Day: 7 January 2010

Whatever gets you through the night it’s alright, it’s alright
It’s your money or your life it’s alright, it’s alright
Don’t need a sword to cut thru flowers oh no, oh no
Whatever gets you thru your life it’s alright, it’s alright
Do it wrong or do it right it’s alright, it’s alright
Don’t need a watch to waste your time oh no, oh no

John Lennon, Whatever Gets You Thru The Night, Walls And Bridges, 1974

Note: The song was Lennon’s first and only US solo number 1 during his lifetime. (Just Like) Starting Over, the only other Lennon single to make it, didn’t actually make number 1 until after his untimely death.

Do you remember the “high street” banks of the UK in the Sixties or Seventies or Eighties? What wonderfully decrepit institutions. A place where 85% of the space was devoted to “admin”; where customers didn’t exist, only account numbers; where the plysical manifestations of these account numbers, the human beings, were sardine-smashed into the remaining 15%; where staff took lunch breaks to make sure queues were at their highest at the only times customers could come in; where bank managers ruled, and considered it an insult if you actually came in to withdraw some money.

Do you remember?

The key thing that struck me during that time was the enormous amount of space given over to the internal workings of the firm, and the tiny area allowed for the customer.  A tiny area that was usually not air-conditioned, smelled of damp and dank, looked like a check-in queue for prison.

You know something? We still have them now. In most firms. They’re called e-mail systems. [Stowe Boyd, come in, I can hear you calling. Time to tell everyone about your Publicy, Privacy, Secrecy. And your love for e-mail :-) ]

Think of e-mail within a firm as a physical space consisting of 100 square units of “stuff”. Then divide that stuff into two parts. Stuff that stays within the firm. Stuff that goes out of the firm, or comes in to the firm: stuff that crosses the firm’s boundaries. And think of these two kinds of stuff as represented in a ratio.

In many firms, “internal” stuff far outweighs “boundary wall crossing” stuff. Check for yourself. In my experience the ratio is close to 9:1. Ninety per cent of e-mail is generated by the firm and never leaves the firm.

Note: I did not count external spam in this measure. Spam is not mail.

Think about it. The majority of collaborative conversations taking place in an enterprise mail world do not involve the customer. Words fail me. Well actually some words come to me. Words like “unbelievable” and “circle” and “jerk”, but then I’m too polite to string those words into a coherent sentence.

Why do I spend an entire post on this point? Because it is really important. Facebook is facebook because it is multitenant. Multientity. Not to do with a single person or home or firm.

Whatever we do in the enterprise, we need to ensure that the walls of the enterprise do not keep customers out. Think Cluetrain.

Collaborative systems are still evolving, people with collaborative instincts are still evolving. Whatever we do, we must ensure that the model of collaboration we build is a holistic one, one that encompasses staff, customers and supply chain.

Building a walled garden in your own enterprise is the equivalent of taking your computer and burying it in six feet of concrete. [On the other hand, since that is precisely what so many firms are wont to do, perhaps I should not be surprised].

Note: This is a follow-up post to one I wrote a few days ago, The Facebookisation of the enterprise, given the kind of interest it generated. People seriously interested in the subject may wish to read my nine-part series on Facebook and the Enterprise from 2007. The first part remains my most-read post,  apart from the kernel for this blog: Building Society for the 21st Century, which is a page and not a post. You may also be interested in my Twitter in the Enterprise series, a sample of which is here.

If the IT department was made to behave like Facebook, what would an enterprise look like?

You join the “company”. You do this by using a personal token like an email address, choosing a password for all your activity in the company, then filling in some basic profile info. You’re all set. At this stage no one has given you a computer or a phone or anything like that. You’re Generation M. You come fitted with these things as standard. The first thing the IT department would need to provide is simple self-service signup. Access.

Because you’re in a new “social network environment”, one of the first things you do is look for a way to discover which of your friends is already here. So you look around. You need tools to do this looking around. You’d also like to invite the friends you already had into this space. Importing contacts, address books, that sort of thing. So you need tools to do this as well. The second thing the IT department would need to provide you is a set of directories, and ways of adding to them, searching them, extracting from them.

You don’t want the directory to be a firehose, so you want some ways of managing your lists. Making sure that you can group people the way you want to. Friends, family, group, company, department, location, whatever. So the third thing the IT department needs to provide is tools to classify the elements of the directory.

Knowing who’s around is a fat lot of good if you can’t connect with people. So what does Facebook do? It provides you with ways to send people messages, chat with them, converse, communicate with them. Publish stuff, upload stuff, read stuff, view stuff. The IT department must therefore provide communications tools, that’s the fourth thing.

Everything in business happens because people talk to people. [Even black-box trading is people talking to people, but delayed and via proxies]. It helps if people could plan when they were going to talk to each other. Facebook calls these things events. Meetings are nothing more than events. Tools for scheduling events is the fifth thing that the IT department needs to provide.

[Strangely, telcos used to have a stranglehold on the first few items: directories, groups, modalities of communication. But for some strange reason they never bothered to provide scheduling tools. Microsoft were the first to fix this gaping hole.]

Profiles. Directories. Groups. Events. Things published, like links, videos, photos. Relationships between all these things. None of which is static. Which means there needs to be a way of telling people what’s new, what has changed. Who’s joined, who’s left. Who was born, who died. Who joined up together, who broke up. Hatches, matches and dispatches as they used to be called. Which is why Facebook has a News Feed. The sixth thing that the IT department would need to provide is a News Feed. And ways of managing the firehose.

These are just the foundations. When people use Facebook, they use a series of other applications. Applications built by third parties on the developer platform. Applications accessed via Facebook, using the identity and relationship and profile and activity data provided by Facebook. Applications whose access to that data also requires the permission of the person whose profile it is.

Which is the final thing the IT department has to provide: A developer platform with the appropriate controls and service wrap around it.

Access to the environment, directories, ways to group people,  modalities of communication,the ability to schedule events, the publication of records of changes. And a developer platform that allows people to build edge applications that use this core in a safe and controlled way.

Was I talking about Facebook? Or was I talking about the IT department?

Which brings me to my final point. Facebook does not invest in the edge apps, build them, host them, amend them. They don’t support them, maintain them, back them up. I think IT departments would do well to learn from this. Let the people at the edge build what they want, within a 21st century enabling framework. They know what they want better than any IT department can. What the IT department should do is their utmost to guarantee safety and security of access, privacy and confidentiality, search and subscription tools, scheduling tools, data migration tools, visualisation and mashing tools, prioritisation and ranking tools.

Sometime later this month I want to spend time talking about the semantic web, linked data, the Web Science Trust and related subjects. I will also spend time on publish-subscribe and enterprise buses, on augmented reality. On mobility. On opensource. And bring it all back to Platforms and Stewardship.

In the meantime, I’d love some feedback.