This week in links - week 20, 2008

"Does ‘SOA lifecycle management’ say it better than ‘SOA governance’?" by Joe McKendrick

These and many other issues were explored at Software AG’s SOA Governance Summit held this week in New York. I had the chance to stop by, and one current
that ran through the event was the thinking that perhaps the industry needs to shift away from the term “SOA governance” — which evokes images of nasty things like control and restrictions — and start referring to it as “SOA lifecycle management.” Will that stick? SOA lifecycle management could be acronymized as SLIM — which evokes images of unwieldy, sprawling service creation and management being streamlined into a nice, manageable process.

Forrester analyst Mike Gilpin planted the seeds for the terminology change, a theme echoed by other speakers throughout the day. However, the bottom line, Gilpin observes, is the fact that “business is still frozen in a mess of technology silos.”

"SOA and the Emperor’s New Clothes" by Loraine Lawson:

For some time now, I’ve been biting my tongue to keep from asking SOA experts one question. A few weeks ago, I couldn’t stand it anymore. Right in the middle of an interview with Miko Matsumura, the vice president and deputy CTO at Software AG, I broke down and blurted out:

'It’s starting to feel like SOA is the famous emperor who thought he was wearing fine threads and in fact he really had no clothes. What would you say to the CIO who is starting to wonder, SOA or any of these three-letter acronyms, are they really wearing any clothes?'

Part of the problem, according to Matsumura, is that we actually have two working versions of SOA. There’s what he calls “Legoland SOA” or Little SOA – which is focused on components – and Big SOA, which is what you get when you add in business process and Web-oriented technologies. Big SOA can be a strategic tool. But, human nature being what it is, people are loathe to give up their little fiefdoms and so, in practice, we wind up with “Little SOA” - pieces and silos, rather than a new strategic architecture. In this climate, SOA becomes “just” something that’s done within IT and never realizes its transformative potential.

"Relating Master Data Management to SOA" by Chris Madrid:

Service-orientation has quickly been adopted for the purpose of abstracting backend complexity from actionable interfaces, LOB applications, and business partners. Once the Service Façade pattern has been applied, backend optimization for performance and maintenance becomes possible. MDM is one technique to assist in that optimization. Existing services are easier to maintain and will perform better. New services will be easier to develop and will become trustworthy to the business without the need for time-consuming data mapping activities.

Experiences from using SharePoint for collaboration (file sharing)

From the comments to my post "SharePoint 2007 - Dream or Nightmare", I could tell that I need to give a little more detail about my experiences from using SharePoint as a collaboration platform. I will try to do that in this post, but I must first say that it is hard for me to tell if the issues that I am experiencing are the specific to the installation I am using or not. Although I have in-depth experience from developing and implementing ECMS, intranets, portals and web-based collaboration tools, I am just one end-user among others when it comes to SharePoint. I have no deeper insight into either the architecture or what features come out of the box of SharePoint and what needs to be added or customized by custom development as I do not work with SharePoint from an implementation perspective.

However, one of my main points in my critique against SharePoint is that SharePoint – as Microsoft claims SharePoint to be a collaboration platform - should provide better capabilities for a smooth collaboration experience out of the box. As end-user I am not interested in investing time and effort to know the architecture of SharePoint in order to use it. I also suppose that most businesses are not happy about having to invest a lot of time and money in customization and custom development to get the basic capabilities for collaboration when they purchase a product that claims to be a collaboration platform (such as SharePoint).

I would like to utilize the collective intelligence of the readers of this blog to help me identify the root causes of my problems and suggest solutions to them, as I know there are many of you who are skilled and experiences in relevant areas (such as SharePoint 2007) and since I might just having problems with symptoms of something else than actual flaws in SharePoint. To get you started I will try to describe my usage context:

As IT management consultant, I often team up with colleagues for team deliveries. As we might work from different locations and have other assignments in parallel, we have to do much of the work on distance. So we need some collaboration tools besides phone and e-mail to support us. Our basic need - which I believe can be addressed by SharePoint - is to be able to share and collaborate on files, primarily MS Office documents, together. We simply need to be able to store the files somewhere we all can access, find and update them in a controlled manner. More specifically, this is what I personally expect from a collaboration tool that supports file sharing:

• Easy access to the files so that we can access the files from any computer or device equipped with a web browser
• A user interface is simple to use so that occasional users can find their way around and perform their tasks without the need for education
• The possibility to organize and tag the files so that users can find them easily by browsing and / or searching
• The possibility to share the documents with anyone we want to share them with, includes notifying them how and where to access the files

Now back to SharePoint. I have trouble doing the following in SharePoint:

• Accessing my files in an easy way - I can access SharePoint from a web browser via a secure gateway, but it is a process that navigation wise takes a lot of time. I would like my SharePoint sites to appear as virtual drives on my computer even though I am not logged on to the domain with the computer.
• Finding my way around – I have had to invest a great deal of time in getting to know the SharePoint environment to be able to find my way around in SharePoint. Options that are likely to be used frequently are hidden with a lot of other options in cascading menus.
• I have found no possibility to tag files with my own tags and to organize the files in folders is anything but a smooth experience. To move a file from the web interface, I first need to know the URL of the destination folder! In addition, instead of copying a document which is already located somewhere else in SharePoint (or even outside of SharePoint), I would like to link to the document from a folder but I have found no easy way to do this.
• It is not possible to share documents with users outside our domain. I would like to be able to send an e-mail with a link to the document and that the receiver of the document can download. Or, I should be able to select a document from within SharePoint and send it as an attachment via e-mail.

I have already invested time and effort in trying to understand the SharePoint environment. My key concern however is to get the people I need to collaborate with to use the SharePoint for collaboration. The main obstacle is, besides the usability of MOSS 2007, that it is hard to access files and resources in SharePoint when we are outside of our domain or using computers provided to us by our clients.

Please enlighten me on how to make the collaboration experience smoother.

This week in links - week 19, 2008

"Alfresco's Social Computing Slant Shows ECM's Evolution" by George Dearing:

"I had an interesting discussion with John Newton, the co-founder of Alfresco, recently...//...Newton makes everything sound so damn easy when he talks about enterprise content management. And when's the last time you heard the words 'easy' and 'ECM' in the same sentence?"

"If you take into account the way information increasingly lives inside and outside the firewall, ECM becomes even more complex. Companies now have to figure out how to consume and create content in both environments, something Newton says Alfresco accomplishes by adopting a 'content-as-service' approach. He argues that most enterprises lay out their palette of required services based on the need to create content. The focal point shouldn't be centered so much on the ECM suite, he argues. It has more to do with looking at 'how the Web browser can help knowledge workers do their jobs.'"

[Newton:]"'Content services should just be accessible wherever knowledge workers are. We shouldn't be forcing workers to go into these ECM suites. In our view, collaboration spans far more than ECM.' "

Hear, hear.

"E2.0 Fundamentals" by Jeremy Thomas:

"As Dion Hinchliffe says (and as I have written before), 'Discoverability isn’t an after thought , it’s the core'...//...Organizations need to embrace the fact that their data will be federated. Sure, workers will put their documents in “wiki X”, but they’ll also put them on the file share, in content management systems, and on email servers. Data that cannot be found is useless. Enterprise search will unlock data and increase the propensity for information (and the knowledge workers who create it) to be discovered. Discoverability leads to recognition, and recognition leads to increased participation. Enterprise 2.0 must be approached holistically."

Hear, hear. Again.

"Report says enterprise mashups on the rise" By C.G. Lynch, CIO.com:

"A new Forrester report says that enterprise mashups, while not yet a panacea for connecting all the dots of corporate data, will help companies (and their employees) mix and match information to help them do their jobs better. According to the researchers, vendors will provide tools for business users to build a mashup on their own with no programming experience."

"'Mashups are trying to solve a long-standing business problem, which is combining disparate data sources,' says Oliver Young, the Forrester analyst who wrote the report. 'We think mashups are doing it in a unique way that's more user-oriented.'...//... "It absolutely starts to look like BI,' Young says. 'Mashups will eat into that market.' Forrester defined a mashup in the enterprise as "custom applications that combine multiple, disparate data sources into something new and unique."

The value of Enterprise RSS

I personally often argue for the potential that Enterprise RSS has for the purpose of improving decision making within an organization. The reasoning is as follows: By encouraging conversations between people in different initiatives and making them explicit as RSS feeds and by making it possible for anyone within the enterprise to tap into (subscribe to) these conversations and passively observe them, managers as well as any stakeholder can get valuable information to make better informed decisions, as well as getting signals about things starting to happen and react on them before it is to late.

When I manage a project, I usually ask each member in my project to write a diary (either as text stored stored in a document or send via an e-mail) about what they have been doing, what they are currently doing and what issues and risks they see. This way I have been able to stay on top of things and resolve issues before they become real problems. I also get information telling me if we are on schedule or not. The problem has been that these diaries have been hard to access and that anyone who wanted to read them had to actively look for them on a file share or in their inboxes. As a result, the only one who have read them has been me. Occasionally. I have also had to remind and motivate each and everyone to write their diaries, which is hard to do when they know that the only one who is reading their diaries is me. Hopefully.

But things are changing as technologies such as blogs and RSS are becoming more common even for enterprise use. With a project blog which every project member can contribute to and an RSS-feed that all stakeholders can subscribe to, the whole process of informing each other within a project as well as informing externa stakeholders becomes so much more simple and powerful. When the effort to inform yourself is small enough, then you find it worthwile. The value is simply so much higher than the cost. When that happens, then you also see a value of sharing information with others. If you know that someone reads what you are writing, then you get the motivation needed to continute writing. And then it becomes a positive spiral.

In the post "How Corporate RSS Supports Collaboration and Innovation", Dennis McDonald advises his readers to read the post "RSS: Underappreciated Web 2.0 in the Enterprise" by corporate IT manager Jim MacLennan. So I did and here is an excerpt:

"We added RSS capabilities to our internal PMO systems this past month, and traffic & content is already building up to become a valuable resource. Some have [correctly] noted that this increased visibility puts a bit more pressure on project managers and team members, to keep updating project blogs with pertinent information. This "time shifting" of communication should develop into the most effective way to let the rest of IT know what is happening in all areas"

"These spontaneous, organic, and very impactful "conversations", between people still experimenting with a new technology, show me real potential for spontaneous innovation and idea sharing. More evidence of the value of [judicious] experimentation with new technology - no silver bullet, but just enough spark to start a few fires."

Dennis McDonald makes a summary of Jim MacLennans findings:

"RSS feeds make it easier for people to kee up with what a lot of different projects are up to.

This has led to better communication as well as innovation.

Email is still the most ingrained communication platform.

Upper management still expects PowerPoints for reporting purposes."

He then continues by addressing the problem to quantify the costs and benefits of Enterprise RSS:

"Simply put, a generally available RSS feed creation and subscription capability can increase the number of projects any one person can remain abreast of for the expenditure of a given unit of time — just as it can increase the total amount of time a person devotes overall to managing — and responding to — the monitored RSS feeds."

"Granted, taking such a quantitative view does not tell the whole story about what might be gained by making RSS subscription features generally available across projects and the people they interact with. There’s no way to predict, for example, when an innovation or improvement will occur as a result of a communication that might not have otherwise taken place."

"That’s a disadvantage of taking a “beancounter” approach to implementing social media within an organization. While you might be able to quantify the time, effort, and technology associated with impacted processes, you can’t necessarily predict when and where the benefits (such as innovations or new ideas) will occur."

If you want to know more about Enterprise RSS, the ChiefTech blog by James Dellow is a good starting point.

This week in links - week 18, 2008

"Of shoes and money …. and information" by JP Rangaswami:

"...mysteriously, we somehow manage to create an environment where we jealously guard information; where we seek to create and extend power as a result of this jealous guarding; where we then exploit this power in all kinds of ways, some less abhorrent than others (but all abhorrent, at least to me)...//...Once we impute value to information, we create a reason for people to have secrets. To hide things.And then it’s a downward spiral."

"The costs of reproduction and transmission and storage have dropped remarkably, and that changes many things...//...But there is a bigger change. A change brought about by the digital world. Now we can archive and retrieve information, search and find it. This has never happened before. And it is huge...//...Information is changing. And it is becoming more valuable to us all by becoming less valuable to any one of us."

"We should concentrate on providing good service and good product, concentrate on providing that service honestly and diligently. And the money will flow. Not by hoarding information, but by freeing it up. Collaborating with each other, within the firm, with our customers, with our partners, with our markets. Even with our competitors"

"Why IT Might Be in Big Trouble — Again" by Mark Smith:

" My assessment might be a little harsh, but my experience in the last six years analyzing organizations across all industries and company sizes provides insight to a serious problem. IT has lost touch with reality as they have been disconnected from the situation in business and do not seem to be concerned about it. My last blog pointed to the state of business being mad as hell. IT is apparently responding by shifting focus to the management of an organization's data assets rather than worrying or focused about the capabilities needed by business."

"How do you know if you are on a good path in IT and ensuring you are delivering value to business and your IT organization? Make sure you have well-defined objectives that can link to business and, just as importantly, to the information and interaction with it across the enterprise. Remember that good management of data assets in a cost-effective manner is one small component of the BI and information management issues in the enterprise."

Finally, in the post"What Type of Meeting is This?" Michael Sampson reviews four types of meetings where it can be better to meet in other ways than in-person.

SharePoint - Dream or Nightmare?

To answer my question in the title; it depends on which side you are on, if you are on the provider side or the customer / user side.

I myself have been having some nightmares as I have been on the user side for almost a year now. During this period, I have had two assignments where I needed to collaborate with colleagues located at other offices. As we have tried to minimize traveling and face-to-face meetings unless they have been absolutely necessary, we looked for support in our SharePoint 2007 installation. Our primary need was support for creating and sharing MS Office files with each other. Given our needs and the promised capabilities of SharePoint 2007, we should have been hand in glove.

Michael Sampson recently shared his notes from a web seminar by Tony Byrne from CMSWatch entitled "Evaluating SharePoint from a Business Perspective". Here are some excerpts and my own comments:

"Tony said that the key strength of SharePoint is in file sharing. Other types of collaboration -- project/task tracking, social networking, enterprise knowledge management, collaborative authoring and review, discussion and collaborative filtering, and synchronous collaboration and communication -- have varying degrees of out-of-the-box capabilities vs. custom development required"

If file sharing is the strength of Sharepoint when it comes to collaboration, then anyone having thougths about using Sharepoint for collaboration should seriously reconsider. There are simply much more simple and convenient ways to share files than using SharePoint. SharePoint is more about file storing than file sharing. File sharing requires easy access, such as the possibility to access files from any computer with Internet access. For this, there are many web 2.0 apps which are better suited.

According to Michael Sampsons notes, Tony Byrne have the following answer to what SharePoint really is:

“Myth ... 'out of the box product' to fit most information management needs"

"Reality ... the most 'finished' pieces still revolve around file-based collaboration. And it's very user-friendly for this."

"When you get beyond that, it becomes a development platform ... or 'consultant friendly'"

The best thing with SharePoint is that it has a lot of capabilities out of the box, ranging from ECM to collaboration. A bad thing is that it underperforms in more or less all areas and that a lot of custom development is required to make it perform. This is why SharePoint is a dream for consultants and why Microsoft has an army of consultant firms that help them sell SharePoint to potential customers. But the worst thing is that SharePoint fails in usability. I disagree with Tony Byrne when he praises the usability of SharePoint when it comes to file-based collaboration. And potential customers need to keep in mind that usability is not something that comes out of the box from projects run by SharePoint consultants.

Information is like water - essential to our survival

Being able to communicate is absolutely essential for humans. As social beings, communication is a key part of our lives and what enables us to create and participate in various social structures. As humans, we need to belong to and participate in social groups or communities, from families to nations.

Communication is essential for any kind of collaboration (process two or more people work together toward a common goal). An enterprise can be defined as “…people getting together and collaborating to achieve a common goal” and communication is therefore vital for any enterprise to succeed. Although humans typically communicate and collaborate most effectively when we meet face-to-face in small groups, this is not practical in many situations. We often need to collaborate with people located elsewhere and sometimes we also need to communicate over time. We might also need to communicate with more people than is possible to communicate with face-to-face in a physical meeting. To enable collaboration in these cases, we create messages which we encode into various types of digital content (text, images, video, sound) and make accessible to the intended users via information technologies. In a sense, information could be compared to water:

• Information, like water, is essential to our survival. Given that collaboration is what an enterprise is about, information is also essential for the survival of enterprises.
• Information, like water, needs to be managed so that it is supplied to the enterprise users when and where they need it.
• Information, like water, needs to be of sufficient quality to be suited for its intended uses.
• Information, like water, is managed in a system which collects it from various sources and distributes it to the users.

The analogy with water can also be used to illustrate the purpose of different disciplines dealing with information within enterprises:

• EIM (Enterprise Information Management) is about ensuring that the users will get access to the information (water) whenever or wherever they need it. EIM is about ensuring that the information (water) is consistent, that is it is of sufficient quality and that it will be delivered (flow) to the users in a timely manner.
• MDM (Master Data Management) integrate information (water) from various sources, store it in a repository (reservoir), cleanses (purifies) the information so that it is of sufficient quality, and makes it accessible to any application (water supply system) that needs it.
• SOA is an architectural style that defines how applications (water supply systems) should architected for ensuring interconnectivity, modularity and reuse of key software capabilities (pipes etc).
• Enterprise Architecture (EA) is usually performed by an EA team (city planning department) which besides organizing the business and IT resources so they align with the business strategy also creates the principles, rules and guidelines for how the information (water) should flow throughout the organization (city).

This week in links - week 16, 2008

"Socialtext People is in-the-Flow!" by Michael Idinopulos:

"Socialtext announced two major product announcements today: Socialtext People and Socialtext Dashboard. I'm excited about Dashboard, but People really rocks my world."

"Socialtext People isn't just an inside-the-firewall social networking tool. It's a networking tool that integrates with Socialtext wikis where people are doing their in-the-flow work: posting messages, drafting meeting agendas, taking notes, documenting processes, spec'ing products, and so on. You can see what people are actually doing, not just what they say they're doing. You can also see who they're doing it with."

"Complimentary report: Executive Insights into Enterprise 2.0 from roundtable hosted by Future Exploration Network and IBM" by Ross Dawson:

"The week before the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum, Future Exploration Network and IBM hosted a roundtable of senior executives discussing Enterprise 2.0. Highlights of the discussions were written up in a report which is being made openly available, to assist other executives in considering the key issues involved. Download the report here."

"The poverty of enterprise 2.0 and social media" by Dennis Howlett:

"CXO’s instinctively know that internal collaboration, whether through rudimentary technologies like blogs and wikis hold significant efficiency promise. They know the technology is relatively inexpensive compared to other types of enterprise technology and that implementation can be rapid. They also get that in the longer term, these technologies could hold incredible promise for business effectiveness across their entire value chain lies in releasing huge amounts of resource back into the business. None of that is disputed. What is disputed are two things, social media and social networking as applied internally. Why?"

Eric Burke shares his short version of Lifehacker’s Top 10 Email Productivity Boosters:

Increasing collaboration, knowledge sharing and innovation

In "Questions to Ask Before Replacing Corporate Email", Dennis D. McDonald addresses the problem of using e-mail as "the one and only" collaboration tool:

"For me a bottom line issue is understanding the costs of introducing new technology and replacing old technology, given that the old technology — email — is not going to disappear (nor should it)...//...How long these extra costs will need to be incurred will depend upon the organization and the speed of adoption, and complete adoption won’t occur overnight ...//...These additional costs need to be weighed against the savings of time that emerge when it is found that efficient use of collaboration software actually reduces not only the number of (inefficient) emails associated with certain types of activities but also the meetings associated with certain types of tasks."

In "Build It (and they won't come)", Marc Solomon debunks some myths about "knowledge hubs" and shares his insights about how to get your users engaged as participants (to make them share their knowledge).

"The perennial, time-tested truth is that people who love to learn don't share that love for what they learn (or care to share). How do we make it worth their while?...//...Turning users into contributors requires that we architect searches that highlight who the contributors are along with the volume and nature of what they're contributing."

"No 12 step program can move forward until the addict admits that they have an addiction -- in this case relying on email to provide a dashboard-like visibility into what's fresh and noteworthy on an organizational level. How can the addict be weaned from the isolation of 1:1 asynchronous communication so that their comfort zone includes RSS readers, search alerts, and subscription feeds for staying on top of their priorities and moving targets."

"Enterprise systems are saddled with the tags we force on them to label their content baggage. But the more control we exert on our metadata the more pressure we put on our producers to execute our elaborate coding schemes. At what point can we introduce commonly accepted web 2.0 fare as folksonomies, tag clouds, and ability to aggregate these terms by their popularity?"

"One of the self-fulfilling failures of expert-finding deep dives is that when you ask for volunteers your most sought-after domain leaders are already snowed under -- why would they volunteer their protected time to be officially pegged for all to see on your corporate radar? One of the many benefits of connecting metadata to search is that the engine can quantify thought leadership based on business need -- not based on who volunteers for guru status in a given topic."

In an article in BusinessWeek, "Life on the Edge: Learning from Facebook", authors John Hagel and John Seely Brown argue that "social network provides important lessons for executives—and a key forum for innovation and experimentation":

"Dismissing Facebook as irrelevant to business would be dangerously shortsighted. Yes, it is on the edge of traditional business activity, but it is an edge where new approaches to business are being tested and refined. Like most edges in the business world, it may look marginal at the outset, but has the potential to redefine business more broadly over time...//...So what lessons should more traditional companies take away from the early Facebook and SocialMedia experience?"

• "Create more edges. The decision by Facebook to open up its platform to third-party developers unleashed a torrent of innovation that continues to expand...//...By offering application developers easy access to millions of potential users, Facebook spurred broad innovation in a short period of time."
  
• "Provide better ways to connect at the edge. Brokers like SocialMedia attract diverse participants at the edge and provide mechanisms to catalyze new insight and share knowledge. "
  
• "Demographic edges are fertile grounds for business innovation...//...Younger generations can be important catalysts for business innovation, both because they often uncover unmet needs earlier than older customers and because they are more willing to try a new product or service."
  
• "Experiment and iterate rapidly. The power of Facebook as an innovation platform is that it costs so little for an application developer to introduce an application and generate quick market feedback. This environment encourages lots of experimentation and accelerates learning."
  
• "Social, technologic, and economic are inextricably intertwined. Facebook succeeds because it satisfies profound social needs to connect and be acknowledged via an easy-to-use technology platform. It also carefully manages the economics of its business to avoid upsetting the social order."

This week in links - week 15, 2008

"Most Users Are Unhappy With Enterprise Search" By W. David Gardner:

"Separate U.S. and U.K. surveys released this week found that search engines are failing workers."

"...keyword searches don't work for most employee searches and the search 'monster' is becoming a growing problem for businesses and organizations."

"In its report, Sinequa said many employees in the London study are struggling to find even the most basic information, and their travails are negatively impacting their productivity. Just 8% of the workers have a tool that permits them to search across their own company using key search terms, Sinequa said."

"A world without Enterprise RSS" by James Dellow:

"Enterprise users are lacking some of the tools and features available through the Web 2.0 consumer RSS ecosystem. And Enterprise RSS users want their RSS "when and where they want it" too!"

"The problem is that without Enterprise RSS this is hard to achieve, as most basic enterprise approaches to RSS use a simple Web content publishing approach - i.e. RSS content is published like any other Web content but consumed through an existing application or a desktop reader. However, the RSS content has no idea if anyone has actually read it and if a user wants to consume RSS feeds on different devices or even from different reading applications on the same device, well... bad luck."

"Enterprise Twitter – or how to tap social networks for expertise without using email" by Ross Dawson:

"In organizational network analysis circles, an MIT study on how people find information is often cited. The research showed that in an organization, people were five times more likely to go to people than to databases to get answers to their questions. So knowledge workers’ productivity is strongly related to their social networks, in terms of who they know who can help them, and whether there is sufficient trust and reciprocal value in the relationship that they get a response."

"Effective professionals are already tapping their external networks using Twitter and other tools to do their work better. They should also be able to use the same tools inside the organization."

"Building relevant social ties based on trust and mutual understanding that enable focused, efficient questions and knowledge sharing will always be far higher value than broadcast mechansims. However there is definitely a role for light-touch queries inside organizations, and I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of that in the coming year or two. "

"Tips for Social Computing in the Enterprise" by Chris Howard, vice president and director of the Executive Advisory Program at the Burton Group:

"People form communities based on shared interests. Once the community is in place, it becomes a greenhouse for the development of ideas and the distribution of information, attracting all those who wish to participate."

"Chris Zook recommends searching for "undeveloped adjacencies," or unexploited capabilities in the organization that can be developed into new, repeatable processes. Successful corporate innovation capitalizes on existing assets and ideas combined in new ways. Use of social computing creates a new stage for innovation, where ideas are more easily exposed and patterns spotted. As communities work out the kinks of new ideas in public forums, innovative thinking coalesces and ownership/leadership emerges."

"The collective intelligence of the community leads to answers more quickly. As more questions are answered, repeatability increases. As new workers enter the company, there is a baseline of knowledge to get them ramped up more effectively. Much of that knowledge is available as content within the social computing infrastructure."

Collaboration and SOA - more than just buzzwords

I tried to answer a question yesterday that I got sent to me via e-mail from an employee at the client company and who is located in Portugal . To be able to answer the question, I had to request information from two persons in my team, one of them being located in Switzerland and one being located in another city in Sweden. In a few minutes I had answered the question and received an e-mail from the employee in Portugal in which he thanked me for the answer. Thanks to the information in my answer, he could continue with his tasks at hand. As I mentioned something about this conversation to my client sitting almost next to me, he said "Isn't it fantastic? That we can sit here and communicate with people all over the world within a few seconds?"

I had to admit that it is quite fantastic. His question got me to reflect on how surreal my current assignment must have seemed just 20 years ago; I am planning and coordinating activities which involve hundreds of people (editors) all over the world, people who are located in countries such as Japan, Sweden, USA, Russia, China, Portugal, and France. I have direct contact with well over fifty of these people, primarily via e-mail or phone. We meet once a year on a conference and then never travel to meet face-to-face.

The project team that I am managing and which is responsible for rolling out new IT solutions to the markets (which we must help all the editors need to learn, prepare and launch) consists of a handful of people. We are partly co-located, but some of the team members work from other locations. We mostly communicate via phone or e-mail and when there is a need for us to meet in a more structured way, we use a web conferencing tool (WebEx from Cisco). We basically never need to travel to get things done. Often, it is just not a viable option. In addition, the corporate policy says that travelling should be avoided for environmental and cost reasons whenever possible.

Although we have much more to do to become more efficient in communicating and collaborating with each other, it is interesting that our biggest headache is not about communicating or collaborating within the project team, with the editors or with all stakeholders in different organizations. No, our biggest headache is the one we get from the constant battle we have to fight with the IT legacy. The problem with the IT legacy is, as usual, that it was not originally designed for the current requirements and that is almost possible to change. The short version is that it is a very complex and lengthy process to get things out to the market (or even at all). Add to that that the inflexible IT legacy adds a lot of extra friction between the ordering organization and the organization supplying it with IT solutions.

I personally both understand and stress the importance of separating the concepts of SOA and web services, one being an architectural style and the other being a technology that can be used for implementing a SOA. Still, I must admit to that web services are excellent for demonstrating key SOA concepts as well as for demonstrating the potential benefits than an organization can get out of SOA. SOA and web services go hand in hand. Even though I now work on the business side and not on the IT side, with people coming from a marketing and business administration background instead of an IT background (I have a combination of both), there is now a common understanding between the ordering organization (“the business”) and the supplying organization ("the IT department") that SOA is the way to go. SOA is no longer just some mysterious or over-hyped buzzword. Why? Because we have all seen a SOA in action.

For a small but essential part of the current solution, core software functionalities and content are now provided to consuming applications via web services. On top of the web services layer, different user experience applications can be designed and developed. Fast. And it can be done by external parties. The latter is virtually impossible today for other parts of the IT platform, even though the task is mostly about presenting existing things in a new way. They will have to navigate in a very complex IT environment and sometimes make changes all the way back to the legacy systems – which of course cannot be changed within the time-frame of the project, so you end up having to scope out functionality and content which would be valuable to end-users. To sum up, new solutions can be delivered much faster since core functionalities and content can be easily reused and thereby shortening development time AND since external capacity can be used to deliver them.

I am absolutely convinced that the keys to empowering enterprises today is to better support communication and collaboration between people and to increase the agility of their IT systems. Improving communication and collaboration is to me a low-hanging fruit since the tools and technologies are out there, although it is a big challenge since it has more to do with people and changing their existing attitudes and behaviors than it has to do with technology. Increasing the agility of the IT systems will in most cases be a costly and potentially very lengthy process, but it is an inevitable investment enterprises need to make if they are to compete on a global and rapidly changing market place.

This week in links - week 14, 2008

Meredith Whittaker at Google emphasizes that Google Docs is collaboration tool by launching the Google Docs Community Channel at youtube.com:

"Google Docs is all about being able to share and collaborate, and now we're taking the idea of sharing a step further with a new Google Docs Community Channel. This is a place to watch videos from regular folks all about Google Docs, connect with others, and pick up smart tips about all the ways to use the application."

Continuting on the subject of Google, Network of Unreasonable men poses the question: "Is Google goneburger?"

"Is Goggle heading for trouble? Despite all their product development efforts & a significant amount of hype, they still only have one revenue stream, advertising.

On top of that the word is that they are loosing staff in large numbers due to growth pains.

Finally, look at their strategic stance or lack there of. Who are they strategically aligned with? Perhaps more importantly who have they rankled? MS, Yahoo, Apple, Broadcasters, news companies….Wouldn’t a more prudent stance be to take on just one of these giants (by partnering with their enemy) at a time??"

Whether or not this is true, I will keep enjoying the "free" apps and services from Google. I wrote a post a while ago, "Web 2.0 – A true Internet revolution?", which touches the same subjects as the post cited above:

"Interestingly, the primary business model on the web is based on selling advertising space which is primarily used for marketing consumer products. This is the paradox of Web 2.0. Even if people are really starting to change how they use the Internet and the web, no one should be surprised if Google and Facebook will suddenly stop showing outstanding growth and profit numbers when the business cycle reaches the next recession. When people don’t feel confident enough about the future to buy a new flatscreen TV och refridgerator, it will eventually hurt Google and Facebook badly. Hence, a true Internet revolution will in my eyes only only come when the primary products that we consume (accounting for the biggest part of our consumtion) are intangible digital content and experiences. Then the Internet can become the engine that drives the global economy, just as the industry once became more important than the agriculture for the national economies."

Finally, Bertrand Duperrin applies Archimedes' theorem to Enterprise 2.0 "with trust instead of liquid":

"If we consider companies will have to change, two solutions are possible:

- going quietly, in order to be ready when the “old” model will be out of date. It supposes to start early in order to have time to find one’s own way, since “magical recipes” don’t exist.

- jaming on the brakes and accepting the risk of facing violents changes later. Some, like Gary Hamel, think since change isn’t in corporate DNAs, this is what will happen.
But when it’s time to migrate to management 2.0, enterprise 2.0 or to adopt social computing tools, more than the fear of change, trust is essential.

And what about Archimedes ? “Any individual immersed in a trustful environment gives back to this environment as much trust as he receives”.

A good question would be: is the price to pay when you don’t trust the organization higher than when you trust it wholly, even if some aren’t trustworthy."