The Conundrum of Business User 2.0

This might be a horrible case of parental pride, but I think my 6-year old son is a great example of the new ‘Gen 2.0’ business user. He surfs the kid-friendly Internet, he regularly finds and beats online games without any help from his daddy, and most importantly he cannot seem to understand why he can’t watch ‘Scooby Doo Meets Batman’ in any room in the house at any time he wants. In other words, he’s tech-savvy, he’s adept at picking up new apps, and he lives in a world where everything is available on-demand. I’d say he’s the future of every enterprise.

These are the folks that were born during the days of the first Macs, children during the rise of cable, teenagers during the boom years of the Internet, and pushed through college in the days of XM radio. So it’s not unreasonable to say that you already have huge ranks of new hires just like my son, with just about every one of your 24-year old management trainees fitting this faster-adopter, tech-savvy, on-demand personality profile. And they will reasonably expect that every piece of financial services data they hear about on the news would be available for mashing in a spreadsheet within minutes. The same goes for your newest customer services reps. Sales executives. Logistics managers. All the same. All expect their metaphorical Scooby Doo data to be on their desktop instantly, without excuses.

Easy enough to imagine but it can be a heavy burden for enterprises that spend 80%+ of their IT budget on maintenance of 10-, 20- and even 30-year old applications. Hardly apps that could be described as ‘agile’. And, as I heard one tech journalist put it recently, your typical 50+ year-old CXO doesn’t have a lot of empathy for this type of real-time, tech-heavy employee (afterall, that CXO didn’t spend his entire childhood on a computer like his newest wave of employees did).

But that CXO should care. Because their Business User 2.0 employees are likely to be the most innovative and innovation is generally thought to be where the bulk of corporate growth comes from. Put a big sign above their heads that says ‘Growth Happens Here’. And these new users have other appreciable qualities. They are technically inclined, more than any prior generation of users by an order of magnitude. Want them to learn a new application? No problem, they do that every month on their 360/PSP/Wii/iPhone. Worried about them writing a macro? Collaborating with others on a wiki? Mashing their own data into their personal portlets? Commenting on a blog? No need to worry.

But therein lies the conundrum: Business User 2.0, unlike previous waves of employees, will do it themselves if they can’t get what they need from the corporate infrastructure. That’s good for them and maybe good for the organization overall…but bad for IT (they get marginalized), bad for corporate governance (hard to govern what you do not provide), and bad for the CXO (who can’t manage what he doesn’t provide or support). Business User 2.0 places entirely new, and perhaps greater, demands (just like my son!) from a technology and management point of view. Luckily, they can also give you a much more flexible and adaptable workforce.

And if you're looking for a bright, agile, hard-working Scooby-Doo fan for your management trainee program, I'll have a great candidate for you in about 16 years.

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Mashups and "The Future of Work" in Enterprise 2.0

[As a preface to this blog, I think I should take a moment and introduce myself. I am JackBe’s CEO and co-founder. Until today, I have been leaving the blogging to some of JackBe's better known (and more loquacious) team-members. However, as Enterprise Mashups continue to garner more and more attention, I've come to the conclusion that the global Enterprise Mashup conversation might benefit a bit from my perspective on occasion.]

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Harvard professor Andrew McAfee, originator of the term 'Enterprise 2.0', has introduced another wonderful set of ideas in his latest blog entitled The Great Decoupling. Andrew’s blog is a discussion about MIT’s Tom Malone’s book The Future of Work, which deals with information flows and decision rights and how these are impacted in enterprise by technology.

McAfee mentions that (and Malone’s book details) that information can now more freely move about in a company due to the ease of communication and cost-effective nature and availability of broadband internet access and processing power. He then goes on to explain the phenomenon of “lateralization” replacing “centralization” when analyzing information exchanges and uses drawings (like the ones pictured here) to explain the differences.

McAfee makes the point that:

“Malone’s theory, however, goes much farther than just outlining how information flows change. It also predicts how decision right allocations will change as a result. His thesis is a simple and powerful one: decision rights will also become more lateralized as information costs plummet, leading to greater power and autonomy at lower levels within a hierarchy -- in short, greater decentralization.“

Why is this at all interesting to me (and you), you ask? Well, all of this seems to certainly be relevant to the nature and definition of mashups. After all, a mashup is the result of taking disparate and highly available pieces of information and “mashing” them together to create a new piece of information. In essence Malone seems to be describing, among other things, the reason why mashups have arisen and the importance that mashups have in today’s IT environment.

However, McAfee’s knowledge about enterprises and how they work lead him to disagree with the practical nature of some of Malone’s ideas. McAfee makes it a point to highlight how new rules about distribution and access to information as well as the possibility to interact with it will need to be put in place in order for these ideas to be implemented in enterprise.

“Most of what I’ve seen recently strongly indicates that the sudden near-disappearance of information costs is bringing up a fascinating and consequential set of questions for organization designers and corporate leaders. They now have the freedom to place decision rights where they wish without being hampered by information costs. What are the long-term consequences of this great decoupling? Rather than a steady rise in decentralization, I think we’re going to see an extended period of innovation and experimentation. I think Malone might well be right that the "market share [of centralized management] is likely to decrease," but I also think there will be strong movement in the opposite direction -- toward more centralization of some decision rights—and a lot of very interesting hybrid models, some so interesting that they’ll look like science fiction.”

In essence McAfee is making the point that for enterprises, a hybrid model needs to be put in place. One in which information is available as long as proper governance, auditing and tracking can be established. Simply put, without the possibility of governance, no enterprise will formally allow nor motivate such an exchange and hence the decentralization of decision rights cannot occur.

This is very similar to the point that JackBe has been making about the need for enterprise IT infrastructure to evolve so as to be able to establish and enforce the necessary governance and create an environment of trust. JackBe's own John Crupi and Deepak Alur have gone to great lengths (like here and here) to make and illustrate the point that the difference between consumer and enterprise mashups has to do with the fact that consumers can have free access and free rights, but enterprises must have the ability to create and manage their circle of trust.

JackBe's enterprise mashup experiences in dealing with many large enterprises to deploy enterprise mashup solutions makes it clear that the hybrid model that Andrew McAfee describes is required. Furthermore, we believe that all enterprise IT stacks will need to evolve to ensure that these new capabilities can be put in place. Fortunately for us, we saw this coming and have created an Enterprise Mashup Platform that strongly focuses on governance and trust issues, and one that is complementary to existing platforms.

The future is here!

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Mashups on a plane

I am writing this as I fly home from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. It was a good show to get the big picture of all the things under the Enterprise 2.0 umbrella and all the heavyweights were there (IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, ) talking Web 2.0 everything in the Enterprise: wiki, blog, search, mashups, collaboration, and a few other topics as well.

It probably wouldn’t surprise anyone to hear that my favorite session was the ‘Enterprise 2.0 Mash-up’ panel. JackBe wasn’t on the panel (but of course we would have been happy to!) so I got the chance to listen closely to other vendors talk Enterprise Mashups. Here’s a few of the more interesting things I got to hear in the session:

• BEA showed off AquaLogic Pages. They created a blog, grabbed a SOAP data source, connected that to a Google map and then tried to grab a YouTube video to include in their mashup. Truthfully, it felt more like a user-driven portal builder. But I must admit it was still cool to see.
• Share Methods talked a bit about ‘office app’ mashups and a new mashup ‘standard’, OpenSAM (http://www.opensam.org), that includes things like WebDAV, ALE (Ajax Linking and Embedding), CGI, SSL, and a few other technical bits. The goal, an admittedly noble one, is to allow online apps vendors to interoperate and, optimally, be used together in a single cohesive environment. Not surprisingly, Share Method’s ‘product’ (does such a word apply to a mashed solution?), ShareOffice, seemed to include lots of other third-party apps within it.
• Rod Smith, IBM's VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, showed off QED with some of the neat weather info from Accuweather you might have heard about before. He was refreshingly candid about the time it took to build the demo (17 hours, including 4 hours of design time). And, unlike most of the vendors on the panel (or mashup vendors in general), put some emphasis on ‘getting mashup data from a SQL statement’. Good to know that at least IBM understands where most enterprise data originates.
• Near-Time talked about ‘cross-organizational’ collaboration, not something I often hear associated with the user-driven mashup revolution. But they did seem to have experiences in data-driven mashups.

I must admit I am surprised how different JackBe’s data-driven mashups are from the wiki-, RSS- and application-driven ‘mashups’ of other mashup vendors. The lesson, I guess, is a simple one: like ‘Enterprise 2.0’, the phrase ‘Enterprise Mashup’ is broadly used today. Caveat emptor.

There was also an interesting side-conversation about the ‘definition of a widget’ and what it would take to allow vendors to pass widgets around between themselves. This is a topic raised at the recent IBM Mashup Summit and while it ain’t a done deal yet its good to hear the mashup vendors at least talking about it.

And, in spite of the differences in the practice of the mashup vendors, the principles seemed to be all in line: simplicity, quick, and richly interactive. Now that’s something JackBe can agree on.

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Differences in 2.0's Continued

Wow, we received fantastic feedback on our the last post, Differences in 2.0's. In particular, we received emails asking for more clarification about the difference of Enterprise Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. I created a pic (see below) that I hope will help.

First, let me attempt to relate Enterprise 2.0 to Ford, the car company. We could draw parallels to Enterprise 2.0 and what Henry Ford did with manufacturing. In this case we could say Ford created an 'assembly plant 2.0' which changed the core of the whole organization; organizational processes & relationships with said processes, the workforce, their roles, relationships with partners and customers, and how all of these parts interact with each other. This is a stretch but what I am trying to convey is that the core of the enterprise, down to how its business & peoples operate, changes and doesn’t resemble that of the organization before. This change resembles more of a social diagram tied together by Web 2.0 social tools and loosely coupled web apps capable of being composed or customized by each node at a moments notice to respond to whatever need arises using inputs(data & information) from around and out of the network.

[...pause after that mouthful...and we're back...]

In this stretch example, the change creates a Ford company that looks and operates much differently (better) than other enterprises around it still assembling cars the pre-Ford way. This is due to the relationships between the people, data, and the collaborative nature of the new organization.

I expanded a portion of this new picture to incorporate the two facets of Web 2.0 (The social collaborative paradigm shift & the Web 2.0 technology enablers that make this possible), how these once implemented correctly make up the Enterprise Web 2.0 infrastructure, and lastly how with the addition of a Enterprise collaborative paradigm shift, all make up Enterprise 2.0.

You’ll notice that the nodes here state ‘The User’ but this user could be one person, a team, or even a business unit. The connecting lines can be thought of as the social construct or Web 2.0 paradigm that I talked about in the last post, and the Web 2.0 bubbles as Web 2.0 technology enablers connecting Users with systems and other Users.

So, simply stated (I hope) Enterprise Web 2.0 is a technology solution made up of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 is the organizational paradigm shift that leverages these solutions which, by EW2.0's very nature, must be deeply embedded in the organization to work, creating a much different 2.0 organization as a result. This transition takes time as the whole organization re-roots strategically around the embedded Enterprise Web 2.0 infrastructure. Now one could raise the point of why go through all of this -- benefits of Enterprise Web 2.0 adoption? But this is an entirely new post all of its own. Here are a couple of posts that might help if interested.

• The Age of Customization: Enterprise Web 2.0 is the perfect pair of pants!
  
• Enterprise Mashups and Total Cost of Ownership
• Enterprise 2.0 meme map

I hope this helps. Although I am not a graphic artist, I think it pretty much summarizes the connection and relationships of all four 2.0’s we touched on in the last post sums up how I put all these pieces together. As always I am open and would like to hear your thoughts. mike@jackbe.com

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Differences of 2.0's

A lot of people ask us here at JackBe about the definitions and or differences between Web 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. So here are some of my thoughts simplified for a blog post.

Web 2.0 – There are two parts to this one which will make sense when I get into the difference between Enterprise Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

1. Web 2.0 – the user-driven paradigm shift. Youtube, blogs, wikis, RIAs with greater self-service capabilities… all of these are examples of a paradigm shift from older HTML static, mostly one way communication of ideas and information to a new User-Driven web model which enables you and me to more easily contribute content, share information and collaborate with each other through the web.

2. Web 2.0 - technology enablers. This user-driven shift has been made possible in part by new or now accepted technologies and techniques which have gained greater penetration as web application tools. Such include: Ajax, proprietary RIA tools like Flex and Lazlo and now Silverlight, Service Orientated Architecture (SOA), Ruby on Rail and other lightweight dev models, Web Services like REST and RSS, Mashups (data and visual) and Tagging. Of course this is not an exclusive list but I think you get my point.

Enterprise Web 2.0 – the Web 2.0 technologies mentioned above put into practice in the enterprise. For example: richer, more productive customer self-service apps, inter-department collaboration through bogs, and wikis. But simply ‘slapping’ these technologies into a rooted organization will not bring about the same successes and value that Web 2.0 apps have enjoyed in the public domain. Enterprises have too many constraints and need a mind and culture shift along with deep embedment of these 2.0 tools into its processes to have any kind of a definable impact.

Enterprise 2.0 – The Enterprise 2.0 is analogous to #1 above in that it represents a user orientated paradigm shift of the enterprise makeup itself. It embraces the decentralized organization built around disparate data and information with users empowered to create new information built around and on top of others ideas through sharing, and collaboration. An organic organization loosely designed and constructed to empower knowledge workers to do what they do best by giving them what they need, when the need it and how they need it by enabling them with 2.0 technologies and nurturing this new paradigm mind set internally. Here enterprises reap the benefits of 2.0 through network effects from its user’s contributions and collaboration and realize success that increases proportionally as more users contribute to the organism creating a potentially indefinable value proposition to stakeholders.

Each of these could be expanded in much more detail but why make it more complicated as this? If you have any thoughts please feel free to share or contact me. That is after all the point.

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Ajax is for real in 'Real-World Ajax'

There are a couple of new books on Enterprise 2.0 you may want to check out. First, from Sandy Carter at IBM, is ‘The New Language of Business: SOA & Web 2.0’. It's a good look at what makes SOA projects work. But more important, as Joe McKendrick at ZD Net points out, the book elevates Web 2.0 to true enterprise-grade status. I couldn't agree more.

But we'd would be remiss if I didn’t give equal time to ‘Real-World Ajax’, a substantial effort from our friends Dion Hinchcliffe and Kate Allen. This type of work just proves that Ajax is ready for prime in the enterprise. Once you read it, we expect you'll agree. (In the interest of full disclosure: Yes, we are a bit biased, as there’s a nice section in there on JackBe’s Ajax Bank demo.)

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Business Value Continued….Enterprise Mashups and Total Cost of Ownership Part 2

Well I’m back with some more ideas and thoughts about Web 2.0, the enabling technologies driving it, and the potential benefits for enterprises. I tend to focus on the technologies and the enterprise aspect of Web 2.0 simply because I get tired (am tired) of people defining it as simply a “social collaborative” movement. Although this is true, and great for my girlfriend who can blog and share her photos, this says little to the strategic impact that the underlying technologies, that make capable the social aspects, can have on the enterprise. Here are a few real universal business situations or rather timeless barriers to a better bottom line that technologies such as Ajax, Mashups, and a SOA can positively affect.

Quickly adapt to Changing Business Needs.

When organizations mandate a business process rule, such as a limit on the size of a particular type of business transaction, it is typically embedded deep within the application code. Finding, adjusting, and maintaining consistency with other systems can be error-prone and extremely time consuming and error-prone processes. By deploying such rules in a separate but integrated environment, organizations can empower business executives via a user interface to achieve extreme agility and oversight.

Effectively Monitor and Continuously Improve the Business

Systems information and transactional flows capture critical interactions that may be required for financial, contractual, regulatory, and business governance. Tracing and reporting audit data are tedious tasks and tenuously contingent on predefined conditions, including monitoring servers and client devices, coding predetermined subroutines to capture processing metrics, running batch routines for replication and reporting, and so forth. Due to the complexity of pulling this information together across a whole business process, the effort is often only made when critical issues arise. To avoid business risk, ongoing monitoring can be automatically captured by the abstracted process layer, which can trigger alerts, alternate process flows, provide automated reporting, and expose many other intelligence metrics. By reacting to early warnings a business can preempt situations that may cause undue and costly mistakes. Organizations may also seek to implement Six Sigma or regulatory initiatives via this type on mechanism.

Simplify Business Integration Efforts

Integration points that are incorporated and managed in close context to specific business processes will provide significantly more value. In the example, enterprise procurement activities are often scattered across multiple systems, where the collating, parsing, and regrouping of items to be sourced are typically very manual and labor-intensive processes. However, these processes can be centralized and automated into a composite application or mashup that avoids these inefficiencies.

Reduce Costs and Risks of Manual Processing

Many organizations still struggle trying to automate manual or paper-based transactions. Highly document-intensive composite application processes are very common targets for Web services. In the procurement example, a user may intervene in multiple places, introducing the potential to corrupt the process flow. With an orchestrated composite application, automated triggers engage users where and when necessary, removing the need for each individual to know every activity in the process required to continue the flow of a specific transaction.

Leverage Existing Systems and Resources

Reusability of code not only saver resource efforts in development and maintenance, it also impacts application quality and security. By utilizing a standardized framework, companies can focus skills development across a variety of systems and solutions to prevent these effects.

Again, these are just a few examples but I and JackBe believe it is these types of scenarios that are not as highly publicized at the moment (overshadowed by the Youttube/myspace buzz) but will at the end of the day drive real business value to the mass.

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Enterprise Mashups and Total Cost of Ownership

What is all the Web 2.0, Ajax, Enterprise 2.0, SOA buzz in the driving towards? What does it mean for the line-of-business manager or the enterprise itself? I thought I’d take a moment at breaking down how the approaches/ideas and supporting technologies could positively impact the underlying business books. As to not make this to vague, I’ll take the latest hallmark of Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Mashups, and a classic financial benchmark Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), and we’ll deconstruct how this latest set of technologies and techniques stands up against an old benchmark.

The TCO of a solution must take into account the initial and ongoing costs of the solution, relative to the solution it replaces. Enterprise Mashups (which are closely related to composite applications if not the same depending on one’s definition) are based upon a SOA and have the potential to lower TCO in several ways, including:

• Managing the Services in an SOA is less expensive and complex than managing the interfaces in a traditional integration solution.

• By leveraging the Web Services standards, mashups can lower the cost of proprietary technologies. Standards level the competitive playing field for vendors by lowering prices generally, and also simplify the task of integration, lowering costs directly.

• Business analysts and technical business users are able to compose applications without the involvement of more expensive IT personnel.

• The more complex a business change is, the more effective SOA-based mashups can be at reducing the TCO of the solution because of their inherently flexible nature.

Fundamentally, a SOA provides business an “agility quotient” – the more complex the underlying infrastructure and the more dynamic the business environment, the greater the benefit of an agile architecture to the business. SOAs provide the ability for business users to create enterprise mashups, thus creating and managing business processes.

Where am I going with all of this and how does it fit into the world of Ajax, RIA, or JackBe for that matter? There is one important piece yet missing – the user interface itself. If the tools that users interact with aren’t agile themselves, the benefits of these enterprise mashups to the organization risk being lost. The services that contribute to a mashup can now be consumed by light-weight client models thanks to Ajax. This is why the integration layer will be driven by those who are experienced with client side models. The back-end can do their part, expose the services, which they have or are doing so, but they aren’t going to be able to create what is truly needed for the consumption because this is not there expertise. The services are moving out farther-the power of the apps as well-to the client so it only makes sense that the driver of this integration will be through the client tier experts and more specifically, those skilled in Ajax.

Later, I’ll attempt to address the benefits of incorporating SOA, Ajax, and Mashups into the enterprise to more strategic business benefits. Please feel free to leave your comments and opinions.

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'REA is to RIA as Enterprise Web 2.0 is to Web 2.0' Returns!

I posted this a little while back, and the thoughts were expanded by our CTO, John Crupi in TechNewsWorld. Rich Enterprise Applications enable developers to create new situational applications that can offer improved usability and flexibility for the end user, and can deliver them faster than was possible using traditional approaches. This can empower users to easily assemble situational applications in response to rapid changing business requirements. Click the link to read the full article.

2007 is the year enterprises will start to more aggresively push for ways to realize the benefits of the Web 2.0 paragim shift and bring these efficiencies into the enterprise construct. In short, to empower users to consume, compose, and collaborate in ways that still adhere to enterprise standards and requirements.

Original post.....
Tuesday, October 03, 2006

REA is to RIA, as Enterprise Web 2.0 is to Web 2.0

MikeWagner
JackBe coined the term Rich Enterprise Applications (REA) as an evolution of Rich Internet Applications (RIA). RIA is to Web-grade applications as REA is to Enterprise-grade applications. The side pic. is my personal attempt to illustrate this visually. Some like it; some don’t, so comments are more than welcomed.
So What is Enterprise Grade?

Enterprises require tighter control, security, and reliability. In short they require a degree of governance that the average user building a Google Maps Mashup while sitting at their kitchen table doesn’t need. This should be no surprise to anyone who has worked for large organizations.

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