social – Page 14

Enterprise 2.0: an update

Dion Hinchcliffe wrote a great post a couple of weeks ago giving a checkpoint on Web 2.0 in the enterprise. I was going to just tag it in my del.icio.us links, which would have had it come up in my daily links post, but I wanted to take the time to comment on it since I think that he has a great way of capturing the essential information about the subject. Also, I’ve been waiting for Part 2, which was promised in advance of his Web 2.0 for the Enterprise webinar on July 31st, but I haven’t seen it yet.

His graphic, which you can see in small form on the right (click through to his Flickr page for the larger version, or see it in situ in the linked article above), divides Web 2.0 in the enterprise into four quadrants based on two factors: social versus technical, and internally versus externally-facing. In this first part, he walks through each of the aspects shown on the right, or internally-facing, part.

My thoughts on some of his notes, especially as they relate to BPM:

Wikis are now something that I discuss with every end-customer organization that I visit, even though I’m almost always there to do BPM-related work, not talk to them about Enterprise 2.0. I’m seeing uses in a number of line-of-business areas, such as sharing vendor pricing information across different company locations, and collaborating on updates to operational procedures manuals. Dion points out their importance for internal collaboration as well as a platform for user-built web pages, which ties in with his later comments about collective intelligence.
Collaboration 2.0 is like a wiki with a bit more structure, and an important class of applications/functionality that lies between unstructured collaboration and the highly-structured end of the spectrum that we see in BPM. As this space becomes more defined, I expect to see BPM vendors expand in this direction.
His comments on emergent structure are completely bang on: “The underlying concept of emergent structure is that we guess far too much up front about the features of the software we need or the way the data should be organized.” This speaks to a number of problems in current enterprise software development practices, most importantly that of the massive over-design of software that tends to take too long to deploy, ends up not being what the users need anyway, and being custom-coded hence not very agile. I’m a strong proponent of the “give the users the out of the box tools and see what they come up with” school of customization when it comes to BPM products (as well as many other software products) since the tools provided by the vendors are, for the most part, fairly usable by a trained user or business analyst.
Data aggregation is critical for reuse, but visibility/availability is really the key issue here. In my Enterprise 2.0 conference coverage, I mentioned a few times that I see RSS (or rather, the ability to subscribe to events and data) as a key functionality that’s going to sweep through enterprises. He covers syndication as a separate point later, but these are really two sides of the same issue.
Enterprise mashups are also going to be critical — and make use of that aggregated data via feeds — as the next generation of end-user computing platforms. Instead of Excel and Access, semi-technical users within business departments are going to be using mashup platforms to build the simple applications that they can never get IT to build for them.
Rich user experiences are already throughout organizations for end-user functionality, but that usage needs to continue to expand to include tools such as (in the BPM space) process modellers/designers so that they can be run anywhere by anyone, given the appropriate user authentication. FileNet has long had a Java applet for their process designer; the download is a bit clunky and it looks quite outdated now, but it still doesn’t require the software to be explicitly installed/upgraded at each workstation. Other more modern (Ajax-based) process designers are appearing from BPM vendors such as Appian and Cordys, and this trend is not going to reverse.

He covers a number of other aspects that I haven’t mentioned here; definitely worth a read. I look forward to Part 2 of this article.

Update: Part 2 of Dion’s article published here.

BPM Think Tank Day 3: Enterprise 2.0/BPM Mashups Roundtable

I facilitated one of the last roundtables of on the conference, about Enterprise 2.0 and BPM mashups.

Mashups (considered a part of Enterprise 2.0) are lightweight integration of web-based services and data, often in ways that the service providers never intended them to be used; personally, I think that as mashup techniques get easier, mashups will become the technology of choice for what’s referred to as “end-user computing”, that is, all the stuff that is created within business units (typically now using Excel or Access) because it’s either too small for IT to take on as a project or they can’t turn it around in a timely manner. I see software-as-a-service BPM and other services as having an impact on the ability to do mashups, since these platforms are often designed with a bit more openness in mind.

I’ve looked a lot in the past at Enterprise 2.0 and BPM, and the features that are (or should be) creeping into BPM under the influence of Enterprise 2.0: RSS, tagging, SaaS, mashups, collaboration, and all sorts of user-created content in general. There’s a lot of challenges around this, many of the cultural, since Enterprise 2.0 decentralizes control of IT assets and requires a certain level of user participation.

We spent most of the session talking about BPM mashups, not Enterprise 2.0 in general. At one level, a BPMS can be considered to be a mashup platform, given the right business services available for assembly.

BPM mashups can take several forms:

Lightweight assemblies of subprocesses and services
User-facing information at a step in the process, e.g., Google maps mashed up with BPM data and presented to a user in a form in order to complete a task
BPM as a component within a portal, possibly assembled by a user

Issues around mashup adoption include IT not trusting something that is user-created, and business analysts not understanding the concept of mashups as well as not yet having easy enough tools to do mashups. There are also issues around discoverability of services (as I discussed the previous week in a Mashup Camp session) and the use of internal versus external services, where both types require some sort of SLA to be included in any sort of production mashup.

By lowering the barrier to entry, mashups can play an important role as application prototypes, or emergent applications that IT wouldn’t have thought to build for the business; IT can learn from what the business creates for itself in order to create more structured applications and processes.This is similar to the concept of how a folksonomy is used to gradually become a taxonomy: allow the users to do it themselves, then observe and detect the patterns. My favourite phrase that someone used at this point was to “intelligently stumble upon the future” and the whole idea of unintended consequences of mashups, although there was some discussion as to whether is was closer to serendipity or Frankenstein. Along this line, we talked about how to keep bad things from happening in mashups, and agreed that the services and data to be mashed up had to be controlled in some way (by IT) so that, for example, someone couldn’t do an unindexed full text search on a multi-million record database.

Without a doubt, mashups enable agility in application development, and BPM stands to benefit from enabling all types of BPM mashups.

There was some discussion around whether business users/analysts were asking for this, and whether they really wanted a full mashup capability, or just some parameterized configuration. I think that they don’t even know what’s possible through mashups, and if they did, they’d want it.

Take the Ajax challenge

I had a chance to talk to Kevin Hakman of TIBCO late last week about their Ajax Challenge (Kevin co-founded General Interface, which was acquired by TIBCO a couple of years back), the goal of which is to build the world’s largest mashup. You have to use General Interface to build it, but more interestingly, you have to use PageBus, a JavaScript client-side message bus that TIBCO just contributed to the OpenAjax Alliance as open source to become part of the OpenAjax Hub 1.0 installation.

The contest is splashy (win an oversized TV! win a video iPod!) but PageBus is the real news here: it provides a message bus for mashups in an attempt to eliminate the spaghetti mess of point-to-point integrations that we’re already starting to see emerge. In the enterprise world, this is why ESBs have become an essential part of any sizable application integration effort: without a message bus, you’re creating a unique integration between each pair of applications. Okay when you have two applications, but not when you have 10. [To be fair, usually you don’t have every application interact with every other application in a complex integration: each one may only interact with a couple of others, but that just shifts the pain point, it doesn’t eliminate it.]

Getting back to mashups and the OpenAjax Hub, the PageBus exposes the basic functions of messaging — publish, subscribe, unsubscribe — all in less than 5k of JavaScript, so that multiple Ajax components on an HTML page can share data using these standard methods. This allows the development of a mashup to be more easily split up between multiple developers since each can focus on their specific component and not on the interface between components; it will also allow for easier “no programing required” assembly of components within a PageBus-enabled mashup framework.

This is a pretty important step in mashup-land: I’m starting to see a lot of things referred to as mashups that are actually portals, where the components don’t intercommunicate, but the fundamental benefit of mashups is that they are an integration, not just components that happen to coexist on the same page.

TIBCO is apparently already using this in their BPM product for things such as task list publication, which means (I think) that you could create a mashup between your iProcess task list and some other component or data source — a real BPM mashup. Although many vendors are starting to provide RSS feeds of task lists/inboxes (I hope that my past year of nagging about this has had some contribution to those efforts), this is the first truly mashup-enabled BPM environment of which I’m aware.

The full OpenAjax Hub specification is about 4-6 weeks away from release, but the project is already on SourceForge. TIBCO will continue to develop the source and contribute to the open source efforts in the future; their press release about PageBus is here.

LongJump

I really hate going through a lengthy interview about a hot new product, only to have them tell me at the end that half of what they told me is off the record. Not embargoed until some near-future announcement date, just off the record. Grrr.

Other than that, I had a pretty good demo last week from Pankaj Malviya, CEO of LongJump, who I missed at last week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference. LongJump is the brand for a service provided by Relationals, which has been in business since 2003 with a hosted CRM plaform targetted at media companies. Bonus marks to Pankaj, who starts into the presentation saying that their target users are business managers who organize information and create workflow, then in an aside, says “I see that you’re a business process management expert”, which means that either he’s looked at my blog or his PR person has briefed him well. 🙂

All of their solutions, including both those with the Relationals brand and the new LongJump hosted solutions, are focussed on the small to medium business market. LongJump, in fact, is created on the same underlying platform as the Relationals CRM, including components such as the MySQL database.

LongJump is a platform for creating data-driven, widget-based web applications, as well as offering a shared catalog environment for offering those applications by subscription to other users, including monetization of the applications. The application assembly environment is similar to an iGoogle home page, or other similar portal environments: widgets can be placed on the page, although they can’t exchange data or do other data mashup/filtering functionality like Yahoo Pipes. They have their own widget format, but it’s similar to the Google widget format and they’re working on making it identical so that widget created for Google could be used in LongJump.

The demo application was an asset tracking application, and I didn’t see much difference from the seemly endless array of lightweight web-based application development environments until he started showing me how to apply workflow to objects. There’s no graphical process mapper, but you can set states through which an object must pass and the predefined responses at each of those states, which in turn creates a sequence of tasks assigned to specific people or roles. The workflows can be triggered by data events, such as “renewal date less than 30 days”. This is crude from a BPM standpoint — it reminds me a lot of what IBM had in their Content Manager application a couple of years ago to do simple object-based workflow routing — but I haven’t seen anything else like it in this space. They plan to enhance this capability further, and I think that they could have a real competitive differentiator here.

Each application is “packaged” for publication on their catalog; for example, the Asset Tracking application above consists of all of the tabs that you see along the top (Home, Directory, PCs and Servers, Phones, Equipment, Reports, About), where each of those tabs has its own set of widgets and the underlying data sources. The catalog then makes published applications available for subscription by others, and handles the monetization.

LongJump is in an early (closed) beta now, with an open beta expected by end of year — I find this a longish timeline for this sort of application, but it’s coming from a more traditional company so I expect that their internal test and release procedures are different from the usual hair-on-fire Web 2.0 startup. They received 1,800 applicants for the closed beta, and have about 10 customers on there now.

Is there Web 2.0 in your organization?

Yesterday, when I presented at the IQPC BPM summit in Toronto, I did a quick survey of the audience. How many IT versus business? About a 50:50 split. How many know what Web 2.0 is? Two hands went up, tentatively. How many have used Wikipedia? About 75%. I used this to launch into the part of my presentation about how Web 2.0/social networking ideas are changing businesses and starting to impact some of the collaborative aspects of BPM. There was a lot of discussion generated from this:

Software-as-a-service, and whether companies want to entrust their corporate data and applications to third parties. I pointed out that most of them, if they work for large organizations, already outsource their data centres: they just do it with IBM (or whoever took over IBM’s data centre hosting business) instead of Salesforce.com. If you do your homework and select a SaaS vendor with the appropriate service level agreements, privacy and security, there’s really no difference.
Capturing the wisdom of the masses within an organization, mostly through the use of wikis for some level of internal documentation. I told them about Avenue A|Razorfish, who create their entire intranet using a wiki, where anyone in the company can edit any page. I could see the eyebrows go up around the room, but as we talked about the benefits — more open culture, faster updates to information — I could see the idea start to gain a bit of traction.
Encouraging collaboration and team-building through the use of internal blogs, such as what IBM is doing: they only have 1% of their employees blogging, but that’s about 3,000 blogs. IBM’ers use them to find people inside the organization with similar interests, or with skills that might be of use in other areas.

I also pointed out how favourable this can be to the bottom line, since SaaS is typically purchased on a monthly subscription basis that falls well within the budget of most business departments, and open source wiki and blog software are free to download and install internally. For the public sector people in the crowd, trying to do more on a shoestring budget, this can make a big difference.

After the presentation, I had someone approach me to see if I could do a bit of private consulting just to bring him up to speed on all of these social networking technologies, from portals to RSS feeds to wikis and blogs; this made me realize that there’s a big gap between those of us who have been drinking the Web 2.0 Koolaid for a couple of years, and those who are just doing their jobs in the other 99.9% of the companies out there. On the way home, I thought about how it would be useful to do a series of posts on Web 2.0 for businesses; I know that this has been covered in other places, but obviously there’s still a need.

Then, at the Girl Geek dinner last night, I was seated beside Sarah Pullman, who told me about a workshop that she’s helping to organize: Web 2.0 and Your Organization:

Have you heard the buzz about Facebook, MySpace, blogging, and other popular social web tools, and wondered whether they could be useful to your organization… but not known where to start, or how to sort the good stuff from the hype? Come and learn from two of Canada’s top experts on web strategy and participation design for the not-for-profit sector, this July in Toronto.

The latest generation of Web 2.0 (or “social web”) strategies and tools offer powerful opportunities for organizations to improve the way they work, communicate their messages, empower others, and serve the public. In this workshop you will learn how the latest tools for online collaboration and community building can make your organization smarter and more effective.

It’s targetted at communications types in the not-for-profit sector (and the “socially-responsible small business sector”, although I’m not sure what business would admit to being socially irresponsible), including communications strategists, marketing managers, webmasters and anyone else involved in online (outward-facing) strategy. This is only a small part of the whole Web 2.0 in business picture, but it’s an important one.

IQPC BPM Summit: me!

Here’s the presentation that I did for the IQPC BPM summit in Toronto this afternoon:

Enterprise 2.0: Zoho

I had a chance for a one-on-one chat and demo with Raju Vegesna, Zoho‘s evangelist, while at Enterprise 2.0 this week; since I do face-to-face interviews with a paper notebook, however, it’s taken me until the flight home from Boston to find time to transcribe my notes.

I’ve played around with Zoho, Google Apps and a few other Office 2.0 applications, but find it hard to find the compelling argument for me to start using them: I’m often in places with flaky, expensive or non-existent wifi, and it just doesn’t make sense to have my productivity impacted by the inability to connect to the internet. Case in point, I’m at 35,000’ right now, writing this blog post in Windows Live Writer, not in the Movable Type online environment where the blog is actually domiciled.

A few new releases in Zoho, however, have me willing to try it out: Zoho Wiki and Zoho Meeting. I’ve used another free hosted wiki, PBwiki, but they’ve only just introduced WYSIWYG editing and it still feels a bit kludgy; I could use MediaWiki on my own hosting platform, but they don’t have WYSIWYG editing at all, and I think that’s a major barrier to adoption. So seeing Zoho Wiki, which uses Zoho Writer (the word processor) as the text editor, makes me want to give that a try instead. It also has some nice capabilities for direct integration with some of the other Zoho tools that I want to test out.

The big news this week is Zoho Meeting, and that’s what Raju and I spent most of our time on. Currently free, although I’m expecting some sort of monetization model in the future, this is an online meeting and desktop sharing application, like Webex. It requires the meeting host to used a downloaded Windows application, but the attendees can either use a (Windows-only) ActiveX control, or a Java or Flash plug-in on other operating systems. There’s a high degree of integration with other applications: you can launch a Zoho meeting from a Skype chat, or embed it into a page of a presentation on Zoho Show if you only need to hop into full desktop sharing mode for part of a presentation. The meeting session is downloadable afterwards as a Flash file for replay, and can be used to generate a discussion forum thread with the meeting archive linked in. And, like Webex and other desktop sharing applications, it can also be used for remote control of a Windows PC: you leave the host running on the computer to be controlled (say, your home computer), then enter the meeting from another computer and (presumabely password protected) take control of the host computer.

I also saw Zoho Notebook, a free-form authoring application similar to Microsoft OneNote (but hosted), where you can add pages in a sort of binder/notebook paradigm, then put any type of content on the pages. There’s version control on the objects, and read-only and read/write security can be applied at the paragraph level for sharing.

Zoho Creator was interesting, too: a forms-based database application development environment, similar to a number of others ones that I’ve seen like DabbleDB. You create an application by drawing the associate user interface form, which in turn generates the database required for the fields on the form. You can edit the script behind each form object to change the default behaviours and add more functionality. The data can be viewed in the form or in a table view. Multiple database tables with joins are supported, and data can be imported and exported from the tables.

There’s also a QuickRead browser plug-in for IE or Firefox that acts as a viewer for many different office document types, insteach of having to launch the behemoth MS-Office application just to view a document that’s linked on a website. The browsers handle a lot of the document types natively, but QuickRead seems to handle many more that aren’t supported by the browsers themselves.

Also in the category of fun things to do with MS-Office documents, there’s a WebDAV sort of plug-in for MS-Office applications to allow the documents authored in those environments to be replicated online, which provides an easy transition path for Office users who want to get started on Zoho.

The last thing that we looked at was Zoho Mail; I’m not sure that Raju intended to show me that, but I saw it on his screen when he was getting set up for the demo, and it piqued my interest. It’s still in closed beta with 20-30,000 users, getting ready for general release in a couple of months. By providing some really slick interlinking of content types between Mail and the other Zoho applications, and a much more MS-Outlook style of interface (including the ability to see all attachments to all messages as a sort of document store), they’re looking to add value over what Google Mail provides. I suppose if you can’t be bought by them, then you have to try and beat them.