Blog Archives

Andrew McAfee, from the Center for Digital Business, MIT Sloan School of Management, believes we’ve reached a tipping point in terms of the acceptance of the tools and techniques of enterprise 2.0.

McAfee sees some positive signs and some danger areas – “We have the opportunity to snatch defeat out of the jaws of success”. The way that’ll happen;

• Declare war on the enterprise
• Allow walled gardens to flourish – an interesting analogy to Napoleonic land division in Paris where smaller and smaller lots were created all divided with hedgerows – let’s not go there…
• Accentuate the negative – the risks aren’t quite as bad as people make out, don’t dwell on them
• Try to replace email
• Fall in love with features – “what’s the simplest possible thing that could work”
• Overuse the word “social”

Andrew is the father of the Enterprise 2.0 term – while his shtick is getting perhaps a little tired – he’s still got a valuable voice to add to the discussion.

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A live blog of the presentation…. Christian Finn, Director of SharePoint Product Management, and Alina Fu, Product Manager, Social Computing talk about the SharePoint 2010 offering. An interesting approach – Christian and Alina ran a “speed dating” session trying…

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Tammy Erickson, President of nGenera Innovation Network proclaimed that 2009 will be remembered as the year of “A-ha!”. Her presentation was very much in the spirit of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. Erickson pointed out some problems impacting upon the adoption of enterprise 2.0 and the changes needed to mitigate those problems. She believes that the train is leaving the station for enterprise 2.0 but that the fundamentals need to be addressed.

Problem #1;

• Old approaches have been mastered
• Technology enables a very different level of performance
• Competition will shift the playing field

Erickson believes that Enterprise 2.0 is as game changing as the telex was in days gone by. The twentieth century icons where those who had the ability to master scale and cost. The steel mills, the auto makers. Today’s organizations are simply not optimized for the future. Reason #1 – they’re optimized with;

• Division of responsibility
• Specialization
• Strict accountability – providing excellent control

Going forwards though, enterprise 2.0 mobilizes intelligence;

• The utilization of complex knowledge
• Innovation through the contributions of many
• Harnessing the smallest units of knowledge

Reason #2 – traditional organizations are underpinned by;

• Loyalty, reciprocated with protection and care
• Individual autonomy
• Identification with organizational units and individual managers
• Based on planning

Whereas new organizations have different assumptions;

• performance based arrangements
• collective purpose
• identity with shared objectives
• they’re based upon coordination not planning

The ten factors that shift organizations – enables of collaborative capacity.;

1. Highly engaged, committed participants
2. Trust-based relationships
3. Networking opportunities
4. Selection, promotion and training based on collaboration
5. Organization philosophy supporting a “community of adults”
6. Executives who create a “gift culture”
7. Leaders with both task and relationship management skills
8. Productive and efficient behaviors and processes
9. Clearly defined individual roles and responsibilities
10. Important challenging tasks

Reason #3 – The strategic role. Today the paradigm is

• This is something we have to do to keep Gen Y happy – the recession put paid to that!
• It’s extra, nice to have like fitness centers and day care
• We don’t even know what “it” it

Contrasted with the future organization

• 2.0 supports a broad range of activities – with clear business objectives
• Each best achieves through different organizational approaches and supported by different technologies

Driving outcomes through collaborative intents;

• Connect previously unrelated ideas
• Access untapped people or expertise
• Distribute work or risk
• Co-create
• Detect emerging patterns or trends
• Pool judgments
• Determine group-wide preferences
• Air and debate multiple views
• Influence views or norms
• Coordinate in time and space

Problem #4 – The technology itself. The concerns are;

• It’s overwhelming – and difficult to harness
• The solutions are heterogeneous and disconnected
• Not secure or necessary relevant

The coming realities;

• Unifying approaches
• Ways of partitioning and aggregating data
• Ability to manage relationships

Problem #5 – Engagement

• Management 101 dictates
• Directed activities
• Clear instructions

Participation 2.0 means;

• Individual discretion
• Dealing with rich content that flows through infinite links
• Forming and maintaining complex relationships
• Having trust, a stake, a voice, an impact and a community bond

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Oliver Marks and Sameer Patel – two of the leading lights in Enterprise 2.0 (that is experience in actually doing it rather than merely talking about it) presented this session. Their aim with the session was to move from…

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I recently spoke with Scott Morrison, VP Engineering at Layer 7 Technologies, a SOA and governance company that has been doing appliance based gateways for years looking at traffic, cryptography, authentication, authorization, etc, and setting rules and policy. Layer…

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An announcement from Xero today that I’ve known about for awhile but not been able to discuss publicly. From the media release; Online small business accounting software provider Xero (XRO) will launch a personal money manager in early 2010.…

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Recently I had a briefing from Conformity, a cloud application management platform vendor.

Conformity seeks to be the hub, managing service provision for cloud/SaaS applications for enterprise. The rationale for this, as told by Scott Bils, co-founder and CMO for Conformity, is that SaaS applications are thus far relatively siloed in terms of provisioning, user management and access control.

Bils contends that managing provisioning individually across multiple applications is simply not scalable and presents both a risk to enterprise and a barrier to the adoption of SaaS applications. As they say;

SaaS and cloud applications provide attractive alternative solutions, however, the missing piece to the puzzle is providing enterprise-class management for these on-demand solutions that will enable companies to effectively manage and comply with the increased scrutiny imposed by new compliance and governance regulations.

Enter Conformity, which provides a tool to manage the workflow associated with setting up users for service. Conformity is primarily a business process and workflow management offering, that is augmented by a partially automated offering – it is currently partnered with Salesforce.com, NetSuite, SuccessFactors, Xactly Incent, Google Apps, OpenAir and QuickArrow and for these applications offers truly automated provisioning, permissioning and de-provisioning of users.

The main functional areas of the application are as follows;

• User provisioning
• Role and profile management – normalized permission models etc
• Approval workflows – auditable workflows for change approvals
• Directory integration
• Compliance reporting
• Usage analytics
• Change management

Conformity integrates with Active Desktop, so that changes within the active desktop directory are reflected within the control dashboard, it also runs back end consistency checks to ensure that permissions and authorizations at an application level reflect those within the control dashboard.

What I really like about the Conformity approach is that it is very much workflow centric with a secondary automation play, rather than being primarily focused on the automation side of things. As I discussed with Bils, they’re never going to be able to integrate with every single application an enterprise might require, rather it is important that they document the workflows and processes for provisioning, such that Conformity becomes the hub for enterprise user management.

Conformity also provides some visibility into cloud/SaaS application spend within an organization, an efficiency boosting service that, while somewhat peripheral to their core focus, should still prove useful.

I like what Conformity is doing – their focus on workflow rather than technology is refreshing and the fact that they ease enterprises adoption of SaaS and general cloud solutions is good for all of us.

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I read an article recently on a local IT news site that had me chuckling. It seems that forest products company Carter Holt Harvey is in litigation with a couple of companies who built an industrial plant at one of its factories. Nothing too exciting in that you say… but this is where it gets interesting. In order to make their claim, CHH have to produce copies of the disputed invoices – ha you say, that’s easy, we know that CHH uses SAP, finding the invoices should be a simple process.

Not so – you see it seems that around the end of 2004, CHH changed suppliers of invoice scanning and storage services from Datacap to Datamail (not overly imaginative names it must be said). Unfortunately, and according to CHH themselves;

As part of this transfer CHH received copies from Datacap of the electronic invoices stored on Datacap’s system. However, it has since been determined that the records received from Datacap were incomplete and a number of invoices, including some relevant to this brief, are missing, despite significant correspondence with Datacap we have been unable to resolve this issue.

Stunningly around NZD 2million worth of invoices are missing and irretrievably lost in the ether – and remember, this is using a “robust” traditional ERP system and traditional physical storage solutions.

Remind me again where the risks lie with cloud computing? I reckon Shoeboxed would be interested in pitching for the CHH contract! Obviously this isn’t an issue with SAP per se – but it does second guess those who dismiss the cloud and SaaS because of perceived risks… like I’ve said before, bad stuff happens with on-premises as well.

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A few weeks ago I presented to the New Zealand Cloud Computing Summit. My presentation was titled “An overview of applications that are currently delivered via the cloud and potential applications for the future” however, taking a look at the delegate list a few weeks before the event it became clear that the average attendee was a C-level executive with very little cloud exposure – as such definitions and explanations were the best strategy for my talk.

While my presentation isn’t going to be anything new to the vast majority of readers, in my (entirely biased) opinion, it gives a good high level look at cloud computing, with enough case studies to hopefully show the value to be gained for enterprise by dabbling in the cloud.

I would have thought that the majority of us dealing with this stuff day to day but a post over on Enterprise Advocates got me wondering whether in fact I’d been naive in thinking this way. While the post itself picks up another topic, it highlights the emergence (at least from one person) of a new term to talk about Cloud Computing. The author is using the acronym SOC to stand for SaaS/On Demand/Cloud. The term had me scratching my head – cloud is, after all, an umbrella term under which SaaS, PaaS and IaaS fall. As such, both SaaS and On Demand l accept are a subset of Cloud, but shouldn’t be used in a way that suggests substitutability of the terms. As one commenter said;

The 3 [terms] are related, but Cloud Computing covers the whole topic. I think you should drop this new acronym because we already have too many confusing terms. Most organizations are happy to talk Cloud and as a sub text explain how that covers SaaS, Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service

Anyway – given the post it seems that my slideshow may, in fact, be timely. It’s been on Slideshare for a few weeks now and seems to have gained a bit of a following – either than or slideshare has had a quiet few weeks. EIther way, enjoy!

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