look back into the early 2011, where business leaders/executives across the globe started talking about one common objective—“Team up with social media”. There are several write-ups, talking about the common objective of being more socially aware and engaged with social media.  Enterprises can accomplish strategic organizational goals, but some business leaders are still skeptical to explore the opportunities that might benefit their enterprises.

So which department should lead social projects implementation, Marketing or IT? Many believe these two functions would not be more extreme in their differences, and to understand that I recently put this as a question to our enterprise social networking site “Yammer”. Thanks to all our colleagues for their quick responses. Some of the opinions suggest that marketing leads the social implementation (flag bearer) and IT plays a role of a facilitator; however on the contrary, a few suggested that such projects also depend on the company’s intent towards social implementation (i.e. improve customer service, increase margins, profits, and new lead generation), and hence the department will lead such initiatives. What matters the most is each of these departments (i.e. marketing, IT, PR, R&D, legal or HR) needs to leverage it to achieve their own objectives without negatively impacting what other companies are doing in the social space.

But in general, we could say that both the marketing and IT departments operate separately while deciding points for improving an organization’s marketing effectiveness. In most scenarios, IT has focus on improving customer service and managing the social media platforms for online listening and collaboration with customers; meanwhile marketing department want IT to improve associations with marketing campaigns, sales and other channel groups, and they have unrealistic expectations regarding the timing of projects and a lack of lead time.

One of the few concerns from the IT leaders is the frequency of last minute change requests from the marketing teams in the midst of technology projects, while marketing complains of the rigid nature of the IT process.

The trend has been noticed that most business leaders involved in social initiatives do not even realize how widely these projects have spread within their companies, and often the marketing department doesn’t even realize when business units implement social initiatives. It is a fact  that social media will surely impact every activity performed by an organization, and leaders involved with social initiatives must enable mass collaboration for avoiding the path of social media failure. Gartner analysis says, by 2015, 20% of enterprises that employ social media “beyond marketing” will lead their industries in revenue growth. There are a few examples where social initiatives have added efficiencies in various areas within the enterprises: 1) Sales—Usage of communities to drive direct sales, 2) Customer Service—Building a community of customers to truly listen and engage in customer conversations, 3) Marketing—Identifying influencers to get the word out about new products/services/brands, 4) Public relations—working with communities to know what customers talk/think about the enterprise, 5) Human resources (HR) —Leverage communities to hire new resources, 6) Business process management—Leveraging inputs from communities to continuously improve existing processes, 7) Context aware computing—Acquiring inputs from the user’s context to provide better information and service.

However, enterprises need to understand when departments and business units undertake their own social initiatives, it may hurt the overall business objectives. For instance: Marketing, Customer-service, and Public relations might reach out to the same customer base with different social approaches in their isolation. The marketing team may start a new community for gathering customer inputs for their new product, but such kinds of discussion could lead to a customer disconnect. The marketing team should take inputs from existing customer communities, run by public relation, IT and customer-service departments that generate detailed feedback in terms of what customers talk about your products (what works or what doesn’t work) or take inputs for social co-creation. On the other side, IT leaders may needlessly duplicate efforts for implementing the same social software or aim at the similar business goals which will result in extra cost, and opening an existing community for new members.

To optimize the investments for social initiatives, enterprises must establish a shared understanding of social technologies and trends, and align objectives to the overall strategy. Partnering for social success, both marketing and IT executives should bring to light common problems and opportunities for working together as there is a significant opportunity to have better collaboration between the two groups.

Social media will affect almost every system, process, and role within the enterprise, and therefore, both marketing and IT teams need to speed up a cultural integration and overcome past stereotypes.

]]> With rail market liberalization, railway companies are totally free to build offers and price them.

Pricing is a complex process which involves distance, customer profile, embedded services, infrastructure fees and yield management rules. There are also some special factors such as calendar events (Christmas holidays, final of soccer competition, …) and special offers which may have an impact on pricing.
There is a last special factor which is the organizational factor within the national rail market and which involves several instances, such as the government, the regulatory body, the infrastructure manager and the carrier, which may influence the final operational costs.

Comparing them is not simple but is possible if we can eliminate some of these factors. Let’s take them one by one:

• Distance can be eliminated by taking trips that have the same distance
• Customer Profile can be eliminated if we choose a basic fare such as the one for adult in 2nd class without any discount
• Embedded services can be eliminated by taking a trip with the same services: refundable, cancellable, changeable ticket with no extra comfort services.
• Yield management rules can be mitigated but not totally eliminated by taking a trip which departure day is at least 1 month later and by taking routes which attractiveness is equivalent
• Special caldendar events factor can be eliminated by taking a trip day which do not match with any special events
• Other special factors can’t be eliminated

Now let’s take 4 countries: France, Germany, Spain and Italy and let’s find out trips that match with these constraints.

Here is the result.

Trips used for comparison

Selected routes are all high speed lines under 90 minutes long and they all start from a capital city (except for Milan which can be considered as an economical capital city) to a major town in the country. By this way, we think we eliminated the attractiveness factor.

Departure date is fixed to the 25th January 2012. We requested prices for a morning time departure and also for the afternoon and an evening time on the early of December 2011.

Source: www.raileurope.co.uk

To make the comparison, we use this figures to calculate the booking price per kilometer:

Conclusion:

This chart leads to make 2 observations.

1. Fares do not depend on the departure time except for the French route

The reason is that Yield management rules still apply on this route despite the precautions we have taken above. In fact, this route is strategic for the French railway because it carries many commuters who daily take the high speed train to go from home to work. Consequently, attractiveness is very high on this route and French railway is able to apply high fares which remain competitive respecfully with the other travel modes.

2. Fares comparison shows significative gaps between selected  routes

The 2 major factors which explain these gaps are the infrastructure fees and the separation level between the different instances in the rail market that was listed in the introduction of this article.
First, infrastructure fees factor haven’t been eliminated and still impacts prices.
Second, If separation is not full, government can have accounting support upon the different instances. For instance, in Spain, the government fixes infrastructure fees and keeps them very low. On the opposite, in Germany, the infrastructure manager is fully independant from the government and has to fix higher fees to have balanced accounts.
In France and Italy, there are some intermediate situations which make separation level between Germany and Spain.

Consequently, in a market which going to be more and more opened and liberalized, organizational factors keeps being an impediment to have real fares competition.

]]> “Don’t just ask what the role of the IT department in the Enterprise should be; Ask what the role of Technology should be in the Business of the Enterprise.”

BCSNLB Event Images

That was the tagline for last week’s sell-out event at the BCS, Chartered Institute for IT, which featured Capgemini’s CTO, Andy Mulholland. Attendees were treated to riveting talk by Andy, in which he described the trends, implications and impact of innovation, especially the evolution (in back-office) and revolution (in front-office) of technology and the enterprise. To further drive home the point, Andy outlined what he calls the  top ten game changing technology shifts for enterprises to watch and understand, e.g.: people and social tools, the user experience, big data, user driven IT environments (aka consumerisation), and mobility, to name just a few.

And if that wasn’t enough, the second speaker / session at this event provided a practical hands-on demonstration of what might be described as a prototype for ‘crowd-sourced innovation’ in action. This session, which was led by Destination-Innovation’s Paul Sloane, involved attendees forming into small groups in order to explore painful ‘real life’ problems, and to come up with an innovative approach to resolving one of them. The outcome was then played back to the larger group, and suffice it to say that some of the suggestions were astonishing, and one attendee commented afterwards, saying: “It’s amazing what you can achieve in a short period of time”.

Overall, this event provided a great mix of comprehensive knowledge and innovation foresight, along with some practical application of innovative techniques to address them; resulting in a balanced, demonstrable experience of how challenges posed by technology disruption may be met in turn by an innovative approach designed to harness individual creativity. For an event organised, in their spare time, by a bunch of volunteer committee members / helpers of the BCS, North London Branch, (including yours truly), I think this was an excellent outcome.

]]> As I’ve stated before, during the last decades companies have become data hoarders. In order to extract additional insights yielding competitive advantage, they’ve not restricted themselves to the necessary data for their products and processes, they’ve started to store additional data as well.   IDC Research projects total data storage will soon exceed 1.8 zettabytes. In more concrete terms, over 57 billion 32GB iPads.

This phenomenon is described as ”big data”. This terminology seems to refer very much to  massive database tables and data warehouses. But while structured data is growing rapidly, unstructured data like documents, multimedia and social activity streams is increasing in magnitude even faster.  Complicating factor is that the analysis of all of these unstructured data has gotten harder not only because there is more of it but because it comes from new sources. Blogs, Web comments and other information comes in the form of unstructured data, which can’t be crunched the way relational databases are. The need to mine different types of content has led to new data analysis platforms.  So while big data is being looked upon as a tool for competitive advantage, gauging trends to supporting sciences and determining consumers preferences, it is also a big challenge to manage. It means managing fast  increasing:

-  velocity : creation, read and delete procedures of data including accessmanagement and governace

-   volume : Storage including green IT

-   variety: Type of data and documents including digital sustainability.

New tools (Hadoop, NoSQL) are emerging to analyze big data, but organizations still struggle with how they can truly harness massive amounts of data to improve decision-making and performance. On the one hand it means that the market for new tools to manage and exploit big data is has great growth potential. On the other hand it is clear that with such a variety of challenges and new developments, companies need to develop a big data vision before they start exploiting it as an opportunity.

Become aware of its challenges, possibilities and risks.

Deploy a big data strategy.

Make people aware of the consequences on data usage, products and processes.

As always; think big, start small.

 But most of all, the implementation of big data ‘ain’t over till it is over’.

Meaning that you have to fully implement it in the companies structures, layers and vaults to fully exploit the potentials big data can offer.

]]> “So actually, BPM prepares your coffee every morning?” This is the first comment I heard from the audience at a recent BPM selling presentation I attended. Why did the client ask this question? Was he just joking?

Clients care about business value that translates into gains for their company. This is what BPM is all about: higher net profit for the company and better services delivered to their customers. But we need to prove it, right?

BPM is all about business. BPM is not just “software”, it is actually a management philosophy focused on delivering real value to the business by optimizing processes. More organizations are realizing that BPM gives them better end-to-end visibility, allowing them to drive their business according to KPIs and SLAs, and optimizing business performance.

BPM uses different technologies to solve many companies’ business issues like responding rapidly to changing customers’ demands, managing product and service portfolios efficiently, enforcing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Service Level Agreements (SLAs), managing complex processes and systems, and fighting global competitors.

Some of my colleagues explain BPM like this: “If you are driving a car, what do you want to look at? To the rear mirrors or to the front and your dashboard? Some technologies like Business Intelligence (BI) enable you to explain the historical data: last year’s sales, last month’s new customers, last week’s claims etc. But, instead of explaining why you sold €8 million of business when you were supposed to sell €10 million, wouldn’t you prefer to know how your business is performing in real-time at this second and be able to drive your business in order to actually sell €10 million? Only BPM enables companies to do this.

Let’s look at visibility first. BPM gives visibility of what is going on inside business processes in real-time. This visibility enables us to monitor the KPIs and SLAs, and answer a wide range of questions, such as: How many new accounts were opened during this particular time? Are we performing above or below the KPI? Which region is selling more? Which process is causing a bottleneck, how many transactions are blocked in and how much money do they represent? How many claims were received and how many have been resolved? How many loans are waiting for approval and how many were rejected?

All of these questions and more can be answered in seconds thanks to BPM activity monitoring. This means better visibility of business environment metrics and the integrated value chain, which includes forecast, supply, production, distribution, sales, invoicing, and customer service.

Moving on, BPM also allows managers to drive the business based on KPIs and SLAs. For example, in loan processing there are usually a lot of manual and paper-based activities. BPM replaces paper with electronic forms or scanned images that are automatically routed through the process. So if the marketing department launches a campaign promising loan approval in one day, BPM can automate that process and ensure adherence with SLAs.

The front office will start filling in the electronic application with the customer’s general information, then the electronic application would be automatically sent to the back office for validation stages, then it would be sent to the loan approval department, and so on.  If one back office agent is too busy, automatic rules can assign the application to another back office agent. If the loan amount is too important or if an application is taking too long to validate, an automatic message would be sent to the supervisor for him to approve. If work starts to accumulate, the business rules-based system can automatically assign the electronic application by priority order to the various back office agents.

As for optimizing business performance, as shown, BPM helps companies to drive their business according to specific objectives. BPM would enable the loan company to follow and manage each loan application in real-time through the whole approval process. Managers would be able to identify the products and the business units which are performing well, helping them to take better and faster decisions in order to increase business performance according to KPIs and SLAs.

Capgemini’s BPM solution promises end-to-end continuous improvement for superior business performance. Our approach is based on visibility, and the capacity to drive and optimize business according to KPIs, and it delivers real business value. We collaborate with our clients to transform business processes into valuable activities for their organizations, helping them to:

• identify high-impact opportunities
• define the best approach to exploit these opportunities (business + technology)
• implement solutions and continuous improvement
• implementImplement change management and self-sufficiency.

Our BPM approach helps companies to deliver better services to their customers, reduces costs and increases sales, which results in higher profits, and stronger and more sustainable market positioning.

BPM can do anything based on processes. It solves the BIG business issues, from account opening to loan management, from launching new services to managing aircraft landing at commercial airports and a whole lot more.

BPM is so GOOD that for me it actually prepares your coffee every morning…

Please follow the “Business Value of BPM” blog series and the PoV release (Point of View) where I will further discuss some of the best of Capgemini’s case studies touched upon above.

Gustavo AGUILAR PEREZ
BPM Expert
Business and Technology
Capgemini
Paris

]]> The current state of our economy is also impacting IT budgets. That’s a fact that nobody can deny. At the same time the need for relevant information has increased considerably. Organizations are more and more focusing on their customer and need supporting data. That is another fact. As a result IT is reconsidering its position (back to the core?) whilst the business is waiting for the much needed report or analysis. This need for faster time to information and less IT involvement has given rise to something that is often called Business or Self Service Reporting (SSR). Traditionally BI reports are created by the IT department. SSR allows business users to do this for themselves using end user oriented query and reporting tools.

This might sound like a radical new way of delivering information but it is nothing new. Gartner for example has always placed the report writing function in the business part of the BICC. What is different now is that the tools have become more intuitive and easy to work with. Business users, albeit power users, can build their own reports with a relative ease. IT responsibilities for SSR are limited, or should I say focused, on delivering the quality data on time. Which is not bad considering the lower budgets. Another great thing about letting business user build their own reports is that it improves the quality of the requirements (no more misunderstandings) and the setting of priorities (they will probably build what the need the most first). So it really sounds like a win-win situation and often it is just that. But… there is a down side to this as well. This down side is obviously not often mentioned by the SSR vendors as most try to position themselves as the rescuers of the free BI movement. Their message is simple: Self service good, old BI bad.  However by spreading the report function across various lines of business a dilution of knowledge arises which is often strengthened by the information silos that are created. In a way it is back to the old days with the business (intelligence) silos across the company. Did I hear somebody say: single version of the truth? And the IT department also has a hard time in monitoring the use of the report function and keeping the performance on an acceptable level.

So how can we do something to solve these problems? One way is to make the SSR a little bit more IT monitored by setting up a ‘managed’ self service environment.  Another solution would be to create an organization structure to support these changes. This would be something like a BICC but more business orientated.  A third possibility would be to limit the SSR to a certain kind or reporting. When there is a need for fast time to information or when there is a high need for business involvement SSR is the way to go. All other reports are created in some sort of central function. A hybrid solution can even arise where personal or self service reports become centrally maintained standard reports in time, thus solving the single version challenge. But most important is to have a good data set to work with. Good meaning: unified definitions, strong data quality. Also I would advise all business users to follow a course on how to best visualize their data. That’s probably even more important than understanding all the buttons in your tool.

Self Service Reporting can be a great thing. It will decrease the time to information for many people which is much needed in these roaring times. However SSR must always be implemented and positioned in a way that its benefits will not create concerns for others involved. Always keep the impact of SSR on your information architecture in mind while seeking for quick solutions.

]]> In this ever changing economy we see the  Business Intelligence (BI) landscape rapidly transforming. The increased focus of the market on cost reduction and customer profitability has forced IT to return to its core while business is driving future developments. This transformation is further fueled by technology innovations. This impacts the trends in BI as never before.

Fixing the basics

The business is demanding more and more from their IT department. In their thirst for extending Business Intelligence and Analytical support it is essential to build a strong information foundation to fund future use. Key elements are Master Data Management (with Customer Master Data as the obvious first), Data Quality improvements and robust BI platforms. With a Return-On-Intelligence (ROI) in mind, this requires a highly industrialized and efficient approach to BI services.

Big data gets bigger and bigger

The rise in volume (amount of data), velocity (speed of data) and variety (range of data) gives way to new architectures that no longer only collect and store but actually use data. The challenge however is  that Big data, as opposed to its name,  is really many amounts of small data ranging from tweets, sales reports to mail messages. Therefore performance is key word. Look for technology solutions like datawarehouse appliances, in memory analytics, columnar storage and smart software solutions.

Need for speed

Even though the size of data is increasing the BI user is expecting faster answers from their BI environment. Whether it is standard reports or navigating trough (source) data. In memory technology (as opposed to separate disk storage) will allow for new business usage. In order to store, process and gain insight from Big data, on-demand or real-time BI architectures will replaces traditional datawarehouses.

Up in the cloud

Cloud or As A Service models are in increased demand for both temporary as well as permanent usage. It’s all about services (like reporting or analytics) provided from a managed environment based on a (new) business model (often pay per use). In other words: making BI (hardware, software, intelligence) available via the internet.

Agility is the new normal

Historically BI has been IT controlled data collection, integration and distribution of historical data. However BI has evolved into being part of the ongoing daily (operational, tactic and strategic) business processes to plan, monitor and improve on organizational goals. Next generation BI is therefore by nature more agile in its development (BI lifecycle) and requires (real- or righttime) insights into increasingly complex questions.

Do IT yourself

BI once was the field of a limited number of expert users but has come a long way since. Trough the democratization of information, placing BI in the hand of many but still as a separate process. BI now has become part of our daily work. With this comes the increased need to create insight on the fly instead of trough standard IT (governance) processes. More and more BI users are taking over tasks that traditionally were the field of the IT developers.

Social Media are hot

Social media like Twitter and Facebook are no longer a hype or a trend but part of the everyday life from a personal as well from business perspective. They can supply organizations with essential information about their customers opinions. Combined with the actual customer behavior as captured in transactional systems this proves to be a wealth of information.

Google fast, Apple easy

Just like at home, business users are expecting an engine that searches all available data (structured and unstructured, internal and external) to quickly find answers. Navigating through the results to find patterns, trends could be improved with advanced visualizations. The result is a consumerization of enterprise BI. The corporate BI App Store is (virtually) just around the corner.

Business & IT in therapy

BI users are struggling to get faster access to more data. For this the need to build, maintain and organize BI solutions increases. IT therefore is in an unique position to enable the BI business user. However it often seems like business comes from Mars and IT from Venus. Aligning both parties (for example in a BI competence center) is a first step.

Let’s go mobile

BI users want to access their data anytime and anywhere. This puts a demand on both the backend of any BI solution (like datawarehouse appliances) but also on the frontend where information access and visualization must be possible. The increased use of tables and smartphones has already become mainstream in many business environment.

]]> I’ve talked before about Mastering Social Locations and what you can do with Geo-fencing and that we are developing a solution to enable companies to actually start doing this for real in a repeatable productised way.  Technically we demonstrated this at IBM’s IOD conference in Las Vegas last year and today we’ve released a joint whitepaper with IBM on exactly what the solution does and what benefits it delivers to customers.  The paper MDM: Mastering Campaign Management talks about both how you identify your customers and locations (the MDM part) and then leverage this to drive customers into the store and maximise the basket size (the Campaign Management side).  This is what we mean by an MDM solution at Capgemini, something targeted at a business problem that explains why MDM is important and demonstrates the value that it can deliver, and critically how it can maximise the value of other investments.

]]> I was kindly invited to attend a ‘narrow table’ discussion session about the key challenges facing innovation and startups when dealing with a copyright system that is clearly not fit-for-purpose in an increasingly digital world.

This event was organised by The Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec) and took place yesterday evening at the TechHub, in the heart of London’s TechCity and the fabled ‘Silicon Roundabout’.

London's "Silicon Roundabout"*

This session focused on teasing out the real needs (and supporting evidence thereof) for a Digital Copyright Exchange, as recommended in the Hargreaves report, which would help to address key challenges facing UK innovation and entrepreneurship in the world of digital. This is part of the diagnostic phase of an independent feasibility study led by Richard Hooper.

Attendees included entrepreneurs and start-ups (in music and other digital media) as well as participants from the publishing, legal, academic, public sector, and consulting industries. Highlights from the discussions include:

1. Academic publishing – e.g. universities get double-charged for publishing academic works; i.e. for researching the content, which is provided free to the publisher, and again for the published work
2. Costly clearance – e.g. according to one attendee, the British Library’s Sound Archives proportionally spent the largest amount of time negotiating / clearing rights for the materials, than on creating archive itself.
3. Orphan works – DCE could provide a useful mechanism for managing orphan works.
4. Small / Medium Scale Enterprises – SMEs and startups experience the most difficulty with licensing, especially as they lack the resources and money to go through the hoops in negotiating with rights owners. E.g. the lack of a clear and comprehensive licensing system hampers start-ups in establishing their business models (this is particularly acute with music streaming services)
5. Price versus value – Collecting societies may not have the right pricing models for music content. E.g. On-demand streams are considered more expensive than scheduled streams or download.
6. Physical versus digital copyright – The old world approach of counting instances of works for remuneration does not translate well for digital copyright and new usage scenarios
7. Rights owners are scared – they don’t wish to make the wrong decision and risk cannibalising their existing business
8. Software Licensing – The DCE should also extend to include software and software licensing
9. Navigation – This is a cross industry issue with copyright. A single platform approach to cover all licensing needs would be great as this would provide a single point of reference for information and guidance for users
10. Government copyright – It was suggested that government owned IP (e.g. ordnance survey data, census, land or electoral register data) should be covered by the DCE
11. Social Media Data – Increasing use of social media data streams for powering new applications makes it a crucial element for future services which will need addressing, sooner or later, perhaps in the DCE.

The above are only a few of the sentiments expressed on the day, and attendees were encouraged to send in their responses to the call for evidence as soon as possible.

Overall, this was a very informative session which seems to confirm something I’ve often stated, which is that the key role of any new digital copyright mechanism should be to simplify and facilitate the use of copyright material within and outside the digital environment. If the Digital Copyright Exchange had those as key principles, it would go a long way to ensuring successful outcomes and delivery of the promised benefit of over £2 Billion to the UK economy.

———-

*Note: Image adapted from – Original Image © Copyright Nigel Chadwick and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

]]> Google just announced Search in Your World on their blog, which is basically search in Plus. This might seems obvious, since Google is a search company, however  it might be vital to get to 1 billion users and to become the dominant Social Network. Over a year ago I wrote on how Facebook could finance its growth to get to 1 billion members. There now is a new player on the rise (even though on the rise is not the right expression): Google+. And besides the challenge of fading user interest, Google has another challenge: how to get to 1 billion users, how to get away from the relative niche positioning and get mainstream. The answer is rather simple: start an exclusion strategy.

Google is about search

Social impulses are important for search since these impulses provide additional insight on how important certain pieces of content are. Bing has social integrated in its search, and social is in this case from two important sources: Twitter and Facebook. Facebook is something that is likely not be integrated in Google search and Twitter used to be integrated, however Google didn’t extend its contract.

So basically  it comes down to this:

• Bing: has social impulses
• Google: has no social impulses

This is where Google+ is popping up. G+ is Google’s way to collect social impulses and to build a new social graph not based on their competitors like Facebook or Twitter. However what is the incentive for people to do so. Why would you invest a lot of time in building your new social graph in a new social environment without getting really additional benefits.  An exclusion strategy could solve this issue: instead of focusing on what you have to add for people so they will participate, view it the other way around: what will people miss if they don’t participate.

The big exclusion game

Google introduced just after the start the feature that a small icon of the author is displayed next to a search result. Requirement is that you have linked your Google+ profile to the site you are publishing on. Next up could be that your blog posts will not show up in the search results if they are not linked on G+, or that even your corporate site is erased from the search results if you don’t have created a company page for your organisation. Or that if you don’t plus (pressing the +1 button) anything, you will get rather irrelevant search results, since it is the unplussed results you see.

Needless to say, it will be very interesting to view the developments in this market and the strategies of the several bigger and smaller players. Who will win the social market, who will win the search engine market? Is it a zero-sum game at all?

]]>

Social Enterprise is an exciting concept and in a series of blog posts I will share some tips on how to make a desirable and productive user experience for The Social Enterprise.

What is The Social Enterprise?

The Social Enterprise is not a technology or software, it is a concept that refers to an organisation that is fully connected and where all things are  digitally integrated with each other using what I call The Social Glue.

It is an organisation that thinks differently and makes use of all the opportunities a digitally connected environment presents. It affects everything within the organisation from how systems integrate to how employees behave. It also has a profound impact in how the organisation interacts with its customers, how fast it can react to any correspondence and how well it can collaborate with them.

The switch to a Social Enterprise mindset can flip the company upside down by breaking down hierarchies and business silos and it creates a radically different and modern work environment suitable for the 21st century.  Here at Capgemini Yammer has played a big part as covered by my colleagues Tom Barton and Rick Mans, but there are many other success stories on the web.

Connecting the dots

Chances are your organisation already have several of the cornerstones of a Social Enterprise, email being one of them. You may also have a file repository, perhaps digital working groups and maybe even instant messaging tools.

But are they linked together? Do they all identify themselves as official tools of your company? Have they ever been officially introduced as such?

Historically  such initiatives were often not started at the top of the organisations. They were started by enthusiastic employees either by publicly being active on behalf of the company (whether in an official capacity or not) or who somehow got access to some server space and set up a wiki or similar to make life easier for themselves and their closest colleagues.

While such guerrilla tactics may have been borderline improper conduct they more often than not proved beneficial to the organisation and as such were adopted more widely with the management’s approval and backing.

Where does content live?

But the above isn’t actually a Social Enterprise strategy because these different initiatives, no matter how effective, are not working together as a single entity.

The first step is to look holistically at the systems and map out what each system brings to the collective experience because while they work independently of each other there is a danger of content being duplicated or misplaced leading to a disjointed experience forcing people back to old habits as they struggle to make sense of all these new systems spawning left and right.

Creating an overview of the systems will help determine where what type of content live which is crucial for an optimised workspace. It will also identify what functions might be missing for The Social Enterprise to function effectively as a single coherent system.

How do I find it?

For a traditional single site interface, such as a website, the rules for best practice in user experience design are:

• Consistent Navigation Structure
• Strong Search
• All-Inclusive Sitemap.

But in reality very few Social Enterprises have a single global user interface as they make use of the default interface designs of the various systems. So for The Social Enterprise the two most important aspects are Search and Sitemap.

The search facility need to be able to search globally across systems and it needs the ability to return relevant results and provide user-controlled functions like filters. If the search cannot search all systems it need to state so very clearly and give the users alternative methods.

The sitemap is almost always forgotten for Social Enterprises because of how they appear out of individual systems fusing together. But nothing is more helpful for  users than a single place to see all the different locations with clear indications of what should be used for what purposes. It is not enough to only inform people when they join the company; they need a destination to constantly remind themselves of the logic rather than wasting time finding information on… how to find information.

How do I keep informed?

Real-time information is at the heart of The Social Enterprise as it strives to bring content to users when they need it. This inevitably creates a huge communication stream between people and people as well as between objects and people. However, receiving a flood of automatically generated email alerts is counter-productive as it is time-consuming to manage and hard to filter.

A new mechanism is needed that can aggregate all communication into a single stream of chronological entries. Imagine a single location where alerts from practical systems, from working groups and from colleagues are found in one place, effectively being the digital footprint of the company but delivered in a modified version tailored to each individual employees job role requirements and interests.

Such an organisational Lifestream need to be at the core of any Social Enterprise to be truly effective and software providers are aware of this offering systems that can act as this social backbone of The Social Enterprise, but it is important to remember whatever system is chosen, it need to integrate with all the other systems to be effective, otherwise it is just another digital location soon to be forgotten by the employees.

But what do you think?

Please let me know your thoughts and feel free to share any suggestions for the next article on how to make a desirable and productive user experience across The Social Enterprise.

]]> (or Hadoop for dummy architects like me)

I’m sure you’ve heard about Big Data. If not, I recommend you my blog post “What is Big Data ?”

The most well known technology used for Big Data is Hadoop. Hadoop is used by Yahoo, eBay, LinkedIn and Facebook. It has been inspired from Google publications on MapReduce, GoogleFS and BigTable. As Hadoop can be hosted on commodity hardware (usually Intel PC on Linux with one or 2 CPU and a few TB on HDD, without any RAID replication technology), it allows them to store huge quantity of data (petabytes or even more) at very low cost (compared to SAN bay systems).

Hadoop is an open source suite, under an apache foundation: http://hadoop.apache.org/.

The Hadoop “brand” contains many different tools. Two of them are core parts of Hadoop:

• Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is a virtual file system that looks like any other file system except than when you move a file on HDFS, this file is split into many small files, each of those files is replicated and stored on (usually, may be customized) 3 servers for fault tolerance constraints.
• Hadoop MapReduce is a way to split every request into smaller requests which are sent to many small servers, allowing a truly scalable use of CPU power (describing MapReduce would worth a dedicated post).

Some other components are often installed on Hadoop solutions:

• HBase is inspired from Google’s BigTable. HBase is a non-relational, scalable, and fault-tolerant database that is layered on top of HDFS. HBase is written in Java. Each row is identified by a key and consists of an arbitrary number of columns that can be grouped into column families.
• ZooKeeper is a centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services. Zookeeper is used by HBase, and can be used by MapReduce programs.
• Solr / Lucene as search engine. This query engine library has been developed by Apache for more than 10 years.
• Languages. Two languages are identified as original Hadoop languages: PIG and Hive. For instance, you can use them to develop MapReduce processes at a higher level than MapReduce procedures. Other languages may be used, like C, Java or JAQL. Through JDBC or ODBC connectors (or directly in the languages) SQL can be used too.

Even if the most known Hadoop suite is provided by a very specialized actor named Cloudera, big vendors are positioning themselves on Hadoop:

• IBM has got BigInsights (Hadoop support + custom version of Hadoop) and has recently acquired Platform Computing which has got a product enhancing the capabilities and performance of MapReduce
• Oracle has launched BigData machine. Based on Hadoop and Berkeley DB, this server is dedicated to storage and usage of non-structured content (as structured content stays on Exadata)
• Informatica has a new tool called HParser. This tool is built to launch Informatica process in a MapReduce mode, distributed on the Hadoop servers.
• Microsoft has got a Hadoop version for Microsoft Windows and for Azure, their cloud solution.
• Some very large database solutions like EMC Greenplum, HP Vertica or SAP Sybase IQ are able to connect directly to Hadoop storage.

After weeks investigating what Hadoop is, what I am presenting here is a high level summary as I haven’t found this level of information on the web. I would be very happy if members of the Hadoop community are able to comment it and help me complete / correct it.

]]> When designing business processes solely by using process notation languages like business process model and notation (BPMN), I often feel a little uneasy. Some simple details caused my models to be far more complex than expected. Some other important facts could not be expressed simply and resulted in spaghetti notation. Finally, supposedly simple business processes resulted in complex drawings that were difficult to manage and maintain. The question arose: Why?

Limited scope of process notations
In fact, if you look closely at business processes it becomes obvious that their definitions comprise information that can be divided into three different categories: (1) procedural, (2) declarative, and (3) structural. The procedural aspects determine the order of steps (tasks, events, and gateways) that are needed to achieve the relevant process goals. This is comparable with algorithms or operating instructions. For example, standard procedures and routine operations in hospitals (plaster bandages, jabs, or appendectomy) are candidates for procedural descriptions. In the context of business process management (BPM), process notations are well suited for depicting this kind of information in an appropriate way.

How to deal with declarative aspects
Usually, processes are also based on declarative elements like complex decisions, relationships between variables, or data constraints. This information is expressed using business rules and some kind of functional or logical language. Thereby, business rule management (BRM) just declares the significant facts. It does not specify the computation steps or algorithms for the evaluation of the decisions, relationships, and constraints. As opposed to the procedural aspects, it is awkward and makes no sense to express these declarative aspects with the means of process notations. Moreover, the resulting models are difficult to write and to understand.

In the medical environment, basic knowledge like dosages, side effects, or inferences is declarative. Most BRM systems bring along their own rule modeling language (decision trees, decision tables, or even formalized natural language descriptions). Besides, there are standardization efforts like Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) and Decision Modeling and Notation (DMN) that have been adopted by the Object Management Group (OMG).

Unpredictable processes need structural information
In the hospital, another aspect becomes visible: emergency situations, for example, involve complicated processes like heart transplantations. It is nearly impossible to define such processes in advance because they are highly unpredictable and would have to provide for all contingencies. This does not mean that there are no standard processes or rules at all. On the contrary, they exist and must be combined in a very flexible way. It has been shown that many business processes in various industrial sectors have similar demands. This leads to the third aspect of process modeling: structural information. It determines the underlying structure of the individual process fragments, ad-hoc activities, and additional elements (e.g. documents).

This kind of information resembles templates that list the most common parts and must be complemented and adapted to concrete situations. The so-called adaptive (or dynamic) case management (ACM) is based on this mechanism. Apart from ad-hoc sub-processes in BPMN 2.0 with a rather limited scope, there is no commonly agreed standard notation for ACM. So, all existing tools use proprietary extensions or vendor-specific languages for defining ACM templates. Fortunately, early standardization attempts in the context of ACM are available like Case Management Process Modeling (CMPM), a “Request for Proposal” of OMG.

Combining BPM, BRM, and ACM
I am convinced that a sound handling of these three kinds of information would have made my models much clearer and easier to understand. As a result, I suggest using common process notations for procedural, BRM for declarative, and ACM for structural aspects of the business processes. On the other hand, this advice presumes that both business rules and adaptive cases are supported by the BPM suite. Furthermore, they must be seamlessly integrated with the process models. So, it is essential to consider these requirements early when choosing the right BPM product for your organization.

]]>

In his recent half-term update Christopher Graham, the Crown appointed Information Commissioner, stated that UK businesses “must try harder” to comply with EU cookie regulations.

If you’re unfamiliar with these directives they can be summed up in this one statement from the Information Commissioner Office (ICO):

“The Regulations make clear that UK businesses and organisations running websites in the UK need to get consent from visitors to their websites in order to store cookies on users’ computers.”

Protecting the privacy of web visitors is the key aim of the legislation and despite my personal reservations in its suggested implementation, I agree that we need greater transparency of how visitor tracking is handled.

Being compliant

Within the ICO’s guidance document they advise that businesses follow these three starting steps:

1: Audit your use of cookies

Try using this cookie audit spreadsheet as a starting point to list out what Cookie’s your site uses. There are many free tools available to report on the Cookies a website drops during a visit. Personally I use Firefox with the web developer tool bar. ICO’s advice recommends updating your Privacy or Cookie policy document to list the cookies you use and their purpose.

2: Assess how intrusive your use of cookies is against the provided guidance

For example Cookies that help store basket information are largely exempt. Cookies that profile a user for advertising purposes are considered intrusive.

3: Decide what consent is required for your cookies and begin designing a solution

Christopher Graham appears to be very pragmatic. He wants to see organisations moving towards compliance rather than achieving it overnight. Reading between the lines in his article, if your organisation was to be investigated; evidence that you understand the rulings, know what cookies you’re dropping and that you have plans to put a consent solution in place will be enough (for now)!

Conclusion

There is no need to panic and turn off all your cookies.

Whilst the guidance is strict, it is being enforced sensibly by the ICO. They’re unlikely to come banging on businesses’ doors yet with fines unless there are reports of serious violations. Even then, if you can prove that you’re doing something about it, you’re unlikely to be whacked with one of the £500,000 fines.

Start with a simple audit of your website’s cookies. Ensure that you understand why they’re used and what for. Also read and discuss the ICO’s guidance document (http://www.ico.gov.uk/news/latest_news/2011/~/media/documents/library/Privacy_and_electronic/Practical_application/guidance_on_the_new_cookies_regulations.ashx) with your web team. Work out what solutions would work for you and how major the technical challenges will be.

Further reading:

http://www.ico.gov.uk/news/latest_news/2011/~/media/documents/library/Privacy_and_electronic/Practical_application/guidance_on_the_new_cookies_regulations.ashx
http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/8515-cookies-compliance-my-take-on-latest-guidance-from-ico
http://www.ico.gov.uk/news/blog/2011/half-term-report-on-cookies-compliance.aspx
http://www.ico.gov.uk/news/latest_news/2011/must-try-harder-on-cookies-compliance-says-ico-13122011.aspx

Photo by edwardkimuk

]]> Did I leave out anything? Well, there was just no other way to end 2011 than by taking a quick look at the big four buzzwords that will likely combine to unleash a perfect storm of disruptive forces over the next 12 months or so.

Cloud, big data, Social and Mobility

Over the course of this blogging campaign I have focused mostly on cloud and certain relevant aspects (e.g. content, security, access and Intellectual Property), but the fact remains that other equally profound developments, such as: big data, social and mobile computing also provide significant challenges and opportunities for both consumers and the enterprise. Gartner predicts that the above four forces will combine to transform the IT landscape in 2012, and I couldn’t agree more. In my opinion, this will probably go much further than the IT landscape, since such a potent combination can easily transform entire industries as well.

In 2011, the impact of social media and mobility meant that many organisations sought ways to engage better with their customers, using social media and mobile technologies. Also various organisations, ranging from consumer products to public sector, actively looked for ways to manage and leverage increasingly large amounts of ‘big data’ and valuable content, sometimes in ways that almost rivalled traditional content industries. Think publishing, broadcast and, of course, social media footprint in your organisation today and compare it to just 3 years ago.

So what does each of the aforementioned forces portend for industries in 2012, and what are the early signs or indicators of disruption? My imaginary crystal ball has misted over slightly, but the following are some key trends to watch for the coming year:

1. Big Data – According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index (VNI), there will be more networked devices than people on earth, by year end 2011. With so many networked devices, and a related prediction that this number will double to over 2 devices per person by 2015, this is a clear indicator of the trajectory of growth for big Data over the next few years.
2. Cloud – Cloud service providers will continue to improve and optimise services, particularly at the Data Centre level, in order to provide a seamless and efficient solution for their customers. Key focus areas include: security, intelligent storage, unified networking, policy-based power management, and trusted computing capabilities. Basically, anything that will make it easier to transition customers to the cloud environment, along with greater confidence in sustainable delivery and quality of service will win the day
3. Social – Social media, networking and CRM all represent a move towards user centric engagement models that will allow a two way conversation between the enterprise and their: customers, suppliers, partners and employees. The user expectation of more meaningful and productive dialogue with the enterprise is only set to increase over the next 12 months
4. Mobility – This is both a technology and use centric force which readily demonstrates the combination of all three forces along with location (in space and time). In the paradigm shifting world of context aware computing, the user and their activities are central to the flow and direction of dialogue / interaction with the enterprise. Increasingly users expect the enterprise to be able to leverage contextually relevant information when dealing with them, and this in turn drives enterprise adoption of enabling technologies to provide this capability.

A good case in point will be the summer Olympic Games in London, which should provide a fertile proving ground for many of the combined challenges and opportunities presented by the four buzzwords / trends discussed above.

In conclusion, I expect no less than a step change in disruption levels across industries over the next 12 months, or so. The gloomy economic situation will only enhance the need for change, particularly in situations where: competitors are plunging ahead; customers are expecting even more for nothing; and employees are demanding similar levels of service and user experience from their enterprise, as might be expected for a consumer – which they likely are. Some very interesting times lie ahead.

Note: This post is brought to you in partnership with Intel(R) as part of the “Technology in tomorrow’s cloud & virtual desktop” series. 

]]> API is short for Application Programming Interface, it is a way to communicate with something without having to use the website or tool of the specific service. Often is about the exchange and manipulation of data (such as  most apps for twitter on iOS and Android use the Twitter API). Basically APIs are (becoming) the Ducttape of the Web and a vital part for its success.

There are many reasons for people to start with an API some of these are more business related and some of these are more technology related . Business related drivers to start with an API:

• Increase Brand awareness
• Allow people to use their own data
• Build goodwill with developers (starting a community)

Technology related drivers to start with an API:

• Solve programming problems with an API in mind can improve code quality
• Simplify internal reuse of data
• Allow others to extend the functionality of your application
• Allow alternate input mechanisms
• Unanticipated applications of your data
• Turn your service into a platform.

Things to keep in mind while maintaining an API

From a technology perspective there are several approaches on can choose to move forward with an API. However one of the most important things is that when an API is released the API is used by the service provider themselves internally (drink your own champagne) to make sure that the platform and your solutions keep in sync with regards to functionality. Also don’t change the API in a way that it breaks, which means that people who build on your API all of a sudden have solutions that don’t work anymore. Versioning therefore is very important.

Also important is to build for scalability, to keep an on eye on the metrics for the API (how often is it used, which methods are used most often, what is the fail rate, is there any peak usage), to keep in touch with the development community and to take part actively in this community. Also be conscious about paying or not paying developers for the work they do building on your API. Most often it is better to not pay the developers since they will build things out of passion and if somebody is building something on your API for free then you know your API is useful. Also consider an API never as finished and since you are working with developers on your API be sure to include or experiment with the latest developments since this audience expects you to do so.

For building an API there are four stages that impact the time to integration:

• Vanilla API: starting point of every API with just the functionality, not necessarily specifically written for a certain programming language (often SOAP or REST APIs).
• API wrapper: Wrapper in a specific language (ruby, PHP, .Net, C#) around your API so people can start using it in their favorite development language without having to write the complete wrapper by themselves. (Improves time to integration with around 50%)
• Documentation: documentation next to the Vanilla API and the API wrapper will decrease the time to integration even further especially when the documentation has several examples which can be reused. (Improves time to integration with around 20%)
• Share kit: an easy way to share certain functionality from the API often on a copy-paste basis (such as the embed functionality that YouTube is offering). Offers less (or in some cases even no) room for customization though it offers the shortest time to integration (sometimes even just minutes)

APIs should be free, or at least free for a certain level of usage. APIs often extend a core service which is already being monetized and API extends this and enables the core service to be used more and most likely also to be able to earn more money. Monetization via the API is often done just to cover costs, not make additional money. So the main business model is often just to make sure costs are covered and in some cases it could happen that there is money to be earned with an API.

Common business models for APIs:

Artificial Scarcity

Rate limiting

The API itself is free; however when you go beyond a certain number of transactions a fee is imposed. This fee is the way to cover the costs for the increasing usage (and required scalability) of the API though it can also be used as a way to discourage sloppy programming and make sure people are using the API efficiently also. Also it can be a way to make a divide into people who are using the API just as a hobby and people who are using the API for something they might earn money with and are willing to invest in.

Data limiting

Next to rate limiting there is also data limiting the core for some business models. Developers can only get a certain amount of data per API call or in a certain period of team. Again this could be a way to cover costs for increasing usage of the API, or it can be a way to divide people in two groups: the ones that are likely to make money based on your API and are willing to invest in it and the ones who are using it is a hobby.

Functionality limiting

Another way to create artificial scarcity for supporting your business model is by limiting functionality. Often basic functionality is provided for free (such as read access to data) and more advanced functionality (such as update and insert actions) are only available for paid users. This is again a model that helps finance growth and helps to differentiate types of users as well as make it easy to scale for different types of uses.

Other

SLA / quality

Instead of creating artificial scarcity another way to support your business models can be done via differentiating in service level agreements or quality in general. When developers pay more they get a better service (short support window, increased uptime, faster response times etc), when developers are not paying they get the basic API which is often maintained on a best effort basis (which shouldn’t mean that is should have very high response times and downtimes without an end though).

Transaction free / revenue sharing

Another way to earn money via the API is a shared revenue model. Based on the success the developer has with the API (for example a payments API) he has to pay a small fee per transaction (similar to what Amazon and Apple are doing on their platforms). This way you have a shared interest in making sure the API is successful.

]]> It is impossible not to know; the current amount of data and expected growth is overwhelming. More and more companies are acknowledging this, facing the problem / opportunity head on. In order to prevent the effect of data overload versus information underload, Big Data and Master Data Management are such hot topics at the moment.

Information underload is the effect where companies riks;
- having no overview on hidden gems within their available data
- losing the ability to be compliant to for instance access management or supervisory legislation
- losing the overview of what data is correct, accurate, complete and relevant within processes
- having such poor data quality that the effect ‘garbage in, garbage out’ emerges.
In order to keep in control of these issues, many companies turn validly to Analytics or Business Intelligence solutions.

While BI offers a solution for data questions in the current times, it would be interesting to consider the data maintanance for the long run. Having data in large (Big data) volumes, requires mutual connectivity between different data warehouses etc. as well as compliant access management (security) and maintaining accuracy and relevancy of data. In his blog Leon Smiers stated; “Data is flowing through processes, but what data do we need? It sounds like a contradiction (..) but the answer is ‘As less as possible….’”

While the last decade, we’ve tried to gather ‘As much as possible’ it is an interesting point of view. Using this as a different angle for data management it is possible to do some scenarioplanning for datamanagement.
Questions that are valid to answer are:
Can I still be in control of this ever growing data volume?
Can data in different environments and of different formats (i.e. unstructured and structured) connect?
How to prevent ‘garbage in, garbage out’principle
How to prevent digital sustainability?
How are internal processes and departments effected?

Acquering and storing less data is not a the holy grail for data control. But it offers an interesting starting point to look at data in a new way which will lead to further maturing company data management.
Some first steps:
- Try to get used to the concept, it is different to what has been done in the last decade
- Involve business and IT
- Check data standards such as ISO 15489, DOD, DMA-DMBOK or Master Data Management for input
- Plan scenarios on what will happen, risks and benefits.

I’m sure it will bring interesting insights!

]]>

[Sorry this entry is in Dutch.]

Er is een anti-patroon op het gebied van agile dat me nauw aan het hart gaat. En dat is de institutionalisering van agile.

In de afgelopen vijftien jaar heb ik met veel plezier en inzet organisaties en projecten gecoacht op weg om agile worden. In die vijftien jaar heb ik ongelooflijk veel geleerd, over software ontwikkeling, over programmeren, over processen, over het doen van projecten maar misschien vooral over de mensen in die projecten, en hoe deze mensen samenwerken. En het moet gezegd worden, ieder mens is uniek, iedere samenwerking is uniek, en vooral daardoor, los van alle technieken en technologie, is ieder project anders.

Handboeken agile

Nu zijn we op een punt in de tijd beland dat agile populairder is dan ooit, en waarschijnlijk zelfs populairder is dan het ooit in de toekomst nog gaat worden. We zijn op het punt dat alle grote organisaties hun software ontwikkeling gaan veragiliseren. Dit is het punt in de tijd waarop meer en meer projecten agile worden uitgevoerd. En dit is daarom ook het punt in de tijd dat grote organisaties gaan vastleggen hoe agile projecten dienen te worden uitgevoerd.

Handboek agile in zes delen

Er zullen steeds dikkere en gedetailleerde handboeken verschijnen met voorschriften over hoe lang een stand-up meeting mag zijn, welke vragen daarin moeten worden behandeld, hoe groot een team mag zijn, met welke ontwikkelomgevingen de ontwikkelaars moeten werken, welke testtechnieken mogen worden gebruikt, templates voor het vastleggen van user stories, smart use cases, evaluaties, en wellicht zullen er organisaties zijn die zo ver gaan dat ze gaan voorschrijven dat user stories op langwerpige gele post-its op het taskboard dienen te hangen en individuele taken op vierkante groene.

De geest terug in de fles

Als ik één tip mag geven? Zodra deze verschijnselen zich voordoen in een organisaties is agile ten dode opgeschreven. Agile projecten varen wel bij de juiste hoeveelheid vrijheidsgraden, mensen en samenwerking varen wel bij de juiste hoeveelheid vrijheid. Software ontwikkeling is een creatief proces, en agile werkwijzen zijn geëent op het zichzelf voortdurend verbeteren. Zodra organisaties agile gaan institutionaliseren, wordt de creativiteit langzaam maar heel zeker uit de projecten getrokken. Het zelflerend vermogen van agile projecten aan banden gelegd. De geest is weer terug in de fles, en de stop kan erop.