DLS Thoughts

Business and Cultural Challenges of a Next Generation Collaborative Solution

2008-11-15T11:21:00.005-05:00

Cross posting from my blog post on the EMC Knowledge Worker blog.

Last Monday, at Momentum Prague 2008, I held a Product Advisory Forum (PAF) with 27 EMC customers. The overall objective of the Knowledge Worker PAF was to assess the characteristics of a next generation collaborative solution. As an introduction, we reviewed a set of disruptive trends around:

The changing nature of the Enterprise
New work habits, social and cultural changes
Disruptive technologies that support new patterns of collaboration
The impact of the changing economic climate

See the presentation for more details on each trends.

3 teams of participants were then asked to assess business, cultural challenges and solutions that would help their organizations adapt to such trends.

Overall Needs and Business Challenges
The following needs and business challenges were identified:

Organizations need to improve collaboration within their organizations and with external parties. This raises issues around the proper level of openness and how to balance such a need against the needs for better security.
- Open systems are necessary to enable expertise location and finding information
- Integration between enterprise services is required to break information silos and encourage collaboration across various types of content in the enterprise
- Improving connections between people and content provides additional context to the information and fosters better interaction between knowledge workers
Organizations need to improve the use of information structures and reuse of already existing information
- Formalizing knowledge within organizations can improve its reuse. In order to do so, organizations needs better mechanisms for classifying and organizing information. Both taxonomies and folksonomies have a role to play.
- Reusing content in new ways can open new business opportunities and improve the speed of delivery of new projects.
- Organizationally, there is no substitute for producing lessons learned and synthesizing information. Organizations need to adopt models that encourage information reuse and developed template based information models.
  - This provides a framework for producing new quality information more quickly and on-ramping on new subjects and projects more quickly.
How do organizations make sure that the information they manage is valid and of quality and how do they effectively manage their information lifecycle?
- Organizations can rely on informal validation where the collective intelligence of the community can be leveraged to produce and elevate the most valuable information
- In parallel, some categories of content will never be properly assessed by the community. Formal processes are required for such content (e.g. Standard Operating Procedures)
- In addition, organizations need to put systems and policies in place that preserve information readability over the years and retain only content that is relevant to the organization. How does an organization properly identify the content that needs to be retained, in particular when it pertains to the organization knowledge?
- Organizations should look at technology that helps with concepts extraction and leverages such capabilities for improved information classification
Organizations must deploy technologies and solutions that empower their business users:
- Business users should be able to configure applications in a way that meets their needs
- Access to information should be ubiquitous

Cultural and Organization Challenges
Software does not drive organizational changes, people do. Too often, budgets get sucked into technical implementations to the detriment of investments in driving adoption and culture changes. Investments in driving adoption are critical and software vendors can help by delivering better out of the box solutions that allow organizations to focus on adoption and less on implementation. Some of the cultural challenges organizations have to confront include:

Fear. Fear of consequences and fear of rejection. Organizations need to assess how they value knowledge. Often, people are reluctant to contribute for fear that it will undermine their own value. Organizations needs to adopt processes that better value and reward sharing information.
Privacy. People are also concerned that we will share information and loose control of how the information will be used. Vendors need to provide features that help end users better understand how the information they contribute is being reused.

Organizations need to leverage the viral aspect of Web 2.0 technologies and move towards a Discover / Adopt / Adapt model. Only when the information is adopted and adapted does it start to deliver significant value to the enterprise.

Being able to justify the ROI of Web 2.0 and social networking technology is a challenge. Organizations must be able to measure the adoption of the content being shared. Measuring direct benefits should focus on productivity benchmarks with or without such technologies.

EMC Knowledge Worker Strategy Fit
Overall, EMC Knowledge Worker strategy is a great fit for many of the business challenges identified during the workshop. EMC's investments in CenterStage will provide improved patterns of collaboration that empower their business users and extend the reach of their virtual organization.

In addition, EMC Documentum provides a robust framework for managing the information lifecycle and the reuse of information. At the core of EMC strategy is a strong emphasis on information intelligence to permeate all of its collaborative capabilities. Based on advanced concept extraction and combined with an understanding of people social networks and interaction with content, such information intelligence will foster information reuse and provide better models for information classification and retention.

In order to help customers with the adoption of such technologies, EMC will work with its partners and its own consulting organization to provide best practices on how to most rapidly deliver business value.

CenterStage: A Technical Overview

2008-10-01T12:29:00.002-04:00

Cross posting from my blog post on the EMC Knowledge Worker blog.

With CenterStage, EMC delivers an interactive web experience, together with the associated computational resources and web services, for accessing and managing communities and team workspaces within the framework of an enterprise information infrastructure. Designed as a rich internet application, CenterStage leverages AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and web services to provide a dynamic user experience. Let's take a look at CenterStage high level architecture:

For version 1.0 release of CenterStage, two CenterStage clients will be made available in Q1 2009: CenterStage Essentials and CenterStage Pro. CenterStage Essentials provides basic content services; CenterStage Pro builds upon CenterStage Essentials to provide rich Web 2.0 and Social Networking capabilities. CenterStage Pro leverages CenterStage Essentials sub-systems and builds upon them.

Server Infrastructure
CenterStage leverages the robust customization infrastructure of the EMC Documentum Platform components as well as core services to provide both data model and services.
The following server components are provided with CenterStage:

Content server - This core server component provides data model management, security services and content management services
Full text index - Provides CenterStage with full-text search functionality
Thumbnail generator - This component generates thumbnails for common file formats. More advanced rendition capabilities (advanced formats, multi-paging) require customers to upgrade to the CTS framework and its Media Transformation Services (MTS) or Advanced Documents Transformation Services (ADTS)
Federated search - Allows users to aggregate searches across multiple sources. CenterStage Pro will provide search adapters for Google, ODBC/JDBC, Open Directory, and Open Search to name a few
Classification and Entity Extraction - The classification and entity extraction server components extract metadata from the content being uploaded in CenterStage based on semantic analysis of the content itself. The extracted metadata provides additional dimensions used by users to filter content

In addition to the above server components, the following modules need to be deployed to support CenterStage functionality:

Collaboration services: Provide the core collaboration infrastructure and is also used as the underpinning for the collaboration functionality available in Webtop
Rich media and transformation services: Support the ability to preview content in context within CenterStage
Extended search services: Provide the core set of services for search and clustering capabilities
CenterStage Essentials and Pro services: Provide the additional core services and data model for both CenterStage Essentials and Pro

Services Infrastructure
CenterStage application services are built on top of Documentum Foundation Services (DFS) providing CenterStage with a strong service orientation . CenterStage application services provide coarse-grained APIs built to address the needs of the user interface. Elements of the services infrastructure include:

The Rich Content Management Platform (RCMP) services, which handles the presentation layer requirement for:
- Component delivery - the component registry and configuration management for the various UI components (or Widgets) exposed in the CenterStage UI
- Container manager: the infrastructure for managing the user interface layouts
- Bundle support: the packaging and deployment model leveraging OSGi at its core
The CenterStage Essentials and Pro application services which provide a broad set of APIs to address the needs of the user interface and support its team productivity, information discovery, business process and web 2.0 functionality

User Interface Infrastructure
Built as a true rich internet application, CenterStage leverages browser - based technology to bind to the proper services and render the user interface:

A thin UI infrastructure allows CenterStage to render the layout definition provided by the services. Service binding is achieved via either DWR (Direct Web Remoting), REST or SOAP depending on the UI technology leveraged in a particular UI widget. CenterStage leverages the ExtJS toolkit for most its user interface, but widgets can be built using a different UI technology such as Flex.
A plugin infrastructure is also provided to enable seamless integration with the desktop when working with files.

Many of the architectural subsystems described above are in place in CenterStage Essentials Beta. Other sub-systems will be introduced with the formal release of CenterStage. Building upon the strength of the EMC Documentum Platform and standard rich internet technologies, CenterStage will provide a strong foundation for social, intelligent content enabled applications.

What's wrong with today's Enteprise 2.0 offerings

2008-08-18T14:36:00.001-04:00

Cross posting from my blog post on the EMC Knowledge Worker blog.

In the report, "Enterprise Content Management's Next Step Forward", Forrester makes the point that Enterprise Content Management (ECM) does not work for most enterprises. Current ECM implementations provide poor support for how most business people, especially information workers, work; and IT organizations are in perpetual catch-up to the ever changing behaviors of their knowledge worker. Forrester argues that ECM must adapt to move to more organic content management approaches that help abstract ECM’s complexities from end users, adapt to the way people work, and provide contextual views of, and access to content.

Andrew McAffee coined coined the acronym "SLATES" (as in Blank SLATES) to described such organic content management approach in his article, "Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration", which appeared in the Spring 2006 MIT Sloan Management Review. SLATES stands for:

Search: for any information platform to be valuable, its users must be able to find what they are looking for. Improved information discovery drives reuse and better productivity
Links: understanding how content is interconnected is an excellent guide for what's important. The "best" pages are the ones that are most frequently linked to
Authoring: when authoring tools are deployed and used within a company, the intranet platform shifts from being the creation of a few to being the constantly updated, interlinked work of many
Tags: tags reflect the information structures and relationships that people actually use, instead of the ones planned for them in advance and make patterns and processes in knowledge work more visible
Extensions: automate work through the use of categorization and pattern matching
Signals: technology must be able to signal users when new content of interest appears

Since then, authors such as Dion Hinchcliffe have built upon the SLATES framework to add characteristics such as:

Social, emergent and freedom
Network-oriented to describe that the content of Enterprise 2.0 applications must be fully Web-oriented, addressable and reusable

While SLATES is a useful acronym to describe important concepts, it falls short - even with the additions provided by Hinchcliffe - of addressing the true need of the enterprise:

Since December 2006, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which set litigation guidelines in the US, now require electronically stored information be included in discovery requests. This means that organizations have a legal obligation to produce all electronic documents that pertain to a given lawsuit. As a result, organizations must have in place a robust information management strategy that decreases the cost of information discovery.
Information in highly collaborative gets stale quickly, particularly in project-driven environments. This is a typical knowledge management problem. Without processes in place to synthesize best practices and lessons learned, the trail of information is marginally useful. Information lifecycle management becomes critical to managing the growth of digital information and improve the quality of the information available for reuse. To meet the needs of the enterprise, enterprise 2.0 solutions must blend delegated administrative controls (such as provisioning, de-provisioning, retention policies, etc) with features that empower end-users
Sensitive information must remain protected no matter how it is accessed or exchanged. For instance, in highly sensitive systems, users may not be able to print or export content.

ECM can fill such gaps. ECM is entering a new and exciting phase where a compliant information infrastructure supporting new and innovative social networking and content creation paradigm will put ECM in business context and drive the adoption of such infrastructure. This is the vision for CenterStage.

Software Plus Services - An Interesting Development

2008-07-19T11:16:00.006-04:00

Last month, I blogged about next generation internet application and how companies like Amazon are innovating on the business model side and scaling their infrastructure out to provide rock bottom prices. At the Enterprise 2.0 conference, Rishi Chandra from Google touched on a similar topic. Early July, Microsoft announced it Microsoft Online Services that can:

Help relieve the burden of managing and maintaining business systems, freeing IT departments to focus on initiatives that can help deliver true competitive advantage.

Microsoft Online Services include:

Office Live Meeting
Exchange Hosted Services
Dynamics CRM Online
SharePoint Online

The most interesting part of the announcement is the pricing. Microsoft introduces a new licensing model call a User Subscription License (USL). USLs are interesting because they blend online access and on-premise access. So if a company has bought a USL of Office Live Meeting, their users are licensed to use either Microsoft Online or an on-premise deployment of Live Meeting. This provides an interesting twist to the Software Plus Services that Microsoft has been touting for a little while now.

Licensing is very competitive as well. A USL for the Business Productivity Online Suite is $15 per month. That means, for $15 per month, a user can have access to Exchange, SharePoint server, Live Meeting and, when released, Office Communications Online. See the Office SharePoint write up for a good explanation of the licensing model. Customers can also license Microsoft Online piece meal:

$10/month for an Exchange USL,
$7.25/month for SharePoint,
$2.50/month for Office Communications
$4.50/month for Live Meeting

Each USL includes a storage allocation: 1GB per USL for Exchange storage and 250MB per USL for SharePoint, and additional storage can be purchased for $2.50 per GB per month.

Looking back at how Cloud Computing is shaping to be a disruptive trend, this announcement is particularly interesting. The business model part makes it particularly attractive to IT organizations as they can start testing out mixed deployment of hosted and on-premise while protecting their investment. It will be interesting to follow how this gets adopted, but in my opinion, this is indicative of a paradigm shift in our industry.

On a closing note, an interesting description of the infrastructure required to support this offering and telling on the level of investment:

13 global datacenters (growing to 20 next year)
Replicated to two distinct datacenters to provide redundancy
Service guarantees a 99.9 percent SLA

Have you heard of CenterStage?

2008-07-19T10:38:00.002-04:00

CenterStage is EMC Documentum next generation information workplace that will provide an integrated end user experience that's contextual, visual, multi-modal and personal. CenterStage will include two offerings:

CenterStage Essentials: a free client that requires the Documentum Content Server and provides basic content services functionality
CenterStage Pro: the full Web 2.0 client built upon CenterStage Essentials and the Documentum ECM platform.

CenterStage Essentials Beta will be announced with EMC Documentum 6.5 launch. We have also created a community on labs.emc.com to manage the beta program. Join us there.

Enterprise 2.0: A State of the Industry Address

2008-06-11T19:16:00.001-04:00

Dan Keldsen, director of market intelligence at AIIM and Carl Frappaolo, book author and vice president, market of market intelligence at AIIM are presenting the result of an extensive study they just completed on what's going on with Enterprise 2.0. The survey had 441 respondents and was recently released as a 90 pages report available at www.aiim.org/enterprise20

AIIM also assembled a panel to assess the findings of the survey. The panel included Patti Anklam, Stowe Boyd, Andrew McAffee, Eric Tsui and David Weinberger

Among the top findings from the survey:

Age does not matter (as much as you think)
Culture matters (more than you think). This is the single most important thing to embrace Enterprise 2.0
- KM inclined organizations are 2X as likely to significantly increase rate of networking and increase formation of communities
- KM inclined organizations are 31% as likely to pursue Enterprise 2.0 strategically
- The key drivers for adoption are: Increase collaboration (69%), Awareness of what we know (56%), Increase agility and responsiveness (56%), Faster communication (55%)
- The biggest obstacles are: Lack of understanding, Lack of best practice
It is a slow market which frustrates early adopters - market is not moving as fast as led to believe
Strategy (is hard to find) and Enterprise 2.0 is often undertaken in a non-strategic way

Working in the Cloud: How Cloud Computing is Reshaping Enterprise Technology

2008-06-10T20:28:00.000-04:00

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference, Rishi Chandra, product manager for Google Enterprise delivered a thoughtful and interesting talk on how cloud computing is reshaping enterprise technology. Rishi makes the point that the next 10 years of innovation will be in the cloud.

From Rishi's presentation, I took the following takeaways:

The cloud will drive towards unmatched scalability which in return will marginalize the cost per unit of the infrastructure whether it be storage or processing power
The uptime requirements of the cloud will provide unmatched reliability
Cloud computing providers need to build trust in their infrastructure. Security being often the primary concern.
This is a highly disruptive trend which could transform the economic dynamics of the software industry for on-premise software

During his presentation, Rishi outlined 4 areas of innovation that will further increase the appeal of cloud based solutions:

Consumer driven innovation will set the pace. Why? Because the consumer world is Darwinian in nature. Within the Enterprise, there is a lack of direct connection to the end user as purchase decision connect vendors with IT or purchasing departments. In the consumer space, consumers have direct choice and access to the technology.
One key lesson learned at Google is that simplicity wins. Google has been able to accomplish this by having an explicit focus on end user. This results in better solutions for the end user and drives towards increased innovation.
The rise of the power collaborator. The world is about team and group productivity where individuals needs to become increasingly connected to be more productive. Rishi makes the point that tools in the enterprise are still built for power users. The cloud is focused on collaboration and allows users to contribute information anywhere, all the time. Rishi envisions users being able to collaboration on content online and leverage "cloud services" such as automated translation to break communication barriers between contributors, or publishing services to publish information. The cloud is the right platform to provide those services and will offer one repository of information with open APIs.
The economics of IT are changing. The larger question for the enterprise is: how does the enterprise deal with scalability? Google as tremendous scalability challenges it needs to deal with. For instance, on the Google Picassa web service, 7 million new photos are uploaded a day. As Google scales its infrastructure, Google predicts that scale will drive unit costs towards zero. This is an interesting trend and aligned with what Amazon S3 services illustrate with storage at $0.15/GB. This provides some clear challenges for more traditional storage companies. Google positions its App Engine as a scalable hosting platform. This trend towards unlimited scalability provides huge opportunities and have great implications for the enterprise.
Barriers to adoption are falling away. Connectivity is becoming less of an issue. In addition, the user experience of web applications is getting richer all the time. Also, reliability expectations have changed. For instance, Gmail is multi homed, providing unmatched reliability. Rishi predicts that this will provide a level of reliability that on-premise deployment will be challenged to meet. One key barrier to adoption is security. But how secure is your organization today? 1 in 10 laptops are stolen within 12 months after purchase. Rishi makes the argument that data in the clould is more secure. However Google recognizes that in order to address the security issue, it will need to build trust with its customer. Google already does this, Postini is leveraging its cloud infrastructure for security and compliance solutions.

As closing remarks, Google does not believe that on-premise software is going away but predicts that innovation will happen in the cloud and open APIs will foster competition. Rishi predicts that all Google applications will become more social and leverage a common platform.

From the Bottom-Up: Building the 21st Century Intelligence Community

2008-06-10T20:19:00.001-04:00

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference, Sean Dennehy and Don Burke, both Intellipedia evangelists at the CIA covered some interesting aspects of Intellipedia. Intellipedia encompasses:

Wiki, the core of Intellipedia
Blog
Tagging and social bookmarking (ala del.icio.us) branded as Intelink
Document management branded as Inteldoc
A gallery of images similar to flickr
Video services

Intellipedia differs in many ways from Wikipedia. With Intellipedia, all edits are attributable to the author as users are required to login. It is not limited to an encyclopedia use case. Intellipedia also introduces a team dimension as well where many contributors from different agencies are contributing attributable point of views. Adoption is still ramping up and Intellipedia is not at a point where everyone is contributing knowledge. One of the challenge for adoption has been cultural. Sean and Don created a framework with 3 core principles to deal with distribution of knowledge issue:

Work at broadest audience possible
Think topically not organizationally
Replace existing business processes and move processes out of channel but into a platform. For instance, if a user is about to send an email sent to 50 people, it would be more effective as a blog post.

At Intellipedia, the #1 contributor is 69 years old with 40 years of experience. Adoption is not an age issue, organizations need to address the cultural challenges, and start small.

Visual Search: A Better Way to Find Information?

2008-06-09T13:33:00.008-04:00

Visual search is an area that's definitely gaining traction. A couple interesting startups have emerged that put a new twist on searching for information:

SearchMe, located in Mountain View, CA, a well founded startup, launched its private beta in March 2008
Viewzi, based in Dallas, TX, is offering early access to its visual views

SearchMe takes the Cover Flow approach to visually represent search results. Their model is very similar to Finder in Apple's Mac OS X.

Though very attractive, the SearchMe model is limited when searching for songs, videos, or shopping items. SearchMe always return a web page which may not always be the most appropriate context.

Here comes Viewzi, which created a platform with an API to allow domain experts to build specialized views. As it matures Viewzi is planning to open up its platform to allow the community to contribute views and expertise. Viewzi already provides multiple ways for users to search for information and users can switch between different views based on the type of search that they perform. Some interesting samples from the various view Viewzi provides:

Video x3 View
4 Sources View
Web Screenshot View
Gadget View
Everyday Shopping View
MP3 Search View
Album View

Viewzi also does a pretty good job at associating the relevant views to the search term.
Such focused visual searches are very effective to help locate information more quickly as they clearly set the context for the user. The application of such technologies within the enterprise would be tremendous. It will be interesting to follow Viewzi's evolution as they open up their platform to a broader community and how many business related views emerge.

Next Generation Internet Applications

2008-05-31T16:42:00.001-04:00

A colleague of mine, Michael Hackney, pointed me to an interesting company, DreamFactory and their Cloudware offering. DreamFactory leverages the Amazon infrastructure for their storage and billing infrastructure and Webex for their realtime. This allows them to focus exclusively on the application side and they leverage SalesForce AppExchange as an alternative delivery mechanism. I have to say, this is quite an innovative approach and a disruptive business model. Basically, they hardly own any infrastructure and focus exclusively on value-add. This allows them to be dirt cheap for their entry offering - @12.95 for a starting point + usage fees:

For their professional offering:
- Storage: $1.50 per GB/month
- Data Transfer In: $1.00 per GB/month
- Data Transfer Out: $1.70 per GB/month

which is basically what Amazon charges for their infrastructure plus a small markup.

Their business model is set up to be low cost and profitable from day one and cover cost as usage increases. For the Amazon of the world, it solidifies their position as the infrastructure that runs the web.

Back from EMC World

2008-05-24T11:05:00.003-04:00

Back from EMC World in Las Vegas. Overall this was a very positive show. The numbers are impressive:

The Content Management and Archiving community represented 23% of the EMC World Audience
There were more that 200 tracks, sessions and demos showcasing our products for our CMA four solutions platforms

On the Knowledge worker side, this was a very positive event. We publicly announced "Project Magellan" and got some exciting response. Here are some extracts of the positive feedback we received:

First at Mark Lewis keynote which can be found on YouTube, Mark Lewis introduce our new generation of client as follow: "You will be amazed by the new levels of usability in the content management products we’re introducing, and also the use of Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures to connect our products together" from Byte and Switch
We also got some very positive blog coverage. Marko Sillanpaa wrote a nice piece on Project Magellan, a few extracts from his post:
Better still the UI is not only clean but sexy. Learning from the best in UI, Magellan adds interfaces introduced by Apple for iTunes and iPod. In addition to standard thumbnail directory views, Magellan offers a browse option similar to Cover Flow. While search adds a filtering option similar to that in iTunes for finding a song based on a genre and artist.
But what it does show is that EMC is listening. Finally a UI that is as clean and simple as Alfresco and SharePoint and a bonus that it’s as sexy as an iPhone. And I for one want to say, thank you for listening.

You bet Marko and thank you for the positive write up!

A case study in Wikis, Facets and KM

2007-11-25T10:43:00.000-05:00

It has been a while since I posted on my blog. I have decided to write again to share some of the interesting topics I have come across. I recently read a very interesting write up from Pete Bell from Endeca published on KM World: Acmepedia: a case study in Wikis, Facets and KM. Pete makes some very interesting observations.

Regarding the key differences between Wikis and traditional KM:

• Wikis are an addition to KM, not a rip-and-replace. They will become yet another silo if they’re not designed to complement your existing enterprise packaged applications.
• Faceted navigation and information access can be the key to crossing different content silos.
• Although facets are part of the solution, they also introduce new requirements: how do you categorize everything so it can be found again through faceted navigation? With enhancements, tagging and folksonomy provide an answer.
• Authority and trust impose different constraints in the enterprise than in the public Wikipedia. Facets offer dramatic changes here too.

Best practices for Wikis:

• “Curated” content: Only a utopian would expect white papers, legal documents and HR forms to be produced by the proverbial million monkeys banging on a wiki. These would continue to live in a CMS, complete with version control, workflows and the like.
• Packaged applications: Data and notes from CRM, HRM and ERP packaged applications were some of our most valuable content. We would sensibly leave it where it was, but use information access to integrate it.
• Wikis and blogs: These group collaborations proved best at capturing the conversational nature of emerging topics, discussions, threads, opinions, ephemera and niches. And they required some business
process changes to align them with communities of practice.

Folksonomy and Taxonomy:

In our own experimentation, we found that the purists’ folksonomy can be amended very successfully with a pragmatic approach. It can succeed by blending elements of tops-down and bottoms-up organization. Key techniques:
• Controlled vocabulary: instead of free-form document tagging, first prompt users to select common terms from a controlled vocabulary, like names of industries, products, customers and geographies.
• Enter tags in facets: Instead of prompting for tags in a single field, offer faceted fields—again, like industries, products, etc. The name of the facet itself adds valuable structure.
• Auto-complete terms: Prevent vocabulary drift by using a type-ahead search to suggest known terms as the user types.
• Put an editor in the workflow queue: Actively prevent vocabulary drift with an expert. It takes less effort than you’d expect. You won’t catch everything, but you can add common synonyms and hesaurus
terms, and promote frequently used terms to the controlled vocabulary.
• Auto-tag: Supplement user tagging with some based on rules, like tags derived from an author’s department or LDAP profile.

Finally! My Yahoo is Getting an Upgrade

2007-03-18T12:11:00.000-04:00

I have been a long time My Yahoo! user and over time have accumulated quite a collection of personalized content. But lately, with new and innovative services like Netvibes and PageFlakes, I had grown overly frustrated with the lack of investment in My Yahoo! and had been considering migrating away from using it. Finally, it looks like Yahoo! has decided to change course and some exciting new features are coming our way. The new My Yahoo! is currently offered in Beta to a limited number of users. For a preview of what's coming, check out this screencast. Also, Yahoo! is starting a new My Yahoo! blog that will hopefully give users a good sense of where things are going.

So, I guess I will wait a little longer and see if the new My Yahoo! finally gets to par with its competition.

Build Your Own Application With Coghead

2007-03-10T18:46:00.000-05:00

I have been invited to participate in Coghead beta program. Coghead's catch line is a:

Simple, powerful new way to create web-based business applications that can be used by anyone, anytime, anywhere!

Their application is built using OpenLaszlo and provides a very responsive user experience. I have been evaluating their application and they definitely get the idea right. End users have a multitude of needs for business application. We could refer to this as the long tail of business applications. And IT cannot respond to everyone of those needs in a scalable manner. Therefore it makes sense to create an application that empowers business users to quickly create applications as their needs occur. Coghead Gallery provides a number of application templates to quickly get started.

Where I personally find that Coghead falls short is with its concept of collection Coghead allows users to build applications made collections, forms, views, and actions. Collections are objects used by the application. They contain records. A collection describes a data structure, and provides tools for viewing and modifying data of that type. Records are the actual data that is stored; each record is an instance of the data defined by the Collection. For example, if you have a collection “Purchase Orders” then a record would be the data that makes up one purchase order.

Though a powerful concept, it does not go far enough in my opinion. Business application needs go beyond the need to assemble collections. Nevertheless, this is a good start and a nice application.

Jetspeed 2.1 Released!

2007-03-03T11:38:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to the Jetspeed team who released Jetspeed 2.1 this week-end. Included in this release are a large number of bug fixes and some significant new features including:

Jetspeed Desktop: a web 2.0 client-side JSR-168 portlet aggregation
Parallel Rendering: multithreaded portlet aggregator with portlet timeout tracking and removal of slow rendering portlets
Jetspeed Distributed Cluster: support for distributed deployments of the portal on multiple application server platforms
JSR 168 Caching: full caching support of the JSR-168 portlet specification and distributed cache invalidation
Improved LDAP support: full security maintenance using LDAP is now supported for many LDAP providers
Full fledge AJAX API

All great features that will go a long way to make Jetspeed 2.1 an option for enterprise portal deployments.

The Jetspeed 2.1 release comes with a nice installer and you can try it for yourself in about 5-10 minutes.

The detailed releases notes are available on Jetspeed-2 web site.

Below is a screenshot of the new Jetspeed-2 desktop client side aggregation.

Data Sharing and Vizualization: Next Generation

2007-03-01T17:58:00.000-05:00

The International Weekly Journal of Science has published an interesting article illustrating how social software us creating a new paradigm for sharing data. Proof in point is IBM's new Many Eyes service launched on January 23rd. The site provides an infrastructure for uploading data sets and creating visualization for the data through various visualization types available.
By making the data publicly available and providing an infrastructure to analyze it, it empowers individuals and creates a very powerful model for developing collective intelligence quickly. Fernanda Viégas of IBM's Visual Communication Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts points out that governments, international agencies and research organizations generate huge silos of publicly available data on almost every aspect of society, but the public has never been able to explore, share and discuss these data sets easily. That is interesting, but more interestingly, I could see huge applications of this type of technology to the enterprise with potential dynamic enterprise datasets. In the enterprise context, this type of application of social software could drastically impact organizations' ability to be more data driven and to leverage data to collaborate on business decisions.

Below, some more screenshots from Many Eyes.

Posted visualizations:

Posted comments:

Posted data sets:

Online Office Suite - It's Heating Up...

2007-02-25T10:17:00.000-05:00

My blog post a couple weeks ago on online office suites was quite timely. Last week, Google announced the re-branding and extended reach of its Google Apps for your Domain. As I pointed out in my previous post, Google's announcement validate in many way the disruptive nature of such offerings. Google's improved offering includes:

Google Apps Standard Edition: a free service that includes Gmail accounts (since enhanced for mobile access on BlackBerrys), a shared calendar, Google Talk instant messaging, access to Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and a Web page creator.
Google Apps Premier Edition: a service designed for businesses of all sizes (read: targeted at the enterprise) which costs $50 a year per user and includes a 99.9% uptime guarantee for e-mail, additional e-mail storage (10GB per account instead of the 2GB limit of the Standard Edition), and new administration and business integration features.

In the enterprise edition, a control panel allows domain administrators to control which features they want to activate and to customize those services for their organization.

Administrators can:

Add, change, or remove user accounts
Create the Start page layout for their user base where users can quickly preview their inbox, calendar, document list and other essential information related to their organization.
Run a chat session
Design a Web site
Set up e-mail accounts
Define mailing lists (you can include recipients outside your domain)
Configure calendars

Not surprisingly, Google Apps also comes with a broad set of APIs that use HTTP requests for a publishing and editing protocol in the spirit of the REST approach to web service interfaces. Most of these APIs allows client applications to view and update Google Apps constructs (e.g. spreadsheets) in the form of Google data API ("GData") feeds. GData leverages either of two standard XML-based syndication formats: Atom or RSS. Such APIs will strongly empower Google's partners and could overtime provide Google with strong competitive differentiation.

From the end user standpoint, Google Apps Premier Edition is all about collaboration, with 2 main positioning statements:

Communicate and connect: This includes GMail, Google Talk and Google Calendar
Collaborate and Publish: This includes Google Docs and Spreadsheet, the Start Page and Google Page Creator

Evaluating Google Docs and Spreadsheet is beyond the scope of this post, but in many ways compares to the Microsoft Office Suite, it falls in the category of the good enough.

This may explain some of the early broad adoption Google is claiming. Kevin Gough, product manager for Google Enterprise observes that:

CIOs are increasingly looking at what can they safely outsource to a trusted partner and what is a core function that is going to give them a competitive differentiator. They’re realizing that email and productivity tools and the staff that have to maintain that is not a competitive differentiator for them and they can redeploy that staff on things that are more core to their business.

Early in its release of Google Apps Premier Edition, Google claims that a number of large enterprises have commenced deployment and pilots of the online system that is looming as a threat to Microsoft's desktop-based office productivity dominance.

We have hundreds of thousands of small to medium businesses that have already done that," said Gough. "They’ve already switched their entire infrastructure over to Google Apps. We have just released the Premier Edition of Google Apps today and today we already have GE, Procter & Gamble, Prudential and Loreal. If on the first day of the launch we have two of the top 25 companies in the world. Imagine what’s going to happen in a month or a year from now.

The coming year will be interesting to watch and should create plenty of opportunities for those who can seize them.

Digg Like User Interface as a Product Management Tool

2007-02-17T10:34:00.000-05:00

Yahoo!'s Yodel Anecdotal blog provides an interesting take on gathering user's feedback. Yahoo! has built a brand new Yahoo! Suggestion Board to collect users' feedback for its various web properties.

From a product management stand point, this is a great use of the Digg concept. Instead of providing the traditional disconnected feedback form where users provide feedbacks one at a time without any understanding or context of previously submitted feedback, the Yahoo! Suggestion Board concept provides an avenue to directly involve users in the prioritization of features/enhancements by letting them vote, comment, and make suggestions on what really matters to them. This is a great use of community building and the architecture of participation to better listen to the voice of your customers and make your users the drivers for how a company's products should evolve.

Yahoo! is getting quite an earful for reaping off the Digg user interface, but this is a creative a powerful use of such concept to put users' at the center of future products enhancements.

Online Office Suites - Part 1

2007-02-11T11:35:00.000-05:00

There has been a lot of talk lately about online office suites, or Office 2.0, with the mandatory 2.0 moniker. The acquisition of Writely by Google in early March 2006 rekindled speculations that online office suites where back for good and provided a real threat to the dominant Microsoft Office position.

I believe there are some strong arguments for this, this time. If we take the new entrants in that space through a classic Clayton Christensen analysis, new online office suites clearly have new market disruptions characteristics. Compared to Microsoft Office, they provide:

Lower performance in "traditional attributes" but improved performance in new attributes, simplicity and convenience
Target non-consumption: customers who historically lacked the money or skill to buy or use the product. The standard version of Office costs about $400 where most online office suites are typically free.
The business model of these new entrants make money at a much lower price per unit sold.

In addition, Microsoft's monopoly on the Office suite market has created strong regulatory pressures on the company and has forced it to transform its integrated, differentiated, proprietary file format into a more modularized and standardized file format (see OpenXML), that will drive towards the commoditization of the Office suite. If a user can produce and open any Office documents with about any Office suite application, including a free one, why would someone spend $400 for MS Office 2007? These technology factors combined with the "good enough" user experience factor will create significant competitive pressure over the coming year and Google has definitely recognized the opportunity as it gears up with its Docs and Spreadsheets applications from the Writely acquisition and soon to come, a Presently offering for presentations that will presumably support the OpenXML PresentationML format.

Over the next few weeks, I will take a look at a few of those online Office suites.

Mashup for the Enterprise? A look at QEDWiki

2007-02-10T21:09:00.000-05:00

IBM announced early February the release of QEDWiki for the Enterprise. QED stands for "Quickly and Easily Done" and is intended to be a tool for mashups in the enterprise. As IBM puts it:

QEDWiki is a browser-based assembly canvas used to create simple mash-ups. A mash-up maker is an assembly environment in which the creator of a mash-up uses software components (or services) made available by content providers. QEDWiki is a unique Wiki framework in that it provides both Web users and developers with a single Web application framework for hosting and developing a broad range of Web 2.0 applications.

QEDWiki also provides Web application developers with a flexible and extensible framework to enable do-it-yourself (DIY) rapid prototyping. Business users can quickly prototype and build ad hoc applications without depending on software engineers. QEDWiki provides mash-up enablers (programmers) with a framework for building reusable, tag-based commands. These commands (or widgets) can then be used by business users who wish to create their own Web applications.

To see QEDWiki in action, check out an introduction and an insurance claims use case videos on YouTube.

With QEDWiki, Lotus Connection and Lotus Quickr, IBM has been riding the Enterprise 2.0 wave at full speed. Those products are definitely innovative and very interesting. It just bodes the question on how do you position one versus the other versus Websphere Portal, Quickplace and Workplace if you are an IBM sales rep...

Web 2.0... The Machine is Us/ing Us

2007-02-08T12:08:00.000-05:00

I came across a video produced by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology from Kansas State University that I found to be very well done. Instead of looking at Web 2.0 through the usual lenses of collaboration, social networking, wikis and folksonomies, it takes a fresh time machine approach to describing how end users became the engine of the Internet and some of the societal questions that result from this transformation. This is very refreshing.

A transcript is available on Digital Ethnography's blog.

Internet Users and Tagging

2007-02-02T08:37:00.000-05:00

The Pew Internet & American Life Project just published a report on tagging. Some very interesting findings from the report:

A December 2006 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content.
Taggers look like classic early adopters of technology. They are more likely to be under age 40, and have higher levels of education and income.
Taggers are considerably more likely to have broadband connections at home, rather than dial-up connections. Men and women are equally likely to be taggers, while online minorities are a bit more likely than whites to be taggers.
The act of tagging is likely to be embraced by a more mainstream population in the future because many organizations are making it easier and easier to tag internet content.

More details on the demographics of taggers are provided below:

In his upcoming book, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder,
Weinberger describes how radical it is for people to move away from hierarchical classifications. His prediction:

We'll also undoubtedly figure out how to intersect tags with social networks, so that the tags created by people we know and respect have more “weight” when we search for tagged items. In fact, by analyzing how various social groups use tags, we can do better at understanding how seemingly different worldviews map to one another.

The New Era of The Long Tail of the Pharmaceutical Industry?

2007-01-27T15:41:00.000-05:00

I came across a good article on the New York Times this morning, The Dangers of Swinging for the Fences by Joe Nocera. Reading this article, I could not help but think whether the pharmaceutical industry had entered a new era where addressing the long tail of drugs production would be the next evolution for that industry.

Joe Nocera makes the point in his article that the pharmaceutical business is changing. This is particularly well illustrated by the tough times at Pfizer. The modern Pfizer was built on Blockbusters, which is what the industry calls medicines that generate $1 billion or more in annual revenue.

At Pfizer for instance, the top 4 drugs account for 35% of revenue. Lipitor alone with $12.9 billion in annual revenue accounts for 27% of Pfizer's revenue. And with Lipitor coming off patent in 2010, Pfizer needs to worry on how to make up for that blockbuster's revenue.

The blockbuster business model is falling apart - and not only in the pharmaceutical industry by the way. First, big bets like the Lipitor one, require a significant time period to recover the investments to produce such blockbuster and drug patents expire after 17 years. Second, expensive go to market strategies with direct advertising to consumer and doctors are experiencing a backlash.

New business models in the pharmaceutical industry are starting to favor the long tail of drugs where new discoveries tend to be very much targeted and according to Harvard economist David Cutler:

Drugs are eventually going to be customized for individuals.

Jeffrey Kindler, CEO of Pfizer is betting on it and wants Pfizer to become as good at developing $500 million drugs as in coming up with new blockbusters. Well, that's a big bet for Pfizer and let's hope with Pfizer can pull it off.

It will make for a much healthier industry and could be the start of a new area of the long tail of the pharmaceutical industry. It will be interesting to watch closely how successful Pfizer is at revolutionizing its industry.

The Cost of Ineffective Search

2007-01-26T18:22:00.000-05:00

Great article in Network World on the Cost of Ineffective Search. The author starts with a strong punch line:

A company that employs 1,000 information workers can expect more than $5 million in annual salary costs to go down the drain because of the time wasted looking for information and not finding it, IDC research found last year.

You think that's bad. think again:

A survey conducted by Accenture this month of 1,000 middle managers found that more than half of the information they find during searches is useless.

The Butler Group estimates that 10% of a company's salary are wasted on ineffective searches.* Susan Feldman at IDC found that 3.5 hours each week are wasted on search that don't turn up the right information.
People spend about 9-10 hours a week on average looking for information and don't find the information they are looking for 1/3 to 1/2 of the time.

So why is search so ineffective?

1. Enterprises are not investing much in search
Most companies are under-investing in search compared to other systems such as portals, dashboards, databases and other enterprise systems and are not using the latest search technology. The best search applications use concept searches and very few companies have adopted such technology.

2. 90% of the documents that are created have no useful metadata
Companies for the past 10 years have found it extremely difficult to get employees to add metadata to content.

3. The right data sources are not getting indexed
Companies need to figure out what search is used for (customer service, eDiscovery, etc.) and adapt their search strategy.

The Answer?
The semantic web is viewed as an answer to ineffective search. Recent research from MIT Sloan shows that using semantic search technology will turn up most desired results about 80% of the time compared to 50% of the time with search technology used by most companies today.

Improved metadata through a non-intrusive tagging process will definitely contribute to improved search as well, further indicating the value of social tagging.

Service-Oriented Information Infrastructure

2007-01-23T18:34:00.000-05:00

Mark Lewis had an interesting write up a few days ago on Service Oriented Information Infrastructure (SOII) and I could not agree more with him. Actually, I believe that in many ways this trend has already started. Look at Amazon Simple Storage Services and how sites like SmugMug and YouOs use this infrastructure to essentially run their web sites. You are talking 60,000 customers utilizing 12 GB of storage and 80 GB of bandwidth per month for YouOS and 10 terabytes of new images each month for SmugMug. That's serious infrastructure there. In the case of SmugMug, the company estimates saving $1/2 million a month in storage expenditure!

So, I definitely agree, SOII is the way of the future for the storage industry, looking at Amazon S3 strategy is actually enlightening.

This actually strongly highlights the need for standards in that space. But, then imagine the possibilities: based on the value of their information, customers could either leverage an Amazon S3 services or internal storage for key business records. This also means that application providers need to anticipate such need and layer their product architecture accordingly.

This is starting to happen, Koral, a startup in the content management space is built from the ground up to support storage as a web service and has done a reference implementation using Amazon S3. It will take a while for this type of technology to be adopted in the enterprise, but given the profound impact it will have on established players' product architecture, this clearly has the potential to be a disruptive innovation.