David Boloker, IBM Software Group's CTO of Emerging Internet Technologies, sees the Web moving from a publishing paradigm to an e-business paradigm (and now) to an AJAX paradigm." - and it's not just talk. IBM and others are putting their muscle behind an open source initiative (from IBM Leads "Open AJAX" Coalition of Web 2.0 Vendors, by Roger Strukhoff, Sys-Con Australia, Feb. 1, 2006) The key components of AJAX, JavaScript and XML, aren't new, but industry buzz has grown in recent months due with the technology industry recovery and the wider acceptance of open-source approaches. Strukhoff posits that the Open AJAX announcement is "the most significant story in the open-source technology world since the creation of Linux."

8:39:45 AM    

I was browsing through Don Hinchcliffe's lists of Web 2.0 software: The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005 and More Great Web 2.0 Software, wondering how quickly this information would be out of date given the rising adoption rate of Ajax and all things "Web 2.0" - a term that I admit I'm still a bit fuzzy about.

In 2002 and 2003 I created an online catalog to track the quickly evolving marketplace for COTS collaboration tools, but I can see this type of solution would need a radical overhaul to work with Web 2.0 concepts. To start with, the lessons of collective intelligence tell us that a handful of researchers can't be the only ones populating the database. Rather, a system of open submissions and ratings would be necessary, such as in use at Digg. The second big change would be in the data elements captured - for example it's no longer interesting to filter tools by which "operating system" they run on. For a short while it may be interesting to filter based on which browsers it's been tested in. A huge discriminator would be whether there's an open API available. In addition to capturing "articles" (which could include blogs) on a particular tool, it would be cool to link each tool to a list of mashups that use it. Each of these may be considered a tool itself, so the links between tools will be recursive.

Very preliminary thoughts, to be sure, but the more important question is if such a tools guide was created, how would it be used? Would it be valuable?

8:34:53 AM    

The Wisdom of Crowds (Beta Version) by Jory Des Jardins (Fast Company, Dec. 2005) highlights a unique business experiment in distributed work. Rob May set up The Business Experiment (TBE) as a virtual incubator/online startup firm based on the wisdom of crowds, but the experiment is not exactly living up to the dream. As Rob states in a post on his home page, "I've struggled for some time to see where TBE is going.  Unfortunately, it is not going to end up where I had hoped, but that's because I was wrong in my assumptions."

Rob's September 10th post, What Have We Learned So Far?, captures some incredible insights into what people need to work best - and not just in a distributed environment. The wisdom in crowds was harnessed to select a business concept, but the five items show other issues are at play in executing that concept.

Rob's second and third "learned so far" items are both about worker incentives, discussing tweaks to the  current points system, and aligning projects with people's passions as seen in various Open Source success stories.

Figuring out the incentive issue is the key to the success of TBE's venture business. It's easy to recruiter philosophers and curiousity seekers to an innovative project, but real contributors will only stick it out during hard times and devote the hard work required if they are appropriately incentivised. It might be about financial gain, or it might be about passion, or better yet it should be about both!

This may start as a philosophical question, but trial and error should be allowed, encouraged, and in fact welcomed. It's a basic part of the innovation risk/reward cycle that many high-risk projects should be undertaken with the expectation that most will fail. The reward from the small fraction of successes will produce a payback to justify the program as a whole.

I suspect TBE is confusing their goal (learning how to harness the wisdom of crowds for business ventures), with the goal of the selected business venture. The solution is simpy to treat the TBE goal as an innovation program, and pursue MORE THAN ONE business venture. Encourage each project to evolve according to its participant's collective wisdom and see which variations thrive. Continue to harness the wisdom of the overall crowds, but perhaps some will be advisors working across multiple groups, while others are more active contributors zeroing in one a specific task.

To Rob and the rest I wish the best of luck. I hope you continue the TBE experiment to its logical - and successful - end.

1:53:06 PM    

Who is using Groove Virtual Office today? With over 4 million users, the list is long. Examples of government and civic organizations include Illinois homicide detectives, Interpol, US Army in Afghanistan and Iraq, Katrina rescue workers in Florida. A few commercial companies from the list include Siemens, HP, DHL, Pfizer and Wipro.

These examples come from Smarter ways of working by Leslie D`Monte (Business Standard's ICE World, December 28, 2005), which describes the product as "...threaded discussions, calendars, project management, white board, chat, VoIP and instant messaging – all in one product. It can be deployed in any IT environment, behind firewalls with no change in security settings, no open ports, and will work with double NAT (Network Address Translation) and even GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) connections with roaming IP addresses,"

But the article goes further - describing how organizations are moving beyond communication point solutions to adopt and gain value from "collaboration suites – email, chat, VoIP, instant messaging (IM), document and knowledge management, blogging, wikis and much more put together." The market is estimated by Gartner to grow from $680 million to $1.1 billion by 2008. Still in the early adopter stage, Gartner predicts adoption to rise as the technologies mature and become more integrated with business processes.

Examples show how these products are maturing: Microsoft will be integrating key features of Groove into its Office Suite; IBM's Workplace suite has shown double-digit growth for three consecutive quarters; BEA's WebLogic Portal and Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g add collaboration to their core products as well. The Open Source community is actively at work as well. Novell donated core components to start up the Hula project, which intends to bring together blogs and wikis within an XML namespace to facilitate team collaboration. (Hula is one of thousands of ongoing projects. Check out Open-Xchange and Zimbra for more powerful examples of open source collaboration suites.)

Adoption issues can't be ignored. On the technical side there's interoperability and security to worry about. But collaboration is all about people communicating, so trust and cultural issues must be acknowledged. Integrating collaboration suites into business processes takes time even without these issues, so the payoff might take years to see. As Alok Shende, the Director of ICT Practice at Frost and Sullivan puts it: "Collaboration is not a quick fix. As part of a re-engineering effort, it may take two to fours years to see the result."

Estimates of ROI are still lacking other than savings from eliminating business trips - which are often substantial enough to justify the investment on their own. For instance, Microsoft anticipates saving $ 70 million in 2005 by using MOLM (Microsoft Office Live Meeting) to replace one-in-five business trips.

10:44:24 AM    

CollabNet has a new release, with features intended to help "corporations create a sustainable advantage in a new era in which applications are developed by decentralized teams collaborating over the Internet." hmm. a bit of marketese, anyone?

Translation: CollabNet, whose business model is built around tools for developing software over the internet, has added process improvement to its bag of tricks. A brilliant move if done correctly.

From their press release:

"Increasingly, software development practices are becoming distributed. Case in point is the fact that a number of today’s leading computing initiatives like SOA, compliance, outsourcing, convergence, open source, and other strategic community development programs all share the need to assemble distributed software development teams," said Bill Portelli, President and CEO of CollabNet.

Portelli cites good indicators that distributed development is increasing in importance. And the more you do it, the more important it is to get it right:

"In this distributed environment it has become essential for CIOs to set, measure, and improve their development processes and for project teams to understand and complete their specific development tasks in view of the overall lifecycle."

The new feature in CollabNet Enterprise Edition 4.0 that offers this is the "Application Lifecycle Manager", which lets project managers select and customize a set of pre-configured process templates. The templates define consistent processes for their particular projects, from requirements definition through design and deployment. Management views into the development effort allow teams to measure and improve their processes - a critical requirement for higher-level maturity organizations.

This is the kind of robust infrastructure many corporations are learning to employ as part of a radical shift in the way we develop, deliver, and maintain software.

7:14:24 PM