The emergence of the widget software industry has to be seen as a paradigm shift that will turn the software industry on its head

It didn’t really matter where in the world you lived in the 1990’s, you always knew that the place people made films was Hollywood and the place where people made software was Silicon Valley. But times in the software industry are changing and commercial markets for software are about to turn another corner.

The software industry has always been centred on people that understood how ‘to programme’. These clever individuals that have the skills to type characters into a script and then see the script magically create user interface screens, business logic rules, reports, visualisations (etc.) have consistently got better at serving up tools that non programmers could use to input data and produce documents.

But whatever tools programmers produce, they never appear able to meet all of the discerning demands of modern information workers. The world of competition is simply moving too fast. And this creates a very expensive and ‘high risk’ short-fall in the ability of the creatives, the high performers, the business development people that are tasked with driving corporate growth and cost reduction strategies – at the ‘edge’ of business operation. As global markets are hotting up, ‘old world’ corporations desperately need to release the innovation that exists in these small groups of people, in pockets of the enterprise.

The big change happening today is being described as the ‘consumerization of IT’. The formation of industry standards driven by web technologies and key software industry players like Microsoft means that a new generation of software application building tools are now emerging that require no programming skills whatsoever (see http://www.encanvas.com/, http://www.coghead.com/ and http://www.teqlo.com/). These new applications liberalise IT by making it conceivably possible for non technical people – entrepreneurs, students, housewives and scientists – to develop new ways of gathering, managing, sharing and using information.

Introducing Widgets
It’s not too clear who came up with the term ‘Widgets’ but it’s likely it originated from the work Apple did in developing their loosely coupled desk accessory tools.
Widgets themselves are, at the core, simply HTML files that are displayed within a user interface layer. Widgets are created using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript. Because the same programming languages are used for creating websites, many web developers can already build them.

When a widget is built, it usually consists of six files:

1. The widget's HTML file, which is the actual file that will be displayed in the user interface layer.
2. The widget's CSS file, which is used for styling the widget (but is called on from the HTML file).
3. The widget's JavaScript file, although it may be implemented directly within the HTML file if the developer desires.
4. The widget's Property List (called “Info.plist”), which is what the user interface uses to load the widget’s properties (i.e.: name, version, HTML file, etc.)
5. The background image of the widget, in PNG format.
6. The icon that is displayed in the menu bar.

Once all of these files are in the root of a directory, it is given a name and the extension ".wdgt" and then it can be opened up in the user interface as a widget.

Widgets are centre stage in the ‘consumerization of computing’. Explore the Oxford English Dictionary and you will find that a widget is described as a small gadget or mechanical device. Today, it is also a term used to describe little applications that people can share and use to create composite applications of their own making. Surf the web and you will find there are already hundreds of Widgets (see http://widgets.yahoo.com/gallery/, http://directory.snipperoo.com/ or my personal favourite www.widgetbox.com/).

What makes widgets so influencing is that they are rapidly creating a new global market for instantly pluggable, ‘atomic’ components of ready-built, ready-to-go software application elements. Instead of having to ask the IT department to develop ‘new code’ or purchase yet another shrink-wrapped software application, information workers are able to contemplate ‘serving themselves’ by creating their own information gathering, managing, reporting or sharing application by ‘mashing together’ a series of ready-made components.

The world of software engineering attracts not only some of the greatest technical minds of our age; it also attracts the very best entrepreneurs seeking their fortune by creating the next .COM boom. The result is that any tiny step forward like ‘the widget’ can soon take hold and create a new wave.
Widgets are coming.

So why will widgets create a new wave in the software industry?
We know by looking back at history that it takes two things to occur at the same time to make a paradigm shift in an industry happen – the emergence of a new thread of demand and the capability of suppliers to service it. The industrial revolution was driven by demands of middle-class people to acquire consumer goods that upper class people enjoyed at a price they could afford. It was the emergence of companies like Wedgwood that were able to identify this demand and respond to it by providing the right product, at the right price, and at the right time (the widget factories of their day).

Widgets democratize IT by giving anyone – not just programmers - the ability to create new types of applications that use information in a way that individuals or groups want to use it. We are beginning to see early seed examples of the tools to make this happen. These new ‘see no code, use no code’ authoring software products like Encanvas means that people accustomed to using MS Word, PowerPoint or Excel can themselves start to develop robust enterprise applications. These products provide the necessary light-weight mash-up software to bridge the gap between the widget industry and the users that want to harness them. They also provide the necessary glue to empower non technical people to gather information in a secure and risk managed way from back-office data sources that traditionally have been off-limits to users.

Where will the new Wedgwood’s of the widget software age be located? It may not be Silicon Valley. The cost of establishing a ‘widget factory’ and gaining entry into this market (ie. To, to start building new components that individuals can embed into their mash-ups) is significantly less than the traditional building of complete shrink-wrapped applications. A self-governing, highly communicative global market-place is already forming for widgets around the world that quickly embraces new innovations.

How can we expect widget software industry to mature?
Software widgets today focus on the light-weight tools that consumers might use to improve their blog, or build a social networking website. These attractive clocks, calendar sharing, application links, voting systems, chat and collaborative tools. We are seeing the very early stages of the software widget industry forming. Most of the innovation today is targeted towards the needs of individuals and has a non-commercial context to it. For business people, it is unclear how these new developments can translate into the formation of economic engines that start to make money (Think .COM before the boom).

This new wave is coming into view fast. Companies like http://www.salesforce.com/ with a proven track record in delivering corporate ready robustness and scalability, are offering widgets that bind front-office and mobile workers to the knowledge they need through side-bar widgets able to summarize their hot prospects and link them through to data that would traditionally have been found somewhere on a back-office server. Next we can envisage widgets that are more inter-operable with one another (adding 1+1 to make 3) such as a visualisation widget that can be filtered by a time-lining widget; or perhaps a context search button widget that can be targeted towards internal and external sources of data.

Within the next 2 years we should expect to see eCommerce tools manifested as widgets to add ‘one-click’ payment processing capabilities to websites and blogs. Within this same time-frame we should expect to find new business logic building widgets that again require no code to install into applications and provide a level of business process management that yesterday was thought only possible by using IT programmers.

IT departments remain huddled behind their firewalls feeling very safe and secure from the threat of consumerized IT. But in a similar way to the birth of spreadsheet computing and recent developments in Blackberry-style mobile computing, the personal value that widget computing brings to business people, starved of the right information at the right place and time, means that it won’t belong before these technologies break into the corporate IT glass-house (but probably in the more corporate-ready guise of products like Encanvas that already have track record of corporate deployment and sit on trusted Microsoft technology platforms).

What will the impact be on the software industry?
Traditionally, in order to incubate new software businesses there needed to be a deep regional business services infrastructure and mixture of localised resources including office premises, a constant flow of skilled programmers coming out of colleges, funding sources etc. This was the Silicon Valley deliverable. The advent of widget factories means that the operating model of a cottage industry comes back into play where the Internet becomes the connective tissue that binds widget factories to their market-place, the colleagues and the source of their market insight.

The widget industry creates an open global playing field for software innovation that allows developers in Eastern Europe, China and India to leverage their lower operating costs to bring new widgets to market without needing to tap into deep business infrastructure, heavy-weight resources or multi-million dollar research development war-chests.

Widget software and corporations
It remains unlikely that the first wave of consumerized applications for corporates will be targeted at end-users themselves. This is not because complexity of interfaces or skills of workers will prohibit it, but because of the re-definition of IT departments in corporations. Forward thinking IT heads are already planning the re-modelling of their organizations; to turn business analysts into business process value and improvement managers responsible for key parts of the value-chains that drive corporate success. Organizations like VW already adopt this approach in Europe.

Expect to see information systems designers emerging that have the responsibility of providing light-weight applications for their ‘customer’ departments that perform the important bridging role between business people and IT. In the short-term there are significant benefits in keeping applications authoring in the hands of experienced ‘IT-aware’ people. This is because the generation of computer users today do not resemble the ‘Internet-ready’ generation of my daughter that were raised assuming that the WWW has always existed. The “tweens” of today’s participative age are tomorrows’ computer users and they really won’t need any help to build applications (in the same way that they don’t need to read instructions to use a mobile phone!).

Another good reason to retain the applications authoring interface within the domain of the IT department is because the ability to access data from back-office resources and to organize it into logical structures that ensure good husbandry, are insufficiently mature to be entrusted to non technical users. As corporations develop their infrastructures and tools to empower corporate social networks and virtualize their organizations (ie. Moving to organizational structures that embrace the skills and expertise of independent knowledge workers), the need to chaperone business people during the task of building new composite applications will no longer be an issue.

In Summary

• The Widget Software Industry describes a new kind of software industry that forms its economic engine around the ability to develop world-class widgets that re used by consumers and business people to fashion new ways of gathering, managing and sharing information.
• New ‘see no code, use no code’ composite application authoring environments, like Encanvas, will provide the light-weight glue layer that to make widgets ‘corporate ready’ and rapidly build a market-place for new widgets as they emerge.
• Demand for widgets will come from both consumers and business people who increasingly demand tools that deliver the right information, to the right place, at the right time and find current technologies are unable to deliver the necessary blend of personalization, access to data sources, respond to changing information needs with a rapid build capability, and a commercial model that makes it possible to ‘throw away’ applications once they have delivered their value.
• Supply will come from a global market for widgets from existing software companies releasing their core competency in the form of a ‘widgetized component offering’ and new widget factories that will spring up (enjoying lower cost of entry and all the advantages of “cottage industry” lower operating costs).
  

All trade marks and trade names used in this document are acknowledged.

How Encanvas could have saved Nationwide £980,000 in a single day

It must be ‘gutting’ to the customers of Nationwide to find out that they will be soon forking out close to £1 million to the FSA as a financial penalty for a lapse in the company’s data security that they had nothing to do with. ‘Doubly gutting’ after being told that their personal information is now somewhere in the ether because it was being held on a laptop stolen from an employee's home in August, 2006!

Those that live outside the corporate world must be thinking how on earth something like this could possibly happen with all of the alleged security protocols that corporations are being encouraged to adopt. How on earth could the personal information of 11 million customers find its way onto the hard-drive of a laptop that could be so easily lost?

I suspect there are many business people upon hearing this story will have a wry smile on their face in the knowledge that holding business strategic data on hard drives is not so uncommon. They probably see the practice going on inside the company they’re working for every other day. In the cold light of day, it becomes almost possible to second-guess how this story played out.

There remains a huge gap between well-organized, highly secure back-office information systems that support business continuity, and the daily needs of corporate workers, starved of the information they need to discharge their roles.

A recent Accenture sponsored survey (Jan 2007) reported that most middle managers found that the majority of information obtained for their work is useless and only half of all managers believe their companies do a good job in governing information distribution or have established adequate processes to determine what data each part of an organization needs.

Small wonder then that knowledge workers like our friend in Nationwide succumb to beating up the IT department to provide an export of the information they need to fulfil their role and walk out the door with the company’s customer database under their arm.

When will companies like Nationwide come to realize that for less than $200,000 a year they could avoid these ‘miss-haps’ by providing appropriate tools that enable workers to access information as they need it - to be as effective as they know they can be?

Business agility software like Encanvas bridges across pockets of information held within the organization (and beyond its firewall) to provide information workers with the ability to ‘serve themselves’ with the information they need within a trusted framework of security. Encanvas formalizes information flows that manage how workers access and use information without being forced to work at arms length.

A saving of £980,000 in one day. That’s quite an ROI.

Google's $10 computing revolution

Google, the fastest-growing company in the history of the world, announced late in 2006 that it was inviting subscribers to register for a personal domain at a flat $10 per year. Whilst it’s not uncommon to find an Internet Service Provider (ISP) that will provide you with a domain for $10, with Google you get much, much more. Infact, the Google offer represents a virtualized data center built for one.

And what do you get for your money?

For starters you get a web-site hosting, web-based IT infrastructure, a personalised portal and intranet, an email service, instant messaging, calendar and scheduling software, web-site design software; and, by utilizing some of the other free Google services you can also obtain web-site analytics, word processor and spreadsheet software along with all the necessary storage, data backups, security and maintenance you would expect from a corporate service provider. And this is no pipe dream. At the time of writing, Google has a market capitalization of $138 billion. The founders, Larry and Sergey, are worth more than $10 billion each.

'Corporate-ready' products like Encanvas that bring the 'mash-up' world of light-weight applications development to the door of corporations, provide a new kind of 'software glue' that turns Google's vision of a virtualized service-led computing platform into a reality for risk-averse corporate buyers.

If the future of business IT is a Google subscription at $10 per person for ‘all that you need’, there will be a whole bunch of software companies in ERP and CRM world wondering what the future holds for them. But then, they've had it good for a long time haven't they?

Double Loop Learning

Double loop learning is really important in business. As Dr. Martin Vasey, Knoweldge Director at EY would say, "It's about doing things differently, not just doing things better."

Academics describe these two concepts as single loop and double loop learning:

“Suppose an organisation manufactures a product X. When the employees of that organisation detect and attempt to correct error in order to manufacture the product X, that is single loop learning; but when they begin to confront the question whether product X should be manufactured, that is double loop learning, because they are now questioning underlying organisation policies and objectives.”

Sourece: Argyris, C. (1977). Double-loop learning in organisations. Harvard business review, 55(5), 115-125.

Whilst single loop learning makes improvements possible, double loop learning provides the opportunity for step-change which is a fundamental characteristic of successful 21st century businesses.

When Capitalism Was Cool

When I look out of the kitchen window to over-filled refuse bins that are brimming with the often unnecessary packaging of our food and consumer products - it’s easy to forget that at one time capitalism and the consumer society was cool!

Consumerism was great fun in the 1950’s with snazzy kitchenware, pink Hoovers and cars for the average Jo. Industry in the UK was already starting its slow decline but the advertising sector was finding its feet. The 1950s was the age of the consumer. The post-war boom meant that in 1950, average household income was double or triple what it had been in 1935 and this brought massive changes in the home; it was out with the old and in with the new. Open-plan living was introduced, and the fitted kitchen with its brand new appliances was every housewife's ambition.

The ‘VIP’ world

Did you ever see the great 1961 blockbuster film comedy featuring Rock Hudson and Doris Day called ‘Lover Come Back’? Rock and Doris are rival advertising executives with different views on how to conduct business. Carol Templeton (Doris) thinks Jerry Webster (Rock) is unethical in his business practices and while trying to catch him at it is also trying to steal his next account. The plot gets more complicated and entwined until eventually a mistake is made and one of the agencies launches an advertising campaign to promote a product called ‘VIP’ that doesn’t even exist - so Jerry has to make it up.


The film is a parody of the late 1950’s style and consumerism. It was born of an age that industrialists believed that with good advertising and public relations you could pretty much sell anything – such was the desire for new commodities from a public trembling with anticipation for the next new kitchen gadget, cosmetics product, automobile or garden tool.

The 1950’s started in the UK with housewives queued on icey pavements with their ration books and neared the end with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's phrase 'never had it so good'. Pent-up demand for goods and services and the unexploited supply of new technologies combined to bring a nearly unprecedented wave of radical change that painted new colours over the drab walls of the 1940’s. This was where suburbia began, and rejuvenated the idea that we all needed to have one of everything to improve our social status. The brands of the moment were Marlboro (cigarettes), Colgate (toothpaste), Hoover (vacuum cleaners), Heinz (beans), Kodak (cameras), Wrangler (Jeans) and Electrolux (electricals).

The 1950’s was a period when the western world wanted to let its hair down and have some fun in a post-war world that was reinvigorated by the power of capitalism. It was a time for fun, design flair, advertising and must-have consumer products.

Demand appeared to be without bounds. This was hardly surprising. More women (around 34%) were now working in the labour force, introducing the two earner nuclear family model that is common today. Family sizes were in decline. More people owned their own home. Confidence in the banking system was high, appreciation of inflation was low and average household incomes in some places were 6 times what they were in 1901. No wonder people were spending their money.

50 Years On We See The Raw Deal of Capitalism

Today, new generations see the relationship between capitalism and society moving further out of balance and sliding ever closer to a fatal point of failure.

The expectations of society are evolving apace as new generations expect more and are less prepared to buy into the human consequences of capitalism. An ever growing shortage of skilled labour means that the educated population of the western world is beginning to demand a better deal; a more balanced way of life that blends work and play, work-life and home-life, to mirror their personal aspirations of what a good life should be like.

It’s true capitalism isn’t perfect. But that’s no reason to think it’s sour to the core and believe that we should throw it away like sour fruit. The way that markets work and the power balance between buyer and seller can change over time. These are the natural market forces that describe the true essence of capitalism. Capitalism isn’t owned by industry or by governments. The foundation of capitalism is the ability to maintain a free market that is influenced only by the market forces of supply and demand. The opportunity for capitalists today, and tomorrow, is to supply what people will pay for. Commerce and market forces can and do make a positive impact on the quality of life for millions of people.

Those of us born into a world where capitalism dominates find a way to live with the uncomfortable marriage. Sometimes we fall out of love - but we never leave. It’s a familiar friend; a nightlight that reliably burns and protects us from the scary ghosts of scarcity, communism, political interference and dictatorship.

Just in case today is one of those days!

With sincere thanks to Julie Meyer, CEO of Ariadne Capital, for allowing me to use this thoughtful sound-bite for my book 'Agilization'. It has provided me with the necessary confidence to keep going on those days when you just feel like you're pushing elephants up the stairs!

[Entrepreneurialism]

“It’s about having the confidence to persist in a vision of the market and your contribution to it, which is not widely understood in the early stages. I have learned to trust my inner knowledge, but one must have patience and not be swayed by what others think.”

When society influences business

I started to write the book Agilization, not because I originally intended to write a book about how organizations can become agile (after-all why should they need to?); I wrote it initially to put down on paper the impact that individualism and the participative society is likely to have on corporations - and therefore, what they could do about it.

So, I'll start by describing these two concepts.

Individualism is about how new generations expect to be able to assert their individual personality on their life-choices, who they work for, what they buy, who they are friends with.

The term participative society describes how technology is making it possible for individuals to share their thoughts and experiences in an always-connected digital environment that makes it easier for a single voice to have global influence.

There you go, didn't even take a page to cover it!

This is an excerpt from chapter that didn't make it into my book 'Agilization' because it explains in almost too much detail where Individualism has come from.

>>

The constancy of demand no longer exists as it did in the infancy of capitalism. Consumers are less prepared to settle for the ‘standard Model-T Ford’ and below average service. They want attractive designs, nice smells, tactility, deep emotional support – they want to be different.

There is a new dynamic set to change the way capitalism works. It's called individualism.

Individualism has emerged in the past decade to describe amongst new generations, a psychological self-determination to make life choices without interference. Whilst there can be no doubt that we are all individuals, individualism is now being used by economists and social commentators to explain the impact of this socio-economic phenomenon. How I identify with this evolving socio-economic group is perhaps best exampled through my own personal experiences.

One of my business clients was the chief executive of a rural borough council in the black country. 'John' had previously held the position of deputy chief executive in another rural district council that our company had done some work for. We had helped them to transition from being an inward looking process-focused organisation to one that put its customers first. John had led the project and I knew it meant a lot to him. Through this experience we developed a mutual respect.

John came from a mining family. His father was a coal miner. In fact mining had been the way the family had made its income for generations. Most of John's peer group went to school expecting to become miners when they left. But one day, as John reached the end of his schooling, his father said, "You're not going to be a miner. You're going to work up at City Hall. They make better money there and it's a job for life." Well in John's case, his fathers' vision for his future had come largely true. The next week, John applied for a job at his local Council and over 30 years later there he was a chief executive (albeit not for the same council but close enough).

My own father, now retired, was an engineer and with few employment options that paid enough to feed a young family, in the early 1960’s established his own engineering business producing machine parts for Leicester’s textiles industry. I still remember the occasion when it was the turn of my father to present me with my future. I remember my anticipating a lecture that would chart my course and leave me with a final outcome. Instead my father simply said, "Just do something that you enjoy. But don't worry, if it doesn't work out you can come and work with your mother and I at the factory."

Strangely that little piece of reverse-encouragement was enough. The thought of working in a factory all day, starved of sunlight, then to arrive home late, with lacerated fingers, smelling of suds (a water and oil lubricant used by engineers to keep cutting tools cool that has a particularly pungent smell - once smelt never forgotten) and covered in black casting dust. It was enough to power me through my exams and find another path. I had no idea of what I wanted to be, but I did know one thing - I was not going to be an engineer. For me personally, anything was better than that!

And now today, reading my children their bedtime story I realise that I am fast approaching the other side of that same life event. What will I say to them? Will it matter what I say? For the first time in our society we face a new reality. Our children will not be expected to follow in their father's footsteps. That generation was my father's generation.

They do not need our direction to tell them what they are to become (would they listen?). They are a generation with an open book of opportunity. They are not expected to put their family or their community before their career. Our children will decide who they are, what they want to be, what they believe in. And they know that we, their parents, will do more than support them financially and emotionally.

As parents we will endeavour to provide the essential building blocks that go to make up ‘good people’ – social values, empathy, respect, selflessness, charity – but we will also encourage individualism; the quality and importance of being an individual. This is not an easy option for our children. When someone offers you unlimited career choices, but you’ve no experience of them, how can you possibly decide?

My friend and colleague, Nick Lawrie, told me one time about a conversation he had had with his teenage daughter. Talking about her school friends she reflected the frustrations and apathy of her peers by describing themselves simply as the hopeless generation; a generation without hope. As a father of two young children it was one of those 2-minute conversations that make a mark on your soul and comes totally from out of the blue.

Individualism is a right of birth that countless generations have fought for. The Suffragette’s attaching themselves to the gates of Buckingham Palace to demand voting rights for women, Martin Luther King, Jr. as he campaigned for freedom from racism not to mention countless other acts of selflessness and bravery.

Individualism has been brought about by increased economic freedom, longer life expectancy, greater access to education, equality and a fractured class system. It is something that will impact all of us and it will change society both significantly and rapidly.

Individuals are today embracing technology in different ways to find new relationships, sharing experiences and developing new virtual communities. If you’re not convinced and have a moment on the Internet, visit http://www.youtube.com/, http://www.flikr.com/, http://www.myspace.com/, http://www.aim.org/ or http://www.elog.com/ and you will find thousands of individuals expressing themselves.

It would take some time to describe each of these examples but taking YouTube™ as an example: http://www.youtube.com/ is a web site founded in February 2005 providing a place for people to watch and share original videos worldwide through a Web experience. YouTube™ is a place for people to engage in new ways with video by sharing, commenting on, and viewing videos and has grown into an entertainment destination with people watching more than 70 million videos on the site daily. This is an online community powered by people. It is visual evidence of a society on the move.

Here’s another example of the changing attitudes that evidence the move towards individualism:

On the 26th May 2004, I was driving home late back from a business trip and tuned into a late night radio talk-show. The subject was a document called ‘Cherishing Life in London today’, published by the catholic bishops of England and Wales. It documented their new instructions on how people should live in today's society. The document offered a new set of ground improvement work streams for a new age that addressed a range of issues including sex education, abortion, stem cell research, euthanasia, infertility and the importance of marriage.

The panel of notables and its contributing audience soon found themselves positioned into two camps. One (for now I'll call them the traditionalists), made up of clergy and a collection of mature, verging on elderly, contributors, made the point that bishops are chosen by God and therefore were ordained by God to set boundaries of behaviour. They said it was a good thing that the bishops were setting moral values on modern human issues such as gay rights, gene cloning etc. because if they didn't, who would?

The other camp, headed by the editor of major European men’s magazine (I'll call it the nouveau view) argued that as an individual, he set his own moral position on these issues and did not need a group of bigoted old men telling him what moral values he should observe. Instead, he argued, the world would be a much safer and friendlier place if people honored their own core values, respected one another’s ways, and people stopped telling other people how they should live - especially religious leaders that create segmentation that leads to friction in society. His argument was quickly interpreted by the 'traditionalists' as being typical of today's selfish generation who only think about themselves and do not respect authority.

I found the two sides of the psychology underpinning the debate interesting and a mirror of the way society is shifting towards individualism. If not the clergy, who else should define the values of people? But there was a deeper argument; that educated individuals living in a multi-cultural society no longer recognise the authority of the traditional institutions. They're not anti-institutional, or bad people, they're individuals demanding the right to determine their own values of behaviour.

Looking at the reluctance of the new generation to engage with traditional community structures as their parents did before them can be viewed in a negative way. Our children might be seen as a generation of wasters that only care about themselves and don't give anything back to society. I take a more positive outlook. Knowing my children as I do, I know they will want to contribute to their community, to help others, but as individuals and not because god or politicians think that they should.

Commerce and the individual

So what does this change of the values of ‘self’ mean to business and commerce?
Today, young people are choosing to opt out of relationships that do not recognise their individualism. When they don't feel that their interests or their opinions make a difference to organisations working by old improvement work streams, they elect not to participate. They don't want to mandate a political party, church or association to speak on their behalf; or to buy from a faceless corporation that sees them as a transaction rather than as an individual.
They have the confidence and expectation to make their own choices.

Aging organisational command and control structures that were developed to help a small number of educated people to manage the ill-educated majority no longer have the relevance that they once did.

Individualism is set to cascade its influence through commerce like a tidal wave. And with confidence in a stable international banking and trading environment, and the advent of internet communications extending consumer reach to global markets, new generations have an unsurpassed level of choice in what they buy and where they buy it from.

As individuals start to give consideration to their own values, they are likely to form values of the people within their peer group, or those that they aspire to be. Their buying decisions will reflect the values they believe in determining the style of products they buy. The task of marketers is going to get ever more complicated to appeal to these individuals – or will it?
Is individualism good or bad?

The growth of individualism does not have to mean that human-kind has lost its soul. On the 26th December 2004, the day of the Asian Tsunami, one of the most devastating natural disasters of the Century, sparked a response of selflessness and charity across the world that has scarcely been seen before. The power of the digital age was demonstrated once more. Within hours of the disaster, pictures were transmitted around the world bringing millions of the world’s people in full view of the disaster; able to see the suffering faces of mothers, fathers, grandparents and children. In our armchairs we think, ‘There for the grace of god go I.’

Should we treat individualism as an unwanted friend after countless generations have worked so hard to offer it to their children as a birth-right?

Can we blame our children if our systems of capitalism and government fail to keep pace with a change in our social conscience? Should we be disappointed that the outcome of greater social care, better education, longer life expectancy, the fight to remove inequality and discrimination from our society, moulds a generation of people that demand more control over their self-determination and to make their own life choices?

Just because the young don't want to be sold to (treated as a face-less transaction), doesn't mean they don't want to buy. A reluctance to pledge allegiance to a political party or association does not mean young people are not interested in politics, or the social privileges of their work colleagues.

In time individualism might be seen as the good thing that I believe it is, but it will only become known, and its value assessed, when examine the impact of change as social commentator Thomas Carlyle did on the consequences of the industrial revolution.

"Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we hould be tempted to call it, not an Heroic, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practices the great art of adapting means to ends. There is no end to machinery. With individuals, in like manner, natural strength avails little. No individual now hopes to accomplish the poorest enterprise single-handed and without mechanical aids; he must make interest with some existing corporation, and till his field with their oxen. In these days, more emphatically than ever, 'to live, signifies to unite with a party, or to make one."

In order to agilize, western world corporations must be able to develop 'throw away' applications

I’ve described in this document why having the ability to 'throw away' applications is critical to business agilization and the regeneration of competition in western world corporations.

Any artist will tell you, for every master-piece you’ll find a pile of canvases on the floor that didn’t work. The nature of creativity is that in order to learn you have to make mistakes. But until now, this iterative learning process has been a nightmare for IT people. Simply put, it’s almost impossible to be creative and not make mistakes. The thought of hard-coding a software application only to throw it away in a couple of weeks?!! That’s why we need throw-away applications.

I suspect Encanvas is the first of many software products designed to liberate the every day human being from having to become a programming geek in order to develop new ways of gathering, sharing and using information. It’s definitely one of the first commercial products to encourage the creative process of building light-weight applications - what people are now describing as ‘composites’ or ‘mash-ups’ (where information comes from several different sources and is brought together by a single application development environment).

The global market for products and services is getting ever more competitive.
Chinese and Indian companies are now producing world-class goods and services at ridiculously low prices, from $50 air flights to $2,200 cars. Most of the world’s retail banks now operate their outsourcing centres in Asia. The country with the world’s largest population now competes both with very low wages and high tech. In a survey of Chinese and U.S. manufacturers by Industry Week, 54% of Chinese companies cited innovation as one of their top objectives, compared with only 26% of U.S. respondents. Today, Chinese companies spend more on worker training and enterprise-management software than their western counterparts. Western corporations are falling behind when it comes to innovation and creativity. They need to regenerate their competitiveness.

Business markets today are in a constant state of flux. A global survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2005 of 336 senior corporate executives, one quarter of which were CEOs, found that almost fifty percent of business managers believe an uncertain business environment is the biggest obstacle to introducing successful changes to the business model. The survey also reported that forty-seven percent of respondents anticipated major changes to their business model within the next 3 years. No surprise, corporate leaders are talking up the need for greater agility.

How corporations can ‘agilize’

But how do corporate leaders regenerate competitiveness? More than anything else, leaders know they need to set the right minds free and re-awaken the creative process. But organizations do not need to ‘agilize’ every aspect of their operations. Business agility exists in tiny pockets within every organization. It’s found in ‘high performers’.

So, who are these people? They are the business development managers, strategists, marketers, researchers, new business unit heads (etc.) that are expected to source new thinking and business growth. And behind them are the energetic heads of business support departments – finance, human resources, IT – seeking better ways of working; encouraging the organization to work as one. These support departments have a thirst for new mechanisms to bridge across hard-to-reach information sources to react to new opportunities or threats on business continuity within a matter of days, even hours.

Why IT is failing to deliver competitive advantage

The faster paced commercial market reality is re-defining the role of IT in corporations. IT is under pressure to find new ways of aligning information systems with the rapidly changing requirements of the enterprise. The debate about whether investments in IT deliver a competitive edge continues to rage. When most corporations are adopting the same mix of business continuity software products – SAP, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Cognos etc. – it has to be said that competitive advantage is only ever likely to result from better quality implementations of the same tools. Not a terribly convincing argument!

The pendulum of budget allocation has moved too far towards business continuity. What makes matters worse is that outmoded IT procurement procedures can take up to 6-months to qualify a new technology and conduct due diligence before allowing new software to join the business continuity systems of the enterprise. The bar for adopting new innovative tools becomes so high that vendors and purchasers are forced to shrug their shoulders and accept it can’t be done.

It’s also partly about culture and embedded ‘norms of behavior. IT departments and business managers find themselves out of sync with one another. The IT department, charged with being the corporate watchdog and ensuring business continuity by protecting business critical information systems, has its head focused on sustaining operational systems (keeping them scalable, secure, resilient, rationalized and optimized). It does not see its role as leading the charge to find new ways of helping ‘high performers’ to grow the business; to encourage creativity.

The IT department has scarce time or enthusiasm to think about how to respond to the many new ad-hoc requests. Many of these demands are for new applications coming from operational managers and directors charged with finding new ways to acquire customers, grow business in new geographies, tap into more creative circles, progress collaborative relationships with channel partners, sub-contractors and affinity groups. As soon as one part of the IT infrastructure comes into line with corporate needs, a merger or technology leap brings another series of IT challenges. The hyper-iterative requirements of the ‘front-line’ managers wait in the inbox of CIO’s until the next budget review.

Traditional hard-wired IT systems can never hope to keep in tune with business demands that change so rapidly. As soon as one part of the IT infrastructure comes into line, a merger or technology leap causes another series of challenges for IT to take care of. The hyper-iterative requirements of the ‘front-line’ managers waits in the inbox of CIO’s until the next budget review. This practical inability to respond to change in a timely and cost effective way is further hampered by aging IT procurement procedures that take 12-months to qualify a new technology to conduct due diligence before allowing new software to join the business continuity systems of the enterprise. The bar for adopting new innovation becomes so high that vendors and purchasers are forced to shrug their shoulders and accept it can’t be done.

But with the broader adoption of Service Oriented Architectures, IT professionals are better able to release the tightly-woven fibers of back-office information systems and make information available through web services to business users. The opportunity has now come to empower business users to serve themselves and to author their own formalized information flows to gather, capture, analyze and share information.

So, how is ‘the edge’ of IT being supported? In reality, few high performers have access to the information they known they need (see Accenture research findings – Schedule A). Less than 5% of IT budgets are typically focused on empowering the ‘right people’ in the right way – and yet corporate leaders know that to re-kindle competitiveness, their organizations must become Agile.

The only way to maintain a highly fluid blend of business applications that always fit the business needs of the enterprise is to give Information Workers the ability to serve themselves.

Competitive advantage comes as the result of people being empowered to do what people do best; finding new commercial opportunities, using their curiosity to dig up new opportunities, applying their experience to create new solutions to old problems. To do all of these things, people need information. But this information is today held within hard-to-reach back-office systems and in the many spreadsheets and word processing documents held within hard-drives.

These new applications have four prime characteristics:

1. Self-serviced - Applications that can be authored by non technical business people with zero-footprint on IT resources dedicated to business continuity.
   Low impact on business continuity. Otherwise, quite rightly, IT must have full authority over any projects.
2. Robust and secure for purpose - Providing Information Workers with a trusted, orderly, authoring environment for publishing composite applications that is essentially a ‘bonded’ area for the creation of role based information flows and bridging applications – ie. Secure and accessible to privileged Information Workers without harming business continuity. That means no over-engineering of applications or discussion of enterprise platforms or tools that are procured with the expectation they are meant to last forever.
3. Affordable - The ability to author applications that have to be regarded as ‘throw away’ to liberate business people to develop applications to support their information needs with zero-impact on business continuity.
   

Why throw-away applications make sense

Giving business people tools to author their own applications that bridge across the mixed sources of information that exist in a corporate environment (and beyond it) today, means that new initiatives to acquire new customers, merge with businesses, work with affinity partners, collaborate with sub-contractors etc. can happen within a timeframe that gives organizations the possibility of a first mover advantage.

Without the potential to throw-away applications, organizations are unable to afford or risk the cost of experimentation that is essential to the process of innovation. But with software like Encanvas, the ‘leave-behind’ is always a 100% Microsoft compliant application which means that if applications do have a longer term role, they can be easily nested into corporate IT architecture.

We probably haven’t heard the last of ‘throw away’ applications.

A new day, a new blog

I've got a few blogs running around the WWW but this one is dedicated to the subjects that I cover in my latest book - Agilization - that gets published by MB2000 in October 2007.

Here I'm going to introduce some of the key topics over the next few weeks. Keep an eye on the site for changes. It promises to be a busy year!

Ian.