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;-)

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!

ERP in a Services Oriented World

I've just completed this White Paper in support of work that I'm currently doing in the Insurance sector to migrate organizations from traditional ERP systems to more agile platforms based on a blend of Master Data Management, SOA and Enterprise Mashup Portals. It's hard for CIOs to come to terms with the fact that business social networking and collaboration means that it's no longer possible to protect the enterprise by selectively cutting it off from the rest of the world behind Firewalls. This White Paper I've written for Encanvas describes how a blended strategy of ERP+MDM is a smarter move and encourages investments in 'IT growth innovation'.

Hope you like it. Ian.

Wake up JackBe, Encanvas v2 has arrived

It's been a frustrating year watching JackBe and Corizon running around the market while we sit on our hands and code ferociously to get Encanvas secure&live ready for market before Google Wave. I think of it as our 'wilderness year'!

Thankfully it's now coming to an end and in 2010 we have the launch of Encanvas v2 and Squork to look forward to. Unfortunately, we're still busy patenting the unique technologies that have been added to the platform so you'll have to bear with us on going public until the end of January. At least there will be a sneaky peak next week!

I'm delighted that we've been able to beat Google to the punch with what I believe is a more appropriate communications platform for web collaboration than Google Wave - which has had its doubters of late - but I'm sure, when the guys at Google overcome the short-comings of the beta,Google Wave will be a world class product.

At the TECHNOLOGY WORLD event in Coventry next week we'll be meeting with the major electronics companies of the world to introduce a truely world class enterprise mashups platform. Can't wait.

Thanks to everyone involved in Encanvas since the early days of 2002 for staying with the product. If you'd like to see a Webshow of the new technologies just let me know.

Idiots Guide to Enterprise Mashups

I keep getting asked for a simple overview on Enterprise Mashups. After looking around slideshare for a while it became apparent that descriptions of what Enterprise Mashups are about and what they're for tend to be really over complicated so I've penned a simple 10 slide overview.

Top 10 Enterprise Mashup Software Products and Why

The growth in information working and the knowledge economy is placing new demands on information technology. Knowledge workers today expect the same level of access and ease of use from their business systems that they enjoy with their iPOD or favourite websites (such as Google). A challenge facing IT departments is how to keep up with the volume of requests from information workers to develop new applications in response to their rapidly changing information needs. In a 2008 survey conducted by IBM, a majority of CEOs rated their organisation's ability to manage change 22% lower than their expected need for change. Business mashups give people the tools needed to adapt to change, develop new insights, and act on new business opportunities.

Enterprise mashups are an important new development in IT as they provide a new and accessible means of creating large numbers of business applications without requiring complex IT projects or large numbers of IT people with deep technical skills. They offer organizations a way to rapidly adapt to changing business needs.

Unlike traditional IT development tools that focus on the small number of heavy-weight business applications that serve the majority of users, enterprise mashups are specifically designed to support the 'long-tail' of demand from small numbers of users, sometimes individuals, for a proportionately large number of relatively light-weight (and sometimes short-terms) business applications that information workers as individuals, or working in teams, need in order to respond to new business situations. Without enterprise mashup technologies these information applications would otherwise go unserved by IT. The usual consequence of this is IT heads finding information workers serving themselves with self-made applications built using desktop tools such as MS Excel or MS Word (and the security risks and version control dangers this represents).

It was Luba Cherbakov of IBM, who is attributed with putting the term situational application (or SN) on the IT technologies ever growing list of acronyms. Cherbakov describes a Situational Application as - “…an application built to address a particular situation, problem, or challenge. The development life cycle of these types of applications is quite different from the traditional IT-developed, SOA-based solution. Situational applications are usually built by knowledge workers who adopt iterative development often measured in days or weeks, not months or years. As the requirements of a small team using the application change, the Situational Application often continues to evolve to accommodate these changes. Significant changes in requirements may lead to an abandonment of the used application altogether; in some cases it's just easier to develop a new one than to update the one in use.”

Enterprise mashup software applications (that produce situational applications) mean that the majority of information worker needs can be self-served by appropriately robust and scalable enterprise IT solutions. Applications are normally authored and deployed using Web based technologies (so called Web 2.0) that can harvest information from disparate sources to create composite applications - built using ready-made building blocks of applications components that are assembled using integrated point-and-click development environments designed specifically with non-IT people in mind.

According to a report published in 2008 by IT industry analysts Forrester Research, mashup usage is growing rapidly. According to their research the enterprise mashups software market is expected to generate global revenues of $700 Million by 2013 (Forrester defines mashups as "custom applications that combine multiple, disparate data sources into something new and unique").

In January 2007, an Economist Intelligence Unit survey revealed that mashups were the most popular traditional web 2.0 technology in the enterprise, with 64% of companies saying they already use or planned to use mashups within the next 2 years.

Situational applications are growing in popularity because business organizations seek to:

•Unlock innovation and the creativity in their business
•Need to increasingly work in consort with industry partners to achieve shared business outcomes
•Demand information agility to respond to rapidly changing market situations and therefore need to uncover business insights more speedily; often relying on a blend of information that exists within and beyond the enterprise fire-wall
•Reduce application backlog without losing control and governance - Speed development of applications and reduce the cost and risk of applications development for the majority of knowledge worker applications that serve small groups of workers (and sometimes an individuals’ specific information needs)

Performance Metrics for Assessing the Top 10

I’ve based my assessment on the terms of reference established by Microsoft in their excellent white paper on enterprise mashups (J.R. Arredondo, May 2008)that comes in two parts:

1.Capabilities that an enterprise mashup platform must display in order to ensure broad enterprise adoption across business users and also acceptance within the IT organization such as:
-Business user requirements.
-Easy to use for business users.
-Integrated with business users’ daily work life.
-Powerful for power users to “finish the whole job.
-Social and viral.

2.The existence of key technical elements of a mashup platform:
-Access to a repository of web services that users and IT managers can employ to publish and manage corporate and public information that information workers can leverage in Enterprise Mashups.
-A gallery of visualization components that users can use to make sense of newly aggregated sources of insights.
-Mashup creation capabilities are easy to use by non technical users.
-Authored mashups create THE PORTAL ARCHITECTURE (ie. User permissions, site layout, page layout, hierarchies and taxonomies etc.), not just component pages.
-A place where users can share the mashups they create and a social and collaborate workspace that supports the deployment and manageability of mashups for internal and external users - as well as the social networking capabilities that help people to connect with one another, create workspaces and data mashups within them.

The Top 10
So who are the key players in the Enterprise Mashups space? Here’s my Top 10 of what I believe are the most influencing products in the market today (presented in reverse order):

10. Corizon – A UK software business that originated from call centre and CRM integrations projects sponsored by British Telecom and has continued to develop its platform to serve the needs of call centre integrations market. This early verticalization of its proposition has enabled Corizon to rapidly develop a sound raison-d’être for its technology and through successive deployments the company has fashioned a robust enterprise mashup platform. However, the solution offered – whilst incorporating many of the attributes of enterprise mashups technology does not target or meet the needs of the long-tail of business applications (or Microsoft’s key functional determinants) and therefore sits at number 10 in my list.

9. Just Systems – Headquartered in Tokyo, Just Systems is a global software provider with three decades of successful innovation in office productivity, information management, and consumer and enterprise software with over 2,500 customers worldwide and annual revenues over $110M. Whilst not strictly speaking an Enterprise Mashups player, JustSystems – with its XFY technology - has developed an XML architecture for dynamic composite documents similar to Encanvas that makes it well positioned to become a leading player in the market over the next few years.

8. Twinsoft - A French company, Twinsoft sees itself as a market leader in Enterprise Mashups. According to its website, its flagship product, Convertigo Enterprise Mashup Server helps companies reuse their existing assets to build new and exciting WEB 2.0 composite applications for a fraction of the cost and time needed to complete software rewrites or traditional development. It’s a good story and the company has some very interesting case stories but its software platform relies heavily on Twinsoft’s OEM relationship with DreamFace and to me looks very much like a consultancy-led offering rather than a coherent software application.

7. Nexaweb – This Burlington (Massachusetts, USA) based company specializes in modernization technology that ‘enhances, extends and transforms legacy applications through an open web development platform and reference architecture’ but to anyone in the enterprise mashups space, the parallels between the technology platforms are obvious. Nexaweb has found a convincing story to sell its Web 2.0 architecture to IT departments in a way that IT people understand its purpose. Not a platform for situational applications yet but no doubt it’s on Nexaweb’s roadmap.

6. Serena – Serena is the first major player to create a marketplace for mashups and their software applications dovetail nicely into the Microsoft desktop world so users find their UI familiar. Serena has profited from its experience in Applications Life-Cycle Management and has the most advanced version control and mashup management features in its class. Another strength of Serena’s platform is its orchestration module for integration with legacy systems (similar to Encanvas’s Information Flow Designer). However. Serena has yet to provide a full platform to include social networking and collaborative features so in my view they’ve still got some way to go. The absence of an On Premises offering is also a major weakness for large corporations.

5. JackBe – The Enterprise Mashup platform making the most noise, JackBe has recently received even more coffers for its developments through another round of funding. Jackbe sees portals and mashups becoming the 'ecosystem' for business users - and the browser as the business container of choice (I agree). Similar to Encanvas, JackBe’s mashup platform, Presto, can leverage internal and external data while meeting tough enterprise security and governance requirements. The vision of the management team seems to be sound but the company has got some way to go to prove its marketing messages with real-world case examples and the software platform currently appears to lack depth in areas of legacy integration tools, life-cycle management and orchestration.

4. Microsoft SharePoint – Other than its light-weight consumer mashup product Popfly, Microsoft doesn’t really have an enterprise mashup ‘product’ as such but it does a pretty good job of gluing its enterprise computing platform tools together to create an enterprise mashup environment. SharePoint Designer 2007 is intended to be more of an end user tool but not for any users that I know without a computing degree!

3. Interneer – Interneer (CA, USA) would not describe themselves as an enterprise mashups player at all but their technology is relevant and well designed. Inteneer’s Intellect platform is positioned as a human-centric workflow platform that (according to their website) “allows average business people to configure web-based applications with integrated workflow at the speed of business, without programming.” Interneer has developed an extremely intuitive and easy to use point and click design environment for non-IT people and has managed to combine this UI with an equally impressive applications integration and orchestration module. What Interneer lacks at the moment is the collaborative workspace and automated portal deployment architecture. It also remains to be seen whether Interneer has the vision and marketing muscle to remain at number 2 in my ‘best of the best’ chart.

2. Encanvas - Encanvas version 1.7 didn’t make the number 1 spot – but that’s okay considering the amount of investment that has gone into its GIS and print technologies of late (and with the 1.8 release just around the corner). Encanvas continues to be the easiest to use code-free situational applications publishing platform, the most secure and most dexterous. Its ability to create databases, virtual marts and harvest legacy sources through multi-linking between fields of data from disparate web services, legacy and desktop data sources makes its data mashup possibilities more versatile in my view than any of the other products in this category (although OpenSpan’s desktop integration technologies gives Encanvas a run for its money). Encanvas also has built in collaborative tools like WebShow for turning enterprise mashup applications into virtual collaborative workspaces. Encanvas’s use of its own embedded applications components (including GIS and visualization, dashboard meters, charts, reports and now printing) together with its ability to deliver the deployment portal architecture and security without requiring IT skills, makes Encanvas a strong runner up.

1. IBM Mashup Center – IBM has taken the whole subject of enterprise mashups much more seriously than Microsoft and has recently invested over $100 million in mashup, collaboration and social computing technologies. This investment is now beginning to show through the new line-up of technologies coming out of the IBM stable. IBM Mashup Center is in my opinion the first meaningful platform that unites a user interface that non-IT people can understand with data mashup technologies and web harvesting and discovery. The portal based solution also integrates with Avaya’s Application Enablement (AE) Services API which is probably the first mashup cross-over into the unified communications space. IBM appears to understand collaboration better than Microsoft, yet its strategy is enterprise platform based and so it may suffer as the industry moves towards self-forming situational people networks who will want the ability to pay for their IT platforms on a utility basis. A challenge for the IBM team is how to counter the factor of 100 price difference to Encanvas when the functionality is getting so similar.

Other key players that are likely to influence the Enterprise Mashups space are Coghead and Dreamface who have excellent design interfaces but have yet to deliver the full gamut of enterprise mashup platform capabilities, Endeca, StrikeIron and OpenSpan who play in the Information Access Platform space and have particularly powerful enterprise legacy systems connectors with scope to develop enterprise mashup capabilities in the future, Kapow technologies who currently lead the way in mashup harvesting tools, composite applications vendors like Cordys that focus more on enterprise business process management but whose technology implementation is similar in terms of usability and dexterity to enterprise mashup platforms, and finally rapid applications authoring providers like LiquidApps from Harmonia Inc and IronSpeed who are introducing development environments that have the potential to respond to a number of the use cases that enterprise mashups address.

It will be interesting to see who the winners and losers will be in 2009 which promises to be a year of step change innovations in all areas of technology – cloud computing, unified communications, virtualization, mashups, location-awareness… time for a coffee ;-)

The importance of lists

Happy New Year? Not on Friday

So there I was driving back up the M1 motorway following a meeting in East London. I was so absorbed in my thinking that I completely missed two junctions and found myself at Junction 18 adding another half an hour to my journey. Poo.

Anyway, what I was so self-abosrbed in was the subject of LISTS. What got me thinking about lists was the conversation I had just had with the sales director of an office equipment company. It reminded me of a problem that just keeps surfacing. When sales people use CRM systems they quite rightly complain about the time it takes to fill in all of the record data. Why? becuase the user doesn't always want to add (or see) all of the data that managers do. They just want to order their thinking and make sure they spend their time on the most important things rather than the 'can do' subjects that are sometimes easier to do but are less beneficial in achieving outcomes.

The technology problem with this is that databases - particularly relational databases - demand that users fill out a certain level of fields of data in order to maintain the linkages between tables and provide coherency in the quality of data. But this results in users being presented with too many fields of data to fill in at times when they just want to create a list.

You see the reason why products like Google search don't work in business is CONTEXT. All information in business has to be associated with its purpose, the topics it relates to, the people who need it, the processes it serves. So business is about LISTS and DATA the relationships between them. But we've not got that balance right yet - which is why information workers still feel poorly served by IT (me too).....and so I missed my junction, two infact and ended up north of Coventry on a miserable day with sub zero temperatures and a dirty windscreen that my frozen screenwash couldn't clear feeling marginally sorry for myself.

So here's the challenge - how to create a simpler way for information workers to create, access, order, edit and prioritise lists on different subjects where items can be converted into records and those record can be developed into relational database tables. Ironically, we (I should say Andy) solved this problem at NDMC in 2003 but I'd forgotten that we had - so my New Year Resolution is to fix this problem once and for all and incorprate the new usability features into Encanvas 2.0 when it gets released (which if we're lucky will be before 2010!)

The Perfect Business Application

I had an interesting conversation with a management consultant a few weeks ago that is still playing on my mind even today, hence the blog. He was describing Encanvas to his customers. He said that it was an excellent way of rapidly developing an interim information management platform until the customer found the perfect solution. Boy that bugged me.

I had to ask myself, what is a perfect business application?

Ask most IT people even today and they would probably point towards shrink-wrapped software solutions as being the closest thing we have to perfect solutions out of the box. These pre-templated solutions are meant to be ‘plug-in-able’ and instantly improve the way that people work – because the software vendor knows best. Of course, this ignores the fact that most of the end users of any system have more experience of how they do what they do than ANY software house could ever hope to develop. What arrogance! The best people to scope a system must surely be the practitioners that work in the discipline the software is designed to support.

To my mind most corporations have still to come out from the other side of a 50 year love affair with the idea of shrink-wrapped software solutions. This has resulted in the biggest IT hang-over ever. Many corporations have been left with more than 50 software supplier relationships and IT infrastructures that look like my worst bolognaise.

Most shrink-wrapped business applications involve data, databases, reports, charts, numerics, query and search, visualization, workflow and a hefty amount of business logic. These core building blocks have recently been enriched with geo-spatial information management and of course mobility features. Whilst these building blocks are consistently present across the majority of business applications, corporations still buy software applications ‘shrink-wrapped’ from different vendors for every business process they want to automate.

It's a sad fact that almost 30% of the cost of any business application goes into integration with other systems. It's also likely that less than 60% of the capabilities found in applications ever gets used. And any businessman knows that many vendors appear to think that the data they hold in the database you bought from them somehow becomes their property!

What will it take for business leaders to revisit the merits of the truly bizarre love affair they have with shrink wrapped software?

The answer is simple. They have to have a realistic alternative. That’s where Encanvas comes in. Yes, Encanvas is probably the fastest way there has ever been to build a database centric business application. And there is no doubting the fact that the benefit of working across-the-desk with users is the surest way of guaranteeing the end-system is a perfect fit for users. But more than this, Encanvas is corporate ready, and that means that it passes all of the essential security, scalability, resilience, accessibility and IT hygiene parameters that corporations must insist upon in order to secure business continuity.

So I come back to my original premise – what is a perfect application?

I think a perfect application is one that works in a way that users want it to work, that provides the information that people need at the right place, right time etc. and that delivers economies by removing tasks that can be automated. It doesn’t need to cost a fortune to create a perfect application – Encanvas proves that – but what it does need is for IT people and business people to work together and take accountability for delivering 'outcomes', not 'contributions'. Once we tackle these human issues, mastering the technology becomes a cake-walk.

Frictionless IT

I spend most of my time in board rooms helping management teams to develop an understanding of their customer value and golden threads that will focus the energy of their enterprise towards its success. Through a series of workshops I work with leaders to reach a small number of objectives and key performance indicators that will form the basis of a sustainable method of managing performance.

When the time comes to try to find the data to populate these KPIs, it is at this moment for management teams that the challenges of getting information the last mile really start to hit.

So we have a meeting with IT. They tell us that some of the information exists but it has never been brought together in that way before so it might ‘be difficult’. They say that for some of the newer KPIs the data has never been gathered before. Then one of the department heads says that he has some of the information on a spreadsheet. Another department head says the same. Then as we finally reach the end of the list we find that there is a requirement for new information systems to capture the data that doesn’t exist at the moment.

By the time we get to the end of the sheet our timescales for the change programme are in tatters. We are facing a serious risk of all the momentum of the strategy communications programme, the energy and vibrancy that we started with on the first day spent with the management team plotting to take on the world with their great customer offer, all of that ebbing away.

I should like to introduce to you a new paradigm called ‘Frictionless IT’.

Frictionless IT describes a theoretical information management environment where all costs and restraints associated with aligning information systems to emerging business needs are non-existent.

Let me recap and describe precisely what I mean: I’m talking about a situation where people networks – collaborative groups of information workers who share a common goal or outcome - are able to train their information systems to always fit their changing information requirements.

In the next 5 years we will see Frictionless IT become a reality. But for Frictionless IT to happen you need what I call ‘Rubber-Walled IT’.

In our management meetings we used to use the term rubber-walled building to describe our requirement for office space which, as a fast growing business, always needed to be sufficient for the people that we employ but not excessive so that we were paying for space that we don’t need.

Unfortunately, most buildings don’t have rubber walls so the choice for tenants is to estimate the size of office space they think they will need over the next 3 to 5 years and hope that they guess right.

We’ve come to apply the same terminology to describe the needs of organizations for their information systems. Rubber walled IT is the ability of an information management system to always fit the needs of the organizations. It describes an information management platform that expands and contracts in a similar way to our rubber-walled building.

The technology to power rubber-walled IT exists today. Technology that enables your key workers to serve themselves with the information they need without having to make do with inappropriate tools like Excel and Word to use as information management tools?

What I’m talking about is what people are now calling situational applications. (You see the difficulty with new technologies is knowing how to describe them! Thankfully IBM did a great job in providing terminology to something that we’ve being doing for a few years now but never really managed to explain it. Thank you IBM!)

As organizations experience change, small groups of users find themselves requiring new information management needs. Products like ENCANVAS – our own software – exist to create these applications as new requirements emerge.

Situational applications typically have a short life span, and can be created within the group where they are used, sometimes by the users themselves. As the requirements of a small team using the application change, the situational application continues to evolve to accommodate changes. Any significant changes in requirements might lead to abandonment of the application altogether as with agile software tools it’s often easier to develop a new one

The fact is, most IT service providers and internal IT departments have a truck-load of small IT project requests to deal with that are either too difficult to justify so they sit on the shelf, or they don’t have time to action; so there is a huge pent up demand for situational applications.

The ultimate outcome of situational applications software like ENCANVAS is the creation of a rubber-walled information management platforms that deliver Frictionless IT.

McKinsey is still No.1

I'd just like to pay a small tribute to the guys and girls at McKinsey that contribute to McKinsey Quarterly. I have been surprised how frequently the insights that NDMC has captured in Europe - and our interpretations of those insights towards market change and enterprise behaviors - so frequently get represented (and are often better described) in the content of the McKinsey Quarterly. I'd specifically like to draw your attention to Lowell L. Bryan who has been doing some great work in exposing the topic of organizational design and helping business leaders to come to terms with new market behaviors. Lowell has authored an excellent book on the topic and his endeavors encouraged me to finally get on and complete Agilization.

Yet again this month, Nick Lawrie and I were delighted to read that McKinsey has been researching peer-to-peer collaboration and collective intelligence. Their Quarterly Report titled How Businesses Are Using Web 2.0 describes the findings of a global survey they have conducted of C-level executives.

According to their findings three quarters of executives interviewed plan to maintain or increase their investments in technology trends that encourage user collaboration. That's excellent news for encanvas and the development of business thinking around the topic of situational networks. The innovation of enterprise mashups is unlikely to change workforce behaviors until business leaders start coming around to the idea that the new economy of the 21st century is about 'fit and creativity' more than it is about 'process excellence'.

If you have the opportunity, take 10 minutes out of your day and read what they say.

AJAXWorld Event

I'm delighted to be attending the AJAXWorld event in New York and to meet some of the other thought leaders in the area of RIAs and Enterprise Mashups. It looks like situtational applications are finally getting some attention. My speech will focus on the work Encanvas has done in Europe to deliver enterprise applications without coding and I' m really looking forward to comparing notes with some of the other software companies that are driving change in USA.