Teblog

R. Todd Stephens on Enterprise 2.0

Sometimes it's easy to be overwhelmed by new ways of working. Enterprise 2.0, for example, has crept up on us over the past few years. Those who've tracked it from the start have something of an advantage in that they pretty much know what all the elements and issues are. Anyone coming to it cold might find themselves misled by evangelists or confused by the propellor-heads.

It's not easy to get on top of things and see all the elements in a sensible perspective. Three cheers then for R. Todd Stephens who is Senior Technical Architect of Collaboration and Online Services for the AT&T Corporation. He has been involved in corporate IT for 25 years with a high focus on enterprise information management since 1999. He has produced an Enterprise 2.0 Blueprint, a chart which can act as a checklist for all the elements of Web 2.0 for the enterprise.

Enterprise 2.0 Blueprint (click chart to get download)

The chart totally avoids product names, with the sole exception of 'Office', but even that is a functional description rather than an explicit plug for Microsoft. The chart is in five columns: Business Drivers (for investing in Web 2.0 technology); Actors (the people involved); Technologies (and related technologies); Methods (how the technologies are used); and Value-Add (to the employee, the department and the business).

The chart is enterprise-centric, in the sense that the final column doesn't mention value to customers. Or, for that matter, suppliers. Mentions of clients and customers are dotted around the chart, so it's not as if they're being ignored. But such an extension to the Value-Add column might help stimulate more consideration of who the business exists to serve.

Clues do exist in the minutiae of the chart. Sub-boxes contain items like Education, Training, Consulting, Self service and so on, but you sense that these are primarily seen as revenue or cost-saving opportunities. A box for 'Customers' has 'Consumers' and 'Producers' as sub-boxes. Quite often customers have their own forums where they help each other out. It costs the enterprise very little but is a tremendous value-add for the customers. But then again, you could argue that this drops the support costs for the company.

Perhaps I need to wake up to the fact that value-add for customers will nearly always brings a reciprocal benefit for the company.

The good thing about this chart is that it is pretty comprehensive in terms of identifying all the Web 2.0 elements and shows how they fit into an organisation's activities. While setting up an 'under the radar' blog, wiki, IM or whatever is a trivial exercise, to derive real business value someone somewhere has to look at the bigger picture and figure out how to turn skunk works initiatives into corporate processes while retaining the spirit that made them attractive in the first place.

I think it was Napoleon or Nelson who used to toss a coin when faced with difficult decisions. If, when the coin landed, he was disappointed with the outcome, he'd go with his instincts. A chart like this is similar. Without it, you'd be trying to make this stuff up. With it, you have a framework and if any of it jars, just alter it or extend it.

IMHO it makes a fine starting point.

Sustainability winner: SOAK

I'm not totally sold on the Microsoft environmental story (hint: lifecycle costs of replacing kit) but you have to take your hat off to the company for selecting the theme 'a world where technology enables a sustainable environment' for its 2008 Imagine Cup for students. The winners were announced this week and one of them, an Australian team from four universities, came up with project SOAK - a way of managing farm water resources using, of course, Microsoft software.

SOAK, by the way, stands for Smart Operational Agriculture toolKit). It contains no particularly original components, but they've all been put together in an innovative way - a mashup of hardware and software to eke out water resources.

When IT, or ICT really, is allowed to be part of 'real life' like this, then all manner of things become possible and I think that many organisations forget this. Many still regard ICT as a bit of a pain rather than a potential partner in solving environmental issues.

Anyway, enough of that, let's get back to SOAK. It amalgamates information from a number of sources such as ground moisture, water supplies, rain, wind, temperature and weather forecasts and uses this to fine tune the crop irrigation. It means that the crops usually get the just the water they need. SMS messages can alert farm managers of problems and the whole farm can be monitored through a good-looking web-based control panel which combines Virtual Earth displays with statistical information. This can be viewed through a PC or a PDA.

With almost drought conditions, Australian farmers suffered a 59 percent drop in yield last summer, despite irrigation taking some 66 percent of the country's water. The SOAK team chose their project well and it's highly likely to move rapidly to commercialisation.

Because the team members (Long Zheng, David Burela, Edward Hooper and Dimaz Pramudya) were studying at different universities, they kept in touch largely electronically. Practical as well as green. And, judging from their email addresses, they weren't totally in Microsoft's thrall. If you want to sense the excitement, take a look at David Burela's Twitter page. Or, if you want more project details, try this blog post.

These guys are on a roll. Well done Microsoft for choosing such a great subject. And well done guys for winning the software category.

[BTW: a Singaporean team won top honours for  Embedded Development and Brazil for Game Development.]

Who controls your personal information?

Doc Searls is a long time blogger, a deep thinker, a co-author of the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto, an open source wizard, and too many other things to mention. He is held in massively high regard by all the social computing pioneers I've met over the past five or so years. He's currently on a mission to invert the relationship between us and the data about ourselves. Instead of repeatedly providing different cuts of information to everyone with an interest in us, we actually hold the information once and let it out according to need. (If you're reading this, Doc, I apologise for the horrible simplification.)

Doc recently found himself in the world of his namesakes - doctors. He'd undergone a medical exploration which resulted in him contracting pancreatitis. This in turn resulted in hospitalisation and a period of considerable discomfort. After watching the progress of his illness, it was good to follow his recovery and eventual discharge on Twitter. (Why do I care? Because I met him a few years ago and thought he was a good egg with some interesting insights.)

Not surprisingly, on his emergence from the 'health care' system, he had a few words to say on the madness of big systems which are not at all patient-centric, despite any assurances to the contrary. You can read his blog post for the specifics of his situation. The key point is that we know a lot more about ourselves than any doctor can hope to absorb from a medical history.

In his blog post, Searls chose to cite Fred Trotter, a US citizen amd open source software advocate, who said "Given current primary care reimbursements, my doctor is incented do everything in his power to spend under 10 minutes talking to me." I don't suppose it's hugely different anywhere else in the world. They just don't have time to unearth the key facts that lie in our medical history and, of course, the stuff that *we* know that lies outside our medical records is totally inaccessible.

In our own family, we make great use of a cranial osteopath. None of the information relating to his work finds its way into our official medical records. I also know that dairy products affect me within a few minutes of consuming them, but I've never bothered to share this information with the doctor. In fact, I rarely go to the doctor. The last time I went, I had a very swollen eyelid which, as well as looking unsightly, was causing double vision. The doctors in the local practice and the the hospital were all baffled. After several weeks of unsuccessful experimental treatments, I ran into a friend in the street and she said "that's an allergic reaction." She was right, we'd bought a goose down duvet just before the eyelid swelled up. I didn't bother to tell the doctor. It's still in the official records as 'lid-lag'.

There is a point to all this, and that is that we should somehow (no-one's figured out the details yet) become the custodians of information about ourselves, letting it out to others under our control. Doc Searls and Adriana Lukas are just two of the people who are investigating slightly different flavours. It's a bit like the early days of social computing, a bit 'wild west', but the fundamental ideas make sense. It's been christened VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) which strikes me as a bit restrictive, even if it does resonate with and oppose CRM.

If you're interested in keeping up with, or contributing to, progress then you might like to head over to the ProjectVRM blog.

Will software gallop to our rescue?

My first love, apart from my family and close friends, has always been software. I say 'always' but, in truth, it's only been since November 1965, when I got 100 percent in a programming aptitude test. "Good Lord," I thought in astonishment, "And I can actually get paid for doing this?"

Since then, software has been at the heart of my life. Along the way, other skills have been added to the portfolio, particularly writing and teaching. And these skills have taken me into other areas, such as environmental sustainability. First in 1973 but then in a much more substantial way in 2002 when I became closely involved with an exceedingly large sustainability exemplar project. And now with Freeform Dynamics, where I am the environmental specialist, among other things.

While the economic and environmental bad news whirls around our heads, the one thing I know for sure is that software will be a major contributor to overcoming our ills. Not a panacea, but a fine contributor.

As Nicholas Negroponte has been saying for 15 years, "move bits not atoms". And that is one of the major contributions that software can make. In fact, only software can make it. Whether it's Citrix Online style screen-sharing or remote access or full blown telepresence conference rooms, they not only cut the moving of atoms, they also accelerate business processes and cut travel bills.

The other good thing about software is that it is a product with barely any environmental footprint. It can be delivered as a stream of bits and be paid for with another stream of bits.

For those that don't know, I used to be a software publisher, banging out product in expensive boxes with clunky manuals and floppy disks. But since 2001, this very part-time business has been run wholly electronically from the corner of a server somewhere in America. The programmer and I meet rarely (once a year on average), but we're in intimate, friendly and fairly continuous, contact online. And, of course, all support, 'paperwork' and accounting is done electronically.

Our product was lovingly crafted in C++ (following my initial development using the 8080 assembler) and it is tiny for what it does.

I'm not trying to sell anything here, but I can't help noticing that, by contrast, most of the systems I see today are packed full of bloatware, along with programs and data files which have become moribund. But most users are incapable of dealing with such issues unaided. They need software tools.

If larger programs could be debloated and users helped (in plain English please) with program and file removal, we could stall the madness of buying new equipment just because our old stuff has become clogged up and slow.

As with the organisational benefits of 'atoms to bits', users will benefit from slicker running, gain a financial benefit and reduce their environmental impact all at the same time.

Now, someone tell me these things exist. Please?

Or, if not, why not?

Thank you.

Microsoft and EEA's environmental early warning system

Confession time: I get a horrible sinking feeling when I hear terms like 'EU', 'human rights' or 'observatory'. When they come at me all at once, my usual temptation is to run away. But, this time I didn't. Perhaps it was curiosity about Microsoft's involvement, perhaps it was the hint of democracy, but I stuck with it. The 'it' being a recent announcement by the European Environmental Agency (EEA from now on) that it had entered into a five-year alliance with Microsoft to create an environmental observatory.

The observatory's purpose, as the name implies, is to gather information about local environmental conditions and share this with any interested party, including members of the public. The data will come from a multitude of sources including data satellites, NGOs, ornithological and wildlife organisations and the hoi polloi. Much of it will be real-time and it will be aggregated, analysed and presented back to enquirers in an appropriate form. That can include data tables for further processing or geo-spatial images in Microsoft's Virtual Earth. The hope is that such information will lead to rapid local action such as when a factory is spotted polluting the air or soil.

Microsoft will be playing its part in each of these elements: collecting, storing, analysing and sharing the results. It has been working with the EEA since the summer of 2007 and has gone public on the five-year agreement which it believes is entirely complementary to the company's own commitment to environmental sustainability.

Suspecting the worst, I investigated Microsoft's environmental credentials. After all, in cahoots with Intel, it did spend a lot of years more or less enticing people into equipment upgrades. My conclusion is that the company is sincere in its intentions and has already made great strides in dealing with its own environmental footprint, especially with regard to cutting travel and single occupant vehicle usage. It even runs a huge bus fleet for its staff which aims to reduce car traffic in the Redmond area by more than 250,000 miles per week. Not to mention saving the Microsoft campus land area needed for parking and garaging facilities. This is one of the sad aspects of environmental actions, they often save the company money so bragging runs the risk of appearing somewhat two-faced.

But, returning to the EEA project, Professor Jacqueline McGlade, its executive director, suggested that, "To sustain the improvements in the environment made over the past few decades, everyone needs to be involved and understand the consequences and impact of their actions." She added, "The only way to do this is by reaching out to the widest audience. This collaboration with Microsoft is a groundbreaking approach to bring environmental information to as many people as possible." This rather assumes they have a) access to a suitably equipped computer and b) the will to look. I would have thought that traditional media will be the best way to reach these people. The other issue with this statement, taken as a whole, is that she refers to improvements made over the past few decades. This suggests that the actions required are already understood and merely need communicating.

It seems to me that although this project is being billed as a citizen information system, it is actually much more of a citizen spying system. Most people would be more interested in snitching on local sources of pollution than in logging in periodically to check local environmental conditions. However, you can be sure that certain powers-that-be will be very keen on this sort of real-time information. It's a chance for them to swiftly crack down on miscreants, for which we should all be grateful, assuming that things don't get too petty.

In the end, I remain puzzled by the publicity exercise around this. I suspect that Microsoft considers the EEA to be a good notch to have in its corporate social responsibility stick. And maybe the EEA wanted a bit of profile and Microsoft provided an ideal delivery vehicle.

But I'd like to think I'm wrong. Perhaps you see it differently...

Be heard. Be seen. Be green.

The push for environmental sustainability must have been music to the ears of those involved in videoconferencing and its many derivatives. It provides another strong weapon in the vendors' sales armoury. Now, not only can organisations save staff time and reduce travel costs, they can also cut the use of fossil fuels into the bargain.

Add a couple of other things into the mix, like the growth of IP-based broadband and the advent of high definition screens, and the scene is set for an explosion of online face-to-face activity ranging from top-end lifelike telepresence systems right down to desktop applications using webcams. Each plays its part in an organisational collaboration strategy, depending on who the users are and what they're trying to achieve.

Task-oriented people who work together and who know each other can probably put up with lower fidelity or less comfort than strangers who might feel more at ease if they feel they're 'sitting around the table' with other participants. Broadly speaking, the environments could be summarised as boardroom, meeting room and desktop. Although you could add venues such as hospitals and police stations for remote consulting and interviewing, respectively.

As you might expect, you can pay from very little to a great deal depending on the level of sophistication you need. The major vendors are Cisco, Tandberg, Polycom, Teliris and Hewlett Packard. You can get a specially fitted multi-screen room, a 'room within a room', facilities added to a room, a deskside system, a desktop system or, at the lowest level, something that will run on your laptop or other mobile device.

Some services are managed, so you have no technical hassles. Others are provided as equipment to be managed by IT or whoever. At the bottom end, the user is in charge. In terms of hard ROI, Teliris claims that its payback period can be as short as 28 days. In one particular example, 52 business trips between Sweden and Japan were cut to eight or nine. Bingo! Every trip saved from then on is a bonus. Apart from the monthly management fee, of course. Mack Treece, Teliris president, said "Every customer has paid back their room in under twelve months."

LifeSize can supply room systems, at a cost, but it takes a more relaxed approach than some others. A couple of screens hung at the end of a meeting room is good enough. One can be used to check what your end looks before using it for presentations, shared whiteboarding or whatever. As the name suggests, the screen image is life size, but the fact that it's halfway up a wall doesn't seem to matter much. Once the conversation is under way, you tend not to notice. And eye contact, as with the central zone of most systems, is fine.

Some systems require some hefty dedicated bandwidth. LifeSize can do a reasonable job across a conventional broadband line. Most, if not all, high end vendors will adapt to the available bandwidth, losing high definition along the way if necessary. When I finished a recent conversation with Texas-based LifeSize CEO, Craig Molloy, one of the UK distribution people turned to me and said, "That cost us nothing, that call." That's because the company already had a megabit available in each direction on its DSL connection. Bear in mind that each participant was using just one screen/camera combination. It is theoretically possible to scale LifeSize to twenty screens or more.

Before long, we won't be speaking of these things as separate systems. They'll become as much a part of the organisational make up as the furniture in the boardroom, a whiteboard in the meeting room or the phone on a desk. Large organisations will probably install a few top-end systems in their main offices, complemented by larger numbers of the more traditional in-room systems and tiny systems that run on laptops or PCs. At this level, expect a great deal of blending with other collaboration and communication systems such as those provided by IBM/Lotus, Microsoft and Adobe, for example.

On our desktops, it will become quite natural to flick from looking at each other, to sharing screens, to presenting, to whiteboarding to IM, for example. The work itself will take over from the need to see each other although the option is there if visual contact is needed.

Possibly the biggest downsides at the moment concern interoperability and the local loop. Although lip service is usually paid to standards, some systems still do not play nicely with others. And, if reception flickers and stutters, you can almost certainly point your finger at the local loop. But, weighed against the alternatives, the odd glitch is a pretty good trade-off.

A quick route to unified communications?

A cheeky little outsider from Spain has been quietly snitching large unified communication (UC) deals from under the noses of major competitors.

(Reminder: a major benefit of UC is the acceleration of business processes, especially when participants are separated geographically.)

When I was invited to meet with Dialcom, I was amazed that it was still in business. In 1982, I was using Dialcom for my Telecom Gold email account. As it turned out, this is a completely different Dialcom and one that's keen to change its name. It is in the process of transitioning to the more meaningful Spontania, which happens to be the name of its UC software suite.

Yep, that's right, software suite. No hardware at all. Not even an appliance version, it just goes on a Linux server while ActiveX or equivalent controls are stuck in the clients. Clients can be Firefox and Internet Explorer, plus a number of mobile phones and PDAs. Flash, Macintosh and iPhone will be supported later this year, as will SIP. RIM's BlackBerry isn't yet on the radar.

The company has around 100 customers, mainly in Europe, but is beginning to pick up some decent deals in the USA. It targets medium to large organisations as a rule and plans to serve Europe through major VARs. It sells directly in North America but, globally, its ISVs and SIs provide vertical solutions. Vertical markets include health, energy and pharma'. If someone would care to deliver the functionality as a service to smaller businesses then Dialcom would definitely be interested.

IT managers generally don't warm to the idea of 'their' network being used for video or unified communications. But this stuff can be throttled back to suit the circumstances. Bob Johnson, the company's president and COO says, "256k to 512k would support seven or eight people in an active collaboration session."

At the desktop, we're talking about video, audio, application and file sharing, remote control, collaborative whiteboarding and instant messaging. And it works. Its adaptive bandwidth monitoring optimises performance to fluctuating network conditions. Images downgrade reasonably gracefully.

It's pure IP, as you might expect. But the firm has all sorts of edge connectivity bits so that companies with legacy switchboard equipment can still benefit. It also interoperates with H.323 video and can be incorporated into Outlook and Notes.

Price-wise, the Linux-based system, probably comes in below the competition, especially when you take into account that installation is the work of a few hours at most. 25 concurrent users comes in at just under $40k. Obviously, the more users, the lower the per-seat price.

It's an interesting take on the UC business and it's one that will satisfy the demands of the majority whose needs are straightforward. They want to see each other, talk to each other, show each other stuff and exchange files during the session. All this, and more, is available with barely any upheaval for the IT department.

I think I'll close with an "olé".

Unless you'd like to tell me what's wrong with the idea...

Don't put lipstick on the pig

Today's issue of PR influences covers 'greenwashing' - "the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service."

It's good to see professional PR folk in action. Part of their job is to make sure that companies don't get carried away with their rhetoric and make fools of themselves. Of course, there will always be poor PR folk who see their job as "putting lipstick on the pig". We have to take a certain amount of personal responsibility for filtering good PR from bad.

Once upon a time, it was easy to pull the wool over most people's eyes, by writing good press releases, advertisements and brochures. The public didn't have much of a voice - the letters page of the newspapers, the complaints desk of a company or the local advertising standards authority. In other words, except in newsworthy cases, not a lot would happen.

Now, with bloggers galore, some will always be expert enough to see through the greenwash and blow the whistle. And we all know how fast bad news travels through the blogosphere. And how mainstream media organisations quickly pick up juicy stories.

We hear about companies that claim to be carbon neutral which is wonderful, if true. But, if close examination were to reveal that one of the directors drives a gas guzzler or that the heat from the data centre is being vented to the atmosphere, then the carbon neutral claim falls apart and the company risks ridicule.

The best option is transparency. To show what steps are being taken to run a sustainable (financially and socially, as well as environmentally) business and not make any pretence that things are better than they are. Some IT companies - IBM, Sun, Hewlett Packard, Cisco and Fujitsu Siemens spring to mind immediately - seem to be very forthright in their claims and their explanations.

They still fly people around when necessary, but they'll talk about how much travel has been cut. They still have to run high-powered data centres - even more so for those who offer hosted software services, but they'll talk about how much they've slashed their energy bills through consolidation, virtualisation and other measures.

Of course, they would all like to sell more equipment, software and services and they will dangle the cost and environmental savings that are possible. But they are also well aware that new equipment brings its own environmental costs, including the disposal of old equipment. Honest discussion around these issues will win vendors more customer loyalty than misleading claims based on dodgy premises.

Indeed, they may well find that their revenues rise for hosted services, consulting and software, even if an increasing awareness of sustainability among customers were to lead to a slowdown in hardware sales.

IBM's Bluehouse: a human hub?

Even after 42 years in IT, I still tend to forget that projects are always at their most attractive before they're implemented.

A good idea captivates and it's easy to get carried away with enthusiasm, temporarily forgetting that there's a whole lot of hard work in moving from idea to reality.

In the case of an IT product or service, the hurdles are not just technical. You have inconvenient things like channels to market and user acceptance to consider.

All this flooded into my mind following a visit to Lotusphere Comes To You at the Wembley Stadium the other day. Having visited the main event in Orlando earlier this year and been really fired up by Bluehouse I started to mull the reality behind the idea.

Bluehouse is intended to be a software-as-a-service offering from IBM for companies with 5 to 500 employees. According to IBM/Lotus, it will "provide extranet collaboration services for open social networking, instant messaging, file sharing, project management and web conferencing." And it is designed to appeal to those with no internal IT.

It still sounds good to me and I am sure that IBM will have no trouble pulling it off technically. But the way ahead is murky. IBM isn't used to dealing with small companies and its channel isn't used to selling subscription services. Nor, in the main, are the users ready for this kind of SaaS.

It would be interesting to think of IBM as a latter-day web business with curvy corners and off-the-page selling. This strikes me as an unlikely route to market. Or it could jump into bed with (or buy) someone with a ready-made channel. But this seems expensive for an idea which might still be ahead of mainstream user thinking.

I suspect that IBM is being driven by wishful thinking and the prospect of all that lovely monthly revenue pouring in from millions of SMBs who are presently beyond reach. Once attached to the IBM mothership, the opportunity exists for lots of additional revenue from an incremental expansion of the services which can be pushed (or is it pulled?) down the pipe.

But then, another scenario occurs to me. What if a company wanted to connect its business partners to its own collaboration services? It might have already bought into the Lotus collaboration story big-time and sees value in extending its reach. This might be possible, right now, using an assortment of publicly available services, but it might not offer the security, accountability or reliability that matches the company's governance and integration requirements.

Auto-makers and insurance companies provide intimate access to their suppliers and agencies for commercial transactions. I wonder if Bluehouse could end up becoming a hub for human transactions?

You calling me a consultant?

Adriana Lukas was the person who first opened my eyes to the potential business value of social computing. She starred in an Online Information conference a few years ago and, soon after, I trotted round to her office for some indoctrination. We talked about blogs, IM, wikis, RSS, feed readers and all the other technical paraphernalia that supports this new form of collaboration.

Today, Angela Ashenden (she works for Macehiter Ward-Dutton) and I whizzed over to the same office to get an update from Adriana on some project work she's been engaged in. A huge organisation knows that it has to engage more effectively internally and externally, but it is tightly regulated and is fairly traditional in its approach to business. Hierarchies come more naturally than networks. And, quite rightly, reputation has to be protected at all costs.

The user-driven style of social engagement does not sit comfortably with this organisation. Yet it is willing to experiment and find out whether there's anything of value to be had from this dangerous new activity. The fact that the project has been going for a couple of years suggests that it is tolerated at least and that some parts of the organisation are extracting benefit.

To cut the story brutally short, Adriana introduced people to information discovery, sharing and collaboration opportunities, then demonstrated some tools which might help. The list included blogging, wikis, Skype, RSS and social bookmarking. The tools are just the supporting mechanism for new ways of working together.

Prompted by our visit, Adriana posted What’s the real value of social software in enterprise  to her blog a few hours after we left. She gave the example of a wiki which was introduced for one task but which touched 41 people. Some of them, in turn, found other uses for wikis to accelerate and improve their collaboration.

Adriana says, "I’d argue that this is the most significant and long-term value of social media and social software tools at this stage of their use in enterprise. If anyone tells me they can put metrics on that, I’ll just call them a consultant (not a nice thing in my book!)."

I'm inclined to agree with her about determining the metrics beforehand. After all, no-one could have predicted these time-saving uses of the technology. So no IT department, or anyone else for that matter, could have planned and cost-justified the introduction of the software.

But, after the event, I'm sure that metrics could be applied and value measured. This would form a useful backdrop for future discussions about the benefits of introducing social computing to other parts of the company. So, I only half agree with her. And if that makes me a consultant, I guess I'll just have to live with that.