A corporate second life

At the end of last year I posted an article SaaS, SOA, Social Networks, Top 5 Predictions for 2008 in which I predicted that “Social networking sites such as FaceBook and MySpace will grow into the Enterprise, but not as we know it”.  I went on to say that large corporations would want to take advantage of centralised functions and build user friendly collaboration services.  What I did not expect was IBM to take the lead and offer to host private versions of the online virtual reality world Second Life for corporate use as reported by InfomationAge a couple of days ago.  If it is true this is intriguing.  I have been unable to verify the report as no information has been published on this particular Second Life subject by IBM.  However, it is well known that IBM has been investing in a heavy duty presence in Second Life and has been undertaking research and development in this area for a couple of years.  I reported my experiences in Second Life a few months ago, see How do you express yourself in a virtual world? and I am afraid I still do not have a favourable view. However, if IBM have taken the system, industrialised and secured it, then I have no doubt all of my concerns will have been resolved and it will become a fascinating interface.  Imagine yourself as an avatar in a virtual environment (within your company) wondering around looking for information. Instead of portals, menus and hyperlinks, there will be venues, signposts and other avatars to give you directions… a bit like walking the corridors and talking to people.  It could work, it certainly has potential. 

                   

Mobile is back in the news

There seems to be quite a lot of interest in mobility and mobile working this week centred on the use of smart phone devices.  Both in the commercial and consumer sectors.  For me the Blackberry became a way of life several years ago. I know we are advised to occasionally switch it off, and we all agree that we should, but in reality most of us have accepted there is now going back and working life now has become part of our private live as well.  But it’s not altogether a bad thing.  It’s a bit like flexi-time, the blackberry allows me to keep on top of e-mail over the weekend and then gives me the time to get a haircut on Monday morning (without a single twinge of guilt).  At the end of the day it is about managing your time effectively, that’s all of your time not just work-time or private-time.  Silicon.com reported yesterday that in a interview with Monica Basso, research VP at Gartner, she said: “Mobility is going mainstream. It is maturing and enterprises are moving from a phase of experimentation into a phase of rationalisation, where mobility investments are part of the overall IT picture”.  In the IT industry we have seen and lived this for years, it is good to see that the rest of the market is catching up.  The key will be not just the ease of access to e-mail, but the integration into back-end IT systems and services.  In the consumer sector, recent research by Oliver Wyman showed that consumers were becoming more and more used to using mobile banking services and payment services were set to take off.  After interviewing 30 European players in the payments industry they concluded that just over half (57 per cent) of companies in this sector  expect to see strong growth over the next 12 months, and respondents were “very confident” that the advanced payments industry will make significant progress in 2008/09.  I’m surprised the figure is so low, I make payments by phone on a regular basis.  As a regular traveller into London, I now use the text payment facility to pay the congestion charge.  It is probably one of the simplest payments I make during a day.  Maybe not the most sophisticated mobile transaction, but isn’t that the point, these things are to make my life easier.

                   

Touch screen prices drop, volumes up

Anyone who has read just a few of my posts will know that I am a big fan of Apple and especially of the Apple iTouch device (I have not bought an iPhone yet,what I really need is for Apple to support Blackberry or for someone to jailbreak the iPhone and produce a Blackberry app…).  Computing ran a good article last week - “Touch screens push all the right buttons” by Robert Jaques who wrote about some recently published research from the analyst company called iSuppli who has predicted “global shipment revenue for the leading touch-screen technologies will rise to $4.4 billion by 2012, up from $2.4 billion in 2006“.  Jennifer Colegrove, senior analyst for emerging displays at iSuppli said “Catalysed by Apple’s iPhone, sales of touch screens using projected-capacitive technology are growing dramatically“.  It would appear that behind the scenes there are may different types of touch screen; resistive technology being very old-hat; projected-capacitive the new world (as the price has recently come down thanks to the iPhone); optical imaging; infrared and conductive polymer!  The one that caught my eye, or should I say gave me a buzz, was ‘tactical feedback technology’, a screen that delivers a sensation like touching a physical button, fantastic.  The fact that the cost of screen technology is coming down is not surprising, but it is welcomed.  At some point it will mean that someone, probably Apple, will get the form factor right for the business use handheld with a decent touch screen and those of us that spend most of our working lives travelling will no longer have to hawk around ridiculously heavy laptops - mind you… have you seen the latest Apple MacBook Air… another story (by the way I don’t work for apple and have never done so… but I know good design)

                   

Wiki for the enterprise

Wikis have been around for some time now and have met a mixed response from the Enterprise.  I have seen them being used to great effect in development environments between a bunch of developers when building FAQs or knowledge bases and equally have seen them fail miserably when used by marketers to create marketing collateral. If we make an assumption that the skill to use the tool is about the same for a developer and a marketer  (big assumption, mind you anything you say about a marketer is a big assumption), then the reason for success or failure is more to do with the attitude of mind in using the tool.  That is, do I find it useful, or more to the point, do I find it useful to collaborate?  The answer is, as with most things, it depends.  If I am putting together a FAQ, then yes I want to make sure I have covered everything and get a wide variety of input.  If I am developing a proposition to take to market, yes I’m interested in other peoples views, but when it comes to crafting the document, if I am the expert, I want to take the lead and do it myself (thank you very much).  A forced collaboration through the introduction of some new technology may not be the best way to proceed.  There are a number of good providers in the market at the moment, Microsoft of course with its Sharepoint technology if you want the ultimate in collaboration and want to integrate into your back office systems.  MediaWiki, the open source software behind wikipedia (you could even do a comparison of wiki software at wikipedia to see what they say about wiki software) Deki Wiki from MindTouch if all you want is a wiki (the software is free, they charge for support).  Alternatively, there are some free Internet based wikis available, like wikispaces or wikidot, these tend to be low in functionality but are a good starting place if you you want to get a feel for collaborative document work… but don’t let your corporate IT group know you are using of-site IT facilities…

                   

Microsoft opens product interfaces

Microsoft announced today a “… set of broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices to increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for developers, partners, customers and competitors” in a press release and associated conference with recorded highlights.  So what does this mean?  Actually a great deal.  It may seem like Microsoft are simply utilising their phenomenal marketing machine to say to the world “we are going open” and indeed they are, they will get a great deal of press out of this move.  However, this is a bold step for Microsoft who have relied on market dominance and lock-in to ensure product sales into the future.  No doubt it will be a while before we can really take advantage of even the 30,000 pages of information that has been published on MSDN today let alone the the huge amount of information and documentation promised for the future.

                   

A good reason for SaaS

Some 75% of European IT decision makers and CIOs felt they could not make the business case to implement management information systems that would enable them to run their businesses competitively, according to research by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates commissioned by HP.  It is a very sad fact that 92% of the same respondents felt that their organisations were not fully exploiting the competitive advantage that their data held.  I have to say my first thought on this was that someone should give this set of CIOs a good slap and tell them to get their act together and build a sensible business case.  However, coincidentally I was faced with a management information problem myself this week and of course it is not as simple as we would like to think.  Data stores have been created in large enterprises over years and often decades.  The relationship models put in place yesterday frequently have little relevance to the requirements of the business today.  The data stores are usually numerous, varied and disconnected.  Where a system was built to be ‘flexible’ the resulting data is so varied it can be impossible to correlate any trends or relationships.  Is there a quick fix, well generally no, but for some things yes.  Throw the data away and start again.  For many things, especially internal systems running internal processes it is often cheaper and more efficient to trash the old system and buy-in a pre-built service… don’t do it in that order though.

                   

Small devices to radically change industry

Well it seems Bill is throwing the cat among the pigeons again, I refer  to Bill Gates’ statement (see the interview here) yesterday to the UK Institute of Directors that in 30 years technology had come a long way but it was “not even halfway there in terms of building the systems we need to have.” The challenge to the IT industry and to commercial leaders alike was to speed things up.  Gates is in a unique position, he has view of the best and most innovative trends in the industry and people listen to him when he speaks.  It is interesting to note however that one of the areas he focused on was how users will interact with small devices, he said “The devices themselves will get a lot smaller, more powerful and connect to the internet” and this would radically change the way business and staff will use and interact with technology.  It is this area of course where Apple, not Microsoft, excels and is leading the charge, first with the iPod, then the iTouch, both consumer devices and finally with the iPhone, the first true business device.  Where Apple has concentrated on the user interface and the device, and it is a fantastic interface and device, Microsoft is looking at the business systems that sit at the back end.  A good strategy, cos that’s where the money is.  It’s a shame though that Microsoft has lost its way in the area of user interface design, especially as it is exactly that where Bill made his fortune in the first place.

                   

SaaS Management Platforms

I have long been a fan of Phil Wainewrite’s ZDNet blog “Software as Services“, yes that is not a typo, he does quite rightly call the blog Software as Services.  His last two entries “Enterprise SaaS and the Cloud” and “How to Package up the SaaS Platform” have been an educational delight.  Let me start by reiterating the advice Phil gives to ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) about building a SaaS application, he says:

ISVs today have three choices when setting out to build a SaaS application:

1. Build the application on your own infrastructure, which you’ll have to assemble from scratch using open source and commodity components.
2. Build it on a packaged platform from an established application infrastructure vendor such as Oracle, Microsoft, Progress Software, etc.
3. Build it on a cloud computing platform and let the provider take care of the infrastructure for you.

Now here’s the thing, the choices have nothing to do with the application itself, Phil is not giving us a long list of do’s and don’ts about what sort of SaaS applications work or the benefit of his experience to quickly overcome things that have failed in the past.  No, he has gone straight to the heart of the matter, that is the infrastructure and management platform upon which the SaaS application will run.  Thus we see two types of business here; the infrastructure and platform provider, the guys who are concerned with the management of the applications, that is, how they are hosted, catalogued, discovered, secured, provisioned and finally billed for; then there are the applications themselves and the business problems they assist in or resolve.  Once again we see SalesForce.com leading a charge here, they built their own application on their own infrastructure (type 1), then introduces some packaged vendor code (type 2) and now finally, realising the strength of the management platform they have now lease it as a cloud (type 3) for vendors as force.com to do their own development.  Force.com is not on it’s own offering ‘cloud development facilities for SaaS applications though, there are a plethora of smaller companies entering into the fray including  Bungee Connect focusing on CRM type apps (still in beta), Coghead with a selection of fairly simple apps and Iceberg whose promise  is to “allow non-technical users to create Enterprise applications in hours - no code required”.  All pretty much in startup mode, but beginning to make an impact.

                   

How do you express yourself in a virtual world?

Forrester has recently published a report on “Getting Work Done In Virtual Worlds” as reported by ComputerWorldUK yesterday.  They suggest that the popular 3D world such as Second Life will be as important to business in five years as the Internet is today.  I have no doubt this will be the case, five years is a long, long time in this business.  I suspect that virtual worlds will be come very important a lot sooner.  However, I have to say I spent a very unproductive few hours over the weekend seeking out corporate land in Second Life to see what big business was up to.  Not only were the corporate presences of IBM, Microsoft, Cisco and Fujitsu entirely predictable in that they were simply billboards for for their respective companies and lacked any creative or novel design, they were not even populated.  I did bump into two people on the Microsoft campus. I say people, actually one of them was a rather bizarre looking spider who announced that I should not fear him as he had already had his fill humans today. It is little wonder that IBM has already published official guidance governing employee behaviour in the IBM Second Life sales centre.  One of the big advantages that Forrester see is the ability to make gestures in this brave new world, they say “You can easily direct your avatar to express gestures and emotions …”.  I have to say this has not been my experience. It took me some time to figure out how to ‘emote’ gestures and when I did I found them limited to a few very obvious things like laughing, crying, waving and blowing raspberries… not the sort of thing I do in the office often.  That and the ever present dink, dink, dink of people bumping into walls, chairs and tables made the experience anything but pleasant.  It will take time to sort out the teething problems, I would agree that the interface problems have been largely sorted out in the better online games, Second Life will catch up as the money rolls in, and it is true that corporate life on the Internet also started as a company billboard.

                   

SaaS, SOA, Social Networks, Top 5 Predictions for 2008

Well why not… it’s that time of the year, look back and reflect on all those things you meant to do, or look forward and predict what will happen in the future.  Is your glass half empty or half full?  Well I’m going to look forward so here we go, my top 5 predictions for the coming year :

1. Social networking sites such as FaceBook and MySpace will grow into the Enterprise, but not as we know it.  Already we are seeing a backlash because of advertising, people are beginning to create their own private social networks and beginning to see the real power of collaboration.  Large Enterprises will not be slow to catch on, everyone want’s their own space at work, and everyone wants to collaborate and take advantage of centralised functions, what better way to do this than with the FaceBook model but without the Mickey Mouse consumer applets and advertising.

2. SOA will become so mainstream that it will be taken as a given that all new projects will be based on a service oriented architecture.  Knowledge of SOA has now reached the point where it is obvious there will be long-term cost advantages though its implementation, all of the product vendors are punting SOA enable products.  Only a fool would take an alternative route.  Much more emphasis will be on the business side of SOA and how to best take advantage of the services that have been created or will become available.

3. Business Process Management tools will become the next big thing in applications circles, yes I know they have been around for a long time, but it has always been a bit confusing and a bit of a black art.  As SOA programmes mature, we will see a shift to the business user and therefore a need to utilise this technology properly.  To date there has been a lot of emphasis on integration tools at the back end and modelling tools at the front end.  Next year we will see a dramatic increase in the join, that is, using modelling tools to model and then drive and run the services.

4. One more big SaaS player will emerge.  I wish I could predict who it will be.  Clearly the SalesForce model is working and has now become a threat to the big software providers and to the biggest systems integrators and service companies.  One of them will announce an alternate set of offerings/services and attack the medium to large Enterprise space

5. The e-reader will finally come into its own.  Actually I think it will take until 2009 for this to happen, but I’m really hoping that Sony or Amazon will come up with better versions of the Digital Book and the Kindle.  The concepts are fantastic and will, I have no doubt, revolutionise both our work and social lives, but the devices are just plain horrible.  The best device of the year has to be the iTouch (not sure about the iPhone), its a real shame it did not include an e-reader in the package.

And finally, many thanks to Jason Slater for his light heated top 5 alternative predictions for 2008:

We will start getting the bandwidth we ordered on Broadband.

Spam will mysteriously disappear overnight.

Microsoft and Apple will merge their operating systems in a bid to end Linux.

No public personal data will be lost by large public organisations.

A re-discovered Analogue will re-emerge as a superior alternative to digital.

A very Merry Christmas and  Happy New year to you all!