Collaboration momentum building in 2009; what do CIOs think about IT Governance?
A few days ago the results of our second CIO UK poll were published in this piece -
CIO Debate: Collaboration is building momentum in 2009. The poll corroborated earlier research that we carried out for our
Collaboration advisory service in the summer of last year, in conjunction with the guys at Freeform Dynamics.
The headline findings: despite all the hype, collaboration adoption is still just getting underway. A big part of the reason for this is the difficulty of justifying big up-front infrastructure investments. Where collaboration is growing fastest, though, it's business activities "at the edge" - those involved in interactions with external parties - which seem to be driving things along. There is a significant amount of appetite for collaboration technology, though, and our research indicates that 2009 will be quite a strong year for collaboration technology adoption.
Our third CIO UK poll is now live at
cio.mwdadvisors.com, and this time we're asking a handful of questions about approaches to IT Governance. How many organisations are pursuing formal IT Governance programmes, and if so what are the reasons? Are they basing their efforts on established frameworks like COBIT and ISO 38500? And what are their plans going forward? Those are some of the questions we're looking to explore.
If you're a CIO or IT Director - or you know someone who is - please take 2 minutes to provide your input (or send your contacts the
link)! We'll be publishing our CIO UK Debate piece on this topic in the next few weeks.
Labels: CIO, collaboration, governance, MWD, poll
SaaS takes centre stage at Lotusphere
One year on from the launch of IBM Lotus's first home-grown effort in the world of software-as-a-service, codenamed project "Bluehouse", SaaS is again top of the news agenda at Lotusphere 2009, and shows up as an underlying theme across the event's big stories.
The main headline was the
launch of LotusLive, a new brand for the company's cloud-based services, which will incorporate Bluehouse, Sametime Unyte Meetings, Sametime Unyte Events and Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging, as well as a all future offerings in this space, one of which I'll come to in a moment. In line with the new branding, each of the above products will be renamed, with the aforementioned products becoming "LotusLive Engage", "LotusLive Meetings", "LotusLive Events" and "LotusLive Notes" respectively.
Alongside this was more detail about last week's announcement of IBM's
intent to acquire the assets of Outblaze, a Hong Kong-based provider of white-label, SaaS-based webmail services. Upon completion, IBM plans to offer the Outblaze technology as part of LotusLive, under the name LotusLive iNotes. In addition to adding breadth to the LotusLive portfolio which it is selling direct, IBM sees the Outblaze acquisition as providing a new business model, helping the company to develop the SaaS reseller channel through value-added services.
Other major news from Lotusphere centred on partnering activities at IBM, and again SaaS played a central role - Salesforce.com integration with LotusLive Engage and Lotus Notes, integration between the LinkedIn business social network and contacts within LotusLive Engage, and between LotusLive Engage and Skype for VoIP calls.
IBM is clearly determined to show it has a credible story in SaaS, and is working hard to deliver a portfolio which mirrors its breadth in the on-premise software space. The biggest opportunity for IBM in SaaS - particularly with the Engage offering - is clearly the SMB market, and it will be interesting to see whether it is successful here, or whether LotusLive simply becomes an extension of its established enterprise portfolio. In any case, these announcements demonstrate that it is prepared to square up to Microsoft in the battle for supremacy in the cloud.
Keep your eyes open for a new report on Collaboration-as-a-Service which we'll be publishing within the
MWD Collaboration advisory service over the next couple of weeks.
Labels: collaboration, ibm, SaaS
IT spending in a downturn: broadening sourcing options, rather than radical cuts
A few weeks back I
highlighted that we'd just started running the first in a series of short polls in conjunction with
CIO UK (part of the international network of CIO magazines) - with a poll focused on how CIOs expect their spending to change in 2009, given the current economic climate.
The first poll threw up some really good insights, which corroborated what I'd heard in a number of other CIO interviews I'd just completed (at the
Nordic CIO Summit I chaired at the end of November).
We take the output from each poll we run, and write an exclusive piece for CIO UK - which is then used as the kick-off point for some further CIO debate that's published online.
Here's the first article. The headline: on balance, UK CIOs appear to be expecting IT budgets to dip marginally overall, but key projects will still progress (albeit in more bite-sized chunks). Fixed IT costs / IT infrastructure budgets will be managed very tightly - but in a way, this is "business as usual" these days. The health warning: with the economic / political situation changing almost daily, the analysis and assumptions could well be out of date by the time you read the article!
The next poll is already
live on our website: it's on the topic of collaboration and social software. Are companies doing more than paying lip-service to collaboration, and what do people think about social software's value? With our short poll we hope to be able to report some more interesting insights for CIO UK.
If you're a CIO or IT Director - or you know someone who is - please take 2 minutes to provide your input (or send your contacts the
link)! We hope to be publishing our CIO UK Debate piece on this topic early in the New Year.
Labels: CIO, collaboration, MWD, open source, outsourcing, poll, social software
Interviewing Avaya on Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP)
The other week I participated in a podcast interview with Avaya's
Gordon Loader, discussing Communication-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP). This is something that Avaya's been talking about for some time, but it's only recently that it's taken a little more form as an idea. The confluence of trends in collaboration, unified communications and BPM is something that's very interesting to us, given our active collaboration and BPM research programmes.
In the interview, Gordon and I discuss what CEBP is; why it's interesting; what the potential benefits are; and we also touch a little on how you can get started in exploring where CEBP might add value in your organisation. We talk not only about the kind of "firefighting" scenarios that come most immediately to mind (using telephony and/or messaging to make contact with people when there's some kind of process problem that needs urgent resolution) - but also process scenarios related to sales and marketing, product development, and more. It's worth a listen, I think!
You can find the podcast interview
here (though you'll need to register with ETM as a subscriber to access the audio itself). The title of the page is a little misleading, as we don't just talk about "how Avaya defines CEBP"...don't let that put you off.
Labels: avaya, BPM, collaboration, podcast
Microsoft announces Office Communications Server R2
Almost 12 months to the day after Microsoft launched its realtime messaging, presence and conferencing server, Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS), the company today announced the follow-up release of the product, referred to as "R2".
Currently in private beta testing (and due for public release in February 2009) , OCS R2 enhancements focus largely on telephony-based features, for example enabling individuals to dial into the audio part of a web conference without the need to be online, as well as support for SIP trunking. There is also a strong leaning towards supporting call centre and admininstrative roles within organisations. OCS R2 includes a dedicated "attendant console", which allows individuals to act as delegates so that, for example, a PA or central receptionist would be able to manage incoming calls. In a similar vein, a "response groups" feature enables a single call to be routed to multiple users in turn until it finds someone who is available. The new release also provides support for additional mobile platforms - acknowledging that perhaps some people don't use Window Mobile - and includes two-way "single number reach", which extends the existing support for the use of a single number to ring an individual at all of their locations (office, mobile, home, etc.) at once, so that calls from any of those locations appear to come from that number.
The new version also marks the introduction of the persistent chat technology that came from Microsoft's acquisition of Parlano in October 2007, and provides for more seemless integration with Office Communicator for desktop sharing, as well as support for HD video and improved call monitoring.
This new product release highlights the growing convergence between the historically separate worlds of software and telephony, with vendors on both sides extending their reach into the other market in a bid to deliver collaboration and/or unified communications. From my perspective (which you can see
here), it is becoming increasingly difficult to consider these two vendor markets as distinct, although at the business end the budgets continue to be split in the majority of organisations. What is clear is that communication is a major underpinning of any strategy for improving collaborative working practices, and as organisations' implementations of such practices mature, the technology convergence will only increase.
If you are embarking on a collaboration initiative, you need to consider the role of your telephony infrastructure as part of that initiative. Furthermore, you need to think about the integration that will be necessary to ensure that that you don’t introduce communication stovepipes and bottlenecks that will constrain the value of your collaboration investment. Finally, you should look to vendors who are able to sit on both sides of the collaboration software/telephony divide (our collaboration assessments and vendor comparison tool should help).
You can see our assessment of Microsoft's collaboration portfolio (pre-OCS R2)
here.
Labels: collaboration, Microsoft
Cisco strengthens collaboration portfolio
Cisco today announced its acquisition (which is expected to close by the end of October) of email and calendaring startup, PostPath, for the princely sum of approximately $215 million. The PostPath offering is Linux-based, and has been designed to drop into a Microsoft network as an alternative to Exchange, with the company
claiming to offer an easier migration path from Exchange 5.5 to PostPath than from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2007.
This acquisition is a logical step for Cisco, which acquired conferencing vendor WebEx in May 2007, followed by policy management vendor Securent in November. Cisco wants to be a major competitor in the collaboration software market, leveraging its communications background to move up the business software stack. With the exception of its small business email offering WebEx Mail, email and personal calendaring has been a noticeable weak spot in the Cisco portfolio, and by building the PostPath technology into the SaaS-delivered WebEx Connect product (which is gradually becoming the platform for all things collaboration at Cisco), the acquisition means it can offer an alternative to customers, and further fleshes out the Cisco collaboration stack.
The previously stagnant email market has seen a flush of activity recently, with hosted email services such as Google's Gmail introducing increasingly viable alternatives to the costs of maintaining an in-house Exchange environment. While it is unlikely that players such as Google and Cisco will making a major dent Microsoft's Exchange market share in the short term, the competition can only be healthy, and at least prompt Microsoft to address the challenges posed.
I have yet to speak to Cisco directly about the acquisition, so I remain quite speculative about how significant a role the company sees this technology playing in the overall collaboration portfolio. $215 million is a considerable purchase price, although it pales into insignificance next to the $3.2 billion the company paid for WebEx last year. Whether the value of the PostPath technology will justify that investment however, remains to be seen. Integration is a key factor in the WebEx Connect strategy, so it will be interesting to see how effectively Cisco can leverage the PostPath features across the breadth of the collaboration portfolio, rather than simply adding a check in the "email and calendaring" box. For organisations considering hosted collaboration offerings such as WebEx Connect, this acquisition could make Cisco a more interesting proposition, especially if Cisco can leverage the Exchange migration strategy touted by PostPath in combination with both PostPath's and WebEx's Outlook integration.
Labels: Cisco, collaboration, google, Microsoft, PostPath
New Collaboration Service Launch!
We are delighted to announce the launch of our second Continuous Advisory Service (CAS), which focuses on collaboration. Following the same format as our BPM Continuous Advisory Service (introduced in May), the
Collaboration service offers a combination of in-depth reports, an interactive online vendor comparison tool, and optional analyst access relating to topics covered within the service.
The service launch sees the publication of our first
Strategic Insight report, which examines the relationship between collaboration and knowledge management, and our first
Market Insight report, which assesses the value of consumer social networking standards such as OpenSocial within the enterprise.
In parallel with the new premium service, we have published four new reports into our free "Guest pass" research library: two reports which outline our approach to assessing collaboration software, and two new Vendor Capability Assessments (VCA) which focus on the collaboration software portfolios of
Microsoft and
IBM respectively.
If you want to have a look at the Collaboration Continuous Advisory Service for yourself, we're offering free, no-obligation trials that run for 7 days. You can register for a trial
here.
Labels: collaboration, MWD
Collaborative mind mapping
I don't usually blog about individual briefings from vendors, but I've just had a fascinating briefing from
Mindjet, a company which has developed an interactive, collaborative mind mapping solution based on its established personal mind mapping technology. Mindjet Connect allows multiple users to synchronously edit a central mind map, seeing what each other is editing in real time while maintaining full versioning and rollback, and combining this with communications-centric collaboration capabilities such as group chat, video conferencing, whiteboarding and desktop sharing. With almost 20 years of engineering and market experience, Mindjet should be in a good position to recognise the potential of its core solution, but what I think is interesting is that the company has created a slick, powerful and flexible collaborative application which sets a standard for many of the current new wave of collaboration software vendors. Where many talk about the power and innovation of wikis, I think the new Mindjet Connect solution competes very favourably in this space. I'll be writing an On The Radar report on Mindjet soon.
Labels: collaboration, Mindjet
The Mysterious Oracle
As part of my research into all things collaboration, not least through my development of our forthcoming continuous advisory service, I have regular briefings with software vendors to find out what they are doing. Usually vendors are more than pleased to brief us analysts - anything to build the profile of their company or products within the marketplace. It is odd, then, when a vendor refuses to brief you on something. That is the current position I find myself in with Oracle.
Oracle has had a stake in the ground in the collaboration market since 2003 with its Collaboration Suite, the latest version (which was released in 2005) including products for email and calendaring, instant messaging, team workspaces, web conferencing, unified messaging and discussions. It's also true that Oracle has a fair job on its hands integrating the Stellent content management software (which it acquired in November 2006) with its own technology. But with all the general hype around Enterprise 2.0 and collaboration in the market at the moment, combined with the high profile that its major competitors in this space - IBM and Microsoft - are maintaining, it is intriguing that Oracle (which does not usually shy away from PR opportunities) is keeping such a low profile.
Oracle is far from being a major competitor in this space, but with an existing offering on the table, it should be making more of an effort to catch up. Perhaps all this secrecy belies some imminent great announcement that will shake the market. But right now, all it is doing is lowering the market's confidence in its ability to deliver on the collaboration promise. Oracle needs to get its act together in collaboration, or it will miss the boat entirely.
Labels: collaboration, enterprise 2.0, Oracle
Google launches Google Sites
Google is once again treading on Microsoft toes with the launch of its newest product, Google Sites. The new offering allows users to create and manage their own websites, and is based on the wiki technology the company acquired from JotSpot in October 2006. Google Sites is clearly targeted at the market currently dominated by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, and the beta-version hosted derivative of SharePoint, Office Live Workspace (which I blogged about
here), while highlighting its own simplicity and low cost - Google Sites is available free to existing Google Apps customers.
Unusually for a new Google product it is not a beta version but a fully released product, no doubt thanks to its history under JotSpot. Most notable is the work that Google has already put into integrating the software with other Google applications - Google Calendar, Google Docs, YouTube and Picasa are all integrated to allow embedding of calendars, documents, videos, etc. into your site.
It is interesting that Google has squarely removed all reference to wikis in its description of Google Sites, at a time when many enterprise software vendors are clamouring to ensure their offerings at least reference Enterprise 2.0 terms such as "wikis" and "blogs". This is the right decision: the Google Sites offering, while far from being a sophisticated site design tool, is much broader than many wiki tools in the market. It will also help Google in its attempt to "cross over" into the enterprise market - despite the success of business-focused products like Google Search Appliance, Google is still very much an Internet brand. While wikis and blogs are very "now", they are far from established in the enterprise, and the terminology can alienate less tech-savvy business users. Google needs to create confidence and trust among the enterprise market, and this branding/marketing decision seems to reflect this.
Clearly Google Sites is not going to displace SharePoint in the short term. But Google continues to challenge the dominance of Microsoft in this space, and yet again it has chosen a services-based approach to achieve this. The debate around whether or not Google will displace Microsoft in office productivity will continue for a long time yet, but in the meantime, Google continues to show perceptive awareness of what it needs to do, as well as the investment capacity and determination to do it.
Labels: collaboration, enterprise 2.0, google, Microsoft
Assessing technology: life after MQs and Waves
Earlier in January, BPM consultant-cum-analyst
Sandy Kemsley made
some interesting points about how the big analyst firms "parcel up" their analyses of technology areas and vendors. Her catalyst was an observation on the way that Gartner and Forrester each segment the BPM technology space.
BPM isn't unique, but it is challenging as a segment for the big analysts, because there are so many viable vendors offering interesting technologies that customers should know about. So - what to do?
Forrester has taken a "divide and conquer" approach, splitting the segment up into four sub-segments: human-centric BPMS (Java), human-centric (Microsoft), integration-centric and document-centric. If a vendor offers technologies which fit multiple of those sub-segments, Forrester covers them in each segment - each with its own Wave.
As Sandy points out, the challenge of Forrester's approach for the customer is that real-world scenarios don't segment themselves according to Forrester's criteria. Most companies have both Java and Microsoft platforms in place, and need to work with both. In most large companies, processes often have human-centric elements, integration-centric elements and (yes) document-centric elements. The customer has to do a fair bit of work to find out what's going to suit them best.
Gartner, on the other hand, produces just one Magic Quadrant for BPM technology - but by necessity (I imagine to do with usability rather than analyst resources - but this is pure speculation, I don't have any "Gartner insiders" to help me with this) it has scoped a number of what I would say are important vendors out of its analysis. No Microsoft, K2, Intalio, Vitria, OpenText. This is puzzling (to me at least). By representing the whole of the BPM technology space with one logical model, the result is a rather "vanilla" perspective.
This is hardly news of course. So why am I so exercised by it?
The answer is that we think there's a better way to provide comparative vendor analysis to customers.
A key problem underlying both Forrester's and Gartner's approaches is that in order to work within the constraints of their analysis and publishing infrastructure and processes, they're having to make quite a few assumptions about what kind of technologies and companies customers are interested in, and why. The hope, presumably, is that any mismatch between customer expectations and the analyst firms' delivery methods will be met through one-on-one consultation with analysts, who will interpret their own papers on the phone, (hopefully) in the context of their customers' needs. If a you don't have an opportunity for one-to-one consultation, then... it's up to you to try and figure it all out.
Wouldn't it be better if there was an approach that made as few up-front assumptions as possible, but instead provided an online, hosted interactive environment, accessing data from one broad vendor and technology database, where customers could shape analysis and recommendations themselves by providing information about what was important to them and what wasn't?
Such an environment would take customer "preferences" and use them to tune the rankings that were presented. Ideally, preferences wouldn't just be focused on elements of functionality, but also on attributes of vendors themselves (for example - do you only want to buy from big companies, or companies with offices in your geography?), technology dependencies (for example - do you only want to buy from companies who can run their software on Linux or support a certain standard?). Customers wouldn't have to provide such "preferences" - but the more information they provided about their constraints and interests, the more relevant the analysis would be.
Does that sound like too much to ask?
We don't think so. We think customers of industry analyst firms often have to do too much work in order to get relevant advice. So we're using approach described above for new MWD analyses of BPM technology offerings and Enterprise Collaboration technology offerings. We're launching new interactive, online comparison and ranking tools for these two areas as part of two new advisory services which will launch in the coming months.
Oh, and if this sounds interesting, don't worry that you'll have to pay an extortionate amount of money to get access to these tools. We'll be offering free trials to enterprise IT departments :-)
Watch this space.
Labels: BPM, collaboration, forrester, gartner, MWD
Not all processes are created equal - at least under the lens of IT
Andrew McAfee at Harvard Business school
poses an interesting question:
do 'managers' belong on the list of knowledge workers whose jobs are being transformed by information technology?His question is prompted by a number of interesting examples of the use of IT in areas such as "fluid" building fabrication, sculpture, BMW car design and poker playing. He then goes on to describe, based on the experience of his course teaching, that most general managers do not believe that IT can help them in their roles as leaders, change agents and value generators because:
until fairly recently the profession of general management was actually not one of the ones deeply affected by technology. Prior to the mid 1990s the footprint of most corporate IT -- the sphere of direct influence for a piece of technology -- was the single function or task. This made for a happy marriage between technology and knowledge workers like engineers, scientists, and analysts because these workers stayed within a single function. But general managers, by definition, do not. They're responsible for orchestrating the work of multiple groups. So from their perspective, IT was actually delegable and low level.This chimes well with some of the points we raise in
our March 2005 BPM report (which will be updated next month). In it we highlight that much of IT discussion of business process is actually about the shadow that IT automation casts on real business processes. The real world of business processes is much more complicated than would appear to be case based on what IT can support. There are business processes which serve to differentiate the business and there are those that are a cost of doing business. There are business processes which support day-to-day operational activities (or single functions or tasks as Andrew refers to them); there are those that support management of those operational activities; and ultimately there are those that govern strategy.
IT has historically played a prominent role in support the non-differentiating, operational processes. That role is significantly diminished when it comes to differentiating, management and strategy processes because they are more ad-hoc and collaborative and nature and depend on harnessing and exploiting a wide variety of applications and structured and unstructured information assets.
Andrew believes that the emergence of ERP and the Internet has enabled a new class of business process automation which operates at the level of the organisation and so are more suited to management processes. He also believes that "Enterprise 2.0" technologies (which Angela discusses in the broader context of enterprise collaboration in
her recent report), by virtue of their emergent characteristics, promise to do the same and concludes that he is:
comfortable adding 'general managers' to the list of knowledge workers who have very powerful digital tools at their disposal, and who need to learn how to use them well. Does this also seem right to you?His historical analysis of business process automation certainly seems right to us and we believe that a range of new IT capabilities have the potential to shift IT's supporting role in the direction of differentiating management and strategy processes. However, it's not just about managers learning how to use them well. As we highlight in our BPM and collaboration reports (and more broadly in our analysis of IT-business alignment), these management competencies must also address a broad range of organisational, cultural and governance challenges if these innovations are to fully realise that potential.
Labels: BPM, collaboration, enterprise 2.0
Hot off the press.. New MWD Collaboration report!
I'm pleased to announce that MWD's new report,
Ideals and reality: understanding the context for your enterprise collaboration strategy, is now available for free download from our website. The report offers our perspective on the role of technology in enterprise collaboration, and highlights the key issues facing organisations looking to implement collaborative working practices.
One of the most interesting messages to come out of the report is the fragmented nature of the collaboration software market today, both in terms of the breadth of tools classified as collaboration tools, and the lack of cohesion between those tools when it comes to implementing them in an enterprise setting. The lack of adequate standards for integrating the different functions - both with each other, and with organisations' existing IT environments - basically means that an organisation is left to take all the risk if it wants an integrated environment. The cost and complexity of integration, and the likely possibility that any custom integration work will need to be re-built with every new product upgrade, places additional pressures on already challenging cost justifications for collaboration. This is of course also a major issue for the software vendors, as it will serve only to dampen collaboration market growth potential.
It's important for organisations and vendors alike to remember that collaboration software does not equal a collaborative working environment; there are many more factors that need to be considered. This report calls out some of the key organisational, cultural and governance challenges that organisations face in implementing collaboration - and offers advice on how to deal with them.
Click here to read the report, and I welcome your comments!
Labels: collaboration, integration, MWD, report
Collaborative productivity makes its mark on the desktop
The last couple of weeks have seen a wave of product launches and announcements at IBM Lotus, coinciding with the Lotus Collaboration Summit which took place on 18th September. A new version of Quickr is expected in the spring, along with a new product, Quickr Content Integrator, which will enable import of content from Domino libraries and teamrooms, FileNet P8, Microsoft Outlook public folders and Microsoft SharePoint sites into Quickr. Tuesday also saw the release of Lotus Forms 3.0, IBM's XForms-based technology gained through its PureEdge acquisition in 2005.
Also announced was the release of Accelerators for WebSphere Portal - packaged portlets and connectors for integrating key IBM products into the portal, reducing implementation time (and cost). Five were shipped - Dashboard, Self-Service, Content, Collaboration, and Enterprise Software Suite. Of greatest interest to me was the Collaboration Accelerator, which provides integration for Sametime, Quickr and Connections.
Perhaps the most interesting announcement from IBM is the release of Lotus Symphony, a suite of office productivity tools which are available for free, and which are also shipped within the latest Notes release. IBM reported over 100,000 downloads during the first week of the beta availability of the Symphony software, highlighting the growing interest in alternatives to the ubiquitous Microsoft Office Suite. Based on OASIS' ODF (Open Document Format) standard, Lotus Symphony supports Office formats as well as Lotus Smartsuite formats, and runs on both Windows and Linux.
This news was followed last week by the announcement of Microsoft Office Live Workspace - a Microsoft-hosted SharePoint workspace which allows users to access and share documents online. Described as an extension to the desktop Office suite, it can also be accessed by other desktop suites such as OpenOffice, and will be available in beta sometime in November. Widely touted as Microsoft's answer to Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Microsoft claims it is not targeted at the enterprise market, rather at small businesses and home users.
These announcements, along with those services from vendors such as Google and Zoho, highlight the emerging transition in how people want to use their desktop software - personal productivity, which so successfully established Microsoft's stronghold on the desktop, is now giving way to collaborative productivity. It is no longer enough just to create, we now need to work with others to do this, and we are demanding that the software market catches up to support and enable this. All this activity is healthy for the desktop software market - which has been pretty stagnant for the last 10 years - and the entry into the market and buzz from players such as Google and Zoho are clearly making the giants sit up and take notice.
Labels: collaboration, ibm, Microsoft
Market activities this week
There have been two notable events this week in the collaboration software market - firstly the acquisition of Zimbra by Yahoo! on Tuesday, followed by Novell's reach into the broader collaboration market through the release of two new products, Novell Teaming and Novell Teaming and Conferencing.
Yahoo's purchase of Zimbra, a small, California-based start-up which provides Web 2.0-based online and offline email and calendaring as well as document and spreadsheet capabilities, is notable as much for its price tag of $350 million as for its impact on the market. Founded in 2003, Zimbra's three rounds of funding amounted to $30.5m, making the company an excellent investment. In this market where there is such an unusual mixture of broad suite vendors and numerous start-ups and small, independent players, this demonstrates a key concern for enterprises - whether they can really afford the risk of best-of-breed tools in a consolidating market.
Novell's announcement is another illustration of the draw of collaboration for vendors; a long-time player in the email and groupware market with GroupWise, Novell is finally building on this experience and client base to deliver team-based collaboration. With core technology gained through an OEM agreement with SiteScape, Novell's solution leverages its heritage in identity management and email/calendaring to provide a solid, competitive first release product. It also puts Novell in an interesting position - while it is a familiar vendor in IT departments within enterprises, Novell will now need to shift its focus to the business, which will mean a different set of partners and a different marketing focus. It will also have to be careful not to over-emphasise the Linux angle with business users - something it is prone to doing. Many vendors find it hard to make the IT-to-business transition; time will tell whether Novell can do it.
Labels: collaboration, Novell, Zimbra
Is this really collaboration?
As part of a report I am writing on collaboration, I have been mulling over the increasingly broad use of the words "collaboration" and "collaborative", and wondering how appropriate they are in certain contexts. Let me explain.
"Collaboration" literally means "to work together". As I see it, this necessarily implies that the parties involved are conscious of their co-involvement in the activity.
However, increasingly the term "collaborative" is being used to describe tools where the central value is gained by the participation of a collection of users - but where the individual users' contribution is not made in the name of the collective - it is made for their own personal benefit. For example, users of social bookmarking systems may tag pages for their own reference or to help them find things again - not explicitly to add to the broader network of tagged content. But, since there is no explicit intention to participate in the collective activity, surely this cannot truly be collaboration? Just because there is a collective benefit from multiple people using the same system, doesn't mean the people involved shared the same goal.
It may be that the term collaboration is simply the best-fitting umbrella for these tools and methods, but with all the confusion in the market over what is meant by collaboration - especially with terms such as Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Office 2.0 etc adding to the mix - I think we need to be more careful about how we describe emerging social software and services.
Labels: collaboration
A new face at MWD
Hello there, I'm Angela Ashenden, and I've recently joined Neil M and Neil WD to establish a new research area for MWD covering collaboration. I'm not new to the analyst world - you may have come across me in my previous role at Ovum, where I advised on many technology areas, including search, content management, portals, workflow and e-learning - so I have quite a background in this area!
At MWD, I will be coming at collaboration from a different perspective from most other analyst companies - but in line with MWD's broader strategy of IT-business alignment - taking the enterprise need as my primary consideration, rather than the technology. Of course technology is an important factor, but rather than simply drilling in on the individual features and functions of the tools available, I will be looking at the technology in as far as how it addresses the organisation's broader business need. Few organizations have the luxury of selecting new technology without taking into account their existing infrastructure and applications, and so I aim to keep the focus on how the technology fits within and complements that structure.
The other important consideration with collaboration is the practicality of changing people's ways of working; collaboration is not just about using a particular set of tools, it's about working together as a team, making best use of each person's skills, and taking responsibility both individually and collectively. I'll be looking at what makes collaboration work within an enterprise, and what techniques and methods you can use to implement collaborative working patterns within your organisation.
Interestingly, there are some strong relationships between collaboration and several of the existing competency areas within MWD (which of course is no accident!), and so the Neils and I will be exploring those too.
In the meantime, I will be posting comments and interesting links here on the blog regularly, so please feel free to offer your reactions to my musings!
Labels: collaboration, MWD
Real-world Enterprise Architecture part II: conversation, federation, road trips and tools
In my previous post I explained how in order to get real value out of Enterprise Architecture (EA) work, it's critical to focus not only on the outputs of EA work, but also on the process/practice of EA - and moreover that the process/practice has to focus on *conversations*.
What does this mean for tools, technologies and methodologies which purport to aid architecture work of different flavours? To get to the bottom of this, it's important to add another thought into the mix, which concerns the nature of IT work in large organisations.
What we found in our research for
our book is that in large organisations (which are of course the organisations most likely to be pursuing EA activities) IT work is only very rarely truly centralised. Even where there is "officially" one central IT department, the reality is most often that there are other pockets of IT activity that happen elsewhere - perhaps in subsidiaries, remote offices, or within particular business departments. What we also found is that it's pointless trying to centralise IT work and force all IT activity to happen in one place. A top-down, centrally enforced IT mode of production might work for a short while, but soon enough entropy will work its slippery spell and projects will start springing up elsewhere (this is just one reason why the book is called
the Technology Garden).
In reality, then, there's little point in planning and executing high-level architecture work in a highly centralised fashion, when IT work is actually federated. At least part of successful and value-adding architecture practice is going to be conducted on corporate road trips, not in bunkers or ivory towers.
So I'm starting to realise that a lot of architecture theory and method is not always very helpful.
At best the focus of the theory and method work can only be one part of a much wider picture, and it needs to be hidden from that main piece of the action - the business-IT conversations. We need new techniques, technologies and new skills to drive the conversations. We need tools and approaches that promote lightweight, collaborative and iterative work - tools and approaches which we can use to share ideas and edge towards agreements as we make those road trips.
There are lots of tools and approaches on the market that help people "do things right" in bunkers or ivory towers. But let's not forget that there's something that's at least as important as "doing things right", and that's "doing the right thing". Figuring out *that* part of the equation is where road trips come in. Where are the tools?
I really hesitate to use the terms "Web 2.0" or "Enterprise 2.0", but what's needed is an approach which builds off the kinds of capabilities you'll be familiar with if you're a student of those two-dot-oh-isms. Hosted platforms with universal remote access; and collaborative editing and sharing of information.
Embarcadero is planning on supporting this kind of scenario in future releases of its EA/Studio modelling tools, and
Lombardi is already testing the market, from a process architecture perspective, with
Blueprint.
Labels: collaboration, discovery, EA, SaaS, sustainability
Real-world Enterprise Architecture part I: journey vs destination
I was talking to Donna Burbank, Director of Enterprise Modelling and Architecture Solutions at Embarcadero a few days ago - she was briefing me about the company's new
EA/Studio product. We digressed a fair bit along the way, particularly sharing notes regarding our experiences of how Enterprise Architecture (EA) *actually* works in the real world. A key point we discussed was the importance of focusing on EA as a journey, rather than as a destination.
It's all too easy to focus on the technical nature of EA outputs -
which bits of the Zachman Framework should we complete? Should we mandate that all our models use UML? ... and so on. Now don't get me wrong, it's important to get a handle on the scope of your efforts, and try and create some consistency in what gets done - but these things are means to an end, not the end in itself.
Where I see organisations spending a lot of time worrying about the format and scope of EA outputs and artefacts, often, perversely, it comes about because there's a lack of organisational ambition regarding the role and contribution of EA as a practice. The hole left by a lack of ambition here is often filled by huge technical ambition - "let's model the world". We all know what happens if you follow that road too far.
For EA practice to have a valuable contribution, it has to be prepared to prioritise conversations with business people (and less so with other IT people) over conversations with other architects. Although that's not within the comfort zone of every architect, it's critical. Real architecture has to involve
real stakeholder engagement - otherwise architecture is just design with a corner office.
Why is it so important to prioritise "external" conversations over noodling? Because more and more, business agendas dictate integration, harmonisation/rationalisation and collaboration efforts which have unprecedented scopes. Business teams and IT teams have to work together like never before to make these initiatives succeed, and a key plank is to create a competency that can understand and drive the kind of global (as opposed to local) IT optimisations that will enable businesses to drive their agendas forward in the 21st Century.
In summary: in the context of 21st Century business, the critical EA competency is the ability to drive shared language and multiparty understanding - and *conversations*.
Labels: collaboration, EA, sustainability
We the librarian
Dan Gillmor coined the phrase "we the media" in his book of the same name, to capture the sense of the shifts that blogging and other web-based publishing tools are gradually creating in the world of journalism. Globally-available news, analysis and comment are now not only available through the traditional "broadcast" channels; anyone (in theory, at least) can add their voice and have their say. One easy-to-see symptom of this shift is the increasing
use of camera phones by regular citizens to augment major news stories - capturing images of floods, accidents, and crimes in ways that centralised news gathering organisations can't.
At IBM's
Lotusphere conference in Orlando last week, the company unveiled a collection of online "social software services" called
Lotus Connections. If the company succeeds as we suspect it might, this release is ushering in a new phenomenon: "we the librarian".
All five of the service components of Connections are intertwined, adding value to each other. Central to the value of all, though, is a
social bookmarking service called Dogear which is designed for use within organisations. Employees use Dogear to tag resources that they want to bookmark, for later recall. These tags are defined by each individual, according to their taste (as is the case with established "public" services like
del.icio.us). As is also the case with del.icio.us and other similar services, each individual's set of personal tags can be made available to the rest of the organisation. What's interesting is that Dogear goes further, offering suggestions for tags as you start to enter your own choice. You can plough your own furrow, in other words: but DogEar shows you how other people are tagging their information, gently encouraging you to share common tags for common ideas.
What no-one is saying is that what's really going on here is a reinvention of
knowledge management that turns traditional thinking on its head. Traditional knowledge management relied on the skill of a privileged team of "knowledge architects" a priori defining information taxonomies, which organisations had to try and conform to in their day-to-day information creation and searching activities. The problem is that information is very rarely the kind of beast that's happy to be tamed and confined within static structures: its structure and importance morph over time. Most "traditional" knowledge management efforts failed to deliver business value. They created environments that were too brittle, and people quickly became disenchanted. The cost of knowledge contribution and categorisation was just too high.
Social bookmarking technologies like Dogear provide a tantalising way to rediscover the potential of knowledge management. With a system based on social bookmarking there is no central librarian, locked away in an office, creating taxonomies that are dead before they're even used; there is only a group of individuals, collaborating on creating a common understanding of important business information that can be shared by all, at low cost (no tedious or complex information categorisation or search tools are involved). We just tag as we go, and the tags light our way. We are the librarian.
Labels: collaboration, ibm, social bookmarking
