From Agile Scrums to Codeless Workshops - The Evolution of Enterprise Software Development

Will the transition from Agile Scrum development to Codeless Real-Time Development Workshops be as high impact as the move from Waterfall to Scrum?

The Journey from Waterfall to Codeless Software Development

In the Beginning

For companies that were accustomed to adopting a waterfall project approach for their software developments, the move to agile scrum methods has been dramatic, both in terms of its results and its impact on the size and skills of project teams.

Waterfall describes a traditional software development approach (that dates back well into the 1970’s) where different threads of development are performed by different development people or teams. 

When development teams adopt the waterfall method, projects are scope up front and then components are developed in parallel by different people – often employing specialist skills and tools.   The number of people involved in projects and the many threads of activity creates a complex project model that then requires expert project management tools, methods and skills to orchestrate (PRINCE2 became the answer to this eventually and led to a whole new set of skills requirements for companies to mince over).

Following development of the various streams of the waterfall, these are bound together and formed into a final ‘end-product’.  This approach has been fraught with project management issues. Delays in any of the parallel developments causes the entire project to over-run.  Often, ‘next steps’ of integration with third party tools and data, and activities such as testing and tuning, can’t be progressed until the last thread of development has been done. This can result in huge project over-runs and costs.  

The article ‘Why Your IT Project May Be Riskier Than You Think’ by HBR (November 2011), that followed a survey of 1,471 IT projects with an average spend of $167m, found that the average overrun was 27%, one in six of the projects studied was a black swan, with a cost overrun of 200%. And almost 70% of black swan projects also overrun their schedules.

Even when projects do get delivered on-time, the consequences of using one or many expert programmatic tools means that documentation is more complex, testing and tuning takes longer, and more bugs are likely to be embedded in the code. EVEN should everything go according to plan, the remoteness of intended system users and stakeholders to the back-room development process means that resulting systems are difficult to get right as a perfect fit to the user community.  It’s quite an art to write a paper specification for a software application and produce a perfect system right-first-time.  More like impossible in fact.

A major challenge all development teams face is application users and stakeholders rarely know PRECISELY what they need in terms of database management, reports, process workflows and user interfacing requirements out-of-the-box.  Normal domain expert business users find it hard to visualize end-applications and often struggle to formalize their end-product in a format that programmers can use. 

Accepting the high resourcing costs, need for costly specialist best-of-breed tools, use and constraints of coding and its impact on testing, tuning and adaptability, perhaps the biggest issue of traditional waterfall development tools and methods however lies in what gets left behind.  Programmed systems are inherently difficult to maintain and adapt. Companies don’t particularly want to be left with systems they can’t change over time, or that require a team similar in size to the team that built the application to maintain it into the future (mainly because of the dependencies created on a smorgasbord of best-of-breed tools and skills.

The step-up to AGILE SCRUM

Advances in Integrated Development Environment (IDE’s) since the turn of the century, aided by the timely emergence of standards around enterprise web server computing platforms, has produced a number of capable tool-kits to enable software development teams to work more closely together with fewer tools and fewer expert skills.  This reduction in tool-kit complexity has meant the project approach has been able to transition more towards a team-based culture where individuals working towards a shared goal can work together in a collegiate way.

AGILE tools are so-called because they provide development teams with more adaptive tools that produce results faster.  One aspect of the ‘agility’ comes from using bigger building blocks of code that can be shaped to fit a variety of needs but doesn’t require programmers to start with a blank page. 

The SCRUM model has evolved around the need for members of development teams to keep in close contact with one another and stay on the same page.  More frequent reviews of progress – perhaps on a weekly, even daily basis – ensures that the streams of development stay on-track and can be regularly check to ensure the quality of the end-product is as it needs to be and that project managers can check time and again that ‘what is being produced’ is ‘what the internal client wants’.

AGILE tooling does not provide developers with everything they need in one box.  To improve the integration and use of third party expert tools, software providers today normally provide an Applications Programming Interface (API) so the various tools are EASIER to integrate with one another.  While this is EASIER it remains a major overhead on developments as each API tends to be different and developments inherit any limitations presented by the ‘black box’ of functionality provided by the best-of-breed software they are integrating with.  This inability to interplay one application with another using the same properties means that developers find themselves constantly having to come up with work-arounds to produce the best end-product.

SCRUM has its limitations too. While it’s great for developer teams to work towards a common goal and take more of an active interest in making sure their contribution is producing the best ‘total’ outcome, developers continue to work in back-rooms and continue to lack an appreciation of the domain area they are building applications for.  Any developer knows the ‘last mile’ (i.e. managing the interaction with the user and stakeholder communities) is the most difficult part of an application to get right as different user groups will have very different expectations and needs from the applications they use. 

Like the traditional waterfall approach, AGILE SCRUM still relies on coding and that’s a problem.  Not only does it install more post–development overheads are more bugs are built into the end-product, and more testing, tuning, integration is necessary, it means that resulting applications continue to be expensive to maintain and adapt.

The New Age of Codeless Development

So-called ‘codeless’ development software describes Integrated Development Environments that displace the need for applications authors to code.  The leading enterprise platform for this approach is Encanvas.  All of the building blocks required to develop enterprise applications are built into a common IDE. ‘Design Elements’ - as they are known - adopt similar properties and have been designed to provide a sufficient level of tailoring to fit the majority of needs. 

At one time, it was thought that codeless platforms would be only good enough for piloting of projects or serve ‘little application’ needs of the enterprise where larger platforms were too costly to use.  The last decade has shown however that IDEs like Encanvas are capable of delivering enterprise, pan-regional and cross-industry applications to enterprise scale and levels of performance.

In the same way that a step-change in enterprise web platform standards at the turn of the century led to the evolution of SCRUM methods for software applications authoring, use of codeless tools has led to the formation of near-real-time applications authoring methods.

With codeless software, the removal of the programming activity in project (and the removal of best-of-breed tools and the need for APIs) has meant that users and stakeholders can be engaged in development workshops where applications designs are iterated in consort with the users and stakeholders who are able to see and understand what’s being authored because they see the ‘end-product’ being formed in-front of their eyes.

Codeless software has dramatically reduced the number of tools and the variety of skills needed to author applications, but its biggest impact is found in the leave-behind: resulting systems can be easily adapted as business requirements and user needs change.  Neither are there any upgrade costs associated with software; platforms like Encanvas enable hundreds of applications to be authored and do not charge for any new improvements to the IDE.  This means IT leaders seeking to reduce the number of technologies they support in their enterprise IT architecture can shrink their footprint from 100’s of tools to less than 10.

The bi-product of this change in technology tooling and methods makes a big impact on IT budgets. The expectation of IT leaders now is that IT operations should cost no more that 1% of operating profits. Deployments delivered through codeless workshop development methods demonstrate a factor of 10 increase in time-to-market and a similar dynamic in the lowering of onward IT costs.

Will the move from SCRUM to CODELESS be bigger or smaller than the move from WATERFALL to SCRUM?

I would argue the move from SCRUM to CODELESS has a greater bottom-line impact but a lesser change impact compared to the original transition from WATERFALL to SCRUM for the following reasons:

1. IT departments have already shrunk their internal IT teams and now use contractors for much of the heavy-lifting in software development and support. What the move to codeless does is internalize the support of IT systems – making IT more adaptive and better able to support the long-tail of demand for new or better enterprise applications - while displacing the use and cost of contractors. 
2. IT departments are already using IDEs and reducing their use of specialist tooling.  Platforms like Microsoft .NET and Ruby-on-Rails have done much to consolidate tooling for developers.  What Codeless platforms do is FURTHER consolidate tooling.
3. IT leaders are already finding ways to embed IT development skills ever closer to the domain expert communities that use applications.  What codeless software does is take development out of the back-room into the front-office workshop so that developments produce faster, better results that the users and stakeholders WANT to use because they were instrumental in the design of applications they use.
4. IT leaders are already rationalizing the numbers of technologies they support in the enterprise technology stack.  What codeless software does is further reduce the footprint of technologies employed across the enterprise to install more commonality in development methods and tools.
5. Arguably the biggest change factor then with codeless workshop development lies in the impact of an IT department being able to keep-up with the ideas and process changes of the enterprise.  This has surprisingly big organizational design implications.  For decades people in the business have been able to BLAME IT for failing to support their domain needs.  Consider what happens when suddenly it does:  No longer is IT the scape-goat.  Also consider the impact of embedding software development into improvement teams as some innovative companies like AUDI GROUP already do.  The analysts that scope and build the applications are PART of the improvement team, incentivized by the impact of the process changes they manifest rather than being paid for ‘writing code’. Departmental and operational managers will be inevitably more responsible and accountable for IT as part of their function.  They have no choice but to consider the performance of the IT they use as being part of their portfolio of responsibility.  The role of the CIO becomes one of guardianship of IT resources rather than the deliverer of every single IT initiative.

  Keywords:  Waterfall, Agile, Codeless Software Development, CAAD, Encanvas, Software Development Methods, ALM, Application Life-cycle Management

Secrets of Going Codeless

How to Build Enterprise Apps without Coding

Building applications without code still requires methods and skills. In this article I describe the methods that Encanvas has used for well over a decade to successfully deliver situational applications developments.

The first application created on Encanvas in a codeless form was a silly form for appraisals.  That was in 2002 I seem to recall.  Since then the size and scale of applications authored 'codeless' have included several enterprise-wide systems, a few pan-regional systems and even industry-wide systems.

In the early years of Encanvas, most of the applications were created by Andrew Lawrie (the creator of Encanvas) himself.  It was impressive enough that Andy could take an enterprise requirement and just 'make it happen' all by himself, but since then the community of Encanvas authors and architects has grown exponentially.

The types of backgrounds of authors too is wide and varied.  I've produced a few systems and my background is generally sales and marketing.  A couple of the guys are 'proper developers' that have sold their soul to the codeless god, while many are domain expert consultants, entrepreneurs, project managers and analysts.  What do they have in common?  They can all use a mouse I guess!!

As the scale of applications gets bigger, and the variety of author skills broadens, it becomes more important to adopt methods to optimize the authoring process. No question, it is possible without method to be able to produce results with codeless software, but then that places a 100% reliance on the talents of the practitioner.

CAAD came out of a series of 'interventions' to streamline the codeless authoring process that all hang together pretty well and perform certain key tasks well (like requirements gathering).

Hopefully you find the linked document interesting and easy enough to absorb.  If you have any questions, I'd be happy to field them.

Ian.

Keywords:

Enterprise Applications, Codeless Software Development, CAAD, Encanvas, Situational Applications, IT Strategy, Application Life-Cycle Management

CAAD Codeless Software Development Methods

CAAD Methods

I produced this article to describe how analysts can build enterprise-scale situational applications time and again without coding based on the methods adopted by the team at Encanvas over the past decade.  The methodology hasn't changed too much over the past few years but we continue to learn from customers and practitioners.

It's only in the last three or four years that we've honed the use of Outcome Driven Innovation (ODI) and Blue Ocean methods as part of this approach.

One of the factors that we've found critical to success is to specify the requirements, outcomes, user group structures, reporting needs (RPRS Analysis) etc. BEFORE jumping into a meeting room and workshopping solutions.

It's great to work in a collaborative way but having the structures and outcomes buttonned down means that analysts can get to work on the boring 'basic modelling' of a solution and have something to walk around before users and stakeholders start iterating their design.

I hope you find it helpful!

I.

Keywords:
Codeless software development, CAAD, Software Development Methods, Agile Software Development Methods, Encanvas, Enterprise Situational Applications Development Methods

Sub Surface Spend

Slideshare presentation on sub-surface spend

In this presentation I argue the case for federated spend management software tools as a vehicle to affordably source sub-surface spend economies in organizations where procuement teams have harvested the low hanging fruit and now need to consider digging deeper into spend behaviors to achieve the next stage of procurement economies.

Key words:
Sub-Surface Spend, federated spend analysis platforms, encanvas, situational applications, data mashups, actionable insights, procurement strategies

To anyone and everyone that has taken the time to read my blog articles over the past few years - Thank You!

As we begin a new year I should like to take a moment to thank the 11,446 people that have taken time-out of their busy schedules to muse over my articles in recent years. Never did I imagine that anything I produced would get seen by 11,000 people. Wow!  You never did show up in my teens when I was playing my electric guitar. (But there you go.)

Thank you even more to those who have reached out to me to give encouragement or let me know how they've applied some of the learning lessons I've documented about organizational design, business and IT that I have myself found useful.

I hope you all have a special 2014.

I.

A Single View of Customer Data - Thanks Cloud ;-)

Sourcing a single view of customer data can be painful for marketers

In this article I take my first walk around using a BIG DATA private-cloud data-mart for marketing and comment on what it’s actually like as a marketer to be armed with a ‘single-version-of-the-truth’ when it comes to customer insights.

I’ve spent my career as a business-to-business marketer being (one of) the last to leave the office because THE NEXT marketing activity required data in a certain sort, form and quality that required me – and often my willing team – to stay behind and fix all of the wrinkles that fall out of exporting data from operational systems like Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Contact Management (CM) or Intranet repositories.

The marketing industry has spent a life-time grappling with poor quality data from operational systems and using it for a different purpose to what it was intended.  The vision of CRM and other systems was to create a ‘single-view-of-the-customer’.  Great.  Or at least it would be great if systems didn’t change, acquisitions didin’t happen and marketers only wanted to use data that exists within the organization. But this is the real-world, and in the real-world all of these factors impact on marketers to stretch their day.

Thankfully, the advent of cloud computing – and applications platform technologies like ENCANVAS – happily means that nowadays marketers don’t need to rely on operational systems to form their customer data-mart into a single view of the customer.  Private-cloud data-marts are a new form of technology solution to the age-old problem of how to create a nice, neat bundle of customer data that marketers can get their knife and fork into without first having to herd cats.

Sometimes falling under the all conquering umbrella of BIG DATA, CRM private cloud data-marts are a secondary layer of glue-ware:  Instead of creating a ‘new system’ and yet more data entry screens, CRM data marts harvest data from existing operational systems and website to build a holistic view of the customer and market landscapes.  Data is securely uploaded to the cloud using Business Process Management and Workflow tooling (in the case of Encanvas it’s called INFORMATION FLOW DESIGNER), and as it’s harvested, clever algorithms are applied to the data to correct all of those horrid things that marketers usually have to spend their time manually correcting in unwilling spreadsheets – missing postal codes, incorrect salutations, duplicate records, invalid email addresses and telephone numbers.  These algorithms cut a huge chunk of workload off of the marketers’ average day-job and can even cope when salespeople do ther inexplicable data entry faux pas like ‘dead@dontsendemail.com’.

Services like USTech Solutions’ Big Data Skunkworks mean that marketers are able to get up and running with their truly holistic view of customers remarkably quickly and start to show their metal by doing the great things that marketers joined the profession to do rather than the tedious data crunching stuff that drives them to distraction.

SO YOU WANTED A SINGLE VIEW OF YOUR CUSTOMERS – WELL NOW YOU”VE GOT ONE! SO WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH IT?

I’ve only been experiencing the impact of CRM data-marts through ENCANVAS deployments over the last few months and so (even though I’ve been waiting for 20-years to see the day!!). I’m only now getting my hands on the sort of data and tools that I dreamt of as a spotty marketing assistant back in the day.  The results I’ve experienced have so far been outstanding (I may well up!).  Using the interactive charting and mapping tools that are available now to marketers in CRM data-mart platforms it’s now possible to dive into views of data presented in charts or maps and see the related records below to see the detail. It’s also possible to click on the data that DOESN”T have an email, that DOESN’T have a scheduled reminder or scheduled follow-up – so action can be taken to act on what’s missing by resolving the poor working practice.  One can even filter the source of poor quality data to an original system, sales team or sales person!  There’s nowhere to hide for poor quality or incomplete data.

Having the ability to identify patterns and buyer behavior segments is proving extremely useful.  Having defined rules in the system of what constitutes a BAND A customer. or a BAND B customer, the platform will again manage these rules so that, any time a customer inherits these characteristics, they pop into the appropriate group.  Customer data can then be analyzed, sorted, formed into campaign lists (or whatever) by adding this additional ‘filter’.  From a practical perspective this means that marketers can be far more granular with their campaign straegies; they can select customers with or without certain data attributes, by band, by location, by date last contact, by income, by spend, by shopping behavior – gosh it’s fun!!!

Another factor that feels like it’s taking a load-off happens when I see poor quality data and I want to tackle it.  Instead of having to export ALL of the records that have no email address or no Cell/SMS number, I can now concentrate efforts on tackling the BAND A customers that have no email and make sure the most likely sources of business impact are handled first.  Very handy.

One thing I wasn’t expecting is that the data in the cloud data-mart is consistently good even when the data held in sourcing systems remains poor.  This is because the extraction tools that automate the population of the CRM data-mart cloud will install sorting, de-duping, cleansing and enriching treatments not just once but everytime a data upload takes place.  This means that if you’ve instructed the platform to look through your emails and kill any non-conforming data, it does so every time the source data is uploaded – so the result is the cloud always stays PURE.

Does this mean the world of the marketer has changed forever?  Not on a base level; the same old instincts, methods and skills apply. What is different is the IMPACT pragmatic marketing can make on business POWERED by private-cloud CRM data-marts.  It’s and accelerator to marketing innovation.  Of course it also saves me LOADS of time by not having to be knee deep in dodgy data which now allows me to go home at the same time as my sales colleagues that were probably the folk who put the poor quality data in the CRM database in the first place!! Thanks guys – I  forgive you (now).

Another big player in 'big data'

This article announces Goldmans' US$100m investment into big data analytics firm APT.   APT's description of its service is a dead-ringer for Data Investment Management and puts APT, WPP's Fabric (Fabricxx) and Encanvas on different parts of the same page.

Without question, harvesting data, analyzing it and acting on the things that matter is the hottest ticket in IT at the moment.  Whereas APT and Fabric are in the 'big corporate' market playing with big data, Encanvas serves the mid-market and harvests data from anywhere to build customer analytics.

Other notables in this space are Locationary, recently purchased by Apple, Teradata's Aster Data analytic platform, Dataspark in Australia and the people that started it all DunnHumby.

Disappointingly, a focus on the Big Data buzz is somewhat distracting as people seem to be confusing the world of Google, Facebook and Amazon dealing with HUGE DATA (let alone 'big') with the need by organizations to adopt Data Investment Management solutions that can discover data, analyze and act on it.

I.

Operational Analytics: Best Software For Sourcing Actionable Insigh...

Operational Analytics: Best Software For Sourcing Actionable Insights:

In this article I summarize the buying options for businesses looking to source actionable insights - data views and reports that give managers cause to take action to improve the way they work and achieve double-loop learning results.

I hope you find it helpful!

Ian.

Cloud 9. Nine Reasons Why the Cloud is Worth Taking Seriously

For those business professionals who are keen to get a handle on what cloud computing is and why it might be relevant to their business I've put together a very crude list in this most basic of white papers produced for US Tech Solutions to help start the process of deciphering the business case for cloud computing.

For technologists please don't read it because the oversimplification of arguments will drive you crazy;-).

Ian.

Taking your first step onto the cloud

Why situational applications are the obvious first step into cloud computing for public sector organisations

Faced with depressing predictions of looming budget cuts cloud computing has come to the fore of discussions to uncover relatively short-term economies in IT functions within the public sector. But how much of the cloud story is hype? How different are cloud architectures to the web-server farms that organisations have had the means to access for well over a decade? And how realistic is it that core business systems will move out of the data centre into the cloudspace?

Most of the CIOs I speak to are sceptical of the real-world practicality of large-scale porting of business critical apps to the cloud. They site concerns over data security, business continuity, administration and the realistic challenges of running a relationship with a vendor that will need to provide robust administrative tools to manage day-to-day support activities. Even those CIOs who brush through all of these concerns with optimistic verve, there are still huge issues to take onboard about the scalability of databases and commercial structures supporting cloud platforms. And what about the proprietary nature of the various cloud platforms? It’s a very new industry and the entire market is experiencing a sharp learning curve.

What’s the difference between cloud computing and web hosting?

Experts of cloud computing will allude to a small number of very pointy differences between cloud computing and traditional web server hosting. The first clear difference is the potential for multi-tenancy – the ability for individuals and companies to buy into a share of a computing platform that has a seemingly endless supply of processor and storage capacity. They will site dramatic advances in technology that have made possible new levels of virtualization and scaling that is unprecedented in the industry. Other enthusiasts of cloud computing will point to a step-change in the possibilities of deploying virtualized applications made possible by the administrative tools and technologies that the competitive bun-fight for cloud computing has inspired by the major vendors. Whilst these advances in the framework of tools for applications design, deployment and administration might not be exclusively the domain of cloud computing, this is most definitely the ‘flag’ that these new innovations fly under.

Having stepped through the minutia of the cloud debate I conclude that it doesn’t really matter whether cloud architectures are fundamentally different; or whether the software tools that cloud computing has levered to the surface are part of the cloud computing story or not. What matters to hard-pressed IT leaders in the public sector is that – thanks to cloud computing - more opportunities exist for virtualizing server platforms, and achieving economies by adopting smarter means of running key processes including the design, deployment and operation of business applications than ever before. Cloud computing provides a greater ability to leverage the competencies and resources of third party vendors (with smarter technology) while organizations only pay for what they use.

But with so many concerns over the robustness, database scalability, administrative tools etc. of cloud computing, what is the first step that IT leaders should take on this journey?

Situational and departmental applications – the first step into the clouds

While some private sector organizations like easyJet are taking the lead in cloud computing by adopting policies whereby all future application should be considered for deployment on the cloud before any other justification is considered, the majority of public sector organisations are adopting a more cautious approach. The first applications most organisations are considering for cloud deployment are the departmental and so-called ‘situational applications’ that I describe below.
For departmental managers and executives, IT budgets have always been a bit of a lottery. There are so many business processes that occur in any public sector organization, and their operation is to tangentially different to the private sector, that most departments have to make do with the majority of users gaining access to a core administrative system while workers that need a bigger bag of different systems are required to make do with spreadsheets, PowerPoints and Access databases to fill in the cracks in their information management. The gap between information needs and information systems capability is forever growing while IT teams lack the resources or budgets to respond to every need with a shrink-wrapped software tool. Even today, most middle managers report they lack the information they need to discharge their roles and the information they do get is often not in the format (or completeness) to make it useful.

Developments in Rich Internet portals technology spearheaded by investments into cloud computing are now reaching the market. They provide users with the level of user interface experience and responsiveness to queries comparable (if not better) than the systems resident applications they’re used to using. Rich Internet portal platforms like Encanvas engineer a new marriage between data mashups technology, building block applications design and pain-free deployment and operation needed to support near infinite numbers of secure and live community spaces in the cloud.
Rich Internet portal solutions for the Microsoft Azure cloud like Encanvas Secure&Live™ are purposely designed to meet enterprise requirements for situational applications; described by thought-leader Luca Cherbakov of IBM as “applications developed by small teams in response to new business situations that possess the economics that mean once used they can be discarded”.

Experience gained in the last decade on the use and deployment of situational applications suggests that while situational applications start simply as a robust IT answer to a business problem, generally these solutions mature into business critical IT systems as users and stakeholders benefit from their use and start to mature their use cases. And many of these applications start within a department – to serve a departmental need – and grow because of their usefulness and practical rewards.

The way communities and teams tend to mature their situational applications takes on a common roadmap:
(1) Applications start with the need for ‘secure and live’ community spaces providing access to collaboration and participant interaction.
(2) Then the need to acquire data from different data sources emerges.
(3) Next, users call for more enquiry and analysis screens and capabilities.
(4) Then the need for more formalized business processes materialises.
(5) Finally, (and only in some cases) requirements for predictive engines emerge – providing the ability to anticipate the likelihood of events and impacting scenarios that might impact on the community.

While the majority of IT users are adequately supplied by a small number of systems (such as sales administrators that will spend all of their time on a CRM system, or an accounting clerk who will live in their SAP or Oracle portals) there are a smaller number of department managers, marketers, R&D and creatives that demand robust IT solutions to serve themselves with richer sources of insights and smarter tools to rationalise the information overload of the digital age.

Situational applications are seen as the remedy to the ‘long tail of demand’ for business applications coming from this very important minority community of IT users scattered across the enterprise that make innovation happen and spark competitive advantage. Unfortunately, at the outset of these departmental and situational software development projects, it’s often not clear what the return-on-investment might be for investing in the development of a robust IT solution. Equally, there can be relationship and organisational pressures surrounding a software development project that mean cooperation is not assured and data acquisition and aggregation may be prohibited by practical IT roadblocks or the unwillingness of parties to play ball.

It’s in this complex arena of information change management that the unique blend of economics and functionality manifested in cloud computing platforms like Encanvas comes to the fore; where the cloud represents a more neutral zone for cooperation (with each contributing party owning its own data and ability to regulate access permissions while sharing the same technology platform).

Why are situational applications the obvious start-point for cloud computing initiatives?

The main reasons are these:
• Most organisations have too many software products and supplier relationships. Reducing the number of discrete software applications through harmonisation offers a direct route to savings in IT expenditure while the ability to deliver more applications right first time through situational applications is assured.
• Cloud architectures provide a faster and more painless means of designing, deploying and operating custom built applications. They’re more economic and can scale to whatever size they need to grow so there’s no risk of outgrowing the hardware platform.
• The cloud is seen to be a secure and live ‘neutral territory’ for organisations seeking to share data and collaborate with their communities – there is less of an emotional issue towards where data resides.
• Making a start on the cloud journey with situational applications addresses the ‘long-tail of demand’ for business applications so IT teams can be seen to deliver responsive IT solutions to emergent business needs by serving up robust IT solutions at very low cost.
• While situational applications can grow to become business critical, there’s a big difference between starting from day one with new applications on the cloud and attempting to port the much less numerous core transactional platforms that are critical to business continuity.

Use case examples of situational applications

Here are three use case examples that show how situational applications can mature into best-fit business critical information systems; ideal early stage candidates for cloud computing.

1. Streetworks (local government department)

At the introduction of the Traffic Management Act in 2004, the Traffic Manager of West Sussex County Council identified that the current information management of the department was unworkable if all aspects of the new legislation (calling for improved cooperation with streetworks undertakers and demonstration of parity on planning decisions) were to be met. With the current IT systems, no mapping functionality existed that could provide a single page view of all planning aspects. Engineers were required to reference six different internal systems to build a clear picture of the planning considerations – and even then mistakes could be easily made. Another major challenge was the impact of TMA legislation on the administrative overheads of the department demanding that the Council input all of its own streetwork assets, activities and events in order to demonstrate parity with other streetworks undertakers (before TMA 2004 this information was not reported). An urgent solution was needed to comply with the TMA requirements – otherwise the Traffic Manager estimated that at least 2 additional FTEs would be required simply to keep up with the administrative overheads (at a time when skilled staff with appropriate qualifications were scarce due to demand driven by the new legislator framework). An interim situational application was developed by IS consultants NDMC and West Sussex County Council to provide a bridging solution to respond to the new information demands of the TMA 2004 legislation in advance of core business systems being brought up to date. The project team identified the sources of data from across the department and mapped out a requirements specification. Samples of each of the data sources were gathered and a ‘start-point’ proof of concept was developed. This application was presented to a workshop of users and stakeholders who spent a day discussing the format and operation of the system. By the end of this one-day workshop, the majority of the systems design was completed and a fully functioning test system was deployed onto the Encanvas system within 2 days. As the result of this project, the WSCC streetworks team was comfortably able to service the anticipated peak in demand for noticing of works without needing to create new posts and West Sussex County Council became the first local authority in the southeast, outside London, to operate and full EToN3 compliant system.

2. Credentials Management (professional services)

A global professional services organisation found that it was unable to satisfactorily provide credentials of past projects in support of new client engagement bids owing to the lack of retained information. While some detail of contact information was held on a Lotus Notes intranet, project information was either not captured or was to be found in different systems. The current situation meant that evidencing capabilities was proving to be difficult and was risking future business growth. In response to this business challenge, the organisation worked with IS consultants NDMC to create a situational application using Encanvas. The application was created during the course of six days with the project team working in a workshop environment. Data mashup technology, incumbent in the Encanvas platform, was used to acquire data from disparate sources – including the Lotus Notes Intranet, a third party database (held in .CSV format) and project systems. User search and enquiry forms were created that used drop-down filters and free-text weighted search to simplify the enquiry process. Once filtered queries were returned, the resulting records could be downloaded in a templated form for instant inclusion into bid documents and proposals. As the result of the situational applications deployment, senior partners were instantly able to harness the credentials of the global knowledge center operations in support of future bids. Whilst this system achieved an ROI within the first 6-weeks of use, it continued to be used on a daily basis for over three years before an integrated platform solution was developed to displace it.

3. Compliance Management (electronics sector)

A global electronics company found that in order to comply with new regulatory demands from its parent in Japan, it needed to install a license management and reporting solution. The European operation was given scant notice of this new requirement and were challenged to get a system in-place within 6-weeks! The project manager elected to work with IS consultants NDMC to design and deploy an interim situational application using the Encanvas Rich Internet platform. Through a one-day workshop the project team devised a data model and website design. Taking advantage of the data connectors provided by the Encanvas platform, the project team was able to import historical licensing data held in MS Access and spreadsheet files to deploy a working solution within five days. Following a period of user testing, a second workshop was initiated to recommend iterative changes that were subsequently implemented using the code-free design environment of Encanvas; changes that took only a ½ day to implement. Having the license management system on a web hosted environment meant that the Japanese parent company is now able to access report data for compliance purposes directly 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This interim solution has now been running since 2005 and continues to satisfactorily meet compliance reporting requirements.

In conclusion

The idea that IT functions will achieve step-change reductions in operational costs is unlikely to happen without a harmonisation agenda where the hundreds of software applications that organisations use are trimmed down to a manageable number – perhaps to less than 10 core applications platforms. Migrating the many homemade and discrete applications and spreadsheet systems to a common secure and live architecture present a real and immediate opportunity for short-term cashable economies.
Cloud-borne Rich Internet Portal architectures like Encanvas Secure&Live deployed on Microsoft Azure present IT leaders with the opportunity to not only ‘test’ the economics and viability of cloud computing as their first-step to cloud computing, solutions such as this also provide a mechanism to economically serve the long-tail of applications demand that exists within all organisations today (improving internal customer satisfaction towards IT).
So if you’re considering making the move to cloud computing, why not consider taking baby steps first with situational and departmental applications - and just make sure you’re able to reach the cloud before you leap.

Why Enterprise Mashups and Social Media will make India successful

It was a great joy for myself and the Encanvas team to launch our 'Squork' secure and live business social networking technology in Lucknow, India this month with our partners US Tech. We were cheerfully surprised by the enthusiasm that exists in India for new technology - even when it's technology that changes the paradigm of business computing and asks people to consider new ways of working. (A big thanks to the IIM-L team for making us so welcome!).

Through a series of meetings with leaders of academia and business around the purpose and opportunities offered by Squork business social networking, surfaced the fundamental reason why I believe India will be the powerhouse of world markets in the next decade.

You see, here's my point:

In Europe and the USA, I see IT leaders playing a game of 'got, not got' over the building blocks of IT technology in support of their enterprise computing stacks that always reminds me of the game we used to play as kids swapping football player cards with our friends at the school gate. It seems every IT leader has to have at least one of every technology genre whether it achieves a business outcome or not. So I'm always being quizzed by CIOs about 'what Encanvas displaces' and 'where does Encanvas (and Squork) fit' in the enterprise IT stack? This focus on innovation is firmly pinned to their NOW, and the norms of understanding and behavior as they see them today. They are focused too much on DOING THINGS BETTER and think too little about DOING BETTER THINGS.

Never once did I have that schoolyard conversation in India. The most common question was this: "How will Encanvas help me to achieve 100% growth in the next 2 to 3 years?"

This is a much more relevant business conversation.

It's not secret that companies around the world have spent millions on IT, and yet - with an average of 15 business intelligence tools, tens (sometimes hundreds) of shrink-wrapped software products, workflow tools, search tools, mapping tools etc. - most middle managers and C-level execs. still complain about the fit between IT and their business information needs. Nomatter how we measure it, IT has not, does not, deliver agile information systems that always stay in tune with the way organizations want to work.

In Indian I found businessmen and women who aren't shackled by the IT investment they've already made. Instead, they're interested in the potential of IT to be a competitive differentiator. The question they want answering is how technology can deliver the growth they want to see.I'm convinced that, as long as new innovation delivers on its promises, they will happily throw out their current IT - AND ITS ASSOCIATED NORMS OF BEHAVIOR - without a thought.

And that's why Encanvas is in India.

I don't mind so much sitting in meetings with IT leaders in Western Europe and the USA evidencing how the world of Web 2.0 - with its enterprise mashups, drag and drop mapping, agile business intelligence, instant mobile apps and business social networking solutions - can make a step-change difference to business growth. I don't mind because I know that for every stick in the mud corporate gate-keeper there are other IT leaders who are thinking about business outcomes and it's always fun to help any and all of these people to find their own reasons to change their perspectives on the potential of IT to bring about a competitive advantage.

New web 2.0 technology platforms like Encanvas that are built for cloud computing and a new generation of IT savvy business people are unstoppable in the hands of entrepreneurs and creative people with uncluttered minds. And today, there are more of those people in India.

If we are to see economies in the USA and Western Europe remain as major players in global business markets, somehow we need to get more business people (and particularly IT leaders) thinking more about the 100% growth of their organizations, and less about the completeness of their IT stack. The 'got, not got' game of corporate IT procurement has got to come to an end.

How? Beats me.

Why Enterprise mashups are more than a 'nice to have' for business leaders

Today I’m re-authoring the Action Framework system. It reminded me that in 2002, the Action Framework was the reason why I started on the journey to producing a better way of working with data that has since become known as enterprise mashups.

Under any other description, an Action Framework is a performance management system but unlike traditional performance management systems that focus too much on strategies and plans and not enough on reality, the currency of an Action Framework are the actions that happen across an organization on a daily basis.

When I started NDMC I was keen to find a better way of managing organizations because I’ve seen so many good and enthusiastic people find themselves in middle-management positions, not knowing why they’re doing what they’ve been asked to do. All too often, enthusiasm and effort does not translate into results and rewards because of poor instruction or poor alignment between the actions of these key people and the required outcomes of the organization. Another issue that I was keen to resolve was how organizations listen to their customers and learn what matters most to them. Normally organizations get this wrong because they have sales people doing the asking or they rely on satisfaction surveys with their ‘yes’ and ‘no’ black and white responses. So it made sense to me that a performance management framework needed to have installed mechanisms to listen to the outside world and adjust plans based on its ability to learn.

From these fragments of logic, my colleagues at NDMC and I created the first Action Framework in 2004. Initially our first attempt was built on spreadsheets that I used to capture strategic plans, budgets and actions and insights. Aligning all of these elements was not easy on a spreadsheet (I wasn’t convinced we were helping anyone see the woods for the trees with such a complicated landscape of data) so a year on we turned to the use of an SQL relational database and built a series of data capture and analysis applications in dotnet.

But there was a fundamental problem. Whatever we did to create ‘the perfect system’ for every organization, there were too many variables and far too many repositories and sources of data. In consequence, the cost of ‘feeding’ the Action Framework with up-to-the-minute data proved too expensive. We had a good model but not a good ‘system’.

What we needed was a method of creating Action Frameworks that would be different for every organization; that could capture data from pretty much any data source from across the enterprise and present insights in new and useful ways without the traditional overheads and burdens of IT projects.

It was with this fragment of common sense that we embarked on the production of such a system. Initially we went to all of the major suspects to see if we could use an existing tool but it didn’t take long for us to realize that our vision was at odds with what the IT industry believed to be possible.

Enterprise mashups are a very different concept in IT that requires a fresh perspective in the way such a technology can be applied. Unfortunately, most people in business apply the role of enterprise mashups into the current ways of working and uses of IT. They try to fit Enterprise Mashups into the present day landscape of IT and ask the question ‘ so what does it replace?’

People that do this miss the point.

The envisioned role of Enterprise Mashups is to provide a system and mechanism for creating an information management that is always in consort with the information needs of the community they serve. Any effective Action Framework cannot be affordably deployed (and therefore can not exist) without this level of agility in IT systems.

Anyway, back to re-building that Action Framework;-)

Why is Squork better than Google Wave? ..and other good questions

YOUTUBE videos on Squork are getting some attention and the first few bits of feedback we’ve received ask some very pointy questions on what makes Squork better than Google Wave and free source software.

Rather than answer the same questions a hundred times a day I thought it probably a good idea to answer them here;-). My thanks to Aravind for summarizing the key questions!

QUESTION – “What is Squork?”

Squork is a secure and live business social operating system. It enables communities to develop and operate virtual social network operating spaces for their business or community of interest.

QUESTION – “Where has Squork come from?”

ANSWER - Squork is a deployment of the Encanvas Secure&Live Integrated Software Platform (which itself can take some explaining). With Encanvas people can design, deploy and operate their business applications using a single integrated platform without needing programming or scripting skills. It obviates the need for traditional enterprise portal platforms and means people can publish directly to their favored cloud computing platform or web server (although at the moment we’re only supporting Microsoft Azure). Encanvas produces ASP.NET web spaces.

Because Squork is built on Encanvas, organizations benefit from what we call ‘frictionless IT’ – i.e. Once they’ve deployed the Encanvas platform they don’t need to buy any more applications as it becomes easier and more cost effective to build applications than purchase them. Using Encanvas also means organizations no longer have to suffer with upgrade costs.

The fact that Encanvas underpins Squork means that organizations (and communities) can use Squork to extend their networks and processes beyond the boundaries of the enterprise without compromising security.

QUESTION - “I could understand that you deliver data security, aggregating information, making everyone work on the same page...but my question is how is that different from existing stand alone usage of social media. What advantage will it provide me as a customer ahead of ones who aren't using squork?”

ANSWER – While most social media tools are ‘applications’, Squork is a complete Social Operating System.

Here’s what I mean: Social media technologies like twitter and YouTube represent exciting new forms of communication but like the telephone, email or letter, they don’t organize data for you or integrate together in a common environment. What Squork does is provide users with access to the communications tools they want to use in a trusted environment that they can tailor precisely to how they want to work. Users own and manage their data on Squork - not Google, Facebook, Skype or Microsoft.

Squork provides users with the tools they need to create secure user groups and communities. Within these communities, users can serve themselves with the collaborative tools and applications they need to meet the needs of the community (or project). Today, users are coming to realize that social media isn’t architected to provide a trusted workspace that enables organizations to manage their social ties, their intellectual property, business applications, or govern projects but you can find out more by reading my book ‘Cloud Coffee House’ ;-)

“It would be of great help if you could explain why someone should go with your product ahead of using free source software. Tell precisely the differentiation factor that your product delivers and how it could be an added value as a customer for me.”

ANSWER – The Encanvas community is about helping individuals to lever their talents and skills by applying technology in new ways, so we don’t want to discourage people from using their own flavors of social media. It's great to experiment so please try out these new ways of communicating and sharing ideas. The role of Squork is to provide the best user experience and the best way of creating a virtual workplace where people want to spend their time. Our plan is to integrate with as many social media tools as we can (including Google Wave) but Squork will also include its own embedded functionality – so users don’t need to go anywhere else for the different forms of communication (such as live webchat or RSS feeds) unless they want to.

There are many benefits of a thoughtfully designed architecture as opposed to creating sites by mashing together multiple tools where the designer does not have full control over the components. Because Squork is built on Encanvas, it uses the same ‘LEGO brick’ approach to integration and deployment, so there’s no need for scripting or coding skills and all of the capabilities you might want to add to your site – such as dashboarding, charts, visualizations, maps, data entry forms etc. – can be easily added.

And what’s its advantage over Google Wave?

In fairness to Google, that’s not a fair question at the moment because the clever people at Google have already got Wave ‘out there’ while we’re still working on the first version of Squork but I would say adopters of Squork will like that its architected on Encanvas Secure&Live and leverages the Microsoft ASP.NET platform while users will love the usability, integration of different communications vehicles and ability to bring everyone together on the same page. I guess the best answer is ‘try it and see’.

“When will Squork be available? (Wasn’t it meant to be out already?)

ANSWER – We expected to launch Squork in October 2009 but we delayed the launch because we had some fundamental learning lessons from the initial beta that we wanted to apply prior to launch in order to make the technology more adaptable and easier to use. We’re expecting to make Squork available to people who are interested in trialing it some time mid 2010 but we won’t have a release date confirmed for a few weeks yet.

Enterprise mashups and de-risking software development projects

One of the main uses of Encanvas and other enterprise mashup platforms is in custom software development.

Traditionally, business software applications have been purchased as shrink-wrapped products that serve a specific process or functional business area. The fundamental problem of this approach is there are so many processes in a business.  Attempting to purchase a shrink-wrapped solution for every one of them is hugely expensive. Another problem is there's no guarantee that each of the shrink-wrapped packages is architected to use the same building block components of technology - so organizations have to contend with supporting a variety of different database engines, workflow engines and reporting tools (that all work differently).

The alternative to buying read-made software solutions of course is to build your own. The problem in doing this is the high cost and risk of project failure. Developing bespoke software applications has traditionally been performed by programmers and IT professionals in back-rooms working on a common plan that's been drafted as the 'best guess' of what the outcome should look like. Programmers find themselves working in parallel on different parts of the same system. No surprise, when the project team tries to bring all of these development strands together and present it to the users and stakeholders, it's not uncommon for lots of re-working to be needed. Primarily for this reason, organizations make do with buying shrink-wrapped software and coping with the high expense of operating a plethora of different software applications that still don't really fit their business need or how they want to work.

Encanvas, and other composite applications design products, overcome these issues by providing IT leaders with a common toolkit of ready-to-use technology components so they can develop applications across the enterprise as the need arises. What makes Encanvas particularly unique is that it doesn't require coding or scripting skills. Its design environment is completely 'point-and-click'. Even its data integration and mashup features and logic building features are created using drag and drop methods. Another feature is that unlike other Enterprise Mashup products, Encanvas is supplied with ready-made design elements for mapping, forms capture, social networking, reporting, file transfer, dashboards etc. - so there's no need to rely on third party components. This is important for developers because they can see developoment projects all the way through to delivery of a robust and scalable system in the knowledge they have full control over design components and can modify every aspect of the user interface design and application functionality.

By removing the time and complexity of coding in development, Encanvas reduces project risk by enabling business analysts to develop their applications in real-time with stakeholders in workshop environments. With everyone on the same page, it's possible to architect right-first-time deployable solutions.

Time to value on Encanvas is greatly reduced by it use of existing data resources (with its ability to mashup data from existing IT systems) and its ready-made building blocks for complex technology components like geo-spatial mapping.  It means that IT leaders can embed IT-centric business analysts into process improvement teams and provide these individuals with a single design, deployment and operational environment with the dexterity to cope with all of their enterprise information management challenges.

SOA, Security and Enterprise Mashups

I'd like to dispel a myth - that Enterprise Security is more likely to be compromised or weakened through the adoption of situational applications and enterprise data mashup technologies.  If IT leaders were to let users roam free on all of their data through a poorly thought through Enterprise Mashup Platform THEN MAYBE, but then, how likely is that to happen?

The logic behind the argument that 'mashups are a security threat' is usually this: that mashups are about empowering information workers to consume web services (sourced from back office systems and via online public sites) and, if you all this to happen, then several new potential threat areas emerge:

1. Poor security regimes mean that users usurp identity management and access control systems so either back-doors are created to data or administrative systems become more complicated with multiple user identity directories emerging that could create errors in monitoring user identities.
   
2. Users (knowingly or unknowingly) gain access to data that they shouldn't be seeing (or in the worst case editing) by giving power users the ability to create their own applications
   
3. Enterprise Mashup Architectures may not be as secure as traditional enterprise portal suites and so by adopting them organizations might be letting their guard down.

From the experiences I've seen so far of Enterprise Mashup deployments, the inverse of these arguments is actually true and the Enterprise is actually MORE SECURE and facing LOWER RISK when an Enterprise Mashup Portal Architecture is deployed. Here's why:

Firstly, it's important to remember that in most organizations today, the most widely adopted mashup application is Microsoft Excel. Business professionals use spreadsheets to capture data, gather data, analyze data and share data. The popularity of spreadsheets to still discharge all of these roles after 30 years of faithful service is testament to their invention.  But spreadsheet systems are a high risk option. They mean that most organizations have hidden pots of business critical data on laptop and PC hard drives that almost nobody is aware of that can disappear at any moment. They also mean that people can inadvertently add the wrong data to the wrong cell or change a formula that can instantly result in high threat compliance issues.

Secondly,  the Enterprise Mashup Platforms I've encountered so far integrate seamlessly with incumbent User Identity Management and Access Control systems like Active Directory used by corporations today. This isn't rocket science; most of these systems rely on a table of UserIDs, email addresses and passwords that are easily inherited by third party systems when properly designed.

Thirdly, it would be wrong to assume that incumbent Enterprise Portal Suites are more secure than the Rich Internet 'Enterprise Mashup' platforms displacing them. To my knowledge, none of the leading portal products can trace the movement of enterprise data from every single field of every single silo to every single portal and every single user - but platforms like Encanvas do.

Debates on the future of Enterprise security have moved away from the concept of protecting the enterprise by keeping everyone on the outside of the Firewall except 'trustworthy employees'. Organizations are slowly realizing that data breaches are most commonly the result of employees activities rather than unknown 'baddies'. It's also dawned on IT leaders that people in business expect to collaborate and share data - subcontractors, outsourcers, customers, channel partners all have very reasonable arguments for being able to access enterprise data.  So the future of Enterprise security is about protecting the data and the intellectual property rather than the container that houses it.

In 2010 we're going to see a big push towards the virtualization of enterprise systems and cloud computing. We're going to see lots of business social networking tools entering via the backdoor of organizations to serve 'departmental needs'. And security will become all about monitoring the activities of individuals (and the groups they belong to). What better system to do this than the enterprise mashups portal platform that serves them with the data?

What's in store for Enterprise Mashups in 2010?

Enterprise Mashups are the big topic for 2010 as organizations seek to harness their SOA investments and get their apps on the cloud. A report by Business Insights suggests the Enterprise Mashups software market was worth around $161m in 2008, and is forecast to grow to $1.74bn by 2013. So what can we expect from Enterprise Mashup platforms in 2010?

In 2009, Enterprise Mashup platforms designed for business started to make inroads into corporate IT thinking by providing a coherent way of bringing together web services, RSS, twitters, maps and other sources of data together in secure enterprise portals. they're quickly becoming the preferred consumption layer of information served from business applications in the form of web services and now there are more than enough case stories to show how scalable and robust the technology is. 'Enterprise mashups = software that's ideal for consuming web services. Great. So what's next?' you ask.

Here I've summarized my top 6 list of the key innovations in Enterprise Mashup platforms you can expect to hit the market in 2010. These are the capabilities that are likely to separate the 'men from the boys' in this fast maturing enterprise software market.

1. Advanced Security Architectures (Inclusive + User Activity Monitoring)
2010 is the year of inclusive security as firms move away from protecting data silos to protecting data itself. It's no longer possible for organizations to protect their operations by hiding behind a firewall. In an era of business social networking, mobility and collaboration, security has become a more sophisticated challenge and governing data has to become the responsibility of the line of business managers. Enterprise Mashup Platforms are now being equipped with capabilities to track user behaviors to ensure that the usage of every data item can be traced from its source via the consumption portal to each individual user (See 'Encanvas Ring-of-Steel' for an example).

2. Cloud Deployment
The migration from running in-house servers to operating IT systems on a cloud computing platform is now well underway in most industry sectors. IT analysts IDC suggest that up to 1/3 of new IT spend will be on cloud computing technologies by 2013. Whilst we haven't seen large ERP migrations (yet) the future of computing will be in the cloud before we know it.

3. Advanced Analytics
A year ago when you said the words 'Business Intelligence' people thought about dashboards. Of course, dashboards are a great way to expose a single page view of what;s going on in a business or process to expose insights that would otherwise remain hidden in spreadsheets and databases. A decade before, business intelligence meant you were talking about 'OLAP cubes' and the ability to create views of enterprise data that was held in disparate systems, decision makers needed to frequently refer to. But the advent of Enterprise Mashup Portals means that today it's not difficult to harvest data from disparate systems from across the enterprise and create custom dashboards and reports (although many vendors do continue to ignore the important role that printed output has to play in disseminating information!). As we've been heading towards 2010 I've seen a transition in buyer expectations away from 'static business intelligence' that offers up preset views of data, towards a more fluid and proactive form of business intelligence. This new generation of business intelligence platform is about moving away from spreadsheet systems towards portal deployed applications that give users the ability to serve themselves with the insights they need. That means features that provide users with the tools to create 'what if?' scenarios have to be available and easy to configure, and data visualization tools need to exist that enable users to define their own maps, visualization structures and data plotting grids without needing to be mathematicians, programmers or scripters. MiddleApps like Encanvas VisualPlot due for release in 2010 provide this level of functionality out of the box and I'm sure that we've only just started on a long journey of user empowerment for business intelligence mashups.

4. Collaborative Social Networking
Business social working is becoming better understood but we have yet to see a clear market leader in this space. I expect this is because the mix of features required for business have yet to materialize in the same product or platform. It's going to be interesting in 2010 to see how businesses react to Encanvas Secure&Live's social office technology that provides a white label environment for creating secure live collaborative environments. I expect that most Enterprise mashup platforms will have integrated with (or will have built their own) business social networking tools by the end of 2010.

5. Applications Stores (AppStores)
The reuse of mashup applications has always been a contentious issue but platforms like Google and Apple's iPhone are showing how effective AppStores are to access and reuse applications. In 2010 we're going to see many organizations looking to build their own AppStores powered by Enterprise Mashup applications.

6. Collective Intelligence
The blend of collaborative social networking and Enterprise Mashup technologies starts to build a coherent information management architecture for the enterprise that is by its very make-up agile, scalable, secure and extensible. It means that 'the system' will be able to interpret who speaks to who, what content they share, the groups individuals belong to, the problems they encounter, the opinions they express, the projects they contribute to, what their colleagues think of them, and all of this information will help systems to filter out for individuals the subject matter information and relationships that matter most. I expect we won't see collective intelligence solutions emerge until late in 2010 but the first few early seeds of examples will no doubt be in place by the end of the year.

So there we have it. The list of new capabilities you can expect from Enterprise Mashup platforms in 2010. If the product you're considering doesn't meet these capabilities then it makes sense to examine some more options.

Gartner top 10 predictions for 2010

So Gartner's top 10 predictions are out for 2010 and it's a very different picture to last year. Nevertheless, it's always interesting to see what the world's leading IT analysts think is going to happen next in the year to come.

In this article I've plucked out the bits that have most to do with Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), Enterprise Mashups, Business Social Networking and other such technologies that are making businesses more agile.

No surprise that Cloud Computing is number 1. The feeding frenzy around cloud computing has been growing for some time and now it's almost impossible for IT leaders not to consider cloud computing as a way forward for their future IT infrastructure. For many organizations however, cloud computing is just another form of commercial model for virtualization of servers; the result of a transformation is a gated environment for enterprise applications on a hosted web server instead of using in-house servers. This myopic view of cloud computing is a big undersell on the possibilities that the cloudspace offers to create extensible community-based portals and possibilities of knowledge markets, federated applications and the like that reach beyond the firewall of the enterprise to harness talent and resources from knowledge markets - but it's a start. I expect that the majority of organizations will want to 'practise' deploying non-core applications to the cloud first and then see how well the experiment works before they consider porting their discrete applications and ERP systems to this new platform. We could be talking a lag of 3 to 5 years before larger corporations make this sort of 'can't turn back the clock' step.

Number 2 on Gartner's list is Advanced Analytics. It's interesting that Gartner worked hard not to say Business Intelligence and came up with a new term. But BI is changing. At one time it was about massing data into huge OLAP cubes to impart knowledge organizations already owned but couldn't see. Today though, business intelligence has gone online and forms part of the Enterprise Mashup Portal platform business people use to consume information services. These applications are no longer passive, but provide tools for users to serve themselves with new views of information, let's them paint 'what if?' scenarios and share their content within their secure social networks. The need for agile Business Intelligence tools has been answered by mashups that form part of the social operating systems organizations are in the process of developing. Advanced Analytics is no longer about OLAP cubes that serve only 15% of the user population; it's about letting decision makers at all levels of the enterprise consume information in new ways to find answers to new questions they've only just begun to think about.

Social Computing comes in at number 6 on the list. Trying to make sense of social networking in a business context has been a tough challenge in 2009. In truth, there are so many different technologies and approaches that the subject has proved too overwhelming for IT leaders to make any sense of. I expect that the take-off in business social networking will only happen when 4 things happen (at the same time and probably in the same software service that business people can try before they buy):
1. A security architecture emerges that business people can trust - Business social networking has to sit within a security blanket that corporate buyers can trust. The software applications and services found in consumer land don't come close to managing content and intellectual property the way that businesses need to.
2. Data can be owner-managed - Organizations want to harness their corporate information capital, while individuals want a record of their social relationship activities. Having knowledge of conversations, talent and skills on Facebook or Twitter doesn't give business people the security or control over information assets that they require.
3. A realistic alternative to email emerges - Email today is the peer-to-peer communications vehicle of choice that benefits from the ability to work even when the sender and receiver are not both online. Without a genuine alternative to email, the home page of most business people will still be Outlook.
4. Supporting social behaviors - In the real world business people chat, have more formal conversations and even more formal scheduled meetings. It's not realistic to believe that, in a virtual world, business people will suddenly be satisfied with informal communications for every situation. Business social networking tools will have to mature to support social behaviors that people are accustomed to.

The fact that Security - and specifically activity monitoring - has only reached number 7 on the list is surprising to me. With all of the concerns raised around data security in 2009 I would have singled out Security as being a top 3 issue. The issue of enterprise security has matured over 2009 away from the idea of protecting the silos of data to protecting the data itself. This has fostered more mature discussions around inclusive security models that see users as individuals rather than good guys and bad guys (where anyone who doesn't work for the enterprise is assumed to be bad). In 2010, Encanvas is releasing its RING OF STEEL inclusive security architecture that enables CIOs to push back data governance to line of business managers so that appropriate governance regimes can be implemented at departmental level. This means that the people responsible for data are also made responsible for its security. For IT leaders this has to be good news. Whoever said that IT leaders must be the security watchdogs of the enterprise anyway?

The last notable entry holds up the list at number 10. Mobile applications are still topical it seems but the idea that mobile applications need to be treated as somehow 'special' is slowly ebbing away. Convergence of web and mobile platforms mean that Enterprise mashup platforms like Encanvas can produce applications for mobility as easily as they do for desktop and web. The mobile device has become 'just another portal consumer' in an always connected world. I expect we won't see mobile applications appearing on the next Gartner list for 2011!

All of the above is good news for Integrated Software Platforms like Encanvas that provide 2-step publishing to the cloud with the assurety of a robust inclusive security model. No surprise that the global market for Enterprise Mashups Software is expected to grow ten-fold in 2010.

Looks like it's going to be a busy year!