Enterprise 2.0

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We need a better definition for “mash-up”

2009/11/24 in Business-Technology, Enterprise 2.0, Knowledge Worker of the Future, Posterous | 5 comments

Mash-up no longer seems to mean was we thought it meant. The term has been claimed by the analysts and platform vendors as short hand for the current collection of hot product features, and no longer represents the goals and benefits of those original mash-ups that drew our interest. If we want to avoid the hype, firmly tying mash-up to the benefits we saw in those first solutions, then we need to reclaim the term, basing its definition on the outcomes those first mash-up solutions delivered, rather than the (fairly) conventional means used to deliver them.

Definitions are a good thing, as they help keep us all on the same page and make conversations easier. However, what often starts our as a powerful concept—with a clear value proposition—is rapidly diluted as the original definition gets pulled in different directions.

Over time, the foundation of a term’s definition moves from the outcome it represents (and the benefits this outcome provides), taking rest on the means which the original outcome was delivered, driven by everyones’ desire to define what they are doing in relation to the current hot topic. Next, the people who consider it to be just a means, often start redefining the meaning to make it more inclusive, while continuing to claim the original benefits. We end up selling the new hype as either means or goals or any half-hearted solution in between – and missing the original outcome nearly completely. 

The original mash-ups were simple things. Pulling together data from two or more sources to create a new consolidated view. Think push-pins on a map. Previously I would have had to access these data sources separately—find, select, remember, find, select correlation, click. With the mash-up this multi-step, and multi-decision workflow is reduced to a single look, select, click. Many decisions became one, and I was no longer forced to remember intermediate steps or data. 

It was this elimination of unnecessary decisions that first attracted many of us to the idea of a mash-up. As TQM, LEAN, et al tell us, unnecessary decisions are a source of errors. If we want to deliver high quality at a low cost (i.e. efficient and effective knowledge workers) then we need to eliminate these decisions. This helps us become more productive by spending a greater proportion of our time on the decisions that really matter, rather than on messy busy work. Fewer decisions also means fewer chances for mistakes.

Since those original mash-up solutions, our definition of mash-up evolved. Todays definitions are founded on the tools and techniques used to deliver a modern web-based GUI. These definitions focus on the technology standards, where the data is processed (client vs. server), standards and APIs, and even mention application architectures used. Rarely do they talk about the outcome delivered, or the benefits this brings.

There’s little difference, for example, between some mashups and a modern portal. We can debate the differences between aggregating data on the client vs. the server, but does it really matter if it doesn’t change the outcome, and the difference is invisible to the user? The same can be said for the use of standards, APIs used, user configuration options, differing solution architectures and so on.

The shift to a feature-function base definition has allowed the product vendors and analysts of seize control of our definition, and apply it to the next generation of products they would like us to buy. This has diluted the term to the point that it seems to cover much of what we’ve been doing for the last decade, and many of the benefits ascribed to the original mash-ups don’t apply to solutions which fit under this new, broader church.

Modern consumer home pages, such as iGoogle and NetVibes for example, do allow us to use desk and screen real estate more effectively–providing a small productivity boost–but they don’t address the root of the problem. Putting two gadgets on a page does little to fuse the data. The user is still required to scan the CRM and order management gadgets separately, fusing the data in their head.  Find, select, remember, find, select correlation, click rather than a single look, select, click.

The gadgets might be visually proximate, but we could do that with two browser windows. Or two green screens side-by-side. The user is still required to look at both, and establish the correlation themselves. The chair might not swivel as much as with old school portlets, but eyeballs still do, and we are still forcing the user to make unnecessary decisions about data correlation. They don’t deliver that eliminate unnecessary decisions outcome that first attracted us to mash-ups.

The gold standard we need to measure potential mash-ups against is the melding of data used to eliminate unnecessary decisions. This might something visual, like push-pins on a map or markup on an x-ray. Or it might cover tabular data, where different cells in the table are sourced from different back-end systems. (Single customer view generated at the user interface.) If we fuse the data, building new gadgets which pull data attributes and function into one consistent view, then we eliminate these decisions. We can even extend this to function, allowing the user to trigger a workflow or process that make sense in the view they are presented, but with no knowledge of what or where implements the workflow.

We need a definition for mash-ups is that captures this outcome. Something like:

A mash-up is a user interface, or user interface element, that melds data and function from multiple sources to create one single, seamless view of a topic, eliminating unnecessary decisions and actions.

This v0.1 definition provides a nice, terse, strong definition for mash-up which we can hang a number of concrete benefits from.

  • More productive knowledge workers. Our knowledge workers only spend time on the decisions that really matter, rather than on messy busy work, making them more productive.
  • More effective knowledge workers. Fewer decisions mean fewer chances for mistakes, reducing the cost of error recovery and rework resulting in more effective knowledge workers.

Posted via email from PEG @ Posterous

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Enterprise Mashups Defined

2009/10/27 in Business-Technology, Posterous | 1 comment

Luis Derechin, of JackBe has just published a nice definition of enterprise mashups over at the Enterprise Web 2.0 Blog:

Enterprise Mashups are secure, visually rich web applications that expose actionable information from diverse internal and external information sources.

This seems to cover all the bases and should keep most people happy. I’d like it to include something about how the data is integrated to provide a single consolidated and consistent view of the information, as a traditional (but AJAX heavy) portal would probably fall into under the same definition. On the whole it still works for me though.

The most interesting thing, however, is the approach they used. Rather than gather yet another small group of smart people to write yet another manifesto, they took a more democratic route.

The team used a series of games and contests to engage the broader community, largely relegating themselves to a roll of guiding and coordinating the action. The end result were answers to three key questions:

  • What is an Enterprise Mashup?, (the definition from above)
  • How do you do create an Enterprise Mashup?, and
  • Why should an organization care about mashups?’

The answer don’t have the obvious “designed by committee” smell that these things acquire. I particularly like the statement on why to use enterprise mash-ups,

Poor decisions are often made because decision-makers do not have the right information at the right time. Enterprise Mashups deliver new insights and enable better decisions through personalized access to the right, real-time information for the specific problem at hand.

as it nicely captures the shift to a more use centred approach–something badly needed in enterprise IT.

Often it seems to the be the enterprise IT community that is the most resistant to change in an organisation. Sure, we might like to use the shiny new toys, but don’t you dare change how we go about our business. We’ll tell you what you need and the best way of doing it.

It’s nice to see that an old dog can learn new tricks.

Posted via email from PEG

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Why we can’t keep up

2009/06/22 in Business-Technology | 7 comments

We’re struggling to keep up. The pace of business seems to be constantly accelerating. Requirements don’t just slip anymore: they can change completely during the delivery of a solution. And the application we spent the last year nudging over the line into production became instant legacy before we’d even finished. We know intuitively that only a fraction of the benefits written into the business case will be realized. What do we need to do to get back on top of this situation?

We used to operate in a world where applications were delivered on time and on budget. One where the final solution provided a demonstrable competitive advantage to the business. Like SABER, and airline reservation system developed for American Airlines by IBM which was so successful that the rest of the industry was forced to deploy similar solutions (which IBM kindly offered to develop) in response. Or Walmart, who used a data warehouse to drive category leading supply chain excellence, which they leveraged to become the largest retailer in the world. Both of these solutions were billion dollar investments in todays money.

The applications we’ve delivered have revolutionized information distribution both within and between organizations. The wave of data warehouse deployments triggered by Walmart’s success formed the backbone for category management. By providing suppliers with a direct feed from the data warehouse—a view of supply chain state all the way from the factory through to the tills—retailers were able to hand responsibility for transport, shelf-stacking, pricing and even store layout for a product category to their suppliers, resulting in a double digit rises in sales figures.

This ability to rapidly see and act on information has accelerated the pulse of business. What used to take years now takes months. New tools such as Web 2.0 and pervasive mobile communications are starting to convert these months into week.

Take the movie industry for example. Back before the rise of the Internet even bad films could expect a fair run at the box-office, given a star billing and strong PR campaign too attract the punters. However, post Internet, SMS and Twitter, the bad reviews have started flying into punters hands moments after the first screening of a film has started, transmitted directly from the first audience. Where the studios could rely a month or of strong returns, now that run might only last hours.

To compensate, the studios are changing how they take films to market; running more intensive PR campaigns for their lesser offerings, clamping down on leaks, and hoping to make enough money to turn a small profit before word of mouth kicks in. Films are launched, distributed and released to DVD (or even iTunes) in weeks rather than months or years, and studios’ funding, operations and the distribution models are being reconfigured to support the accelerated pace of business.

While the pulse of business has accelerated, enterprise technology’s pulse rate seems to have barely moved. The significant gains we’ve made in technology and methodologies has been traded for the ability to build increasingly complex solutions, the latest being ERP (enterprise resource planning) whose installation in a business is often compared to open heart surgery.

The Diverging Pulse Rates of Business and Technology

This disconnect between the pulse rates of business and enterprise technology is the source of our struggle. John Boyd found his way to the crux of the problem with his work on fighter tactics.

John Boyd—also know as “40 second Boyd”—was a rather interesting bloke. He had a standing bet for 40 dollars that he beat any opponent within 40 seconds in a dog fight. Boyd never lost his bet.

The key to Boyd’s unblemished record was a single insight: that success in rapidly changing environment depends on your ability to orient yourself, decide on, and execute a course of action, faster than the environment (or your competition) is changing. He used his understanding of the current environment—the relative positions, speed and performance envelopes of both planes—to quickly orient himself then select and act on a tactic. By repeatedly taking decisive action faster than his opponent can react, John Boyd’s actions were confusing and unpredictable to his opponent.

We often find ourselves on the back foot, reacting to seemingly chaotic business environment. To overcome this we need to increase the pulse of IT so that we’re operating at a higher pace than the business we support. Tools like LEAN software development have provided us with a partial solution, accelerating the pulse of writing software, but if we want to overcome this challenge then we need to find a new approach to managing IT.

Business, however, doesn’t have a single pulse. Pulse rate varies by industry. It also varies within a business. Back office compliance runs at a slow rate, changing over years as reporting and regulation requirements slowly evolve. Process improvement and operational excellence programs evolve business processes over months or quarters to drive cost out of the business. While customer or knowledge worker facing functionality changes rapidly, possibly even weekly, in response to consumer, marketing or workforce demands.

Aligning technology with business

We can manage each of these pulses separately. Rather than using a single approach to managing technology and treating all business drivers as equals, we can segment the business and select management strategies to match the pulse rate and amplitude of each.

Sales, for example, is often victim of an over zealous CRM (customer relationship management) deployment. In an effort to improve sales performance we’ll decide to role out the latest-greatest CRM solution. The one with the Web 2.0 features and funky cross-sell, up-sell module.

Only of a fraction of the functionality in the new CRM solution is actually new though—the remainder being no different to the existing solution. The need to support 100% of the investment on the benefits provided by a small fraction of the solution’s features dilutes the business case. Soon we find ourselves on the same old roller-coaster ride, with delivery running late,  scope creeping up, the promised benefits becoming more intangible every minute, and we’re struggling to keep up.

There might be an easier way. Take the drugs industry for example. Sales are based on relationships and made via personal calls on doctors. Sales performance is driven by the number of sales calls a representative can manage in a week, and the ability to answer all of a doctor’s questions during a visit (and avoid the need for a follow-up visit to close the sale). It’s not uncommon for tasks unrelated to CRM—simple tasks such as returning to the office to process expenses or find an answer to a question—to consume a disproportionate amount of time. Time that would be better spent closing sales.

One company came up with an interesting approach. To support the sales reps in the field they provided them with the ability to query the team back in the office, answering a clients question without the need to return to head office and then try to get back in their calendar. The solution was to deploy a corporate version of Twitter, connecting the sales rep into the with the call center and all staff using the company portal via a simple text message.

By separating concerns in this way—by managing each appropriately—we can ensure that we are working at a faster pace than the business driver we supporting. By allocating our resources wisely we can set the amplitude of each pulse. Careful management of the cycles will enable us to bring business and technology into alignment.

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The Value of Enterprise Architecture

2009/05/07 in Business-Technology, IT Strategy, Presentations | No comments

Note: Updated with the slides and script from 2011′s lecture.

Is Enterprise Architecture in danger of becoming irrelevant? And if so, what can we do about it?

Presented as part of RMIT’s Master of Technology (Enterprise Architecture) course.

The Value of Enterprise Architecture

The Value of Enterprise Architecture

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Applications let us differentiate, not!

2009/02/15 in Business-Technology, IT Strategy, Mailing List | No comments

Being involved in enterprise IT, we tend to think that the applications we build, install and maintain will provide a competitive advantage to the companies we work for.

Take Walmart, for example. During the early 80s, Walmart invested heavily in creating a data warehouse to help it analyze its end-to-end supply chain. The data was used to statically optimize Walmart’s supply chain, creating the most efficient, lowest cost supply chain in the world at the time. Half the savings were passed on to Walmart’s customers, half whet directly to the bottom line, and the rest is history. The IT asset, the data warehouse, enabled Walmart to differentiate, while the investment and time required to develop the data warehouse created a barrier to competition. Unfortunately this approach doesn’t work anymore.

Fast forward to the recent past. The market for enterprise applications has grown tremendously since Walmart first brought that data warehouse online. Today, applications providing solutions to most business problems are available from a range of vendors, and at a fraction of the cost required for the first bespoke solutions that blazed the enterprise application trail. Walmart even replaced that original bespoke supply chain data warehouse, which had become something of an expensive albatross, with an off-the-rack solution. How is it possible for enterprise applications to provide a competitive advantage if we’re all buying from the same vendors?

One argument is that differentiation rests in how we use enterprise applications, rather than in the applications themselves. Think of the manufacturing industries (to use a popular analogy at the moment). If two companies have access to identical factories, then they can still make different, and differentiated, products. Now think of enterprise applications as business process factories. Instead of turning out products, we use these factories to turn out business processes. These digital process factories are very flexible. Even if we all start with the same basic functionality, if I’m smarter at configuring the factory, then I’ll get ahead over time and create a competitive advantage.

This analogy is so general that it’s hard to disagree with. Yes, enterprise applications are (mostly) commodities so any differentiation they might provide now rests in how you use them. However, this is not a simple question of configuration and customization. The problem is a bit more nuanced than that.

Many companies make the mistake that customizing (code changes etc) their unique business processes into an application will provide them with a competitive advantage. Unfortunately the economics of the enterprise software market mean that they are more likely to have created an albatross for their enterprise, than provided a competitive advantage.

Applications are typically parameterized bespoke solutions. (Many of the early enterprise applications were bespoke COBOL solutions where some of the static information—from company name through shop floor configuration—has been pushed into databases as configuration parameters. ) The more configuration parameters provided by the vendor, the more you can bend the application to a shape that suits you.

Each of these configuration parameters requires and investment of time and effort to develop and maintain. They complicate the solution, pushing up its maintenance cost. This leads vendors to try and minimize the number of configuration points they provide to a set of points that will meet most, but not all customers’ needs. In practical terms, it is not possible to configure an application to let you differentiate in a meaningful way. The configuration space is simply too small.

Some companies resort to customizing the application—changing its code—to get their “IP” in. While this might give you a solution reflecting how your business runs today, every customization takes you further from a packaged solution (low cost, easy to maintain, relatively straight forward to upgrade …) and closer to a bespoke solution (high cost, expensive to maintain, difficult or impossible to upgrade). I’ve worked with a number of companies where an application is so heavily customized that it is impossible to deploy vendor patches and/or upgrades. The application that was supposed to help them differentiate had become an expensive burden.

Any advantage to be wrung from enterprise IT now comes from the gaps between applications, not from the applications themselves. Take supply chain for example. Most large businesses have deployed planning and supply chain management solutions, and have been on either the LEAN or Six Sigma journey. Configuring your planning solution slightly differently to your competitors is not going to provide much of an edge, as we’re all using the same algorithms, data models and planning drivers to operate our planning process.

Most of the potential for differentiation now lies with the messier parts of the process, such as exception management (the people who deal with stock-outs and lost or delayed shipments). If I can bring together a work environment that makes my exception managers more productive than yours—responding more rapidly and accurately to exceptions—then I’ve created a competitive advantage as my supply chain is now more agile than yours. If I can capture what it is that my exception managers do, their non-linear and creative problem solving process, automate it, and use this to create time and space for my exception managers to continuously improve how supply chain disruptions are handled, then I’ve created a sustainable competitive advantage. (This is why Enterprise 2.0 is so exciting, since a lot of this IP in this space is tacit information or collaboration.)

Simply configuring an application with today’s best practice—how your company currently does stuff—doesn’t cut it. You need to understand the synergies between your business and the technologies available, and find ways to exploit these synergies. The trick is to understand the 5% that really makes your company different, and then reconfiguring both the business and technology to amplify this advantage while commoditizing the other 95%. Rolls-Royce (appears to be) a great example of getting this right. Starting life as an manufacturer of aircraft engines, Rolls Royce has leveraged its deep understanding of how aircraft engines work (from design through operation and maintenance), reifying this knowledge in a business and IT estate that can provide clients with a service to keep their aircraft moving.

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