Fake cloud?

I liked this blog entry on 15 ways to tell it is not cloud. Among them, I liked these the most:

• If they are trying to sell you hardware… its not a cloud.
• If there is no API… its not a cloud.
• If you need to re-architect your systems for it… Its not a cloud.
• If it takes more than ten minutes to provision… its not a cloud.
• If it only runs one operating system… its not a cloud.

One thing, I would have added to the list and see cloud succeed:

• If you can’t transfer your existing software licence… its not a cloud.

Cloud computing is maturing and progressing well. It continues to become reliable and available at cheaper cost than businesses otherwise would spend. Time will tell its success. One trend to observe will be small-mid businesses broadly adopting cloud to run businesses-critical core applications beyond adjacency services.

iCloud

Cloud computing is the buzz.

Cloud computing is on the rise.

Cloud infrastructure is becoming cheap and broadly available. Just check out the Amazon EC2 pricing.

Cloud grows (or shrinks) with my need. Infect there is a term for this aka “elastic cloud“. 

Cloud can support my on premise license software copy. 

Cloud computing has lot of cool acronyms – Saas, PaaS, HaaS, S+S, etc.

Moore’s law will continue to drive the cloud cheaper, reliable and readily available.

Some say – Cloud – like other essential services – is recession proof.

Only computer hardware that I need (someday) should be some plug on the wall.

So why buy my own hardware? when I can rely on the professionally managed, well administered, and reliable computing infrastructure for my personal or business use?

I want total control over my little cloud – including pulling it back on premise as and when I deem right.

I want computing infrastructure to be a matter of personal choice – whether I want it on premise or I want it on my cloud.

I want my cloud – mine…and good thing it is getting there.

Convergence

We live in a time of convergence where examples are littered show casing various technologies or products converging to enhance end user experience. One case in point digital media and home entertainment serving to improve everyday experience. Just pick one category of your liking and you will soon find someone is pushing the envelope either bringing adjacency services closer or building one if it doesn’t already exist.

Same is true for the business software community. It remains an emerging trend to converge and deliver enhanced experience for business users.

I usually put the convergence in three categories that overtime gets delivered as one unified solution. These are:

 

 

1. Improve a person’s productivity in the workplace.

2. Improve the ability to make decision easier based on historical or projection based heuristics

3. Improve an individual social standing in the peer community

 

 

 

Simplicity – an example

NYTimes published this interactive chart showing statewide voting trends of democratic primary.

Just plain simple and easy chart - allowing information to dice and slice; form individual opinion and navigate the trend.

Consider the amount of multi-dimensional data that this chart shows. It consists of 16 dimensions; 50 data points; each data point suggesting additional attribute of %age point gain; etc. times 2 – one for each candidate. This easily require decent amount of data crunching to capture the information.

Also, consider how many ways this information could have been rendered to show various scenarios effectively.

Isn’t this chart easy? Instead of getting drowned in the whole bunch of statistics and data – this chart allows connecting dots and seeing the trend otherwise not visible.

Similar opportunities exist for browser based business applications in improving user experience that enables an individual to be informed; help make decisions; manage individual relationships and network along with the variety of tasks he or she need to get done.

People process

Bob Bennett from Sage Payment Solution Division recommended “The Future of Management” and also send me a copy to read. It is an interesting read and the book compares the management practices of the yesteryears to what is needed now to build an innovative/high performance organization. Management Innovation is called out repeatedly touting empowered employees in a self managed, transparent organization where peers hold each other accountable to build a high performing organization.

Truly, at the end of the day an organization success is a direct product of the people it employs. I like the example of Toyota’s TPS (Toyota Production System) fondly known as “Thinking People System” is a good example of how it can be a differentiator in tough industry environment. It is keeping Toyota healthy despite all the challenges within the automobile industry.

A team from Detroit once took the tour to Toyota to find out the difference. Initially, success was attributed due to the Japenese culture and different work ethics resulting in Toyota (and similar other Japanese auto marker) an edge over its Detroit counterparts. It soon got belied as Toyota expanded its manufacturing base in US. Now, even within the same cultural context and country Toyota continues to make the difference that has made it famous.

The key to the success, as people find out, is the constant change that happens at Toyota – mostly driven by its employees who are always looking to optimize or making things better. It is widely touted as “Kaizen“. Contrast this with other companies where change is induced from the top when the need is drastic and employees resist change resulting in half hearted adoption akin to too little too late. Thus companies struggle to remain agile and difficult to keep up with the market need.

In mature market and competitive industry landscape where margins are hard to acheive and average growth remains minimal - it is such a boon for Toyota where employees bring gradual change among themselves ensuring organization to remain current with the need. Also, it fosters a culture of team work, collaboration, and change that thrive to remain agile. Essentially, Toyota is successfully reaping on the bright brains it employs.

Learning here is no different for other industries including enterprise software. Key to success remains empowering employees who regularly reflect on day’s work and adapt; fostering a cross functional team environment; and an environment where peers hold each other accountable for the joint success.

Simplicity – Next frontier?

Recently, a blog post on Sandhill suggested how Simplicity is the next frontier for Enterprise Software.

This topic usually gets its share of debate – particularly what it means in the enterprise space. I tend to agree that Simplicity need to be on the cross-hair of an enterprise development organization. I will venture and suggest Simplicity to augement the definition of “Quality” and make it measurable while product is in development. To continue to differentiate in the market place, enterprise software simply need to go beyond functional and be usable as well.

There are various studies/surveys that suggest enterprise software functionality usage (or lack of usage) due to the end users challenges working with the applications. Functionality already in the product that gets overlooked and don’t get to see the light of the day…

Good news is much of the enterprise industry is investing in usability and developing best practices for wider adoption. The real gains though start to happen as Simplicity becomes part of the culture; grooming champions within the organization; including it as part of the software development process; encouraging indivduals to address Usability issues with the same sense of urgency as it would to the Quality/functional issues. Of course, sooner in the release cycle the better.

 

How you feed your Ecosystem

All of us are potential teachers and learners – in a collaborative environment we are both.

Ecosystem has been a topic I have covered off and on here both in the context of enterprise communities as well as social communities. Social communities continue to grow with various popular examples popping up everyday ala Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

Likewise, Enterprise Communities landscape continue to change and grow as well enabling collaborative and self learning Ecosystems. Few examples in the Higher Education space includes Sakai, Kuali and uPortal groups. In the Enterprise product space a good example is Act! from Sage and others that continue to make inroads. The paradigm shift include:-

	Old Paradigm	New Paradigm
Participants	Business Partners	Various (Partners, Customers, ISVs, Developers, System Integrators, VARs, etc.)
Purpose	Means to an end (Sales, Service and Support)	Way of life (Innovation, More Product, Reach and Scope, etc.)
Relationship	Business, Formal	Trusted, Collaborative
Communication	Mostly one way	Dialogue
Knowledge Sharing	Training	Peer Learning beside necessary Training
Problem solving	Mostly individual groups; limited sharing	Work with peers to solve the problem; and share learning with the world to follow suit
Process	Provide necessary steps to deal with the fiefdoms	Transparency
Technology	Phone, Email, Fax	Wiki, Blog, Forum, Bulletin Board, Youtube, etc. beside conventional means
Use of Web	Limited	Social. Can one live without it now?
World view	World is round	World is flat

For a software product company, regardless of the camp it lives - closed/traditional source software or open source software – the need to foster and harness collaborative, learning ecosystem help achieve sustainable growth as well as nurture innovation avenues.

 

Evolving social communities

As Facebook evolves so does the promise of Facebook applications helping business users. This is the chasm Facebook need to cross as it attracts business users. CIO magazine recently published its list of 5 such widgets for business users.  

I like Wiki mono (think ability to collaborate and generate some kind of document say quote, proposal, etc. together) and Sticky notes (think on your face message as a way to follow up). I am excited about the potential here and what it means to the future of enterprise applications as these trends starts to unleash new wave of productivity and collaboration within the organization.

While I am on the Social communities topic, I landed on this humorous youtube clip describing what is “Web 2.0″. Although the picturaization is funny but the punch line remains what Web 2.0 stands for. Check it out…

Organization Productivity

As enterprise software continues to evolve from automating paper/pen/fax based tasks to business processes/workflows – next frontier remains to tap the collective intellect of the organization and harnessing social power of its workforce to find the competitive edge.

The trend continues as personal web and enterprise web converge. As the next generation of workforce joins the rank it is increasingly important to carry forward the expectation of personal web into an enterprise. Individual experiences of managing various social interactions, relationships and personal preferences define the corner stone of various personal web phenomena. These set of technologies enable targeted communication and mass scale collaboration needed to unleash huge productivity potential in an enterprise.

Enterprise applications remains an exciting space to watch for as several upcoming web technologies makes inroad providing either make over to the current set of products or helping evolve new type of applications.

Facebook

Last month or two, blogsphere is abuzz about Facebook. Particularly, after Mark Zuckerberg, wonderboy CEO of Facebook, announced F8. For those who missed F8 announcement - this is Facebook launching a development platform to building applications leveraging social networks. A very good analysis of Facebook and its new social platform is done by Marc Andreessen at his blog here. I will recommend reading it.

F8 platform provides a good extensibility model around Facebook at interfaces/API, data access and user interface level. I also like the fact how it makes a close system – Facebook site in itself, open to building and extending the system – like building other applications on top of Facebook plus the governance model around it.

This move towards providing a platform for build social applications and access to its social network is fuelling speculation on how Facebook is going to be the next big thing. Pundits are already putting Facebook in a different league than MySpace given its open platform and ability to attract and build healthy and bigger ecosystem.

Personally, I like the move as it continues to influence and challenge traditional development thought processes by opening up the development paradigms necessary to embrace social style of development. An approach that embrace opening up development paradigm to foster healthy eco systems required to serve products and services necessary to deliver unique customer experiences. I have covered this topic in different contexts here, here, here and here.

Mass customization

Joseph Pine was a keynote speaker during Insights. He eloquently described how various companies are tapping into Customer Experience as a way to differentiate and grow the businesses. He calls this “Experience economy” – an evolution as manufacturing and services are increasingly getting commoditized.

This thought process is parallel to what we experience in the enterprise business. Every enterprise customer needs and their business is unique. They operate differently, and have different business process needs. This drives customers to have unique implementation. They deploy enterprise products differently; customize it to meet their unique needs; integrate to their own home grown, or legacy or other niche applications; additionally deploy 3rd party modules from ISVs, etc. thus resulting in an environment unique to run their business. In such scenario, usually, no two customers are alike in their implementation. Their experience with the infrastructure is tailored to their business needs.

Also, as technology landscape continues to evolve it will further improve delivery of the platforms and architecture necessary to provide unique experience and interaction rather easily. Much has already been touted how Web 2.0 and other Social networks based progression enhances user interaction and overall experience.

Companies are investing a lot in the usability studies and interaction design to understand user experiences. TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and ease of use remains the mantra for much of the product organizations to deliver ultimate customer experience in whatever they do.

This talk also added 2 books to my reading list.

 

Can RSS enable new level of productivity in an enterprise space?

I am excited about how various technologies are evolving and shaping up to play in the enterprise space. Like RSS, which has already proven its mark on the blogging side – but it is now touted to aggregate and push the relevant enterprise data to various users within an enterprise. Some thoughts are captured here on the possible use of RSS in the enterprise world under Enterprise 2.0 vision.

For those who don’t know what RSS is – here is a nice video clip explaining it, how to use it and why you should care.

Watch the Video

Growing the ecosystem

Application grows Technology

Ecosystem grows Application

One example is Google maps. Although a late entrant in the world of maps with an established competitor Mapquest. But by opening up its APIs and encouraging it to be used beyond “driving direction” has promoted a healthy ecosystem of building unlimited solutions around geographical mapping needs.

Now Google maps based mashups are available around the world on almost any concept. Innovation is happening daily expanding the influence of Google Maps without Google breaking a sweat leveraging the power of many that grows everyday.

Similarly, healthy ecosystems around enterprise applications continue to differentiate among current players. Organization and product encouraging ecosystem that goes beyond basic enterprise need expanding it to address niche markets, new industries, micro verticals, various local/global needs etc. find itself scaling faster than its competitors regardless of the size. Key remains how to nurture this ecosystem towards delivering end to end customer experience consistent with the core throughout its life cycle.

One success factor is when organization is able to tout “proudly made elsewhere” rather than tied to “not made here” syndrome. An example is P&G – in the March 2006 issue of HBR there is a good case study on how P&G found its new innovation strategy. The Article titled “Connect and Develop: Inside Procter & Gamble’s New Model for Innovation” discusses how “invent-it-ourselves” was restricting its growth and what it did to turn around.

So support your ecosystem to spur innovation and growth needed by enterprise products to scale new heights.

Stitching systems together

As the need increases towards providing Internet scale systems either to serve consumer business or to serve enterprise businesses – various SaaS providers are working towards building huge IT infrastructure needed to support their services by stitching boxes together. Companies are putting much effort around how to architect, build, manage and provision such an infrastructure.

To that cause – Sun recently announced “BlackBox” effort as it tries to find its way and regain its footing. The pictures of the “Blackbox” are just great – it is datacenter pre-built in a shipping container and ready to be hooked up. Kinda data center on demand shipped to you right from the port. Side effect – it also saves the building cost needed to house the data center for much of the entrepreneurs who are bootstrapping their ideas. Can this thing be rented? Check it out for yourself…

 

Data everywhere, Information somewhere, Decisions nowhere

Sometime back, I wrote my thoughts around Enterprise 2.0 and how it is about leveraging social communities within an extended enterprise. I was asked whether Enterprise 2.0 is just another round of attempt to deliver on the promises of better analytics and knowledge management. I have already covered my thoughts on why Enterprise 2.0 is more than that. Regardless, I believe progress within analytics/business intelligence space is key towards achieving Enterprise 2.0.

Relevant data that provides everyday vital information is key to making decisions. And it is a powerful notion that influences people behavior.

Various opportunity areas where much progress is happening within enterprise industry are (this is not a comprehensive list, feel free to add others that you see missing) :-

1. Delay between generation of data and for the corresponding action to take place - How to quickly get to decisions? New analytical models around SOA/Events based architecture paradigm are emerging here. How this system will scale and perform as the trend continues to evolve from batch to realtime for widely available 24×7 system with more internal/external end users will be the testament and tipping point for possible Internet scale adoption.

2. Disjointed analytics from everyday business process - How analytical information get closer or be embedded within business applications like billing, accounting, other ERP applications, CRM, etc. so that users have their transactional and analytical information available side by side to take action when things happen. Much progress is happening here on daily basis by the application, analytics and integration vendors trying to bring analytics closer to business processes. 

3. Automate “most” of the regular tactical decisions - How to overcome or provide additional intelligence needed in the data to be able to identify and isolate bad information generated due to the noise from the actionable good information? Today, much of these interpretation happens manually. I am sure some level of human involvement will be needed but the idea remains how to automate “most” of the regular tactical decisions needed to keep things flowing on everyday basis. SOA/BPEL/Events based architecture has the promise to potentially automate “most” of the tactical decisions. But the challenge will be how to eliminate noise before acting on some information. You don’t want some automatic tactical decision being made due to a noise that result into potentially more bad situations.

4. Meaningful presentation of various analytical knowledge – gleaned from wide variety of information at different level of granularity. Information need to easier for human to read, interpret, drill down and act upon. So much progress has been happening here due to Web 2.0 and touted reverence to the dashboards that demos so well. The need here is also to continue to make it pervasive, available wherever needed, and making it available in wide variety of form factor.

5. Ever increasing size of data - Advent of new technologies like RFID and increasing automation of processes has opened up the flood gate of data (structured/unstructured)that needs to be analyzed and aggregated on daily basis. This is growing data size to manage and analyze by leaps and bounds. Increase bandwidth, much innovation in the storage and other industries for faster access continues to push the limit. One hear terra/peta/exa byte much more often in conversations – something not common just few years back.

6. Quality of data that gets integrated and aggregated from various sources - Maturity of the integration/EAI products, better cleansing and aggregation tools, increase automation, etc. are helping keep data fresh, consistent and actionable.

Analytics future is exciting as the technologies are maturing, business use cases are evolving where market is looking beyond aggregated historical trending information to reflect the current or future needs. Companies are asking for front view (real time, forecast data) beside rear view mirror (historical information) to run business. Continued consolidation of the industry – Reporting, Performance Management, Analytics, Data Warehouse, Knowledge Management, etc…will keep this space exciting and help bring several of these information islands closer.

It is all about Business Processess…

There are several upcoming technologies that will have much impact to the enterprise applications like SOA, Web 2.0, etc. Various pundits have already touted the technical advantage of all these technologies. To prove the point, every major software vendor today, has a SOA strategy. So how does all this cool technology will help businesses whose only job is to manufacture, sell and service some simple widgets and not necessarily care about what technology they uses. Infect, they probably don’t care whether it is Web 2.0, SOA or some RPG/Cobol on a green screen terminal.

Business deploying enterprise software (ERP, Supply Chain, CRM, HRMS, etc.) uses technology as a business enabler to help them manufacture the widget cheaper/better/faster or service its customer better, etc. Successful companies proud themselves on their business processes making them unique and differentiating them in their respective market. Technology wow factor is usually not the front runner. Much of enterprise businesses remains slow on the technology adoption curve. At best, it may either be classified as “Early majority” or “Late majority” if not outright “laggard” trying to avoid “Innovator” or “Early adopter” technology adoption curve.

So how would all the upcoming technologies help existing business processes of a company? To do that let’s look at the key components of what makes a business process and understand how these upcoming technologies can be applied to make aspects of business process better. One can certainly add or refine the list here.

• Information – Information is critical to any individual executing a business process successfully. As technology continue it improves it is providing new benefits that were not available before like –
  1. Reliable information that provide deeper visibility into what goes on in a business
  2. Real time information when you want it, where you want it
  3. Information from relationships – multiple degrees apart and from extended sources like partners, suppliers, outsourcers, employees, market places, etc.
  4. Information from unstructured sources – capturing knowledge, increase integration with email, files systems, document management systems, etc.
  5. Vastly improved searches for mining the sea of information and analytical tools to come to deliver what you want and understand Patterns, Metrics, goals, etc.

• Tasks – This has been the frontier as industry has been busy automating much of the human tasks aggressively since more than a decade or so. Also, as existing tasks gets automated – new set of human coordination tasks or extended responsibility appears in the horizon. Some benefits from new technologies here are:-
  1. Extending/changing existing tasks without writing code – STANDARDS is the way to go
  2. Easy creation of new tasks as new processes comes to life
  3. Enabling work-flows easier between automated tasks and human tasks
  4. Quick alignment/training of the team to ever changing processes regardless of location of employees
  5. Enables getting tasks done cost effectively without sacrificing quality or customer satisfaction goals
  6. Enables ramping up new people easily and help extend enterprise frontier to newer geographies

• Interaction – A business is net sum of its people accomplishing their individual tasks and interacting with each other. This is their everyday interaction as they formulate, strategize, decide, work, act with each other to take company ahead one day at a time. Much is based on the foundation of real time visibility, availability and ability to engage everyone needed in a dialogue. Huge benefits from new technologies in this space:-
  1. Collapsing invisible walls that were between the parties/individuals as relationship maps become visible
  2. Continue to make world a small place to live, connect and make interaction real within it larger ecosystem
  3. Assess and establish new relationships quickly – expand ecosystem and extend reach
  4. Increased participation of many in decision making as several new communication channels reaching out to all becomes available – enabling the system to operate on power of many
  5. Capture, track and publish knowledge at determined time to feed into everyday work
  6. Speed up information sharing, decision making and rollout to the ecosystem
  7. Speed up feedback from market on decisions and place effective measure to correct

To sum it up upcoming technologies holds the promise of providing new kind of business processes not possible today or refining existing business processes that can help a company to remain differentiated and successful.

Just as an example – think today we enter more trades every day (couple of billions everyday on NYSE these days) than what we used to do in a week couple of decades (couple of million everyday on NYSE in early 70’s) back. All of this due to technology improvement that leverages the same process of placing, reconciling the trade, clearing the trade, settling the trade, invoicing, paying for the trade, etc. But now these tasks are automated, collapsed various walls that were needed in the past to place a trade, and provide real time information to a trader. New processes have evolved around technologies like real time information, increase self service, automatic trade placement, portfolio analysis, etc… that is changing the scale of business.

There are many examples how leveraging the right technology can help things scale quickly that is otherwise not possible. It is this promise with upcoming technologies like SOA, Web 2.0, etc. for businesses allowing them to unleash new level of accomplishment across its social communities – makes enterprise applications an interesting space for years to come.

More thoughts on Social communities within an Enterprise

Facebook on Tuesday added a new feature that RSS feeds changes on a member page to its friends like photos updates, profile changes say address, status, etc. This new feature got strong negative feedback from the user community. By Friday, CEO of Facebook has to come out and say how they messed up here and need to review and modify the feature. Read his blog here.

Anyway, the point here is what I suggested earlier on Social communities and interaction blog around how within an Enterprise a similar relationship can be formed between its social communities.

Like in this case among the end user community and the developer/implementation folks. Currently, within enterprise, this is accomplished in various ways to engage customers/users, capture the need of the end users while building an enterprise software and get user feedback on the feature. Several local or global user groups, customer consortium, product launches, conferences, regular meetings, customer surveys, etc. all try to gauge the need, establish requirement and later feedback on what’s working or not. This works for few customers that participate but misses out on the larger customer base. Also, the process is long and lot gets lost in translation as information changes hand from end user before it reaches developer/implementer.

In some regard, today, it is a discussion of haves and have nots. Today, it is a discussion of which customers have found ways to influence the eco system versus who don’t.

Can Enterprise 2.0 provide similar equalizer to all – small or large, local or global, vocal or supportive, successful or struggling, etc. - with an opportunity to choose and participate in defining enterprise implementation to morph to their need in a quick and efficient way? If done right – I think yes…What do you think?

Social communities and interaction within enterprises

Enterprise 2.0 is a catchy term. If our history teaches us something about hype cycle it is the over usage of trendy terms. However, well known terms also are the best way to capture much of the broader context to convey the essence and help with the mass adoption. So to better describe what Enterprise 2.0 to look like – I am sharing some examples here.

In my opinion – Enterprise 2.0 includes effort beyond just capturing collective knowledge for deeper insight into businesses. It should also provide application building paradigm mimicking interaction model needed within different social communities of an enterprise. Something unleashing new values and making current challenges in an enterprise disappear.

Let’s briefly discuss “Social communities” within an enterprise and their “Interaction model”. At a high level an enterprise consists of various social communities of internal and external stakeholders. Some examples of these communities are say Sales community – which includes direct sales organization, marketing organization and partners, etc. or say a Product community which includes development organization, contractors, implementation partners, outsource vendors, end user customers, etc. So a web of individuals that are stakeholders of some set of common interests like what is needed in a product, success of the company, working on similar project, need to solve similar kind of issues, etc.

First version of Enterprise, if someone calls it as such – was about automating much of the paper process. Applications were built to automate the work traditionally done by filling paper(s) – hence much of the current generation of enterprise applications are build around user experience that mimic the paper process – be it invoicing, pick slips, order, entry in financial books, etc. These applications did good job of automation of routine work and brought in a level of consistency within an enterprise. It established best practices for doing everyday task.  Quite a win in this regard as overtime companies shifted IT budget towards packaged enterprise software.

However, current solution limits the collective knowledge captured to the extent of the structures defined within an application – its schema model. Also, the focus is much more on routine tasks rather than enabling various social communities within an extended enterprise to have an effective interaction.

This is a promise that people are hoping Web 2.0 based technologies and emerging/successful web based models can be deployed in the enterprise arena. Today, much of the interaction within and across social communities is either done poorly by software (like having notes kind of field in all application to key in any unstructured information) or done in all sort of fashion – say pick the phone and call the other person, capture information in a spreadsheet and share, emails, browsing/researching multiple sites, etc.

Enterprise 2.0 – as the promise starts to get shaped – has the potential to overcome it and provide much more than that. Some of the macro reasons that are adding to the trends this time compared to in the past are: -

1. Confidence of the enterprises around adoption of Web based technologies to run the business (quite a jump from green screen to client server to web based computing)
2. Maturity of the work force and their comfort using web and computers
3. Shrinking geographical boundaries creating more distributed and virtual organizations whether it is for manufacturing or outsourcing
4. Thus driving the need to capture knowledge and effective knowledge transfer within a social community 
   • Also read – capturing of graying or displaced workforce vital knowledge for the new comers to be successful
5. Create more knowledge workers than routine workers

Some examples of successful interaction model within Social communities of a company that Enterprise 2.0 could address are: (My apologies in advance as my examples are biased towards product communities within an enterprise as that is my focus. But there are similar examples on every community that exist within an enterprise)

• End customers rating usefulness of a feature (and providing feedback to its implementer/developer) directly for future improvements – ala digg it; embedded within a product
• End users forming community and sharing best practices of how-tos and influencing industry wide business process definition and consistent adoption – ala wikipedia; available within the self service dashboard
• End users subscribing to the interests in product features/updates that are in development and getting auto updated when the feature/patch is available – ala RSS feed; embedded within the product administrative suite
• Distributed, virtual product development organizations effectively capturing knowledge, aggregating information to ramp new knowledge workers quickly
• Above can be extended to include Implementation Partners for know how to extend/customize right from the guts of the system
• Sales organization acheieving higher success rate of business leads converting to opportunities due to better visibility of contacts and degree of relationship with prospects within the community
• Quick growth and scaling of an eco-system across multiple geographies for a company by its Partners/Distributors
• Remain aware of the changes to business processes by learning from similar companies/industries and get knowledge workers transitioned
• Quick market wins due to an organization ability to pull together right skills/people from an extended enterprise
• Finding the network effect helping business open up opportunities not available/hard to do at present – say building economies of scale with like minded community to acheive desired results
• etc…

Anyway, there are tons of other example that people can think around Enterprise 2.0, which has the foundation around how to enable successful interaction model for various communities of an extended enterprise.

Think for a while couple of years back our daily work was around paper/pencil/fax/todo lists, etc. Now people find it difficult what it was living without email, internet, etc. This is just another natural progression as technology matures and the younger generation (read more adaptive) gets in the workplace. 

Also, while I am at this topic – seems like Wikipedia has brought back Enterprise 2.0 discussion now under “Enterprise social software”. Thanks to SJ for pointing this out to me.

Enterprise 2.0

Much discussion is in progress about Enterprise 2.0 – including a large cry after “Enterprise 2.0″ was deleted from Wikipedia earlier. Here is my simple explanation of Enterprise 2.0.

Model every day enterprise users activity leveraging Web 2.0 based technologies (like Ajax, RSS, Wikis, blogs, IM, etc.) that can provide increased social interaction (like successful models of MySpace, YouTube, eBay, etc.) and enriched personal experience needed to build highly collaborative geographically distributed company/community (including employees, customers, partners, supply chain and other communities). A foundation that can help generate increase level of productivity necessary to manage both top line growth and bottom line control. Consider this along with other technology innovations (like RFID, SOA, etc.) and wider deployment choices(like SaaS, Licenced, BPO, etc.) – if anything enterprise industry is getting into some exciting time for innovation.

Enterprise 2.0 naturally enhances the current web based computing model that forces developers to think abstract application components rather than facilitating user interaction (say with your customer or salesforce) that is needed to provide the social experience of getting a task completed. BTW, this happens today although in a primitive way – today one person enters the info in a form that stores relevant data in one tableset that either a work flow or by some other trigger mechanism notifies other person who then picks the recordset from those tables; do some work; and put the modified recordset in another set of tables for another user to pick and do something about it. One can make this user interaction worse if you consider integrated legacy applications and best of breed suites in today’s IT environment – where users have to jump from one application to other hoping to find the relevent information needed to progress the work flow. Think about how this behavior of user interaction can be enhanced leveraging some of the successful and other upcoming future social interaction with the web when trying to accomplish a task.

Thre are other interesting scenarios as well that can be thought of as Enteprise 2.0 takes some shape. I can see much improvement in the CRM space to improve customer facing functionality. These new models will evolve in the time to come as technology gains wide spread adoption and as enterprise vendor catches on to capture social experince needed for them to continue to retain and grow their customer base.

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