Content Log

Symbiosis of Cloud and On-Premise Enterprises

Symbiosis: One is free to move, the other is not. But they both need each other. 

Eventually we will see computing as a utility like electricity that will be consumed on demand. I also believe that cloud infrastructure providers will ultimately be able to undercut the cost advantages and carbon footprint of the data centers of even the largest companies. Just not yet.

As Gartner’s 2012 Predicts, Cloud Computing dated December 8, 2011:

"The perceived (and real) risks to the technical reliability, integrity and security of applications and data that are entrusted to cloud providers hold back organizations' initiatives."

For many CIOs, we as an industry still need to overcome security issues, build trust from the IT organization, ensure open exchange of information, and even negotiate treaties on the rights of information domicile and ownership.

However, there are benefits to using the cloud and even the public cloud starting today that can transcend these issues. There are several use cases that require a cloud platform, particularly in the context of content and collaboration, that would not be possible or at least very difficult today. The first is when sharing information between companies, such as those that are currently described as an extranet, only easier to set up. The second is when information is public anyway and the efficiencies of cloud make distributing this information more efficient as well. The third is where the risk or cost of hacking or intrusion is low compared to a relatively high cost of operating computing resources internally. The fourth is when the need to provide information externally, particularly for the purposes of accessing in mobile environments, outweighs the relative risk of exposure of that information.

Business to Business Collaboration

Credit: Confederation of Indian Industry, Jan 2011

Business-to-Business Collaboration through IT systems has always been difficult when any one side of the collaboration is responsible for the infrastructure. Trying to get the IT organization in a large corporation, even a technology vendor, to set up an external system that is accessible from outside the firewall is nearly impossible—not from a technology perspective, but from an administrative perspective. And there is no way that the IT organization is providing a VPN.

This often leads to the default means for collaboration, which is email. I have been involved in enough standards and board meetings to recognize this is a real problem for even the big IT vendors. Perhaps this can be done with Private Cloud instances outside the firewall, but that again would require thinly stretched IT resources. Yet this needs to be done when two or more companies cooperate on development of products, joint bid offerings to customers or coordinated marketing campaigns. At the end of the collaboration, the results need to be owned by everyone, not just the one who set up the collaboration.

Public Information

Information that is public by default provides another opportunity to share in the cloud. When I first started broaching the subject of Cloud Computing with CIOs and IT departments, I was met with a bit of incredulity about why anyone would want to do this. However, the idea of putting information that was already or should be public in the Cloud didn't really meet much resistance. After all, this is what everyone is doing with web content, either in a DMZ or CDN and Cloud provides an excellent vehicle to manage that content. Marketing departments want to provide marketing material to potential customers and see that material as wasted as long as it is behind the firewall. Also some government agencies must provide certain information to the public by law. If it is going to be public anyway, putting it behind the firewall is only hiding that information.

Small, Medium and Underserved Organizations

Medium and small size organizations are likely to have an IT department that is swamped, if they have one at all. This is the situation we have for internal systems here at Alfresco, like HR and expenses. However, this situation is not limited to smaller companies as even large companies have their underserved departments with strained resources likely focused on core business processes. Many collaboration and content needs may not get met and it may be impossible to know what the impact will be.

Smaller companies are more likely take the risk of putting content in the cloud or with a SaaS vendor, but increasingly, it is becoming more acceptable for non-mission critical departments to also store information in the cloud or with a service. That is if that service can be shown to guarantee security.

Sometimes speed of execution outweighs the risk of exposure. Many on-demand projects or customer interactions require IT resources "Right Now!" or business will be lost. Limiting the time of exposure in the wild or public sphere may help, but if business demands immediate access and IT cannot provide that, then organizations will seek ways to make it happen.

The Mobile Worker

Finally, there is that nether world outside of the office, but still in the domain of the enterprise. Increasingly, we are doing more and more work outside of an office. Right at this moment, I am writing this in my home office, away from any distractions. I am often on the road working - in the air, in a hotel, in a convention center - on presentations, plans or reports, much of which I would just keep in the enterprise. A similar situation exists where workers are out in the field or at a customer site, where working outside the office is essential. Increasingly, this work is being done on tablets and mobile devices.

These are situations where you would want to have the mobile device or laptop be seen as an extension of the firewall. However, using VPN connections is not always practical and can create their own security concerns. If you could put and store the content and materials you need to get the job done in the cloud, you would not only make yourself more productive, you could raise the productivity of the entire organization. This of course assumes that the content is secure and perhaps available only for the duration of the task at hand. The value of the work should exceed the risk of exposing the content.

Content Symbiosis

There are many more situations where you wouldn't want to put content into the cloud. Any corporation that is regulated should consider documents and content under regulation and be stored on premise. Highly sensitive information such as board documents or legal documents should be maintained behind firewalls. I know of two very large corporations with very popular cloud services that are using Alfresco to store their documents behind the firewall for this reason. Records whose final disposition is managed and destruction guaranteed should be stored in a controlled environment. Mission-critical documents that must be absolutely accurate and must not be tampered with should also be considered behind the firewall.

However, these new use cases are so much easier in the cloud. They become the reason to start to move to the cloud and actually add value to the enterprise systems to which they are connected. As Gartner puts it:

"Users should plan for a gradual shift from on-premises IT architectures toward a hybrid model in which these architectures coexist and interoperate with public-cloud-based architectures. For most midsize to large user organizations, a shift to a totally public-cloud-based strategy will not happen during the next five years."

I have heard the term "Hybrid" used for this combination of In-the-Cloud and On-Premise enterprise structure. I prefer to use the term "Symbiosis" since these environments are very complementary and help maintain the health of each. The more symbiotic these systems are, the more effectively they will work. Just like symbiosis, the cloud and on-premise may be very different, but have evolved to derive mutual benefit. If you remember your high school biology, this is called Mutualism. From a content perspective, we can see how these use cases of on-demand content services, enabling mobile working and facilitating B2B collaboration can help the enterprise thrive. Likewise, the enterprise is the protector of information and the producer of content from internal processes.

Like any symbiotic relationship, these systems will reach a balance. As I said previously, I think it will be a long time before the cloud becomes a dominant component. However, equilibrium of 80/20 where 80 percent is in the enterprise and 20 percent is in the cloud could be something we see in the next few years. We are far from that equilibrium at the moment, but the signs are there. If we look at this as a symbiotic integration of systems, it's easier to see how we get there.

Our next lesson on Content Biology will be about “Content Osmosis”.

A Month in the Bay Area

Sixteen years ago, my wife, my 9 month-old son and I left the San Francisco Bay area to live in the UK. I was still at Documentum, but I had always wanted to return after starting a company, which ended up being Documentum. Since then I have constantly flown back and forth between the UK and SFO. 

Friday before last, I returned from one month in the bay area with my family. This is not something I tweeted about or put onto Facebook. There were enough warnings about this on the Internet to make sure I didn't say "Hey burglars! You still have 31 days left to rob my house!" In fact, I unintentionally made it a one month holiday off of Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and most things SocialNetwork.

That's me on the left - that little dot next to the Golden Gate Bridge

The purpose of the trip was to re-establish connections in the Bay Area (I'm a Cal grad!), to network in Silicon Valley and do a reality or "sur-reality" check on the state of technology. As William Gibson noted "The future is here, just not evenly distributed." Living in Europe has its own interesting sur-realities and in most cases stuff just moves faster (too fast?) in the valley. I have tried to take an extended period of time every 5 years or so and the last time was much longer than that. Besides, I have a lot of family in California and a day trip into SFO or San Jose just doesn't allow any sort of good catch up time.

I guess the way to think about it was that I was doing good old fashioned social networking, not internet social networking. I also had a few objectives that I wanted to accomplish.

First, I wanted to understand how consumer and enterprise were intersecting. As Geoffrey Moore noted in working session with AIIM, end users of software are asking "Why am I so powerful as a Consumer and so lame as an Employee?" The conclusion that most enterprise software companies have come to as the antidote is to make their software more like consumer software. "We are the Facebook for the enterprise!" they will exclaim. I have never been convinced of this and wanted to get other opinions, particularly of consumer internet companies. I also wanted to see if the traditional enterprise software guys are staring to get it.

Second, as we are approaching the launch of our Software as a Service later this year, I wanted to explore what the best practices are in operating SaaS in the Cloud. What are the adoption rates? What are the hardware requirements? What are the best practices in pricing and billing? How do you value a Freemium service? Etc., etc., etc.! Interesting there is more experience of this in San Francisco than on the peninsula. A real reversal of fortunes from when I left the bay area in 1995, not that either is doing too badly!

Third, I wanted a first hand observation of the Clockspeed effect first introduced to me by my friend and Documentum co-founder, Howard Shao. (It's too bad he was skiing in South America, which he always does during the North American summer.) The book Clockspeed (http://www.amazon.com/Clockspeed-Winning-Industry-Temporary-Advantage/dp/0738201537) by Charles Fine says that markets consolidate to a point of unsustainable Oligopoly or Monopoly until their whole ecosystem is exploded by a new wave of either vertical or horizontal integration. One example given was the horizontal integration of the Wintel platform that is now being challenged by new vertical integration platforms. These new vertical integration platforms have everything to do with cloud, mobile, social and consumer. This is going to lead to radically new ecosystems and I wanted to meet and work with the participants in these new ecosystems.

Finally, it's hard to overemphasize the role that personal life can have on professional life and the need to balance the two. I am of a generation that didn't do this very well and I can only try my best. Normally, I fly into SFO, try to see some of my siblings, niece and nephew, and the then head out to non-stop meetings as jet lag takes it toll. This is no way to do either. As my sister said last year, "Of course John, we love to meet with you and watch you fall asleep over dinner. :-)" I not only want to get some quality time accomplishing my professional goals, I wanted to see old friends and spend time with my family. I wanted my kids to see where we used to live and what it's like living in the bay area. In the end, I could have done better on this and everything really, but the trip was very fulfilling.

I will be blogging (I hope) about the first three points over the coming days and weeks, but not the last part. If we are connected on Facebook, you can learn all about that side of the trip. However, in the meantime, I thought I would include this photo of some of the old-timers from Documentum. We were able to meet up at the Hopyard Brewery in Pleasanton. It was great to see everyone so well and so healthy given how old we all are. ;-) I hope we can get more people next time I do this. 

Jim Donahue (Dr. Object), Kendall Smith, Nicki Crosswhite, Dana Ford, Roger Kilday, Lalith Subramanian, John Klassen, me, Cathy Herbert, Jeff Miller.

Brainstorming at Fortune Brainstorm in Half Moon Bay, CA

Groucho Marx once said, "I would not join any club that would have someone like me for a member." That was my original concern about attending the Fortune Brainstorm, a three day technology conference in Half Moon Bay California. I met one of the conference organizers, David Kirkpatrick at a couple of the World Economic Forum events and he is a very bright and insightful guy. But I thought it might be another one of these conferences where you spend a lot of money just to attend. Our marketing team convinced me otherwise.

Brainstorm last week was a very connected event with some very influential people. I recognized at least a quarter of them from Davos. The bloggers were also there in force with Robert Scoble, Om Malik and Kara Swisher participating as the first evenings entertainment. The subject matter was also generally more relevant that Davos as well given its proximity to Silicon Valley. Given how far I came, I used part of the time on Monday to do some interviews in San Francisco on our Alfresco Labs 3 launch, so I missed the opening sessions with Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Michael Dell, Mark Benioff from Salesforce and Brad Smith from Intuit. The setting for most of this was somewhat intimate with main room laid out like a giant conference room with lots of Herman Miller executive chairs. (Herman Miller was a sponsor.)

The environment was set up like an office. So everyone ends up doing work.

Although this was a tech conference, some of the focus was on how relevant tech is. The level of discussion was what you would expect in an article in Fortune magazine. That level of discussion is good to understand how the big trends are moving to affect everyone's lives, not just those in tech. The first breakfast session that I attended was on Cloud Computing with Marissa Mayer from Google, Adam Selipsky from Amazon, Kevin Lynch from Adobe, and Zach Nelson from NetSuite. Cloud Computing is increasingly attractive from a cost perspective, but enterprise customers are still worried about security and reliability. Google does not allow encryption and Amazon does not guarantee recovery and recommends that you back up your data on S3. So I asked the panel when we can expect security AND reliability. Marissa didn't answer and the other panelists answered the part of the question that they wanted to.

Cloud Computing: Michael Copeland (Fortune), Charles Fitzgerald (Pi/EMC), Zach Nelson (NetSuite), Kevin Lynch (Adobe), Adam Selipski (Amazon Web Services), Marissa Mayer (Google)

Mark Anderson hosted a session on the direction of technology with several CTO and technology leaders including Sophie Vanderbroek from Xerox, Padma Warrior of Cisco, and Bob Iannucci of Nokia. The discussion range as far as their technologies. Xerox is looking at collaboration and sees the future in intelligently understanding the content being handled in that collaboration in something called content-centric networking. This is something that Alfresco can get its head around. Cisco sees the internet morphing from a primarily messaging based platform to more of an entertainment platform. Video being a more natural form of communication will become more pervasive and that the real requirement will be more filtering rather than generating. Nokia took us on a cosmological tour of technology trying to show us that the bigger issues are around mobility and the data that affects our lives. In addition, data privacy will become one of the biggest issues to tackle.

CTO Forum: Mark Anderson (Strategic News Service), Sophie Vanderbroeken (Xerox), Padmasree Warrior (Cisco), Bob Iannucci (Nokia)

Vinton Cerf, inventor of the Internet and now at Google, kept sitting in front of me and always asking questions. It made it difficult to get a question in myself since the moderators would always move to another part of the audience. Get your own seat Vint!

Nicholas Negroponte showed off for the very first time a dual-boot One Laptop Per Child XO machine (the famous $100 laptop) that is now configured to run both the OLPC operating system and Microsoft Windows.

David Kirkpatrick and Nicholas Negroponte showing of the latest dual boot OLPC XO

In "How Green is Your (Silicon) Valley?", VJ Joshi from HP, Rob Lloyd from Cisco,  Jonathan Schwartz from Sun, and Michael Spliter from Applied Materials discussed the role that Silicon Valley can play in creating green solutions. By and large, as you would expect, IT makes things more efficient and eliminates the need for travel and face to face meetings. VJ kept it relatively small with the practical steps that HP is taking like making two-sided printing the default. Jonathan kept it big getting us to think about what will happen when IT services as a utility will be 10 times bigger. Jonathan Schwartz talked about MySQL's approach of no office buildings at all. But, I found Rob's and Cisco's point more insightful. When we start architecting our buildings (and homes) with information systems and controls in place, that is when we will really start to reduce our greenhouse footprint. Meeting rooms, transportation and environmental control facilitated by IT (and of course internet routers) will allow us to reduce transportation of ourselves and our resources.

Greening the Valley: James Manyika (Fortune and hidden by the Fortune sign), VJ Joshi (HP), Rob Lloyd (Cisco), Michael Spliter (Applied Materials), Jonathan Schwartz (Sun)

David Kirkpatrick is writing a book on Facebook called The Facebook Effect and used this position to interview new COO Sheryl Sandberg. She puts on a much more media savvy front than Mark Zuckerberg, but not quite as much out-of-the-garage appeal. It all sounded a little too glib. Apparently she used to work in the White House at some point and Google. I was surprised to learn that co-founder Matt Cohler had left Facebook, although he was attending the conference. She announced that he was becoming a partner at Benchmark Capital. I bet Peter Fenton had something to do with that. I had interacted with Matt in relation to some work that we were doing with the World Economic Forum and it seemed that at least part of his role at Facebook was now taken up by Sheryl.

David Kirkpatrick and new Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg

At this point, my camera ran out of battery :-( I participated in a Lunch Lab on Healthcare facilitated by Marissa Mayer of Google and Zoe Baird of the Markle Foundation, but they did most of the talking. There were a few experts who got a word in edgewise, but I didn't really feel that I could participate despite having working with pharmaceutical companies on information management and classification for the last 15 years.

In World without Exits, Andrew Braccia (Accel), Danny Rimer (Index), Dana Settle (Greylock), David Siminoff (Venrock) and Quincy Smith (CBS Interactive) all talked about how there are no exits aside from acquisitions. Danny, one of the best investors in Europe and backer of MySQL and Skype, said that there are still acquirers for good companies. He said all of his portfolio that had been acquired since the beginning of the year had been enterprise software companies. Andrew said that he is telling his portfolio companies to hunker down for the next couple of years. I have heard such talk since 1994 before the big launch of Netscapes IPO.

Life on the Net 2018 was pretty interesting, although probably a little too diverse like several of the sessions at the conference. We had Larry Lessig - open source intellectual property specialist, Phil Rosedale - founder of Second Life and Half Moon Bay resident, Joichi Ito - chairman of SixApart. Larry's "the sky's falling and your privacy is gone" position was pretty scary. He said that the Patriot Act came in so fast that it must have been pre-written before 9/11. He said that he had sources that have told him that is exactly what happened and that there is an internet-based Patriot Act waiting to be put in place as a result of any sort of catastrophic disaster on the Net. Phil believes that virtual worlds of some sort will be the future of user interfaces to the internet because they are easier for older and non-experienced users to use. Obviously, we need more technology improvements for this to happen. Perhaps the biggest technical obstacle to be overcome is the notion of a single identity that is secure and non-repudiable.

The evening event started with a Tweet Out in the platform overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I now have more respect and interest in Twitter as a result of meeting so many Tweeters. Dinner was hosted by the government of Singapore and I met so many people that evening I can't recount it all. However, I didn't stay up so late that I didn't get a chance to get up early and take some pictures of the harbor I was staying next to. I waited too late to stay at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, but sometimes that can be an advantage, especially cost wise.

   

An early morning stroll around the harbor at Half Moon Bay.

I was up early enough to sit in on a breakfast roundtable on Programming for the Web and Social Networking. Now I thought this meant programming like programming a computer. They meant programming like NBC is setting up it's Fall line-up. Still interesting. I am getting a sense that there is still a new big wave of video and much richer content coming than just YouTube. And the opportunity to manage it, organize it, categorize it and monetize it will be huge.

Finally, I sat in on a real programming session with the Future of Code, featuring David Hansson of BaseCamp and Ruby on Rails fame, Grady Booch - early pioneer of Object Oriented Programming and at IBM, and Charles Simonyi of Intentional Software, creator of Microsoft Office and Space Tourist. They all take very different approaches to architecture and they spent a lot of the time telling each other that the others were wrong. They all have points and my biggest insight from this is what prejudiced guys they all are.

Neville Roy Singham (ThoughtWorks and moderator), David Hansson (37signals), Roger Simonyi (Intentional), Grady Booch (IBM)

Grady Booch: "There are systems built upon systems and then you have a lot of crap. But that's enough about the Bush Administration."

I missed the rest because I had to head off to Sun Computers, but you can read more below about Eric Schmidt and Neil Young. We had gone to meet with Jonathan Schwartz who had left the conference the day before. He said that although there were interesting things there, he does go to a lot of those things. I asked him if they were all the same. He nodded. Lucky guy. Living 5000 miles away from the valley, I don't get to go to that many events of this quality.


Philip Rosedale Doesn’t See Browser-Based Virtual Worlds As A Threat to Second Life.  Is He In Denial? - Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch

A glimpse into the future of the Internet - Tom Forenski, ZDNet Blogs

Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg: Making money isn't a priority (except for her) - Nicholas Carlson, Valleywag

Liveblogging Eric Schmidt/Google Interview at Brainstorm - Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch

The best Fortune Brainstorm Tech Talk: Neil Young challenges tech industry - Robert Scoble, Scobleizer

The blog editing system in action - Robert Scoble, Scobleizer

A Manifesto for Social Computing in the Enterprise

Investment in the infrastructure of the internet has dramatically increased bandwidth to everyone in the developing world and created home computers that are not only inexpensive, but very powerful. This change has expanded the usage of the internet exponentially and introduced new demographics and generations of users that had not used computing prior to the expansion of the internet. These users have themselves created the content and applications that feed the internet and have set expectations of the applications that we use in web browsers and new mobile devices. The increased bandwidth has made this experience much more interactive and visual experience encompassing video and visual elements. Web properties such as YouTube, Google, Amazon, Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr have set the benchmark for expression, accessibility and social interaction of computing systems.

Dubbed Web 2.0, this revolution in computing has shifted the face of software from a logical, linear, and introverted science to an expressive, graphical and social art. New designers of web sites, unschooled in traditional software techniques, are nonetheless able to create software that scales to millions of users and billions of objects of information and still meld those users into an artistically aware community. The next generation of enterprise employees who started using the internet in their early teens have only known this evolving culture of free and creative development of the internet and now demand better of the enterprise software that they meet. Older employees also know that that the software that they use on a day to day basis can be better. Enterprise 2.0 seeks to emulate the success of Web 2.0 in the creation of new software for the enterprise.

Social Computing

The shift of computing power from business logic and calculation to socialization and people-orientation has been dubbed by some as Social Computing. The term Social Computing has been used interchangeably with Enterprise 2.0 or Enterprise Social Applications, however, IBM and Microsoft have created Social Computing research centers and Forrester has started to use the term in describing next generation enterprise collaboration. Social Computing is the use of technology to support sharing of information and enabling collaboration through social networks and to tap into the value of the “Wisdom of Crowds”, a concept made famous by James Surowiecki in 2004 to explain how many people are smarter than individual experts. Social Computing exploits software oriented toward people and Social Networks, the extended relationships of individuals, to connect to more people and access the Wisdom of Crowds.

To tap into the wisdom and awareness of social networks and empower people to collaborate at any time or place, Social Computing platforms need the following capabilities:

• People - Support information about people, their preferred communications, their relationships and affiliations, since social networking is all about people rather than just systems, data and objects. The more information available about other users, the more likely they can be found as a source of knowledge.
• Context of Networks - Social networks organized around projects, teams and departments provide the context of work and relevance of information as it spreads from creation to the people that need that information. Social networks, especially networks extended beyond the enterprise, provide the greatest differentiation of social computing from previous generations of collaboration.
• Social Collaboration - Provide an environment where people can share ideas, contribute knowledge and solve problems in creative, unstructured socialization as opposed to rigorous workflows that are required for control of information. Next generation tools use techniques developed by Web 2.0, particularly those tools that empower social knowledge, such as social tagging, integration of communication and awareness of changes in social networks.
• Content as a Service - Content is the container of knowledge and information and is core to the socialization of information. Content needs to be accessible everywhere, not just in large, monolithic applications. Content capabilities need to be accessible as reusable service components. Social computing can happen inside the enterprise or outside and a channel can be a web site, web application, mobile device or even external web platforms such as Facebook or Google applications. Mashups can occur inside the enterprise or outside and the channel will require content as a service that can securely be accessed wherever it is needed or wherever it is contributed.
• People-centric Tools - As Web 2.0 has spread new paradigms of user interaction, the consumerization of software has created expectations that enterprise software becomes easier and empowers user to contribute, correct and classify content and information within the context of social networks. AJAX and next generation rich internet application interfaces such as Adobe Flex will provide users with a much richer, more intuitive user experience and the ability to scan much more social knowledge to find ideas and solutions. These tools should themselves be componentized and accessible as a service so that they may be mashed up with other sources of social knowledge.

This does not mean that the need for traditional enterprise content technologies such as document and records management goes away. They are still repositories of the truth and verifiable information and thus play an important role in sharing knowledge within social networks. However, these traditional technologies lack the usability, empowerment, and breadth of reach that Web 2.0 sites provide. They lack the collaborative nature that invites in people without barriers and restrictions to contribute to the sharing of knowledge and information. Web content management for creating a richer Web 2.0-style user interface becomes even more important to this collaboration to provide a compelling face to the interaction and to simplify the access and navigation of shared information. Enterprise Content Management cannot become one of the principle platforms of Social Computing unless it addresses the requirements of Social Applications.

Use of Social Computing

The balance is shifting from contained and controlled companies to engaged and empowered collaborative enterprises driven by Web 2.0-inspired social computing. At the center of the shift from old models of computing in the enterprise to new social models are companies that are inspired to innovate or to engage more with their customers. This includes companies not just using their internet or intranet web sites, but engaging in social networking channels such as Yahoo, Google, YouTube, Facebook and MySpace. Those using social computing are interested in engaging people, such as customers, employees or partners. They are using new people-centric tools and facilitate creating or extending existing social networks.

Major ECM vendors are all planning their Social Computing efforts and to a large extent are being dragged in this direction by their more forward-looking customers. Enterprises that have discovered the value of Social Computing are:

• Consumer-oriented companies that particularly address a younger demographic must engage their customers as part of both the marketing process as well as the development of new products. For example, games and film companies that engage their viewers in plot and scene development do much better than those that keep everything under wraps until the game or film is ready.
• Enterprises hiring a new generation of knowledge workers who grew up on the internet must provide tools as empowering as those available from Web 2.0. Turning these tools off forces these workers to seek employment elsewhere and forcing them to use tools that do not meet their expectations of usability and engagement.
• Financial Services firms are leading the shift in usage of these technologies. Financial Services have always been innovators in developing new technologies and investing in providing better service for their clients. Speed in innovation in these services becomes a major competitive advantage where churn of clients can be very high in turbulent times. Internally, competition for talent is intense and providing better support is important for attracting and retaining employees. In particular, young and ambitious brokers and managers are more likely to be sociable themselves and seek out Social Computing inside and outside the enterprise.
• Government and Non-Profit organizations that provide services and citizen feedback online find increasing their IT budgets much easier than those that merely arbitrated by a front-line service. It is now inconceivable for an American politician to run for office without an extended internet presence such as Facebook or YouTube.
• Enterprises that have faster cycles of product innovation, especially high tech, are looking to their customers and partners to participate in the development of new products and services. In previous generations, the field acted as a filtering mechanism of new customer requirements and ideas. However, today technology can provide a frictionless way of getting the entire enterprise to exchange ideas and improvements with the customer communities.

Integrating Social Computing

Because Social Computing is unlikely to come from a single source, especially because of the diversity of sources of knowledge and social networks available on Web 2.0, it is extremely important for the enterprise infrastructure for Social Computing to be integrated with those sources. This means bring these sources into the enterprise and bring the enterprise sources out to Web 2.0. No matter where the people collaborating are, the tools they want should be available. To facilitate this, the Social Computing should be:

• Open Source - Through being developed through social computing paradigms and sharing best of breed components with the open source community, open source systems have evolved rapidly and encompass social computing capabilities developed by the open source community. Social tools such as MediaWiki, the wiki that powers Wikipedia, and WordPress, the most popular blogging software were developed using open source.
• Integrating the Inside Out - By providing content as a service and enabling light-weight, Web-Oriented scripting development, the Social Computing platform should quickly integrate content services into external channels and web sites, such as Facebook and iGoogle, to allow enterprises to engage customers, partners and home workers.
• Integrating the Outside In - If the Social Computing platform is modular and supports a Web 2.0-style mashup-oriented architecture, it enables users and teams to integrate external open source tools and social networking web services, such as Facebook, LinkedIn or other Open Social-enabled properties, to tap into the wisdom of crowds available on the internet and to make customers and partners part of team collaboration.
• REST-style Architecture - A Web 2.0-style or REST-style of architecture using easy, light-weight scripting languages and integrated through internet standards-based APIs can easily mash-up content services into any web-oriented application or web site. These architectures should be scalable, fault-tolerant and high performance to meet any enterprise or internet requirement.
• Choice - The Social Computing platform should be based upon open interfaces developed by the open source community to provide choice of operating system, database, application server, content authoring tools or APIs.

Over the past year and continuing into the coming year, Alfresco is dedicated to expanding its architecture and applications to enable this vision of Social Computing. We will work with partners and open source community to provide best of breed open source tools for enabling this architecture. We will integrate with external Social Computing properties such as Facebook and the Open Social alliance to expand the breadth of social networks and the ability to collaborate through those networks. We will be expanding the Alfresco system’s understanding of users as people and facilitate sharing of information and content through their networks. We will be open in the process and seek and encourage your feedback and participation.

Dad, did you have television back in 1994?

Last night we were watching the Seven Ages of Rock on our Sky Plus (Tivo-like machine) that has been playing on the BBC. The most recent age starts with Morrisey and the Smiths and focuses mainly on the mid-90s competition between Oasis and Blur. My 12-year old son, who wasn't even born before their rivalry began, asked if Noel Gallagher of Oasis had Tourette's Syndrome after watching his interviews. Yes son, but it's not nice to make fun of the disadvantaged.

This seemed like a long time ago, but it looks even longer ago when you see this video posted by John Battelle. "In the future...you will be able to expand into new markets at low cost." Click here if you can't see the video.

You have to feel sorry for Digital. They should have invented the PC, they could have been Microsoft (where did Allchin's team come from after all), and they could have been Google (with Alta Vista). But weren't they prescient?

For video on Seven Ages of Rock, click here.

Open Source and Business Pleasure vs. Business Pain

A European PR firm was pitching my company for business last week and putting out a few ideas on how to generate demand in different countries across Europe. One of the ideas that they presented was a “business pain barometer” to indicate how much pain companies might be feeling using existing enterprise systems. This didn’t exactly resonate as a value proposition for open source, but it is a tried and true campaign strategy for traditional enterprise systems. Selling pain relief has worked for the last three decades to sell enterprise software, but has it run its course?

Read the rest of this entry »

Rudyard Kipling on Innovation

Portrait of Kipling at the National Portrait Gallery - one of my favorite museums

I found this quote by Rudyard Kipling, author of Gunga Din and the Jungle Book (remember Mowgli and Baloo?), when I worked at Documentum. I found it amusing that we would come up with an innovation and everyone would copy it. We would compete against other companies with capabilities like virtual documents, object models, auditing, query languages and workflow.  We would focus on vertical solutions and use the crossing the chasm model and then you would see the competition do the same thing. Kipling said:

They copied all that they could follow
but they couldn't copy my mind
and I left 'em sweating and stealing
a year and a half behind.

But then we lost our eye on the ball. After Version 2.0 of Documentum, I really investigated the web, but I found a real lack of enthusiasm to apply Documentum to the web. Some Documentum people seemed to think that there would be a richer set of protocols on their way. I remember speaking to Jeff Miller who said that this was very interesting, but FileNet was our competition and we should have a laser-like focus on dominating that market. Kipling said:

And they asked me how I did it,
and I gave 'em the Scripture text,
"You keep your light so shining
a little in front o' the next!"

We started doing to the competition what they had done to us. About the time that Dave DeWalt came on board, we took on Interwoven using their own game. We came to match their capabilities and for awhile get ahead. This became the foundation for the Enterprise Content Management platform. Howard Shao then scouted the other missing pieces of a larger puzzle that included digital asset management, digital rights management and imaging. That force of innovation is now gone from Documentum and we will see how the next generation rises to the challenge.

The quotes from Kipling come from a poem called The “Mary Gloster”.  It is about a dying old man who made his fortune the good, olde Victorian way. The man has grown bitter to see his seemingly ne’er-do-well son not know the benefits of hard work and keeping close to the roots of the old man’s success - the Sea. Those forces of innovation have died and he looking on to a better life in the hereafter. In case you are wondering, I’m not very religious, but I always like a good parable and object lesson.

Unlike the old man, I have had the chance to try it again and I love it. Interestingly, I am seeing the same pattern. We have been out long enough to start to see people copying what we are doing. We can’t be complacent though, there is still a lot of innovating to do.

There may be an object lesson as well for the next generation. I once wrote about the fact that the younger generation is not interested in computer science and information technology. Perhaps Web 2.0 is changing that or there are new sources of wealth around the corner. But just as wealth moved on from Britain in Dickie's generation, perhaps that wealth is now moving on to the developing world (the BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India, China) where they are interested in core value creation around boring old things like computer science.