Author: JP

There have been a number of interesting comments on my recent post on the build/buy debate. Leo de Sousa feels I have missed out “reuse” as the first port of call. And I guess he’s right, since I haven’t been explicit about the role of reuse in all this. So I will modify what I said earlier and try and make this more explicit:

• For common problems use Opensource (thereby reusing community property)
• For rare problems use Buy (thereby reusing the learning of someone who has already solved the problem for a few others)
• For unique problems use Build (but do so in an environment of component architecture and reuse)

Or…..

I could just say

• For common problems use Opensource
• For rare problems use Buy
• For unique problems use Build
• And in all cases make sure you maximise reuse

Abhijit Nadgouda points out that “with opensource, it is quite possible that you end up doing all three”. Which is also something I agree with, I think we are heading towards a time when opensource is the heart of all software development, but with some local builds and some specialised builds in a hybrid model. The distinction between build and buy and opensource then becomes one of scarcity economics versus abundance economics. Everyone’s got bills to pay, we just have to get the funding models right. Whatever the answer, one thing’s for sure, the current model’s busted.

Louis Nauges takes the argument in a slightly tangential direction, suggesting that SaaS plus open APIs is a different option. I guess I considered it nothing more than a variant of Buy, but then I may have misinterpreted what Louis said. Yes there are SaaS examples that are free-as-in-gratis, but opensource to me remains free-as-in-freedom, so I can’t really find examples of “opensource” SaaS. I need to think about this a little more.

Jag takes a completely different line, one that I am still pondering. What kind of ontology and taxonomy is needed in order for us to classify the problems and their domains accurately? How do we have to educate IT professionals as a consequence of this? More of this later.

Once again, do keep the comments coming. I really do appreciate them, even where I don’t answer back individually. And I learn from them. Occasionally I land up with quite a backlog as a result, but that’s a nice problem to have.

And remember, these conversations are snowballs. None of us should be proprietary about how they evolve and where they get to. You start them off and soon they have a life of their own. Sometimes someone else starts them off, and all you do is add bits to it.

Yes of course the conversations get fragmented. But this is better than stultifying and straitjacketing the conversation in the first place. And if we use tags and folksonomies sensibly, we can always de-fragment them.

When I started writing Confused of Calcutta, I included the following text in About This Blog:

I believe that it is only a matter of time before enterprise software consists of only four types of application: publishing, search, fulfilment and conversation. I believe that weaknesses and corruptions in our own thinking about digital rights and intellectual property rights will have the effect of slowing down or sometimes even blocking this from happening.

I believe we keep building layers of lock-in that prevent information from flowing freely, and that we have a lot to learn about the right thing to do in this respect. I believe identity and presence and authentication and permissioning are in some ways the new battlegrounds, where the freedom of information flow will be fought for, and bitterly at that.

I believe that we do live in an age of information overload, and that we have to find ways of simplifying our access to the information; of assessing the quality of the information; of having better tools to visualise the information, to enrich and improve it, of passing the information on.

I believe that Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law and Gilder’s Law have created an environment where it is finally possible to demonstrate the value of information technology in simple terms rather than by complex inferences and abstract arguments.

I believe that simplicity and convenience are important, and that we have to learn to respect human time.

I believe we need to discuss these things and find ways of getting them right. And I have a fervent hope that through this blog, I can keep the conversations going and learn from them.

I haven’t changed my mind. I still think Publishing, Search, Fulfilment and Conversation are the Four Pillars of enterprise software.

I see that some of you are still concerned about the level of hype there is about Facebook; some of you are angry because it’s not open enough; and some of you believe that today’s enterprise applications are fit for purpose. So let me try a different tack.

Assume there is no Facebook. What do I want to see in enterprise applications?

Directories. 

First off, I’d like something that tells us who is out there, a directory of sorts. For some people this is an internal-only directory, for others it can include partners and supply chain participants. A small number are prepared to consider the possibility of actually having customers in that directory.

I would like to see everyone in that directory. I can’t understand why it should be any other way. We’ve learnt this lesson in the post and telegraphy world, in the telephony world, and to a lesser extent in the e-mail and instant messaging worlds. But are we prepared to learn this lesson in the enterprise world? You know the answer.

What many of the social networks are doing is vying for this Great Directory in the Sky. And for sure we can have more than one, so that we can have a whale of a time reconciling information between the directories. Some people like that. I for one would prefer to let the market decide. Go where the market goes.

In order to make the directory useful, I would want to see some additional information about the people in that directory. Contact details. Descriptors of various sorts. Preferences and profile information. Who is the best person to keep this information accurate and up to date? The person himself. Again, why don’t we do this in enterprises? Probably because there’s a department out there who think it’s their job.

By the time we add these two bits together, we are approaching the issue of Identity. Basic information plus contact details plus some preference plus some profiling, leading to a complex array of permissions and authorities and authentication information. Some bestowed by others upon you, some acquired by you, some earned by you, some selected by you. Thankfully, with things like OpenId, we are making progress on making information like this consistent and shareable and standardised.

So now we have an enterprise full of people, we have people in the extended enterprise as partners and supply chain, and we have customers. Everyone with their identity, authentication and permissioning stuff all laid out apple-pie order. Consistent. Clean. Collaborative.

Relationships 

What next? These people have relationships with each other, relationships that help everyone decide what the permissions need to be. Permissions to do with what you can see and what you can’t, what you can read and what you can’t, what you can do and what you can’t. So we need something to capture these relationships, so that we can use the “rules” of the relationship to guide a number of activities. In an enterprise these relationships are usually to do with the department the person belongs to, and the reporting line.

What utter tosh.

Those are not relationships. They are irritants. Irritants apparently required in order for people to allocate costs and profits accurately. I will believe it when I see an enterprise, any enterprise of scale, where this is true. In the meantime I prefer to state that these things are irritants that allow us to pretend to know our costs.

I am prepared to change my mind on this, the day I meet a customer who cares about what department I work in or whom I report to. Hasn’t happened in three decades.

Relationships are different. Whom do you talk to? Whom do you hang out with? What interests do you share with others? How did you get to know this person or these persons? What is your reputation amongst your friends and peers? Who would recommend you for anything? Why? Who stands in the gap to say that what you say is true? Who will stand with you in a tight corner? These things are relationships. And so much more. I know I have described them appallingly, but it’s better than departments and reporting lines.

So we need relationship information. Groups and networks and causes and beliefs and skills and interests. Who is the best person to provide this information. You. Who decides who is your friend? You. And your friend. Bilaterally.

Relationship information is absolutely critical in solving authentication and permissioning problems, in solving privacy and confidentiality issues.

Once we have the directory of identity and relationships set up, we can do many things. Like what?

Four Pillars.

Well, in most service industries, people appear to “work” by doing four things:

They look proactively for information. They search for things.

They receive information because they said they were interested in receiving that information. They subscribe to things.

They talk to each other using various forms of communication: letter, e-mail, audio, video, text, IM, blog, wiki, twitter, whatever. They are even known occasionally to talk to each other face to face without use of technology.

And they transact business as a result. Within the enterprise. In the extended enterprise and partners and supply chain. With customers.

People do all this now. But we do not have the tools to do the job well. Search is not free-form and wild-cardable and probabilistic; most of our search is very forms-driven and deterministic. Publishing or syndication is done using reams of paper producing reams of reports that no one reads. Mainly because it is done in elephant-sized chunks rather than bite-sized chunks. We need to be able to subscribe to changes in data elements rather than whole humongous lumps of data. Conversation is constrained by the difference in the technologies used. And fulfilment is often held up because we have weaknesses in the static data we use, things are not always up to date. Wrong names, misspellings, wrong addresses, wrong or missing authorisation information, poor delivery or fulfilment instructions.

That’s what Four Pillars is about. Syndication. Search. Conversation. Fulfilment.

Where we are. Now.

And guess what, everything is getting a lot easier, for a number of reasons. One, we have convergence between telephony and computing. Two, we have the web. Three, we have democratised innovation. And four, we have petri dishes like Netvibes and Facebook.

That’s what they are. Petri dishes. Where we can experiment with the culture of business and see what happens.

Now back to Facebook. Why am I so fascinated by it? Because it is collecting a critical mass of people, and that is very useful. The people are different from the MySpace people or the Bebo people. And this is important because we also have a number of challenges.

• One challenge is to do with Generation M, they have different expectations from us, and the tools and techniques that are evolving have much to do with them. There is a process of comsumerisation of technology we need to understand and adapt to.
• A second challenge is to do with the Three Is, Identity, Intellectual Property and the Internet. We need petri dishes to work out how to deal with these things correctly, in the new world we live in. A world where so much can be digital, can be archived, can be searched, can be shared, can be retrieved.
• A third challenge is to do with democratised innovation and the Wisdom of Crowds, how we can make use of the population to create increased collective value.
• A fourth challenge is to do with Long Tail approaches rather than Hit Culture approaches.
• A fifth challenge is to do with openness and transparency at the same time as privacy and confidentiality.
• A sixth challenge is to deal with network effects and scale, the sheer challenge of the number of people and devices that are going to be always connected. Moving to a real-time world.
• A seventh challenge is to do with doing all this in a world of global sourcing, global markets, global customers. And global talent. Which needs global collaboration.

Guess what? I am learning more about what the enterprise needs by having something like Netvibes to play with, by having something like Facebook to play with. Inherent within them are concepts to do with relationships and conversations, with identity and privacy and confidentiality, with syndication and search and conversation and fulfilment.

Now I can go further, and work on things I can do with Four Pillars when there is a large population of users, things to do with knowledge management. More of this later. In Part 5.

Alan Patrick, in a comment on a recent post of mine, asks “JP, why do you think F/B communities will be any more likely to be see each other socially more than previous Social Nets?”. What I had said was the following:

[Facebook] is different from other cyber-communities in a very real way.

How come? My guess is that Facebook friends see each other a lot more often than was the case in other communities. It is rooted in physical relationship rather than just electronic. The interactions are therefore a lot richer.

Let me try and answer as best I can. The summarised answer is simple. Because things like LinkedIn and Plaxo were networks but not really social networks. At least that’s my contention. Talking about contention…..

At the outset, please recognise that there is no scientific basis for what I am saying, just some very unscientific observations. Call it a hunch if you will.

Observation 1: The world seemed to be divided into three groups of people. (a) Those who used stuff like Bebo and MySpace and Cyworld (b) Those who used stuff like Plaxo and LinkedIn and Xing (c) Those who did neither.

Observation 2: These three groups of people were mutually exclusive, often age-bound and displaying quite different “interaction” tendencies. The MySpace people interacted with each other regularly, often more than once a day. The LinkedIn people only got in touch with each other in time of need, usually job-related. And the Neither people kept themselves to themselves and didn’t approve of such goings-on anyway.

Observation 3:  You couldn’t really call things like LinkedIn “social networks”. Yes they were networks, but they weren’t “social”. There was something fundamentally different about the way people used MySpace or Bebo, in comparison to LinkedIn or Plaxo. Nobody in their right mind would call a Rolodex a social network. A collection of names and addresses, yes, but not much more. Very useful in keeping names and addresses and contact details up to date, but not much else. A heavy user of LinkedIn was probably called a “networker” and avoided like the plague by his friends. I’m sure you’ve been there.

Observation 4: When Facebook opened its doors to all and sundry, something strange happened. People who belonged to the LinkedIn group suddenly had somewhere to go. Somewhere “to be social”. The great coffee shop in the sky. Now the groups began to move around.
All this made me think. Why was Facebook different? The people that connected to me were different. LinkedIn was all professional, whereas Facebook was all and sundry. The e-mail content was different. LinkedIn was primarily three types of mail: Introductions, Looking for Work, Looking to Hire. A job market. Whereas Facebook was truly social. The richness of interactions was different. The number of interactions per day was different. There were times when I would not log on to LinkedIn for a few months, this never happened with Facebook.

I then looked deeper into my Facebook interactions, as well as those of people around me; my family, my co-workers, my friends, my community, whatever. It was then that I realised that the Facebook community was different, that Facebook people tended to connect with each other differently.

Facebook was, in effect, MySpace for the LinkedIn generation.

Now LinkedIn users seemed to be from a fairly narrow socio-economic grouping. Which would suggest that we’re also going to see a plethora of studies on the population of Facebook, deriving what could be startling socio-economic grouping and exclusion statistics. There is a birds-of-a-feather effect which, in its most extreme forms, will lead to tribalism. We need to watch this carefully. As an example, I would expect to see very high correlation between Netvibes  users and Facebook over-25 users.

I enjoyed reading this Smart Mobs story (incidentally by Judy Breck, someone whose books and blog I enjoy reading). An article written in South Africa, referring to an Indian paper, quoting an English agency, with a story datelined Los Angeles, about a barbershop in Austin, Texas.

Particularly since I’m Indian, I live in England, my last two family holidays were in California and in South Africa, and I was en route Austin, Texas when I read the article. And that’s where I am writing this.