Stream Computing ...

Even before the cloud had settled on the computing scenario, the stream is flowing. One wonders ... is this being back to nature? While earlier there was grid computing, now its cloud, followed by streams ...

I came across this interesting post by Swathi Dharshana Naidu about Stream Computing ... You could actually get details here, and if you are technologically challenged, you could read this. One thing i liked about Swathi's blog is that she explains this quite simply.

What i could gather from this is that stream computing picks up large streams of data, and is able to analyze and correlate this. The question that this brings up is ... can this concept be used for making sense of the blogosphere? Given, that the blogosphere usually contains voices which usually dont agree with each other, and that there is a lot of content which is getting generated out there, could this technology not be used for analyzig, for example, the ideas that are coming out of twitter, or from your facebook feeds? I know, overkill, but if you take twitter, and combine it with an organization the size of, say IBM, or GE, certainly there could be large chunks of data that would be generated. And, something to make sense of this ...

The idea that i am basically talking about here is that as more and more opinions are coming online, in the form of blogs, tweets, social networks, there must be a way for making sense of these. You will see that the sense sort of emerges on its own in few scenarios, but in others, this is not necessarily so. And, if you look at this in the organizational context, with organizations more and more understanding that value is to be generated from conversations, the sense emerging from these conversations becomes something which is important. Something i have written about before ... Probably where something like sentiment analysis could play a part? Though, from what i can understand, sentiment analysis is about whether you like something or not. At least thats what i got on wikipedia ... or, if you look at this overview from a site from IBM, though looking through some more search results i got for this from google, you may find this to be interesting reading. This is not to say that search would replace human thinking (at least not as of now), but this could give a better sense of the thoughts which are coming out from different parts of the organization.

Barriers To Adoption

Today Jocelyn Ruiz Perez from evalueserve sent a very nice paper about Barriers and Facilitators in Use of KM Systems ... Quite an interesting paper. While on the whole, the paper discusses the findings of the authors about human and organizational issues which are usually not addressed in the way KM is approached in a lot of organizations (i wouldnt say all, but quite a few, probably), there are a few things which stand out.

Especially the part where the authors discuss the things which need to be addressed if organizations are to leverage Knowledge Management successfully:

• Inadequacies of technology
• Systems not being user-friendly
• High current workload
• Failure to institutionalize

Interestingly, these are all challenges which are not very difficult to overcome. At least, some of them.

About the inadequacies of technology, we all know about them. Having said that, though, most of these inadequacies, over a period of time, are being taken care of, and technology is evolving with platforms which can meet the requirements of both users and organizations, which usually come from user-friendliness, and integration.

Another aspect of this, however, is to make KM relevant. Most organizations i talk with, have a on-size-fits-all approach towards KM platforms. This means that the platform usually tends to be a static one, with all users, irrespective of what their requirements are, and what they are likely to be looking for, coming across a single user-experience with the platform, which leads to a lot of irrelevant information being presented to users. Of course, this is easily addressed by RSS and other similar technologies which are pull based, rather than being push based.

Coming to the concept of high user workload, this is the classic conundrum which a lot of KM practitioners would have faced, and continue to face ... Wheres the time?! With users being hard-pressed for time, where is the time for going through the resources which KM presents to you, and also where is the time for contributing to the repository of knowledge which KM can make available to others? This makes it a chicken-and-egg situation. And this is where the whole idea of making KM engagement a part of work, rather than being an additional activity. Whether it be contributing to, or learning from, the resources which are available on the KM platform. This, to an extent, would also address the failure to institutionalize ... though only to an extent.

Any thoughts, please feel free to comment.

Of Systems

In today's work environment, disaggregated systems are a reality. As much as ERP vendors would like to push for one, centralized system, this doesnt seem to be becoming a reality. Quite of a few of the systems seem to have been integrated in a large number of organizations, but this is something which is an ongoing process, though i am not sure how far this is going. Which is something Rachel Happe has written about in her post about The Future of the Social Web. Interesting reading ...


The way i like to look at it, systems within the organization can be classified as personal (ok, so you might put productivity tools as part of this classification), and enterprise apps. Personal systems, like IM, blogs, wikis, communities are tools you use to enhance your way of working. Enterprise apps, on the other hand (i reckon ERP to be probably the largest piece here), are those which you are told to use by the organization (ok, even here, there seem to be islands of information). The point here is, there doesnt seem to be any amount of talking happening between these two disparate systems. As i had written earlier, SAP was working on incorporating components of web 2.0 into their apps (though we havent heard much about this after this, or maybe i missed it ... please do let me know!), but one doesnt see them bringing out comprehensive social computing functionality in their apps. As such, the gap between the enterprise and personal tools seems as though it would remain.

And this is one of the sources of information which organizations seem to be missing out on. Between the different terms like Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence (personally, i havent been able to make out the difference, but then, thats not surprising ... i have been a Supply Chain consultant for quite some time), and a number of others, there seems to be quite a bit of information that seems to be slipping through. And maybe, this gap is one of the reasons that organizations are not able to make the mostof knowledge which is essentially personal in nature, and gets expressed and shared on the personal platforms, and enterprise apps have no way of accessing this.

Learning And Work ...

Something i have been thinking about for some time now ... though, for some reason (dont know what that was), i was just not able to write it down ... couldnt quite get to articulating it. Which is why the post by Jay Cross which is looking into the future was something which i quite liked. For the simple reason that he has articulated what i was thinking quite well ...

In a knowledge society, learning is the work.

I quite agree. In a scenario where the nature of business, and hence work, was more or less the same over a period of time, this was not necessarily so. Of course, thats not entirely true, but somewhat so. But, in a scenario where the nature of business, the markets, customers, and hence the work that people do at office changes quite regularly, using static trainings to enable people to find solutions to ever-changing business problems is not exactly the ideal way of doing things. What this implies is that training, for whatever form it takes, must evolve as work content changes. Now, this is a tricky proposition, because noone knows in advance what direction change will take. So, the only possibility i can see is that of developing platforms which can enable people to find the appropriate sources of information (not necessarily training courses) for a particular scenario.

And this, to my mind, can be done through the people-to-people connections which technologies like social computing are bringing to the table. Rather than looking at developing training courses, which are obsolete by the time they are launched (given the lead time of development for some of these, this is not an exaggeration), a training function needs to look at creating a platform which is capable of finding bits and pieces of knowledge across the organization (usually to be found in a highly distriuted scenario), and collating these into some form of a dynamic training course (for want of a better term).

Its like saying ... someone is facing a particular problem ... lets say, client management. Now, there are standard training courses which are available for this. What i am saying, however, is that if the client is a utility company, then maybe a short nugget made up of a write-up about the utilities industry, the specific problem they are trying to solve, and similar experiences from others can be grouped together to make a small capsule. Its not as though this is too far out ... if you see carefully, in the blogosphere, most of this kind of content would usually be already available. Its a question of creating a dynamic book (again, for want of a better word) from specific blog posts (lets say) which is capable to solving the specific problem. Not something which is sort of a one-size-fits-all. There is, of course, still some components lacking from this picture, and i would ask you to fill in these pieces?

AppWar

Talk about serendipity ... ya, i have been using this word more often ever since i figured out what it means ... over at linkedin, a friend had joined a group, and i came to know about this from my homepage, and went and joined the group. The day after joining, someone posted an interesting link about the SAP vs Oracle wars. Shows something of the role communities can play in the free flow of knowledge, whether within or outside the organization.

But no, i am not writing about this. This post is about this article about the Oracle vs. SAP smackdown ... the gorillas of the enterprise apps market. Of course, knowing that i worked for quite some time (major part of my career) at Oracle, you can guess who i am rooting for. But, having said that, this is ot about who i am rooting for, but rather, what is being written by analysts. And it seems to be good news for Oracle over SAP. They are positioned much better off with respect to their vision in the enterprise apps space. Interesting ... for a long time (read at least the last couple of years), people have been trying to figure out what Oracle was thinking, acquiring over some of the enterprise apps heavyweights. In fact, at one point, folks has lost track of how many products Oracle had taken over. And i am talking about Oracle guys here.

But, it looks like they had a picture in mind, about where they see the apps headed. And, a good reason to take over PeopleSoft, Siebel, and a whole host of others ... Now, i am not clued into the details of this vision, but from what i read, there seems to be a coherent strategy in place, and its been in place even when people were wondering what Oracle was thinking.

Having said this, what is more important, when it comes to Oracle, is execution. This has not necessarily been their strong point. A lot of customers still have memories of what was called the "red bell of death", when you would see a red bell, and your browser would shut down. Things were better with R 12, but Oracle needs to make sure they can get large parts of Fusion right first up. Along with, of course, the migration path, but that is something which they would have already thought of, and been able to manage.

What are worth reading are also the comments from some of the readers. More so because they are a mixed bag. In fact, one comment reminded me about something which, i believe, was said of IBM:

Nobody lost his job for buying IBM.

Seems like a similar thought process running in favour of SAP?

Power ... Aggregator

My friend Mark pointed me to an interesting site ... you might need to check out Power ... interesting because this is doing something which was a requirement with a lot of people. To begin with, a lot of people have presence in multiple social networks. More often than not, you would have the same set of friends in your network on most of these networking sites, but then you might not.

Which is where power comes in. Instead of having to login to multiple social networking sites, you can actually point your multiple social networks to a single place, and actually connect with multiple social networks at a single place. This is quite neat, saving a lot of work, am sure. Of course, they still need to do a lot to bring this to a place where it can be more widely accepted, but what i liked most is the way you get the original facebook look and feel in the UI here.

Social Media, Or KM?

There is much debate about the friction between Knowledge Management, and Social Networking. Venkatesh Rao has written an interesting piece about Social Media vs. Knowledge Management ... interesting because he treats these two as being the tools of two different generations. And then there is a post by Jeff Kelly about KM vs. Social Media (ya, the terms are inter-changed) ... and together they make for interesting reading.

For one, i dont quite agree with Venkatesh when he says there is a war between two opposing ideologies. First of all, i dont believe they are opposing ideologies. Neither Knowledge Management, nor Social Media (at least within the organizational context) are ends to themselves ... these are means to other ends ... whatever those be (and i am not trying to define them here, because most organizations have their goals defined for themselves, and there is no single goal that they envisage for either of these two, at least not the way they articulate it, though basically, they are all similar). Once we see these as means, they become tools which are to be used for delivering something (in this example, greater effectiveness of knowledge work). And once we look at it this way, the idea of war doesnt seem to stand. Lets look at it this way ... each generation has their own way of doing things ... viewpoints change ... and there is ample interest in Social Media among members of a few generations, though this interest is varied in terms of magnitude, or usage.

And then, Jeff goes into something which i basically disagree with ... treating these different tools as generational. While they may be (and no, i am not saying that they are), its not serving any purpose to classify them as such. Why? Look at it this way ... for a large part of "millenials" they dont even exist. I am talking here, about one-third of humanity ... India and China ... both countries with a large proportion of young people, who are not focussed on social media, though social media can change their lives in a large way, maybe not even thought about.

Having said this, i quite agree with Andrew McAfee when he asks the question of technologies being at war with each other. As i have written earlier, while people are at the focus of KM efforts, we should be careful not to over-compensate for the emphasis on technology, and ignore it completely.

Mashlogic ...

I have been planning to write about this for quite some time now, but travelling, and not keeping well, and so, here i am, delayed writing about this for more than a month ... no, not excuses, but ... well, ya, excuses! Natasha had written this one about Mashlogic. And, it seems to be a cool tool. No, i dont think this is what web 3.0 (if at all we ever reach it ... and why i say that is because, in all probability, by the time we are ready to reach 3.0, someone somewhere will come up with something promising to take us to 4.0 ... isnt that what happened with 2.0?), but its a really nice tool. This is a plugin for Firefox, which tells you more, context sensitive things about the thing you are reading. This sounds really cool, somewhat on the lines of snap, but quite different. In fact, i would like to take this further (if i had even an iota of technical sensibilities in my pea-sized brain). Imagine this ... you are reading a blog, and you come across an idea on the blog. select the text, and this little add-on shows you other possible blogs, which could be related to this blog. Or, in the organizational context, this add-on runs a search through your repository of content, as well as through the various communities you run in your organization.

Why would you want to do that? No reason, really. Except that, there was an interesting statement that came out of KM India ... that people are not really interested in KM. They are interested in doing their work, and so, if knowledge contributions are over and above their work, then it is, in all probability, not going to happen. If this sounds a little cynical, this is something which is happening in most organizations. In some of the discussions that i had with folks over at KM India, this aspect came out quite too well ... that no matter what tools, processes, you bring in, adoption is the challenge. And, this is something i have believed for some time now ... that your KM initiatives are as good as the adoption for these initiatives. And i have written about this before. Which is probably one of the reasons one of the labels i put to my posts is "People Aspect". Which is why you find that social networking, within and outside the firewall are two totally different ballgames.

Now, the question that this brings up ... if people are only doing their work, how do we get them to relate to the entire idea of knowledge, and management and sharing ... something which is important, but hey ... why should i do it! And this is where serendipity (hey, i am liking this word more since i found out its meaning) comes into play. I think more and more KM initiatives will need to be centred around people, and will need to consider knowledge sharing as a product of the work people are doing, instead of being something they explicitly have to do. Think facebook ... and its not really that difficult to do. Most of the aspects of people's work is already to be found in some systems or the other in the organization, so its a question of integrating these web 2.0 tools with some of the enterprise apps you already have in place, and viola ... XYZ is rolling off from this project in another 2 months time, so if you are a Project Manager, you should be able to see whome you probably want to talk with.

Coming back to the idea of mashlogic, a tool like this could be built into one where a person, when seeking information, should be able to use this for quickly having a look at stuff similar to what they are looking at, and see where they can get more details ... making discovery that much simpler ... in a search mode, rather than in discovery mode.

People, Or Technology

As i have written before, Dr. Kavi Mahesh, moderating the panel discussion on the role of technology in KM, was of the opinion that at times its fashionable to downplay the role of technology in KM. My friend Anjali has raised a comment on this ... that people are the centre of KM.

I quite agree with that. In fact, theres no two ways about it. But, the way i see it, in practically most systems (and Peter Senge has mentioned this in Fifth Discipline as well), it is very, very difficult to attain an equilibrium. And, the larger and more complex the system, and the larger the gap, in terms of time, or otherwise, between cause and effect, the more difficult it becomes. Which is why, we fine, inspite of economic theory, hardly any markets which are at equilibrium. The way i see it, its like a pendulum ... it goes from one end, to the centre, which is the equilibrium, but due to intertia, it overshoots, and so on ...

I think this is, to an extent, happening in the people or technology aspect today. People are at the centre of KM ... there is no way i am going to try to negate that. But, after a decade of overemphasizing technology, the pendulum is now trying to move towards the centre, which is the equilibrium between the three aspects of people, process, and technology. Having said this, the changes in the technology landscape are such as they cannot be overlooked, which is somewhat bringing the technology dimension to the centre, along with the people.

In fact, you would find that i have a separate label on my posts for "People Aspect", which is the way i can show that i believe that the people aspect of KM is critical, but at the same time, the technology also is very important.

Looking Ahead ...

This is a question a lot of people are asking, and a lot of people are talking about. Is web 2.0 going to change the way we work? The answer seems to be yes … that web 2.0 is more than just a set of tools … that it’s a new paradigm for business. The basic concept of this paradigm being the "democratization" of knowledge creation, dissemination, and absorption. In other words, anyone today can write a blog, create knowledge, disseminate it, and anyone can read anyone's blog, interact with the blog (through RSS Feeds, and Comments), and absorb what the author of the blog is saying (simplistic example).

What not too many people are talking about is how this new paradigm is going to change the way business functions. Like, in the 90s, e-commerce changed the way companies worked, by expanding their boundaries, and increasing collaboration with business partners. However, web 2.0, to my mind, is far more profound a change. Why? In one word ... People! Till now, all changes have been focussed around the classical management approach ... optimize, streamline, etc. ... where the focus has been on analytical functions, and business processes. Even the web, for all the changes it brought about in the 90s, had these changes focussed primarily around business processes, and not people ... something i have written about.

Take a simple example ... in the 90s, there was the concept of the webmaster. For the last so many years, the concept has quietly disappeared from the websites i frequent. Indeed, i would believe, that to a large extent, the webmaster is getting replaced by ... hold your breath ... users. No, we are not quite there yet, but the fact is, more and more, users are creating content rather than just relying on webmasters to do that. Once we realize this, its simple to also figure out that the possibilities that are there with people are far more than there are with business processes. People can do so much more than processes can. And this is why i believe why this change is more profound.

Another aspect which we might need to look at ... With this "democratization" of knowledge happening, there are certain things which could change fundamentally. First of all, this "democratization" would lead to concentration of decision-making rights on a particular subject to a particular set of people, while at the same time, decision-making rights would get diffused across the organization (or maybe, the word might be scattered), if we look at it from the corporate level. In other words, decision-making rights would no longer rest with a privileged few, but rather, be distributed among people best suited to take them. Something i have written about before, based on a post by Andrew McAfee. This has interesting implications ... What this means is that the patterns of power-holding would also shift drastically.

Which brings me to the point of power ... The nature of power has changed over the centuries, since the modern business world has come into being. This has been manifested by the way power has been wielded in human relationships. Now, "democratization' of knowledge, and the consequent distribution of decision-making rights would imply distribution of power in the organizational context. Now, human beings crave power ... there cannot be ay disputing that. Which means, that one could expect staunch resistance to this kind of movement. Some of which we are seeing even now in the organizational context. Though, in all probability, this may not be enough to stop the way technology, and hence, business is going to evolve. This, too, is something we are witnessing today. In other words, we are, today, seeing the evolution of business, and the resistance to this evolution which one would expect.

The important offshoot of this is that while we are seeing changes in the way power is distributed in organizations, if we superimpose on this the fact that human beings crave power, one would expect, over a period of time, the nature of power to change, both in terms of its sources, as well as in terms of its manifestation. One would expect this change to occur based on knowledge sharing. In other words, reputation of individuals, and how worthy they are seen to be (regardless of seniority, function, etc.), would probably play a key role in defining the position of people in the organization. In the "web 1.0" context, position defined reputation ... going forward, this could change diametrically.

More about how networks could impact this ...

Just a few thoughts i have been pondering upon ... Welcome all comments, and thoughts! Thanks ...

Technology Shift

I was reading an interesting paper written by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson about Investing in the IT That Makes a Competitive Difference ... Quite an interesting paper. Brings up some thoughts ... about the way i have seen the technology landscape shift.

Having worked in the ERP domain for quite some time, the one thing i would see that ERP has managed to bring about is a shift. This shift has been from a primarily function based structure of the organization, with departmental silos dividing the organization into interdependant parts which, nevertheless, didnt talk to each other, to a structure which is more based on business processes, and the flows of these process tasks across various business functions, in the organization. Perhaps the functional, departmental silo based structure was necessitated by the lack of opportunities to communicate, and due to the power equations in the organization. In a world where there are a number of stakeholders for every business process (say, having the Materials/Inventory folks, the Procurement/Buying folks, the Finance/Payables folks, distributed across locations), and no single means for actuallycoordinating work across these in a seamless manner, inter-office memos being the norm, a sort of beauraucracy, leading to rigidity would be something to be expected. With an integrated approach to business, ERP changed this in the 90s, leading into this millenium. ERP vendors, such as SAP and Oracle, have long talked about the process-centric approach that they espouse, more or less.

However, ERP, for instance, has not been the unqualified success one would have accepted it to have been, or the success that SAP or Oracle would have liked to see it as. The reason, to my mind, is essentially to do with the fact that a lot of organizations brought brand new ERP packages, and implemented them on top of existing organizational structures and business processes. Automating a wrong way of doing things, is only going to lead to more mistakes per minute. Having said that, in my experience, senior management teams have come around to the realization that a process-based way of thinking can yield immense benefits. Something similar can be said of frontline executives, who also find the enhanced efficiencies coming from the process-based approach. Somehow, middle management is what hasnt really brought in as much as one would have liked them to have. But, on the whole, mindsets have changed to a very large extent.

Having said that, one thing this process-centric approach doesnt address is people. The process, from this perspective, is assumed to be totally people independant. While this is a nice thing from the perspective of standardization, the fact is that there are always aspects of the business process which benefit from the experience of the people performing those tasks in the process. This experience has not been harnessed too effectively. Going forward, i would like to see a shift in enterprise applications, in a direction where the "people aspect" of business processes gets more highlighted, in a way that people performing business processes should be able to gain from the experiences of others in similar roles, while at the same time, capturing their thoughts in real time. What i am talking about is including web 2.0 aspects to enterprise applications ... to make the shift from a purely business process centric platform, to a process-people centric platform.

In the current scheme of things, enterprise applications, and collaboration tools are two different, seemingly independant components of the enterprise technology landscape. However, somewhere, the context of the collaboration is something which gets diluted in this model. This context (say, the transactional context), could be carried forward to the collaboration.

Enterprise Apps and Web 2.0

Something i have been thinking about ...

What is the basic difference between business applications the way they have been around for decades now, and the social computing tools which are developing today?

Not many folks are talking about the possibility of blending the two (the focus seems to be more on the usage of web 2.0 tools ...). Which means that as of today, the two are being seen as two different independant entities. Which need not necessarily be the case as these evolve. Which is because, end of the day, they are both addressing two different aspects of the same thing.

The way i see it, the success of social networking has been essentially because they are built around people. In other words, users are central to social networking. On the other hand, the software, the apps, for example, that you see in facebook, are peripheral. And the relationship between the two is that the peripheral applications are pushing value to the central user.

On the other hand, enterprise software, or business applications are just that ... they are not focussed on the user. As we must have seen, these are built keeping business processes as the central aspect of the enterprise, with people being the participants in the business process (who are essentially performing some pre-defined, well documented work, which might benefit from SOA, or some such other software tool ...). However, as i have written about earlier, there is always some aspect of such straightforward computational processes which is not necessarily straightforward.

And this, to my mind, is the point ... there has to be, over a period of time, the melting together of these two concepts. There has, to a large extent, come the understanding in organizations, that business processes shouldnt be seen as being isolated from people. What this should mean is that sometime soon, there should also be an evolution of software which combines the two? I have written about how SAP is already trying to do this.

Welcome all thoughts about what shape you think this could take?

Encouragement - Continued

Some reflections continuing from the previous post ... and, encouraged by Bill Ives writing about the Enterprise 2.0 conference ... Some of the things i have been thinking about, and talking about for some time ...

If we were to look at three levels of management in the organization ... the junior, the middle, and the senior ... ok, ok ... so, this is a bit of an oversimplification, but not too much, dont you think? ... i find that the junior folks (call them kids in my old age?) are the folks who are usually gung-ho about adoption of some of the social computing tools which are available to us today. These are folks who have almost grown up with social networking ... who started using these while at school, or at college ... and, who effectively use a variety of tools for managing their connections. In other words, these are the folks who live in a connected world.

The top management (older than me, if you insist ...), are the folks who are looking at adoption of social computing tools from the business returns perspective ... and, more often than not, these are the folks who, uncalculable ROI notwithstanding, are not necessarily the folks who are against these tools (ok, so this is a generalization, so please take this with a pinch of salt!).

The challenge to adoption, what i feel, is where the middle management comes in. These are the folks who arent as adept at social networking, or computing, as the junior folks are, and these are the folks who dont necessarily see the bigger picture, and hence, in their domain of the limited picture, with an inadequate understanding of these tools, there seems to be a kind of lack of understanding of where social computing could lead us, as individuals, or as organizations. And this is probably the part which we need to address as much as any other.

Role of Tech Pros

I came across an interesting piece ... about the impact of web 2.0 on tech pros. Interesting thought ... about the impact web 2.0 technologies (more of the DIY web, the way i like to see it) is having on the job profiles of technology professionals. Of course, to a last extent, when it comes to business apps (read ERP, CRM, SCM ...), i dont see web 2.0 really impacting the role of folks who work on these technologies (though there is an extent to which web 2.0 technologies are being incorporated in some of the business apps ... i have written about this here).

However, when it comes to the larger information technology arena, the research this article refers to shows that more than more, there is the requirement for more and more technology professionals to align themselves to web 2.0 technologies. Interesting ... the research shows that there is quite a bit of inroads the technology is making in organizations, though maybe not to the extent that would make it as effective as a facebook. A lot of folks believe this might make technology professionals irrelevant, though i believe it wont ... it would simply reorient them. From being the masters of the apps, to the facilitators of business innovation (something i have written about here). Now, thats quite a shift. Of course, thats only the ideal, and the shift could probably be to different levels in different environments, but to an extent this is already happening. Especially in companies which are more at ease with deployment of new technologies.

An example of what i am talking about ...

The SharePoint draw is that Microsoft is essentially giving away lightweight wiki and RSS technologies for free, and unquestionable business value from a trusted brand. The opportunity will be for IT professionals to leverage the partnership ecosystem Microsoft is creating around SharePoint to extract further uses for the system.

What this is doing is making the technology folks the discoverers of new apps and new usage for these apps, in the face of increasing, and changing demands from the user community.

Emerging Technologies ...

Andrew McAfee has an interesting post about My Provocation, and Others. Interesting read about the impact of technology on the world of business. We have seen this happening over a period of time. How the advent of the steam engine and the telegraph changed the entire notion of business, and enabled the expansion of the European business model to large parts of the world, especially Asia. We have seen how the automobile has further changed the way work is organized (anybody who commutes in any of the megapolises of the world would agree with that, wouldnt they?), and of course, how the advent of computers, and more recently, the emergence of the network have drastically changed business models, created entirely new things to be done, and entirely new ways of doing the things we were already doing.

I remember someone once arguing that human needs lead to developments in technology. While there is merit in that argument, over the last decade or so, it seems to be even more apparent that probably its the other way round. Technological developments are changing the way we do business.

And this holds good for the web 2.0 surge as well. Like a lot of us have written earlier, web 2.0 is going to change the way things are done. The challenge, i feel, is more with the organizational willingness to let go, rather than people contributing their thoughts. One of the interesting things he writes in this ...

The second thing IT does is give business leaders the ability to let new work structures emerge without forcing them. Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 technologies are wonderful new tools for letting processes, interdependencies, decision right regimes, operating models, etc. appear over time without central direction, and without much (if any) up-front guessing about how these structures will or should look.

Now this is an interesting thought ... with web 2.0 technologies, there is the scenario where work structures would emerge based on the experiences and thought processes of people. The question that remains to be seen is ... How quickly organizations can let go. Let go of the control over decision-making, and understand how to harness these new discussion channels (if i may coin the term!) towards building a more robust organization, and more importantly, to create an environment of embracing change.

SaaS, SOA, Web 2.0 ...

There are a plethora of terms ... And, if you ask me, I am confused. So, a little bit of thinking, and I am trying to get to the root of some of these terms. Of course, this would, by no stretch of the imagination, be anything authoritative, but a little effort.

The way I see it, SOA and SaaS are related concepts ... Cant have one without the other. Software as a service can be provided only with an architecture that is oriented towards the service approach to software. So far, we are ok. Now, coming to the web 2.0 piece, in terms of technology ... At the core, I think the two are related. While SOA and SaaS are talking about the technology infrastructure to make software more flexible, and to ensure the software can mould itself to changing business requirements, web 2.0 is doing the same thing at the front end level. In other words, basically, web 2.0 is what you see, and SOA and SaaS are things the developers who are developing these applications see. So, in a sense, these concepts are related, and are components of a single jigsaw which is emerging as we go along.

For example, google has come up with OpenSocial, and Facebook has already done this. And, mashups are a part of the emergent jargong. None of these would have been possible without the componentization of software which is something SOA claims to achieve. Though, to an extent, I think this is essentially old wine in new bottles, but the fact is, there has been talk of modularity in software design for quite some time now, and SOA take this one step further. Of course, this is quite devoid of the technical aspects (much of which I dont know), but just thought would put thoughts together to bring these to a point where they are seen as being aspects which are complementing each other.

Social Computing and Technology

I have been reading a lot about Social Computing. And I am trying to experiment with it too. Though, trying is the closest I get to it. For some strange reason (or maybe its too much to ask for ...), the formidable Social Computing challenge is being made more formidable by technology.

I was trying to setup my account on Technorati, and that is quite a simple task. As they say ... The Devil lies in the Details. There is a mind-boggling array of tools all arrayed out there for you to us. Needless to say, these are not meant for an ignoramus like you. Yours truly ... A technological dinosaur!

I will definitely write more about it. As you know, Social Computing is something I am very interested in, and if you dont know (I dont think you would), I would like to see some simplification. So a nincompoop like me could "compute socially". Theres a lot of stuff there ... Ping, and a huge Developer Centre. Of course, there would be a school of thought that would believe that a lot of this stuff that is more cutting edge than anything else, and one cant expect cutting edge technology to be user friendly, but it has to become that, if it wants any scope of becoming mainstream. At least, thats what my Corporate Strategy Prof. told in Class! :-)

Technology disintermediation

Abhijit (a friend and ex-colleague), was telling me a little incident ... Something I found funny ...

He was flying from London to Delhi, en route to Calcutta (or Kolkata, if you must, though, I still prefer Calcutta!). He reached the shores of India (aka Indira Gandhi International Airport, but not his luggage). Not for a few days, at any rate.

In the meantime, it seems that he was following up with British Airways about the luggage, and for some reason (dont even ask me to fathom what the reson could have been), the folks at Heathrow were not updating systems (dont believe in them, I suppose?), and as a result, nobody had a clue about the luggage until it actually reached Delhi, and even then, there was a delay in updating the system. And here lies the nub.

Having talked to, and shouted at, the the BA luggage-handling folks in Delhi, he asked hem to inform him moment they hear from his luggage. They said they would, and they did, too ... Only thing, before they called him, he had actually checked on their website that the luggage had come.

Moral of the Story:

Abhijit knew about British Airways luggage before British Airways itself.

Point to ponder: Technology can disintermediate (as it is already doing, and I am sure this post is not telling you anything new, but I just thought that I would pen (or is it keyboard) my thoughts!).