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.
Monday, 10 March 2008
Friday, 1 February 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, 30 January 2008
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.
Sunday, 20 January 2008
Situational Applications and Agilization
I was delighted to have the opportunity to interview Nick and Andrew Lawrie of Encanvas. Here's the interview.
The new 2.0 release of encanvas 07 ships in February and includes a host of new features. Ian Tomlin investigates how encanvas is stepping up its technology lead in enterprise situational applications software in the face of a growing pack of enterprise mashup and situational application software vendors.
Long before people were talking about enterprise 2.0 and mashups the problem of enabling information workers to access and use information in ways that made sense to them existed. And before the hype-cycle of mashups started to rear its head in the United States, people around the world were working on practical solutions that would help to break down operating silos within corporations, make them more agile and finally give information workers the tools to serve themselves and become more productive. What has happened over the past 18 months is that the IT sector has begun to wake up to the idea that there are better ways of working, and that those methods, in the not too distant future, will forever change the operating environment of the office worker. This awakening has placed a convex lens over the technology market which to some extent brings a greater focus on the subject but in other ways creates distortions on the real world picture. And within this mix of hype, blogs filled with a heady mix of impressive marketing slogans and a wheel barrow of new technology acronyms that we all now have to get used to, there is encanvas, one of the first technology answers to appear on the market and still one of the very few with proven corporate success stories evidencing a compelling ROI.
The new release of Encanvas (07.2) to be released in February 08 builds on the corporate robustness that has led to major corporations adopting the technology as a method of solving their strategic priorities – achieving compliance, finding cashable efficiency savings, sharing information with stakeholders, identifying weak signals of market change, leveraging emerging value networks, exploiting their global talent pools and monitoring their competitive threats.
The ethos of Encanvas has always been to simplify the creation of situational applications - applications for small groups of users with specific needs that will typically have a short life span, and are often created within the group where they are used, sometimes by the users themselves, This is achieved by removing ‘coding’ from the process of formalizing information flows that bind peer-to-peer communities with their value networks, and information workers to their objectives and sources of information. Providing a single code-free integrated development environment means that both project sponsor and analyst can work across the desk and fundamentally understand every aspect of the application being created. The result? A workspace that brings people together to work in a way that is better controlled, more efficient and benefits each of the stakeholders without compromising on corporate robustness, scalability, security and performance.
What has made this simplicity of use possible has been the development of a strong library of pre-built building blocks (that Encanvas call ‘design objects’) so that users can point-and-click to create new situational applications combining user interface and portal design, business logic, data management and output. In the latest release, most of the core design objects including those used for e-forms, enterprise search, business intelligence, reporting, charting, geospatial capture, analysis and visualization have been upgraded or enriched to improve usability and dexterity.
The new version of Encanvas provides a richer set of tools for enterprise integration with drag-and-drop formation of data feeds from all sources; providing most of the capabilities you would expect from a heavyweight Enterprise Integration Application (EAI) environment. Andrew Lawrie, Encanvas’s CTO says, “We’re not trying to push the product into the SOA market but our clients have made it clear that they want more integration options. Whether it’s linking to legacy systems or bridging across RSS feeds, document repositories and intranets, they want to be able to painlessly gather data from anywhere and, within the applications, they build they might want to create new databases, temporary data marts or simply use web services to put an agile layer over their existing databases. The new release of Encanvas gives our clients this. It also enables developers to add more sophisticated Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) tools than we offer as standard out-of-the-box.”
Another key feature of the new release is the introduction of asynchronous communications and the possibility of showing third parties presentations and applications over the internet via a standard web browser without needing downloads or plug-ins. COO Nick Lawrie says, “It’s been on our agenda for some time to move the core platform of encanvas into the realm of a collaborative workspace environment to facilitate remote working. There are many situations that demand collaboration and the shared use of information today that are poorly served by desktop sharing tools that are demanding on platform resources. Encanvas has always been about ZERO download, INSTANT on and with our asynchronous capabilities we’re still honoring that. We’re expecting our partners in 2008 to exploit these new features to support situational applications for remote project meetings, remote software development, remote training and remote applications support.”
But with recent announcements by IBM, Cordys, JackBe, Composite Software and Serena, how can Encanvas hope to maintain its leadership in the Situational Applications arena. Nick Lawrie is confident that his team has the answer, “We created Encanvas from the ground up with a specific vision of how situational applications would bring a compelling competitive advantage to corporations in the next decade. We’re still only part of the way down that journey and our time has been spent making sure the technology is corporate ready. That’s what our case studies show – our ability to compete on level terms with best of breed players in areas like geo-spatial information management, knowledge management and enterprise integration. Whilst we’re beginning to see early seeds of some useful tools, we’re a long way off from the BIG corporate solution. We believe that the core technology architecture of encanvas is fundamentally different to our competitive peers, and fundamentally correct. It would be too difficult for software houses that have invested millions of dollars on mashup enabling technologies to turn their ship around and rebuild their core engines to deliver the seamlessly integrated platform that we expect to have completed by Fall 2009.”
Ian Tomlin is a director of NDMC Consulting and author of the book 'Agilization - The Regeneration of Competitiveness'. A regular speaker and presenter on technology matters, he advises major corporations in Europe on new technology trends and market behaviors.
The new 2.0 release of encanvas 07 ships in February and includes a host of new features. Ian Tomlin investigates how encanvas is stepping up its technology lead in enterprise situational applications software in the face of a growing pack of enterprise mashup and situational application software vendors.
Long before people were talking about enterprise 2.0 and mashups the problem of enabling information workers to access and use information in ways that made sense to them existed. And before the hype-cycle of mashups started to rear its head in the United States, people around the world were working on practical solutions that would help to break down operating silos within corporations, make them more agile and finally give information workers the tools to serve themselves and become more productive. What has happened over the past 18 months is that the IT sector has begun to wake up to the idea that there are better ways of working, and that those methods, in the not too distant future, will forever change the operating environment of the office worker. This awakening has placed a convex lens over the technology market which to some extent brings a greater focus on the subject but in other ways creates distortions on the real world picture. And within this mix of hype, blogs filled with a heady mix of impressive marketing slogans and a wheel barrow of new technology acronyms that we all now have to get used to, there is encanvas, one of the first technology answers to appear on the market and still one of the very few with proven corporate success stories evidencing a compelling ROI.
The new release of Encanvas (07.2) to be released in February 08 builds on the corporate robustness that has led to major corporations adopting the technology as a method of solving their strategic priorities – achieving compliance, finding cashable efficiency savings, sharing information with stakeholders, identifying weak signals of market change, leveraging emerging value networks, exploiting their global talent pools and monitoring their competitive threats.
The ethos of Encanvas has always been to simplify the creation of situational applications - applications for small groups of users with specific needs that will typically have a short life span, and are often created within the group where they are used, sometimes by the users themselves, This is achieved by removing ‘coding’ from the process of formalizing information flows that bind peer-to-peer communities with their value networks, and information workers to their objectives and sources of information. Providing a single code-free integrated development environment means that both project sponsor and analyst can work across the desk and fundamentally understand every aspect of the application being created. The result? A workspace that brings people together to work in a way that is better controlled, more efficient and benefits each of the stakeholders without compromising on corporate robustness, scalability, security and performance.
What has made this simplicity of use possible has been the development of a strong library of pre-built building blocks (that Encanvas call ‘design objects’) so that users can point-and-click to create new situational applications combining user interface and portal design, business logic, data management and output. In the latest release, most of the core design objects including those used for e-forms, enterprise search, business intelligence, reporting, charting, geospatial capture, analysis and visualization have been upgraded or enriched to improve usability and dexterity.
The new version of Encanvas provides a richer set of tools for enterprise integration with drag-and-drop formation of data feeds from all sources; providing most of the capabilities you would expect from a heavyweight Enterprise Integration Application (EAI) environment. Andrew Lawrie, Encanvas’s CTO says, “We’re not trying to push the product into the SOA market but our clients have made it clear that they want more integration options. Whether it’s linking to legacy systems or bridging across RSS feeds, document repositories and intranets, they want to be able to painlessly gather data from anywhere and, within the applications, they build they might want to create new databases, temporary data marts or simply use web services to put an agile layer over their existing databases. The new release of Encanvas gives our clients this. It also enables developers to add more sophisticated Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) tools than we offer as standard out-of-the-box.”
Another key feature of the new release is the introduction of asynchronous communications and the possibility of showing third parties presentations and applications over the internet via a standard web browser without needing downloads or plug-ins. COO Nick Lawrie says, “It’s been on our agenda for some time to move the core platform of encanvas into the realm of a collaborative workspace environment to facilitate remote working. There are many situations that demand collaboration and the shared use of information today that are poorly served by desktop sharing tools that are demanding on platform resources. Encanvas has always been about ZERO download, INSTANT on and with our asynchronous capabilities we’re still honoring that. We’re expecting our partners in 2008 to exploit these new features to support situational applications for remote project meetings, remote software development, remote training and remote applications support.”
But with recent announcements by IBM, Cordys, JackBe, Composite Software and Serena, how can Encanvas hope to maintain its leadership in the Situational Applications arena. Nick Lawrie is confident that his team has the answer, “We created Encanvas from the ground up with a specific vision of how situational applications would bring a compelling competitive advantage to corporations in the next decade. We’re still only part of the way down that journey and our time has been spent making sure the technology is corporate ready. That’s what our case studies show – our ability to compete on level terms with best of breed players in areas like geo-spatial information management, knowledge management and enterprise integration. Whilst we’re beginning to see early seeds of some useful tools, we’re a long way off from the BIG corporate solution. We believe that the core technology architecture of encanvas is fundamentally different to our competitive peers, and fundamentally correct. It would be too difficult for software houses that have invested millions of dollars on mashup enabling technologies to turn their ship around and rebuild their core engines to deliver the seamlessly integrated platform that we expect to have completed by Fall 2009.”
Ian Tomlin is a director of NDMC Consulting and author of the book 'Agilization - The Regeneration of Competitiveness'. A regular speaker and presenter on technology matters, he advises major corporations in Europe on new technology trends and market behaviors.
Tuesday, 11 September 2007
Rich Internet Applications and the software as a service model by ZDNet's Ryan Stewart -- Software as a service is going to become a more viable business model in the years to come. Rich Internet Applications are going to play a very large part in that revolution by focusing on offline/online content as well as more customizable applications.
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