…and the reason is that I’m no longer on active industry-watching duty. I am taking a sabbatical for a year or so, with the result that I shall have little time, if any, to keep this blog current.

See http://www.rogersrambles.org for details of what I’m doing instead. See you there, I hope.

Best regards,

Roger

PS My old email address — rgw@office-futures.com — no longer works. If you need to contact me and don’t have my new address, please leave a message at +(0)1883 713074 .

In yesterday’s item, on social networking, I linked to some curmudgeonly mutterings on the subject from Patrick Barkham. They included these sentiments:

If you’re single, every second spent perusing other people’s photos on Facebook is a second less to catch the eye of a gorgeous passerby in the street. If your mind-numbing job plonks you behind a computer all day, every minute spent on Facebook is a minute lost to do something about your stultifying situation.

I wonder what he’d make of this toy, Twittervision, which displays against a map of the world the latest postings on the Twitter system. It was designed by David Troy and is a fine example of misapplied ingenuity. (Twitter itself came up as a topic in this item, ten days ago.)

Mr Troy has also done a toy for Flickr, which shows the picture and its place of origin for each new posting to that system.

Both gadgets are as useless as the human appendix but are far more interesting to look at. So, if you really have nothing else to do with your time…

Guardian Unlimited Technology — Are you connected?

16 May 2007
This week came the news that “William Wales” had joined the social networking site Facebook. Yesterday there was much argument about whether it was a hoax or not. Would Prince William really post a profile on the net? The answer is: well, why not? After all, this is how most people his age keep tabs on their mates.

With websites such as Facebook and MySpace constantly being talked about in the media, it must be easy to feel like a 20th- century luddite if you aren’t already part of the in-crowd. Here lies a great disconnect at the heart of 21st-century socialising: either you’re in (and use every social networking website you can) or you’re out (and don’t use them at all).

This summary gives a different view from the usual of the social networking craze. Most writing on the topic, including stuff I’ve blogged, is written by technologists for technologists and other juveniles of all ages.

Many of the computing commentators, like technologists everywhere, feel that if it can be done, it must be done. There are some correctives in this article and in one of the side panels.

The other side panel gives some tips on behaviour.

It’s a pity that The Guardian chose to put the item in the Technology [sic] area of its Web site, where many people outside computing would miss it. The newspaper itself carried the item in “G2″, which is a general section.

ThomasPurves.com — Where are we? Mobile Geolocation and Social Presence

7 May 2007

Someone at a party the other night was trying to explain what you could do with geolocation on your phone. The conventional wisdom is, it would be “great” because if you are standing on street corner your phone could tell you the nearest pizza restaurant. Or it blink at you with “offers” from the nearest pizza restaurant.

No, I said, the killer app is not about where I am, it’s where my friends are. Sure, often times we don’t want to run in to each other, but sometimes we do. And when we do, it would be great to see who from my buddy list (my real buddy list) might be nearby and we could ping each other, want to meet up? or hey, the movie is about to start are you almost here? where are you?

We try to do this manually with social presence apps with twitter, or for the truly brave plazes. Once it gets easy enough, “social location” services will be huge, and may just be the missing piece in social presence we’ve been wondering about.

David Coleman is thinking about similar matters in his Collaborative Strategies blog. He ponders both the business value of such tools as well as the business model Twitter is using. (He also points out that the vastly more popular Facebook is now offering similar abilities.)

I go along with David’s observation that “Personally, I don’t want someone to know where I am or what I am doing every minute of every day.” I sometimes amaze people by steadfastly continuing to talk to them even though my telephone — mobile or fixed — is ringing. (We are so conditioned to allow machines to intrude on our affairs that they see this as unusual, almost aberrant, behaviour.)

So, like David, I’m finding it hard to imagine how such geolocational tools would make much of a business contribution. No doubt I’ll think of some significant uses in due course. Meanwhile, the Luddite side of me is winning this internal debate.

Yet Another Software Blog: What’s the big deal about Enterprise 2.0?

What’s the big deal about Enterprise 2.0?

Entire blogs are dedicated to covering the topic, and we can’t forget the exceptionally tortured semantic debate over what would be allowed to live under the Enterprise 2.0 tent.

There are many opinions on what defines “Enterprise 2.0.” I myself lean towards Andrew McAfee’s definition. If Enterprise 2.0 comes to mean “anything new happening in the enterprise,” it becomes a meaningless term.

Tortured semantic debates are a typical feature of the adoption of new expressions, no matter how well or poorly they might have been defined at the outset. Even those expressions that had a clear and unambiguous meaning to begin with soon suffer from terminological drift.

It’s human nature. Marketeers are always keen to have their products and services seen as up to date. No matter than their company’s offerings are in truth outmoded and incapable of meeting the new demands, perception is all. By hijacking the terms used to describe the genuinely new, the marketing people can make the product meet this perception without putting their employers to the trouble and expense of doing any actual engineering.

The customers — as gullible and impatient as ever — swallow the marketeers’ guff. What do they and suppliers care about semantic exactitude? They are, respectively, consumers and inventors of business mythologies, not of technical truths. Meanwhile, the originators of the term tear their hair out at what has happened to their carefully wrought words and ideas.

IBM Press room — IBM Launches RFID Technology to Extract Business Insight and Drive Value From Mounting RFID Data

27 Mar 2007
Today, at the RFID World Conference, IBM will unveil Radio Frequency Identification software that unlocks business insight from the information explosion created by RFID tags embedded throughout the supply chain, empowering companies to identify entirely new business opportunities and breaking through to the next phase in the evolution of RFID.

The new WebSphere RFID Premises Server 6.0 aggregates and analyzes massive amounts of RFID and other sensor information from every corner of an enterprise. It then applies built-in business logic, and leveraging a Services Oriented Architecture, integrates that valuable raw data with enterprise applications, such as ERP or billing systems. This open architecture means that data can be seamlessly connected with business processes, allowing companies to use and capitalize on RFID.

Later, in racy style for IBM, the press release says: “Data that was once money left on the floor can be transformed into unanticipated revenue opportunities.” This would be the shop floor, presumably, or that of the loading bay. They are right, though. Data about and from RFID devices can be an important ingredient in composing the ongoing story of an organization’s resources and processes.

IBM has some words on the subject in Beyond the bar code and in this position paper. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has some less cheering words about extending the use of RFID tags beyond the industrial zone.

(RFID, as you probably know, stands for radio frequency identification. The “D” is pointless, as in ID. )

IBM Self Checkout solution: New mounting and signature capture features for models 4845-131, 151,

I expect Dignitas will be among the first customers for it.

Chuck’s Blog — Who Owns Corporate Information?

Much of modern management discussion revolves around the concept of “ownership”. Yes, we all work in a matrixed world, but — at the end of the day — there’s some idea of who owns the overall outcome.

Today, I’d like to explore the concept of “information ownership” from a corporate or organizational perspective, how we see this rapidly shifting from individual business functions to the lucky folks in IT, and what they might be thinking about to prepare themselves for this new responsibility.

I’m not giving much of the game away when I say that Hollis thinks the IT function should be in charge of corporate information.

It’s a predictable choice on two counts. First, he is vice president of technology alliances at EMC, an information technology company whose main clients are other information technologists. As Mandy Rice-Davies (the MRD of the title) famously almost put it: “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?”

The other reason for Hollis’s contention is that no other existing corporate function comes to mind as sufficiently powerful and well resourced.

Whether IT folk are up to the job is another matter. Hollis uses the term “informationist” to describe people who are more interested in info than machines (see his blog item, “The Informationist Manifesto”).

If by information he means more than data [1], I would hazard there is only a small proportion of people in most IT departments who are genuinely interested in it.

15 years ago or more, there was a move to relabel IT directors and managers “Chief Information Officer”. The reason, apart from the usual power-grabbing and salary-raising motives, was that these exalted personages would be best placed to exercise an overview and control of the organisation’s informational assets.

Well, as Harry Hotspur said when Glendower claimed to be able to summon spirits from “the vasty deep”, “Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?”. CIO’s didn’t exercise such control then and, pace Chuck Hollis, I can’t see many of them doing it now.

One reason is the (still) low professional status such a title carries with it. The jibe then as now is that CIO stands for “career is over”. In the macho world of computerists, anyone who is not actually handling code is a ’suit’, an object of suspicion and derision. Those who can, do; those who can’t become CIOs — that sort of thing.

A second reason is the CIOs are often too low on the corporate totem pole to exercise that sort of influence and power. In 2005, the public relations company Burson-Marsteller issued a report on the role of computer experts in corporate governance. Called A Missing Competency: Boardroom IT Deficit, it said that, in 2003, only 5 per cent of Fortune Global 500 companies had a current or former CIO on their board of directors. By 2004, this had increased but only to 8 per cent.

Even by October 2005, a meeting of the CIO Roundtable (aka CIOs Kvetching) admitted that “Recognition of IT at the board level needs to be elevated from today’s low — and in some cases non-existent — levels.” (See Aligning IT and Corporate Governance.) Matters won’t have changed much in the 18 months since then.

The final reason is that the title of Chief Information Officer is a misnomer, not to be taken at face value. If it were accurate, this person would also be in charge of the mail room, internal post, periodical subscriptions, photocopiers, the company library, product specifications, engineering and process data, product manuals, noticeboards, meeting rooms, sales literature, press relations, shareholder notices, the company annual report and everything said on the telephone system.

In fact, the CIO is still looking after the same narrow range of matter as always, which is data a computer can handle — and not even all of that. A more realistic title would be CCDO - Chief Computer-readable Data Officer. This is unlikely to attract support.

Coincidentally, in her Change @ Work blog, Patricia Kitchen has just taken a look at some of the ‘CxO’ titles that have been coined in recent years. In “Where the Buck Stops”, she lists several, including a chief diversity officer. He must work for the Sioux Federation.

Not wishing to be left behind, I long ago gave myself a CxO-style title. I’m the CBO — Cheese (Big) and Owner — of my one-person company.

I discovered Ms Kitchen’s blog via the ineffable Christopher Locke, who months ago assumed the typically sardonic nom de clavier of Chief Blogging Officer. Locke is the author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, a dazzling, honest and angry look at the state of business and the Web in the late 1990s.

It’s a book that got him effed a few times, actually, having the same bell-like ring of truth to it as Robert Townsend’s Up the Organization, 35 years earlier. I’m a fan of both books (and both authors). Each is worth ten times as much as the kind of safe, timid, technology-based “manifesto” that Chuck Hollis talks about.

Come on, Charlie, light my fire!

Note
[1] Most people use the words “data”, “information” and “knowledge” almost interchangeably, as thought they were synonyms. When challenged, they would admit there are differences among these terms, even if they would have trouble saying what those differences are.

A quick and dirty differentiation is that:
· Data is a record of states and changes of state in a system, person, discourse or environment (detection)
· Information arises when a person or machine recognises that data as relevant (identification)
· Knowledge comes about when that information is put into a consistent framework (assimilation).

Machines and people can both deal with these three stages but they process them in radically different fashions, so much so that human-based information could be regarded as distinct from machine-based information; ditto for knowledge. Further, only human beings are presently (perhaps always) capable of higher levels of abstraction and generalisation, such as understanding and wisdom.

Feel free to disregard or disagree with these statements (not that you need permission, of course). Anything that can be apprehended and modelled only one way is scarcely, if ever, worth bothering with.

Cisco Announces Agreement to Acquire WebEx

15 March 2007
Acquisition Furthers Cisco’s Vision for Enabling Collaboration in the SMB Market

Cisco and WebEx today announced a definitive agreement for Cisco to acquire WebEx. WebEx is a market leader in on-demand collaboration applications, and its network-based solution for delivering business-to-business collaboration extends Cisco’s vision for Unified Communications, particularly within the Small to Medium Business (SMB) segment.

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s announcements comes this much larger deal, worth about $3.2 billion. WebEx provides online conferencing and secure instant messaging, both as a service. It says it has about two-thirds of the market for online meetings. (See WebEx — the Multimedia Dial Tone for a profile of the company.)

The deal will take time to work its way through all the relevant rigmaroles and should be complete by the end of this year. By then, Cisco’s vision for WebEx will be more evident to outsiders. Also by then, Cisco is guaranteed to have made some other purchases in this sector. It’s sitting on a pot of money and has made clear its interest in human networking and collaboration.

Meanwhile, the name of one of the social networking companies Cisco didn’t buy yesterday — LinkedIn — has come up in the blog of Don Tapscott. He’s the co-author of Wikinomics and a man who can spot a bandwagon seventy leagues away. He reckons it’s a tempting target for eBay. Read the item for his rationale.

And finally, as an example of the worthwhile use of social networking (in case you were wondering if there were any), here on YouTube is Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us. It’s a cleverly worked debate stirrer, using the conceit of a virtual palimpsest, from a lecturer in anthropology. You don’t have to agree with it to admire it. Sadly, most of the video responses are nowhere near as witty or involving.

ITNews.com.au — Will Cisco social media deals impact enterprise?

Andrew Conry-Murray — 9 March 2007
Cisco Systems sealed a deal this week to purchase software assets from, and acquire employees of, social-networking site operator Utah Street Networks. The networking equipment giant also finalized its acquisition Five Across, originally announced in February. Five Across makes social-networking and forum software to help companies improve communications with customers.

Cisco said it would incorporate Utah Street Networks, which operates the locally focused social-networking site Tribe.net, into its Cisco Media Solutions Group (CMSG). That group was started in December 2006 to create and promote infrastructure products for consumer content providers. Cisco said, however, that it would not integrate Tribe.net site itself. It provided no financial details for the Utah Street Networks transaction.

Cisco’s Media Solutions Group describes itself as providing “an infrastructure platform designed to help media-content owners enhance the content and entertainment experience for consumers”. I can see a role for community-building software in there but the present Cisco offering is down among the plumbing. Presumably the new pieces of software (and the 15 or so new employees that came with them) will create community tools that Cisco’s customers can offer their customers.

At one time, the top man at Tribe.net was best buddies with the owners of two other popular networking sites, LinkedIn and Friendster. Perhaps the latter two are waiting their turn to be snapped up by a giant corporation. (Some companies have that as their ambition from the first. This has always struck me as a cold-blooded approach to building a business and suggestive of little love of what they’re doing.)

Social networking on the Internet started attracting close attention from venture capitalists in 2004. There was, unsurprisingly, little new about the idea or its implementation. It goes back to the days of The WELL, of CompuServe, of Usenet and of bulletin board systems, all of which predate the World Wide Web. This oft-cited 1994 college thesis from David Belson elaborated upon themes in a 1978 book — The Network Nation — and found them relevant then. They still are.

One point of difference emerges, though. The thesis and the book are, to a great extent, about collaboration. Collaboration software (aka groupware) is about creating, often jointly, new information for sharing among a group. Social networking software, 21st millennium style, is mainly about individuals sharing existing information, often about themselves. The former is about making molecules; the latter is about atoms interacting.

Naturally, matters are not that black and white. (Both pieces of software that Cisco has bought are about about networking and collaboration, for example.) Communities can and do develop on social networking sites, whereas some ostensibly collective systems remain stubbornly individualistic. In these, members lob information parcels over the fence at one another but seldom engage in shared thinking.

To some extent, the technology involved is irrelevant. Decades ago, unofficial groups typically communicated by circulating photocopies of interesting articles though the internal post, with the occasional note appended.

The real difference is whether a group persona emerges. It’s a self-fulfilling definition. If people think of themselves as part of a group, they will behave as though they are, thus creating one. Some self-created groups last for decades, others for days or weeks. All are valid.

SeattlePI.com — Microsoft falls further behind in Web search

Todd Bishop — 5 March 2007
In early 2005, Microsoft Corp. launched its internally developed Internet search engine with great fanfare, after a large investment. Its goal was to rival Google in the growing and lucrative market.

But two years later, Microsoft has an even smaller slice of the U.S. search market than when it began, based on an analysis of statistics from two major research firms.

Microsoft’s woes will be worsened by the news that Christopher Payne, its corporate vice president for Live Search, is leaving the company.

How this will affect M$’s desktop and enterprise search activities is hard to say. Last year, it tried to set out a common identity and direction for search across its various competing divisions. We thus had the odd spectacle of a software supplier saying that search is a strategic capability for it but there would be no specific search products. The message was that search is part of the operating environment, the infrastructure, and always will be so.

“If that’s the way you want to play it, fair enough”, I thought, “but why all the fuss?” One possible answer is that this was a defensive show against the big predators entering Microsoft’s territory. Oracle, IBM, SAP and various BI suppliers (in cahoots with search suppliers too small to take on M$ themselves) all fancy a mouthful or two of what they see as the Redmondites’ soft underbelly — large corporate systems. Search and related information management products might be their way in.

Like antelopes when there are big cats about, Microsoft’s announcements were a form of ’stotting’ or ‘pronking’, making extravagant leaps to show how healthy and vigorous it is. “Don’t bother with me”, these jumps say, “I’m too fast and strong for you to catch.” It works in the wild but will it in the equally savage world of software sales?

More prosaically, the exercise also reminded me of IBM ‘marketectures’ like SNA and SAA. In those days the joke was that the only hardware such schemes would run on was an overhead projector. Although never as fissile as IBM’s architectures were, Microsoft’s supposed single integrated architecture has always been a a fiction, well short of true homogeneity.

Guardian Unlimited Business — How one year’s digital output would fill 161bn iPods

Richard Wray — 6 March 2007
Last year enough digital information - from emails and blogs to mobile phone calls, photos and TV signals - was generated to fill a dozen stacks of hardback books stretching from the earth to the sun, according to research published today.

The proliferation of digital cameras and mobile phones that can take pictures, coupled with the popularity of online video services such as YouTube and BitTorrent, has caused an explosion of images. This pushed the world’s total digital content last year to 161bn gigabytes. That is the equivalent of 161bn iPod Shuffles or 161 of so-called exabytes

Why “so-called” exabytes? Isn’t this an accepted term? Is it something else — an overbite, perhaps — masquerading as an exabyte?

I like the “161bn”, too. Given the myriad assumptions and blind guesses needed in an exercise like this, “roughly 160 billion” is probably the best one could get (and “something over 150 billion” possibly more realistic). It’s what my old physics master used to call the fallacy of spurious accuracy.

Editorial weirdness apart, the article looks to have done a decent job of summarising the results of this study. Unfortunately it does not give its title, so the original can’t easily be tracked down for more detail. Also, neither the EMC or IDC Web site mentions it.

This report’s results are destined to become factoids [1], quoted in countless (even by IDC) publications, presentations and Web sites. It’s a pity therefore that we don’t have on the day of its release the details of how these numbers were arrived at.

The last large-scale study of this kind was made three years ago by researchers at the University of California, Berkely. Called How Much Information? 2003, it estimated the amount of data produced by machines in 2002 at around 5 exabytes. (No “so-called” needed then, note.) This included 0.42 exabytes of original content held on film used in still, X-ray and movie cameras.

Ignoring film therefore, the estimated total of new digital data in 2002 was just over 4.5 exabytes. In 2005, according to IDC, email traffic alone amounted to 6 exabytes.

Even though the academic and the IDC researchers probably went about their work in different ways, a rough comparison of these two sets of results gives an idea of just how much data we’re producing and throwing around the place. It’s astonishing.

[1] There are a couple of rants about factoids here and here.

18 March 2007
I’ve just a had a look at the EMC site and it now has details of the survey on it — prominently displayed, in fact. Y0u can download the IDC white paper from here and read more about the topic here.

OUT-LAW.COM — Sheriff awards damages of £750 for single spam email

5 March 2007
An individual has won a spam case in the UK for just the second time. Gordon Dick has won a damages award of £750 plus expenses against Transcom Internet Services after suing the ISP for sending him a single email. The case did not go to a full trial.

OUT-LAW has seen the Sheriff Court’s note of Extract for Payment ordering Transcom to pay Dick damages of £750 plus 8% interest since May 2006 plus £618.66 expenses – though the two parties are still in dispute over how the case was conducted and its outcome.

Transcom director William Smith told OUT-LAW that his firm has not received any official notice of a judgment. Dick says that he has proof that the notice was received and signed for by Transcom.

This unedifying case brings to mind Samuel Johnson’s lofty retort when asked to choose between two minor poets: “Sir, there is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea.”

Office Memo 26 — Yapbrowser: Directing you to Illegal Content in One Click or Fewer

5 March 2007
Web browsers. They’re all around you, on just about every PC on the planet, yet you probably don’t stop to think about them too much. Why would you? They’re just there, and that’s all that matters, like the mouse or the keyboard - a tool you just plug in to do something else, without worrying about what they happen to be doing internally. It’s your gateway to the online world.

The start of a contribution from Christopher Boyd.

Enterprise 2.0 2007 - What is Enterprise 2.0?

Enterprise 2.0 is the term for the technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email. It provides business managers with access to the right information at the right time through a web of inter-connected applications, services and devices. Enterprise 2.0 makes accessible the collective intelligence of many, translating to a huge competitive advantage in the form of increased innovation, productivity and agility.driven technology

Enterprise 1.0
Hierarchy
Friction
Bureaucracy
Inflexibility
IT-driven technology/ Lack of user control
Top down
Centralized
Teams are in one building/ one time zone
Silos and boundaries
Need to know
Information systems are structured and dictated
Taxonomies
Overly complex
Closed/ proprietary standards
Scheduled
Long time-to-market cycles

Enterprise 2.0
Flat Organization
Ease of Organization Flow
Agility
Flexibility
User-driven technology
Bottom up
Distributed
Teams are global
Fuzzy boundaries, open borders
Transparency
Information systems are emergent
Folksonomies
Simple
Open
On demand
Short time-to-market cycles

Yesterday I said I didn’t know what Enterprise 1.0 was supposed to be. Here is an answer, from the blurb for a conference and show on Enterprise 2.0. The table (which I’m afraid WordPress shows only as two lists) sets out where E2.0 differs from what most of us are deemed to work in at the moment.

My sense of déjà vu grows stronger. I remember doing this sort of idealised and absolutist ‘dull old world’ versus ‘brave new world’ table yonks ago. I believed in it at the time, and still do — sort of.

What I have also come to believe since then is that:
– the products themselves are a tiny part of what is needed, even though that’s where the emphasis typically lies
– vision is nice but patience, determination, ingenuity and commitment are needed, too
– much of the old way of working is not as bad as is painted
– the documented old ways are often not what is actually going on
– in some places, some of the new ways will never work or will never be accepted
– the best one can do, often, is replace just some of the old ways and technologies
– compromise is not defeat — having some of the old coexist with some of the new can be a victory.

The devisers of lists like the one from the show also need to be aware that some of these ideas and technologies will not be accepted as they are. Users will adapt them to their own needs and imaginings. They will discover new uses and methods that systems people and the products’ designers would never have thought of.

These emergent uses can sometimes be the key to a system’s success and its wider adoption. Unfortunately, traditional ROI arithmetic — one of the most depressing handicaps ever imposed on commercial endeavour — does not admit of such possibilities. Making a ‘hard savings’ case on them can therefore be tricky, if not impossible.

Being able to steer one’s new proposals though the reefs and shallows of the organisation’s budgeting and project justification systems is fundamental to a project’s survival. If you can’t navigate through or round those obstacles, everything else is a waste of time.

Just hope you can keep your projects away from people who believe that cost displacement arithmetic is the only acceptable justification method. They are fiscal Dementors, who suck the hope and creativity out of organizational change.

You will note that the Enterprise 2.0 list above does not mention the need for new thinking about justifying investments. Nor does it touch on other fundamentals, such as:
– the role of IT specialists
– the flux of power between them and users
– the fight between user freedom and the demands of compliance
– the influence of technical and trading partners and of customers
– the need to agree a safe pace of change from ‘E1.0′ to ‘E2.0′.

Perhaps these aspects are omitted because they’re unglamorous, tough to deal with and devoid of techno-glitter.

Going from E1.0 to E2.0, if only partly, will be hard. Selling dreams about it has always been easy. So has buying into them.

InformationWeek — Most Business Tech Pros Wary About Web 2.0 Tools In Business

J. Nicholas Hoover — 24 February 2007

For all the mind-numbing buzz about Web. 2.0, most business collaboration and information sharing remains mired in endless e-mail strings and scheduled conference calls. More than half of business technology pros surveyed by InformationWeek are either skeptical about tools such as blogs, wikis, and online social networks, or they’re willing but wary of adopting them. What gives?

[Snip] Despite the risks and problems, a solid minority of the 250 business technology pros surveyed by InformationWeek are behind this IT strategy push that has come to be known as Enterprise 2.0 (even if the overplayed 2.0 terminology makes some people wince). Nearly a third, 32%, describe their Web 2.0 strategies as fully engaged, our survey finds

The start of a useful snapshot of a bandwagon.

I do a mental ‘global search and replace’ with articles like this, reading “groupware” whenever I see the expression, “Enterprise 2.0” (and losing little of the sense in the process). There is not much here that was not at least being tried in the 1980s and 90s. The main novelties are the Web and pervasive mobile telecommunications, which provide computing environments that were not generally available until the mid 1990s or so.

Just about everything else is an updated version of something old. These ‘E2.0’ aids to human collaboration differ only or mainly by using new infrastructure and tools. Their purpose and modi operandi are the same as ten or more years ago.

This is not to denigrate the achievement of their developers and the attractiveness of their products. Grabbing the mind of the user is more than half the battle in producing successful groupware, as its use is often at the employee’s discretion. It is seldom, in that useful IBM term, line of business and is thus seldom imposed. (Not that I’m arguing for compulsory collaboration. That’s almost an oxymoron.)

All the same, I wish some of these hot-gospelling authors would take the time to do two things – explain to the rest of us what Enterprise 1.0 is or was, and then tell us in breathful prose what the new version can do that the old one couldn’t. There may be some substantive and worthwhile differences between E1.0 and E2.0 but, for now, I don’t know what they might be.

Finextra — Credit Suisse to shift Swiss IT jobs offshore - report

26 February 2007
Investment bank Credit Suisse is looking to outsource over half of the 5000 IT jobs at its operations in Switzerland to cheaper offshore centres, according to press reports.

As is well known, Switzerland is a landlocked country. This outsourcing would thus have to be conducted internally, off the shores of its largest lakes. Among other problems, this would lead to the creation of the oft deplored ‘islands of IT’.

You can hear the complaints already: “Why did they have to put the support centre there? Those Genevese have no understanding of our problems, can’t be expected to understand our culture and, anyway, I can barely make out what they’re saying.”

ZDNet.co.uk — Google Apps Go Pro

Nicholas Carlson — 22 February 2007

Google took its Web-based applications to the big leagues today with Google Apps Premier Edition, a suite of hosted applications targeted at the same enterprise market traditionally dominated by Microsoft Office.

Google Apps Premier Edition, which will cost businesses $50 per user account per year, includes Google Calendar, as well as the company’s Gmail e-mail application and its Google Talk instant messaging client. It also includes Google Docs and Spreadsheets, word processing and spreadsheet applications geared for collaboration between users. Google’s mobile e-mail application is also now available on BlackBerry devices.

The success or otherwise of these services depend, it seems to me, on these questions:
1. Are end users, system administrators and IT budget holders sufficiently unhappy with owning and using the Microsoft Office products to want to change?
2. Are people apprehensive about what a commitment to MS Office entails with respect to the Vista operating system?
3. Are enough of those people on a good enough Internet link to make remotely-hosted desktop software a workable possibility? Can they trust the programs to be available?
4. Are enough of these people willing to trust personal and corporate data to a system hosted by a third party?

Last December, I put the last question to Roberto Solimene, Google’s Enterprise Director Europe. He recognised that his company would need to “calm corporate nervousness” but felt certain it would. There are already, he pointed out, successful online services companies in whom corporate users trust. Two examples he gave are Salesforce.com, the CRM services supplier (which Google itself uses) and Postini (with which it partners), which provides message security and management. Also, many thousands of individuals trust their email traffic to Google Mail.

Coincident with the launch of Apps Premier Edition, Google has just issued a note on the security implications of using its software.

The Google belief is, clearly, that the answers to all four questions are favourable enough to make its offerings commercially viable in due course. It reasons that $600 a year for each user is cheap compared with the installation, upgrading, licensing and support costs of hosting MS Office internally. Also, it is seemingly not bothered by the early success of Microsoft’s Office Live beta.

You can get Google Apps Premium Edition here, on free trial (except domain names) until the end of April this year.

Much ink and many pixels will be devoted to the battle between these two giant organizations. My feeling is that Google Apps will initially prove popular with SMEs (small-to-medium-sized enterprises) and that it will be a few months at least before many large Microsoft Office shops convert.

When and if that happens, the real fight will start — and it will get dirty. Google Apps are a pimple on the elephant’s backside for Google, which still gets over 95% of its income from online advertising. MS Office, on the other hand, provides an important income stream for Microsoft, one it will protect vigorously.

Meanwhile, where are Yahoo! and its new best friend, IBM?

Outllaw.com — Small companies given data protection guidance

15 February 2007
Small companies should try to answer data protection queries in the normal course of business rather than treat them as formal requests, according to advice published by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

The ICO has issued guidelines to help small companies deal with requests for information under the Data Protection Act (DPA). Aware that small companies can often feel overwhelmed by such requests and the complexity of the Act, the ICO has advised that as many requests as possible be treated informally.

“Individuals have a right under the Act to make a request in writing for a copy of the information you hold about them on computer and in some manual filing systems,” explains the advice. “This is called a subject access request. They are also entitled to be given a description of the information, what you use it for, who you might pass it on to, and any information you have about the source of the information.”

The advice from the Info Commissioner is here, in a PDF file.

18 February 2007

Like a celebrity whose star is fading, business intelligence (BI) keeps trying to reinvent itself. And, like any human performer, it is unable to change its underlying nature.

Looking at the history of this class of software is like reading the Book of Genesis: MIS (management information systems) begat EIS (executive information systems) begat DSS (decision support systems) begat BI (business intelligence) begat BAM (business activity management) begat BPM (business performance management), ad infinitum.

Meanwhile, on the technical side, databanks begat DBMS (database management systems) begat SQL (structured query language) begat OLAP (online analytical processing) begat data warehouses begat data marts begat ETL (extract, transform and load) and so on, ad nauseam.

The latest example of this ceaseless titular inflation is to call business intelligence CI (content intelligence). Does this mean that business is now infra dig to talk about or is it simply the misapplying of an existing term?

It seems to be the latter. The idea of content intelligence is being promoted by document management companies such as EMC Documentum and Interwoven. They use it to mean classifying free-form textual data to make it easier to find and navigate.

In that setting, content intelligence is a reasonable, if typically overblown, term. I think it well wide of the mark, though, when applied to business intelligence.

Now, if the latest wave of BI tools were labelled “context intelligence” — and could meet that claim — I’d be much more interested, as would many organizations. At the moment, BI does not stray far from its origins in financial reporting and its reliance on structured data. It’s not bad at telling managers the ‘what’ of what is going on but hopeless at the ‘why’. Still less can it tell them the ‘how’ of fixing problems or repeating successes. The what, why and how, allied to relevant competitor and industry intelligence, would be information really worth seeing on one’s computer screen.

Collaboration Loop — Integrating Virtual Employees into the Fold: Defining the Problem

Melanie Turek — 6 February 2007

As someone who recently joined a very large, global organization, I know first hand how difficult it can be to integrate into a new corporate environment. Of the dozen or so people I work with on a regular basis, no one is in the same location as anyone else—and about half aren’t in the U.S. (I work out of a home office in Colorado; almost everyone else is also in a home office, but a few are at corporate sites 50%-80% of the time.)

What’s more, those 12 people may be the ones I need to work with most often, but they’re by no means the only people I need to work with. Understanding who else I must know in a company of 1300-plus employees is no small feat, and it’s made much more difficult by the virtual workplace. Certainly, my co-workers can and do steer me in the right direction when I need help (Joe Smith handles this, Sarah Jones, handles that), but it’s a reactive model.

This is the first of two articles so far from someone new to an organization (Frost & Sullivan, in this case). Her second article is here.

Anyone who has changed job naturally notices the differences and oddities of their new berth. When that person is, like Ms Turek, a trained and alert observer of corporate life, the observations will be that much more resonant. She is right on target with her remarks about the voluntary nature of the informal organization and how poorly served it can be. Despite the evidence of their ears and eyes, many managers and HR functionaries are unwilling to admit that it even exists, let alone try to help it to work better. Ms Turek’s second article, on training, reinforces the point.

Entrenched and outdated attitudes to collaboration — online or face to face — are another enemy of the unofficial organization. Many years ago, while working in a large American multinational, I tried to set up a virtual work group for secretaries and word processor operators within the different divisions (how aptly labelled). Its purpose was to let members exchange ideas and information on how they carried out and managed their work.

At first, the idea found favour but then the voices of reaction began to intrude. “Why should these women have something senior people don’t have?” was a choice example. The death knell sounded when another manager pointed out that the group’s members might be able to compare pay and conditions. (Revealing one’s salary to colleagues was forbidden, believe it or not.)

The final nail went into the notion’s coffin when one junior person — himself not noticeably taciturn — said, “It would just be a talking shop, anyway”. Quite so; that was its purpose!

Readers of a certain age will recognise those attitudes to rank and gender. They haven’t gone entirely away.

If you are too young to remember that far back, watching the BBC’s Life on Mars drama series will give you a (not entirely serious) clue to how it was.

eMarketer.com — Is E-Commerce About to Plateau?

5 February 2007
According to comScore Networks, 2006 online retail spending reached a record $102 billion, a 24% increase over 2005.

[Snip] However, Patti Freeman Evans, a JupiterResearch analyst and the author of the “US Online Retail Forecast: 2006-2011″ report, warned…”Online retail sales are maturing and the lion’s share of future growth will primarily come from existing buyers spending more in the online channel.”

The comScore press release is here. The company has also been looking into popular British Web sites.

Patti Freeman Evans’ report will cost you US$1,500 but you do get a half an hour conversation with her for that. “In the online channel” is analyst-speak for “online”.

ComputerWeekly - Business intelligence remains top priority for CIOs

Cliff Saran — 31 January 2007
Businesses will spend 1.5bn euros on business intelligence software during 2007, Gartner has predicted.

Research by the analyst firm has found that CIOs see business intelligence as the number-one technology priority in 2007 – for the second year running. But consolidation of business intelligence tools will also be a big focus for IT directors this year.

[Snip] …Andreas Bitterer, research vice president at Gartner, said, “BI has become a strategic initiative and is now recognised by CIOs and business leaders as instrumental in driving business effectiveness and innovation.”

But Bitterer also warned that BI is not well understood by many firms’ employees, which meant an increased focus on training would be crucial in 2007.

And here was me thinking that human beings were “instrumental in driving business effectiveness” and all that. Chiz moan drone.

As for BI not being well understood by many firms’ employees, suppliers could always try making the software easier to use. Perhaps they think users are sisys and need a does of the KANE.

[With apologies to the shade of Geoffrey Willans, as any fule kno.]

Telecommunications Online — E-Bay’s Skype Ups Its Game, Goes After Business Market

Stephen Heiser — 26 January 2007
Skype, the telecommunications service owned by E-Bay, has announced that it has extended its Skype for Business offering in response to continued demand among businesses around the world that use Skype to communicate with customers and colleagues. Currently Skype has 171 million registered users, and is growing very rapidly in the U.S. and overseas.

Business users have always been part of the Skype strategy and make up more than 30 percent of Skype’s global community. In a recent survey of 250 businesses using Skype, 95 percent claimed to have saved on their telecommunications costs and 80 percent claimed that using Skype had increased employee productivity. The survey also revealed that 62 percent of the companies using Skype communicate easily with customers and 76 percent said they work more closely with colleagues because Skype is so easy to use.

I can’t find any further details on this survey, so view it with the usual pinch of salt. All the same, Skype in particular and voice over IP (VoIP) in general have an obvious appeal to organizations that wish to save money and to improve convenience for their workers.

In this piece, Irwin Lazar speculates on Skype’s becoming the basis for company-wide collaboration services. It is already part of the way there, offering instant messaging and video conferencing as standard in addition to telephony, and running on M$ Windows, Apple Mac and Linux environments.

There are numerous software add-ons to Skype that offer further features (some more serious than others). There is also a speakerphone for it from Polycom.

We use Skype as the default voice communications method within Bloor Research. I also find it helpful during suppliers’ briefings over the telephone or Web, as I have a headset that plugs into my PC. This leaves my hands free for shuffling papers or using the keyboard, and saves getting a crick in the neck through tucking a handset there for an hour or more. Using the SkypeOut service lets me call ordinary (PSTN) telephone numbers anywhere in the world at low cost.

I haven’t tried it yet, but NCH’s Uplink software lets you link Skype to rival VoIP services that use SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). It costs just $US27.50 at the moment. There are other, more capable methods for making this link, but at increased cost and complexity

One area where Internet telephony is not advancing is in the sky. Last summer, Boeing stopped its in-flight IP service, Connexion by Boeing, through lack of demand. This is a mixed blessing. Being online while aloft must have been useful for portable PC users; being sat next to someone using Skype through his or her PC must have been a pain in the auricle. It’s bad enough sitting near mobile phone users on trains but at least that’s not usually for as long.

John Battelle’s Searchblog — When Microsoft (and Yahoo) Are Sucking Wind, Is It Fun to Be Google?

29 January 2007
When Live Search launched, I was happy to see how the company positioned search as in the early stages of development (sure, they quoted my book, so that helped). But since then, it’s been mostly bad news for Live Search. A reader (thanks Michelle) pointed me to this Cnet story. In it, the author describes what most of us already know - that Microsoft has continued to lose search market share, and further, that some analysts believe that the Live brand has confused the public.

“Microsoft’s Live branding has been tremendously confusing and has hurt the company, and it is very likely contributing to the situation they are in right now,” said David Smith, an analyst at Gartner. “They’ve created another brand and have not differentiated it.”

There’s more like this in Batelle’s article and the comments to it. The criticism of Microsoft’s product naming policy is valid but I feel its importance is being overstated. The truth is that Microsoft has, in Google, come up against a competitor as determined, ingenious and energetic as it once was.

Business Wire — FAST Introduces Business Intelligence Built on Search

29 January 2007
London — Fast Search, the leading developer of search technologies, today unveiled the FAST Adaptive Information Warehouse (AIW), a radically new approach that lets users capitalize on their entire universe of information to make better informed decisions for competitive advantage. Built on a robust search platform, FAST AIW integrates an end-to-end framework of products that achieves a previously unattainable unification of search and Business Intelligence.

FAST AIW fundamentally redefines Business Intelligence with a shift away from the traditional data warehouse. AIW directly addresses the limitations of data warehouses — cost, architecture complexity, and limited scalability — as well as the inherent restrictions on traditional Business Intelligence tools that cannot deliver timely, dynamic data to all users.

FAST’s product is not before time. BI, data warehousing and the like have for too long inhabited a separate world from that of unstructured search. There are mountains of memos, emails, contracts, customer contact notes, warranty claims and the like in any organization. All this contains useful and important information, if it can be found and extracted.

Even where an organization is smart enough to put a good search tool to work on that raw unstructured data (and that’s rare enough), it unlikely to be able to find software that allows it to present the results unified with information from structured sources.

This is an endemic problem within the software industry. Getting search vendors and BI vendors to talk about it is like taking a group of right-blind people to an sculpture gallery where they meet a group of left-blind people. Neither group sees the same thing. Their members talk only about their particular and lopsided view of the artefacts in front of their eyes. An in-the-round appreciation is next to impossible to achieve. Consensus is out of reach.

It may be that FAST has the necessary three-dimensional vision. I hope to be able to say more about its intentions in a few days, on the IT Analysis Web site.

(You’ll need to register — free — to read material on the Business Wire site.)

Intranet Journal — Salesforce.com Offers Invitation-Only Collaboration

Tom Dunlap — 9 January 2007
Central Desktop, a respected and rapidly growing online collaboration system, has announced a deeper relationship with Salesforce.com.

Users of Salesforce.com, which provides subscription-based customer relationship management software online, can now collaborate with their customers and partners in a private, secure, invitation-only extranet.

The deal is part of Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, which initially got off to a slow start. Central Desktop for AppExchange becomes one of more than 400 applications that are now available on salesforce.com’s AppExchange, the world’s first on-demand application directory.

Salesforce.com launched AppExchange in January 2006. This is an online market place for application programs. They run as add-ons to Salesforce.com’s hosted CRM (customer relationship management) services.

Marc Benioff, the company’s chairman and CEO, said at the time that: “We’ll take a killer app on the Internet — salesforce.com — and transform it into a platform, just as our predecessors [i.e. Microsoft] did in the PC marketplace.”

Since then, over 250 partners have built or adapted over 500 applications programs for AppExchange. They did so using Apex, the company’s own, Java-like, programming language. This is now becoming widely available (see here). Apex includes a workflow engine, a user interface model, a Web services API and a real-time messaging and integration feature.

Central Desktop is one of a range of collaboration services available through AppExchange. Here’s a list.

As Salesforce.com has shown, the idea of software as a service has an appeal to smaller organizations. Whether signicant numbers of large organizations will ever take it up is still questionable. Last week’s Lotusphere announcements showed no sign that IBM, at least, is detecting such an appetite among its customers. There, it was all still about organizations hosting application programs on their own servers.

Internet.com — Microsoft’s After The Lotus Notes Crowd

Clint Boulton — 22 January 2007
Microsoft is trying to crash IBM’s Lotusphere party.

The Redmond, Wash., company today introduced more free software tools to make it easier for customers of IBM’s Lotus collaboration software to move to and work with Microsoft’s competing SharePoint Services 3.0 suite.

Microsoft Transporter Suite for Lotus Notes, role-based templates for SharePoint My Sites and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 application templates, come as IBM kicks off Lotusphere 2007 in Orlando, Fla.

As expected, Microsoft is trying to rain on Lotus’s annual parade (see Things to come from Lotus, five days ago). The rebuttals will appear in a couple of days, if previous patterns are followed.

“It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate… The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure… the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia… But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were — in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less.”
1984, George Orwell

Guardian Unlimited — Uncovering global inequalities through innovative statistics

Charles Arthur — 11 January 2007
Hans Rosling has achieved what most scientists would call “enough”. Having studied statistics and medicine for seven years at Sweden’s Uppsala University, he worked in Bangalore and Mozambique - discovering, in the latter in 1981, a formerly unknown paralysing disease which (with the research group he then oversaw) is now known as konzo.

But Rosling has done far more since. His latest work asks why governments think it is better to hide their data in silos, and deny its usefulness, in the face of the work that he and his colleagues at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, where he is professor of international health, are now doing.

This is technically stunning as well as making powerful political points — and doing so with wit. I wonder if any of the business intelligence companies offer anything as enlightening as Rosling’s software. You can see more about it here.

IBM Lotus Advisor — IBM’s Mike Rhodin on The Future of Lotus

Liz Novak — February 2007
ADVISOR talked with Lotus General Manager Mike Rhodin about what’s coming soon from IBM, and how he sees Lotus software evolving and improving. Here’s what he had to say.

ADVISOR: Can you give any clues about what we can expect from IBM at the start of 2007?

RHODIN: I think the simplest way to think about what we’ve been focusing on over the last year and what people will be seeing in 2007 is an increased focus on the user. In the past few years we’ve done a lot of work on making the Notes/Domino infrastructure more robust, secure, scalable, cross-platform — lots of really good stuff, but it’s for the IT audience, not the user. Our focus has shifted. We understand that the user is who we serve, and we’ve fundamentally changed our approach to how we’re going to design and develop products for the user. This approach is going to be all about delivering more capability in a way that is consumable for line-of-business users.

As you might expect from the timing, this year’s Lotusphere is nigh. There are some announcements on the way, presently embargoed. I’ll examine them next week at the IT Analysis site.

Microsoft normally announces something about now to try to attract wavering punters to its products. The Lotus faithful treat these ’spoilers’ with contempt, their blog sites typically showing (in their minds, anyway) the infeasibility or unattractiveness of the latest Redmond offering or, now and again, scornfully pointing out its rapid withdrawal. It all makes for Wimbledon-like fun for the unaligned observer.