The Copernican Software Revolution ("Users are the Killer App")

Web 2.0 technology continues to shine the light on users. Luis Derechin, JackBe CEO, and I spoke on this topic several weeks ago at the AjaxWorld 2007 event in NYC in a presentation entitled "The User is the Killer App". I've been so busy working on getting Presto, our Enterprise Web 2.0 Platform and Mashup Environment out the door that I've been remiss in my blogging...well, I couldn't help but follow up on our talk with some comments, since I feel so strongly about the evolving role of users in every facet of next generation software.

Let me make the my point with a little review of history: In the year 1543, in what was considered a very controversial proposition, the Polish-born scientist Copernicus published a theory contradicting long-held views and conventional wisdom, proposing that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the Solar System. Such a model is called a "heliocentric" or sun-centered system.

In the Universe of software architecture over time we've seen numerous discussions focus around server-centric and client-centric architectures. From mainframes and dumb-terminals through the 1980's (server-centric), to Client-Server in the 80's and 90's (more client-centric), to Web-based in the 90's and into 2K (back to more server-centric), and RIA/Ajax-based applications today (back to more client-centric).

I think focusing on client or server in this equation is missing the point. Sure, the pendulum swings back and forth between the relative importance of client and server, but the pivot point from which this pendulum swings remains unmoved above...Imagine this pivot point as the user! Successful software must focus on the User, an approach best termed a "user-centric" or user-centered system.

Software should be user-centered in it's design and development, user-driven in its approach to integration and empowering in its collaboration models and support for ad-hoc, situational applications and mashups.

The evolution of User-Centric Software:

Last year I had the privilege of hearing Mark Hurst, Founder and President of Creative Good, a premiere User-Experience consulting firm, present on customer-focused strategies and he touched on a similar topic. Mark made the point that companies often fail to realize that the customer is the center of their universe.

As we’ve matured as technologists, our industry has continued to adopt a more user-focused approach to software development, an approach referred to now as Agile software development. Extending this focus even more broadly to create more “user-centric” and “user-driven” software is the next step in this natural evolution.

The term “Web 2.0” means different things to different people, but all definitions include one common theme: a strong focus on users. Consider the following features of the next generation of web software :

• User-driven content: the user of the software having more control over what data sources are utilized as part of their applications. It also implies more dynamic access to these data sources.
• User-driven selection/configuration: the software having more control of how information is labeled, categorized, as well as content layout, filtering and look and feel.
• User-driven integration: the user having more control over how various, disparate data sources are combined and transformed as well as how these data sources are utilized and manipulated within an application.

The overall emphasis is on a very dynamic user-driven model.

As we like to say at JackBe: "Users are the Killer App"!

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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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Does SaaS really stand for 'SOA and Ajax as a Service'?

I know, SaaS stands for Software-asa-Service. But it seems there is a recent and fast moving resurgence (which some call SaaS 2.0) being driven by many forces all coming together. And if we’re accurate, the forces driving SaaS 2.0 are Ajax and SOA. I always thought of SaaS 1.0 as an ASP that represented hosted apps, not really services. And especially not multi-tenant apps. But, this is starting to change in a big way.

Much of the credit should go to Salesforce. Not only did Salesforce stick with its “No Software” value proposition throughout the so-called tough Web-years, the company also opened up its services so third-party applications could too be delivered over the Web. This of course is called SalesForce AppExchange. The corollary to AppExchange in the consumer space is Amazon.com. Some execs at Amazon may have the grand vision of running all Web commerce consumer transactions through their Web services, but I’ve heard them say that they expose (latest count is ten) their Web services because they think developers and companies would find them as useful as Amazon does. Pretty forward-thinking to me.

This is only the beginning. If you follow the Long Tail, Amazon and Salesforce.com should eventually generate far more income from third parties consuming their services than from their own customer-facing software. A while ago I blogged about this and called it the Composite Company. A Composite Company is one that has built its business completely on other companies’ services. The interesting part is that applications are built by consuming services from multiple companies, not just one. When I wrote this, the term “mashup” wasn’t widely known. But, it really does represent an enabling architectural style to let developers and users integrate data from the disparate services. This is the only way it will work and the only way it will scale. Can you imagine if IT had to pre-integrate all services from all companies? Not gonna happen. When made available as governed, secure and reliable (businesses need these), these SOA services – which are truly built for consumption – will create an innovation playground to drive new Web applications that were never imaginable before. But SOA is just middleware, it’s not the whole solution. It’s Ajax that provides the “face” or the last-mile that will enable true Web applications to provide these solutions.

This all will evolve into a new market called the SaaS Consumer market and will be driven by three types of companies:

• SOA-only Software Providers - A new generation of ISVs that only provide services, but not UIs. Think SugarCRM and Salesforce as a set of SOA-only services.
  
• SaaS Market Enablers - Companies that know how to host, manage and secure services for application consumption.
  
• Composite Company - A new generation of ISVs that provide applications and composite apps that are completely built by consuming SOA-only Software Providers running on SaaS Market Enablers datacenters.

Get ready for this. Not only will this cause a dramatic shift in how we develop Web-based software, but it will create a whole new market of company opportunities.

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It's All About the User, Stupid!

Let me make a less-than-bold statement: the most important part of software is the user. So why am I on this subject, you ask? Don't I sell 'Enterprise Web 2.0' software? That's Ajax, SOA, mashups, etc., right? Sure enough. But I sell software that supposed to empower users.

I've just finished reading a great blog ‘The Peoples Interface Awards' that drives this point home. It's a nice and concise recap of how important the ‘human interface design' is in how users perceive systems (and their IT department).

As a software provider in an industry that makes the web more interactive (and, presumably, more user-friendly), we see the results of bad and good web interfaces every day. Stealing a phrase from James Carville, we often make the statement that 'Its All About the User, Stupid'. In fact, it is such a popular topic in our industry that we've even held webcasts on it.

The issue with this issue is that it is 'soft and fuzzy', without many hard metrics for tangible, bottom-line ROI. Sure, we have examples. We've seen good improvements in customer conversion statistics for e-commerce applications were the ‘Web 1.0' interface was poorly built. But such stats from a vendor like JackBe could be viewed as biased (as we did the work). So it's great to see that this issue is being given some CIO-level attention.

Long live the user.

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