Category: Four pillars

It’s been one of those truly lazy days, so I think I’ll start seriously sideways.

Twitter. Hmmm. The first time that I can remember coming across the word “twitter” was when I was reading Wordsworth as a boy. [Yes, I know, I have been Confused a looong time]. Here’s the first stanza of the poem in question, Written in March While resting on the Bridge on the foot of Brother’s Water

THE COCK is crowing,
The stream is flowing,
The small birds twitter,
The lake doth glitter,
The green field sleeps in the sun;
The oldest and youngest
Are at work with the strongest;
The cattle are grazing,
Their heads never raising;
There are forty feeding like one!

Twitter. A phenomenon. Just over a year old. If you don’t know what it is, you should. You could do worse start with the Wordsworth poem. Think about some cocks crowing. A flowing stream. Some birds twittering. A glittering lake. Some quiet, some peace and harmony. A diverse group, young and old, weak and strong. Some herd instinct behaviour. And the ability for forty to feed like one.

Twitter. “A service for friends, family and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

Twitter. Still haven’t got my drift? Then take a look at this definition in Wikipedia, or, if you want to get a real and fresh taste, this recent post by Ed Yourdon.

I’ve been watching Twitter almost since it started; initially, that’s all I did, watch. Some of my friends were early adopters, and I thought I could learn by watching them. [It was unusual to be learning fof my friends rather than off my kids, I’ve become so used to the latter]. Earlier this year I started playing with Twitter, but not seriously. It was only a month or two ago that I really got involved, as I sought to understand more about the beast.

I think of Twitter very simply:

First and foremost it’s a bulletin board with a difference, with many differences.
For one thing, the bulletin board has a publish-subscribe capability built into it. Anyone who joins can publish to it, but publishing alone means nothing, a tree falling in some Amazonian rain forest. This bulletin board has meaning only when someone reads your tweet, when someone subscribes to the stuff you publish. In Twitter speak, when someone “follows” you.
The first difference, therefore, is that you choose which parts of the bulletin board you read. You choose who (and what) you read.
When you follow someone, you can get that person’s tweets in a number of ways, directly off the web, read into some other application (like Facebook), via SMS to some mobile device or even via some IM system or the other. You can choose to receive an individual’s tweets via mobile or IM or direct through web only.
The second difference, therefore, is that you choose the device and the delivery method. You choose how, when and where you read.
And that’s not all. There is a hard constraint on the size of the message you’re reading, set currently at 140 characters; I have assumed that the remaining 20 characters available to any SMS-based service are being used by Twitter for message-specific information.

Short, brief, to the point. Where you want it, when you want it, how you want it. And limited to messages from the people you choose to “follow”.

Now that’s all very good, but why would this be of any value to the enterprise?

To answer this question, I need to take you on another ramble. Do you remember the days when you visited your parents’ friends, then had to wait miserably while they showed you their holiday photographs and films? Maybe you were even more unlucky, and you had to live through the next generation, when your own friends bored you with their films and photographs? And then surprise surprise, along came Flickr and YouTube, and suddenly you were interested in your friends’ holiday snaps and films.

So what happened? Did the holiday snaps suddenly become more interesting? I don’t think it was that, the change was more fundamental. You chose when you saw the photographs. You chose where and how you saw them. And when you did see them, there was something participative you could do: you could tag them “your way” and share what you’d done.

Twitter’s success, at least in part, is because of this “Martini” effect, anytime anyplace anywhere, augmented by the participative value. But that’s not all. I think there’s something else at work here, something subtler. Sometime ago, when I was tangentially involved in helping design workflows for a new building, we started looking at the best ways of organising coffee-cooler areas, in order to encourage people to chat. Most of the designs suggested were of the Alien Mushroom category….. you know what I mean, where you have these strange not-quite-tables, I guess you would call them pods, sprouting everywhere randomly. Some of the designs, on the other hand, were of the Wild West Bar variety, where instead of a pod you had a long narrow counter.

Gut feel told me that the long narrow counter worked better than the pod. I have no idea whether I was right, I was only peripherally involved in the planning, and soon it became irrelevant, I changed jobs; what I do know is that I’ve thought about it since, and I think I know why my instincts said what they did.

When you see someone standing at a pod, you need to come face-to-face with that someone in order to start a conversation. When you see someone at a bar counter, you only need to come side-by-side. It’s the same at an art gallery, when you stand next to someone and break into conversation. The moral of the story is that side-by-side makes conversation easier, face-to-face can be threatening at the start, especially with strangers.

There is something about Twitter that is side-by-side empathising rather than face-to-face confronting.

So that’s what I think. Let me summarise, having taken you for a wander all over the place. Twitter has a role to play in the Enterprise, because:

1. It allows you to impose a publish-subscribe model on top of a bulletin-board-like system, which reduces noise and improves the signal as it were.
2. It allows you to publish (and to subscribe) in a platform-agnostic device-agnostic way, which keeps the communications process simple.
3. It supports teamwork and participation as a result, in a non-threating not-in-your-face way

As a result, there are many ways to get value out of Twitter in the Enterprise, ranging from problem-solving through to education and training, while improving overall communication and collaboration. Of course there are caveats. As with any other form of communication, Twitter can be misused. As happened with bulletin boards, it is theoretically possible for Twitter to degenerate into idle gossip, pump-and-dump, smut, whatever. But this time around we can stop it, far more easily than we could stop the desecration of bulletin boards. All we have to do is to stop following someone; all we have to do is to block that someone at the next stage.

Publish easily, from any device, anytime anyplace anywhere. Subscribe easily, again device and location and time agnostic. Keep the messages short. Watch each other, learn from each other. That’s what we can do with Twitter in the Enterprise. But we will only do it if we want to share, and if we have the discipline of learning.

What is the first thing that comes into your mind when you come across the word “platform”?

For me, there is only one answer: Howrah Station in Calcutta. Where I first learnt the joy of “platform tickets”, the practice of paying to see your family and friends off somewhere, or that of paying to welcome them back. When I was young, we didn’t think twice about piling into a car and taking a long journey (by Calcutta standards in those days), spending interminable amounts of time stuck in traffic crossing the bridge, queueing up to buy said platform tickets, then finally skipping daintily over questionable (and often smelly) wet patches. All for what? For the privilege of being pushed and jostled while waiting for a friend or family member to arrive or depart. We loved it. There was a “just for the crack” carefree madness to much that we did, and I will never forget those days.

Howrah Station platform: Picture courtesy of www.anothersubcontinent.com, a site I wander into every now and then.

Not everyone is as confused as I am. When you see the word platform, perhaps you see what Dave McClure sees:

Dave blogs over at Master Of 500 Hats, another site I wander past every now and then. My thanks to Dave for the illustration.

Maybe you’re not like me, and not like the others either. Maybe you’re like Hugh Macleod, who visualises platforms this way:

Note to self: Never trust a techie who shouts in capital letters…. (and thanks, Hugh)

People mean many things when they use the word “platform”. In days to come, we are going to have to get more and more used to seeing some other terms crowd around the platform. Terms like open and multisided; terms like apps and widgets; terms like community. Older terms like architecture and component and reuse and standardised will still continue, will become even more important, but will have morphed into something less central-control and more democratised.

That’s not going to be easy.

For people who are used to terms like proprietary and business model and billable event, it’s going to be even harder.

But just for now, we don’t have to worry. The path to the platform is blocked, by people fighting over what it means to be private in public.

So if you get bored over the Christmas break, here’s something to ponder about:

What does it mean to be private in public?

As a child I used to devour statements along the lines of “now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall“. Whenever I was presented with information of sufficient abstraction or scale, I tried to transpose the context or scale in order to help my comprehension. I would look out for stuff like “if you unpacked the number of carbon atoms in the full stop at the end of this sentence, and arranged the atoms in a straight line, then that line would stretch all the way to the sun”. [An aside: I dragged that from memory, must have read it somewhere when I was young, never bothered to check it out.]

With this in mind, I really enjoyed this video, additionally available here in Spanish, French and Portuguese. I quote from the Miniature Earth site:

The idea of reducing the world’s population to a community of only 100 people is very useful and important. It makes us easily understand the differences in the world.
There are many types of reports that use the Earth’s population reduced to 100 people, especially in the Internet. Ideas like this should be more often shared, especially nowadays when the world seems to be in need of dialogue and understanding among different cultures, in a way that it has never been before.

The text that originated this webmovie was published on May 29, 1990 with the title “State of the Village Report”, and it was written by Donella Meadows, who passed away in February 2000. Nowadays Sustainability Institute, through Donella’s Foundation, carries on her ideas and projects.

Donella Meadows’ original “State of the Village Report” may be found at:
www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/index.php?display_article=vn338villageed

The text used here has been modified. The statistics have been updated based on specialized publications, and mainly reports on the World’s population provided by The UN, PRB and others.

The Miniature Earth website was first published in 2001, since than it has been seen by more than 2 million people around the globe and linked by more than 20.000 websites.

I found it particularly instructive at a time like this, when much of the West is taken up with conspicuous consumption. My thanks to erstwhile friend and colleague Andrew Pullman for bringing it to my attention.

I’ve placed it in my VodPod as usual, but it may take a little time to show.

Yesterday, while working on a reference for a particular post, it came to my attention that O’Reilly have “opensourced” all the back issues of Release 1.0.

To me this is fantastic news. On a cursory glance, every issue from 1983 to 2006 appears to be available for digital download, free of charge. I had been a subscriber to Release 1.0 for a number of years, and I’m happy to acknowledge my debt of gratitude to Esther and the team. They led the field in identifying key themes and topics, providing a reasoned and in-depth introduction to the topics, giving a truly detailed bibliography and contact information, and doing all this aeons ahead of the competition. They gave me early perspective on many issues that later turned out to be critical.

I’ve had the privilege of meeting a number of the contributors over the years, and count many of them amongst my friends. If you were a subscriber then you know what I’m talking about. If you weren’t, then it’s worth taking a look.

Let me know what you think.

I guess most of you have already seen the debate, as captured here,  here, here, and here. Is enterprise software sexy? Should it be? Can it be?

The entire debate is worth a read, the polarisations are fascinating. As and when I finish my Facebook series, I will get around to commenting on the avalanche [nb as per Doc Searls and his conversations with George Lakoff, a blog post is a snowball; it starts with the poster, but then gathers life and pace of its own accord; when this happens with many branches and forks, it seems reasonable to call it an avalanche.]

In the meantime, a few things stand out to me:

1. Outside-in design is an absolute must. We have spent far too long insisting on a distinction between what the employee uses and what the customer uses; as the walls of the organisation increasingly get porous, the distinction becomes false. Where I work, we are spending time and energy seeking to converge the two views, so that the customer and the employee exercise the same codebase. A goodly number of my guys are restricted to having the same applications access as our customers : how else will we know what our customers face?

2. Consumerisation amongst employees is a today issue. Tomorrow’s employees will insist on an applications experience at work that is at least close to the experience they have at home. Tomorrow’s employees will insist on using their own devices and choosing the way they want to interact with their apps. Platform and device agnosticism, with customisable UIs and skins, are must-haves, not nice-to-haves. In order to prepare for tomorrow’s employees we have to act today. Which is what we are doing.

3. Simplicity and convenience can be had at the same time as reliability and security. While Moore and Metcalfe and Gilder have acted in concert to provide us significant productivity gains over the past few decades, human longevity has not moved at anywhere near the same rate. As a result we are far more jealous of our time, and therefore things like boot sequences, boot-up times, management of screen real estate, all these things have really begun to matter. Today. That’s why many enterprises are spending considerable time on user centred design. Where I work, we’ve even changed our internal form and structure to cater for this. We don’t have network, product, process or IT departments. We are a Design department, focused on the user experience.

Searching for things within the humongous database that is the enterprise; searching not on a deterministic basis but on a probabilistic one, with heuristics and learning, preferences and profiling. Syndication or subscription, where individual information element changes are pushed out as if by RSS, rather than through formal structured enquiry screens fullof sound anf fury, signifying nothing. Fulfilment processes that don’t distinguish between booking a meeting room, a flight, a hotel room or a contractor. Conversational support covering blogs and wikis and IM rather than just snail mail and its often appalling electronic counterpart. These are the Four Pillars of the enterprise applications of tomorrow. Using any device, anytime, anywhere, with whatever modality of communications best suits purpose. Collaboratively filtered, rated and ranked. Learning and teaching.

Enterprise 2.0 is already upon us, providing us attractive, usable, reliable and secure applications. We just haven’t made the move to adopting it. But it’s happening now, with Generation M, mobile, multimedia, multitasking and here. Now.
An aside. It would appear that much of Web 2.o, from a consumer perspective, is about music and films and entertainment and gaming and pornography.  So what’s the enterprise equivalent of all these? What gets enterprise people’s rocks off?  Spreadsheets and presentations and databases. Go figure.

Enterprise Blue Zero is upon us. More later. I need to prepare for Le Web tonight, given that I intend to be watching Led Zeppelin tomorrow night.