Wikis – An open book.

I love this post by Mary Abraham on how wikis mess with your mind.  It’s absolutely true within an organisational culture.  I’ve experienced it and I too started off with apprehension that was quickly changed to addiction.  At my previous employer wikis took off albeit a little slowly, but nonetheless ahead of most of our competitors.  The success was simply down to sponsorship from the top down.  The benefits were immediate, the knowledge and the talent in the organisation was blown open and collaboration across teams grew organically or so it seemed.

Virtual teams were created in the content and grew over time.  The fact that people contributed through their own interests was culture changing.  We took it a stage further by integrating presence into the wiki with the goal of creating a tacit knowledge base; meaning that you had the ability to communicate in real-time with contributors to extend the collaboration.

I’m now working on creating a similar platform (or repeating the success) with presence everywhere, but the technology part is easy, the challenge now is to introduce the culture of an open book into the organisation where everyone can publish, search, consume and converse.  That sounds very similar to my old boss JP’s vision of Four Pillars.

Well of course, that’s the culture I supported.

Evolving Enterprise Messaging

In the early 1990s as an engineer, I experienced the birth of corporate email.  I dabbled into what was on offer at the time and saw dominant products born out of existing platforms at the time.  Soon, dedicated ‘enterprise’ electronic mail applications were being developed and very soon after the industry was revelling in the new acronyms that were associated with e-mail (MAPI, POP IMAP, SMTP), . 

 

As usual during the growth stage of any product competition exists and in the case of email, this was around the protocols, standards and of course products.  In the case of email there hasn’t really been a dominant winner, but one thing for sure, the SMTP standard has emerged as the de-facto.  Surprisingly this technology although almost 30 years old is still being used today despite it’s shortfalls on security.  The success of email is simply its disruptiveness, the ability to replace cumbersome, complex and high cost alternatives of communications with a simple concept with a low cost of entry.

 

Email has created an industry within itself.  I chose to focus on it as an early career and many businesses have prospered and continue to on the back of the popularity of email. Archiving, Hosting, Anti-Spam, Anti-Virus, Security and Management, business functions too changed and adopted email as a formal and revenue generating service.  Specialist Marketing firms have emerged that provide mass emailers, agencies as their called now provide off-host email services and of course there are the scams that aim to dupe unsolicited individuals from their cash by using ‘phishing scams’ and spoofing.

 

Electronic communication has now become a high profile regulated communication medium worldwide.  Of course email is beneficial to both an organisation and an individual, it makes money, it saves money, and it can reduce risk.  On the other hand and more importantly, it can ruin your reputation, it can destroy your business, and it can drive you and your business into the ground.  Email grabbed the attention of everyone worldwide with its simplicity and power.  Email was becoming uncontrollable.

 

When I analysed our corporate usage at the time I noticed that 85% of received email was SPAM.  This was being stored and replicated throughout the organisation and creating a high cost and reduced level of service.  I needed over £1m to get us through the next 12 months.  Email usage was increasing.  80% of our communication was performed using email.  Almost everything down to arranging to go for a quick beer after work to transferring of confidential documents is based on email.

 

The term information overload appeared on the scene around 2003 as our productivity time was consumed by managing our inboxes, sorting the signal from the noise or the legitimate email from the unsolicited email.  The researchers were telling us we had to overcome ‘information overload’ and email had become out of control.  I somewhat agreed with that but I thought back then we needed to evolve email.  I remember getting excited when I found ReMail and instantly being disappointed that it was never pursued by IBM.

 

I began looking at some other early dot com ideas that went pop back at the turn of the century and started to chase the concept of a ‘white list’ email platform.  I found a product that was still in a development stage that weathered the bubble.  This was indeed a concept I felt was the next evolution of corporate email.  100% SPAM free, confidentiality guaranteed and storage optimisation through threaded conversations being written as single instance records.  This certainly would decrease the volumes of email we were generating.  Unfortunately still in development meant not fit for production and that was the end of that, but it’s certainly not the end of the search.

 

Fast forward to 2008, we now have social and professional networking sites popping up everywhere and without noticing we are utilising the inherent email features of these.  In Facebook and LinkedIn we are communicating with members of our network or white list.  Okay, not quite as feature rich as email (i.e. no attachments and no bcc fields etc) but that’s the right direction I think.  Corporate email turned into a corporate filing system that it was never designed to do.  Corporate email turned into a medium that bread under the covers espionage with it’s Bcc field and corporate email systems became a mission critical service so much so that without it businesses could not trade.  Organisations also became accountable for all the content transmitted across email and without any method of policing this email continues to be a mission critical concern.  Added to this we are now embracing Instant Messaging and Chat platforms and now talking about ‘unified communications’ by integrating voice and video (I know this is not new, but it still hasn’t gained the traction it needs) into every peripheral an employee can touch to keep in touch.

 

These methods of communications have become our identity, which we are and how we can be contacted.  This blog is all part of this too.  My ‘white list’ can communicate with me within LinkedIn or Facebook, whilst anyone can communicate with me on the many email addresses and phone numbers that advertise my identity.

 

Enterprise Facebook and LinkedIn?  Yes, of course, this is the next evolution of Enterprise messaging and Enterprise CRM, but not in the current consumer guise.  Many organisations are watching these technologies and are willing to embrace, but security is still a concern and could they have this delivered as a service rather than host and manage within the corporate boundary?  Maybe one step at a time, but I’m certainly keen on this direction.

 

 

Globalise-Nation

It seems there’s a flurry of German acquisition acitivity in my reader today.  Well, not really a flurry, but certainly signs that Germany are buying anything that smells German.  Commerzbank and Dresdner is a done deal predicted back in December.  Deutsche Bank and Postbank and now Lufthansa and SAS.  I’m sure there will be more.  My question is… are the Germans trying to reverse Globalisation?

Same old problems.

I remember back in the late 1990s I worked on a project for GE to deploy Microsoft Exchange. GE at the time made a corporate decision to deploy a single messaging platform throughout the globe to overcome what they saw as a business communication problem. They used the analogy of a representative from GE Plastics walking past the representative from GE Lighting in the corridors of General Motors or Chrysler not knowing that they were both working for the same company with the same client and not being able to share any information. They believed that working together Plastics and Lighting could benefit the customer as well as GE. The case was compelling and the sponsorship of a single messaging platform came from the top, it had Jack Welch’s buy-in!

Reading Andrew McAfee’s post today I was reminded of this age and it occurred to me that we are still trying to solve this problem but this time the technology is Enterprise 2.0 and the use of Wikis and Blogs in a bid to reduce the use of email.

His students responses, in my view, are right on the button and his dissection of the responses make perfect sense. They mention cases where Wikis and Blogs can improve the collaboration between diverse businesses and teams within many different organisations, they highlight how collaboration and knowledge sharing can improve business processes, but I still can’t help thinking that whilst technology is evolving and we have new problems to solve, we’ve not fixed the problems that existed all those years ago.

Looking at it from another point of view, maybe we are solving the problem, but in stages. Email was the first step, but we are far from finished.

Microsoft Zimbra?

I really like Zimbra’s collaboration suite.  I remember looking into Zimbra, amongst others,  a few years ago when I decided to investigate what alternatives corporate Microsoft Exchange users had if they chose not to follow the MS Exchange road map.

At the time many of the alternatives available on the market lacked mobility, archiving and Outlook integration.  These were some of the criteria at the time.

The lack of functionality is no longer the case.  Zimbra now supports true push to Blackberry devices and also incorporates archiving and discovery.  The reality of moving from a Microsoft server platform is becoming reality.

Having said all that, look a little harder at the corporate level and you’ll see that Zimbra is owned by Yahoo and there is a possibility that this could all fall under a Microsoft brand in the future.  So what will become of Zimbra or indeed Exchange (which incidental is in need of a serious overall from the ground up)?

I can’t wait, but I fear we will all have to.

Search for search

Just over two years ago, I embarked on a project to deploy an Enterprise Search engine within the bank. I may have mentioned this before.

During the period of evaluations and proof of concepts, I attended a few seminars and a couple of meetings with Microsoft who were embarking on repackaging their legacy index server as a search engine delivered with Sharepoint.

I documented my findings from these meetings along with other comparisons and conclusions from the products we looked at, unfortunately they are located on the internal wiki and cannot be referenced here. In any case,my findings were in summary, that Microsoft were making a poor and reactive attempt to compete with Google in the Enterprise. Their only hope would be to either go back to the drawing board, in which case they would be late to the market if they were to bring anything innovative to market or acquire a established Enterprise product.

That was around early 2005 and low and behold, here we are in early 2008!

Personally,I think this is a good move. Not sure about the timing commercially, but financially, yes! Let see what Microsoft decide to do with it.

Farewell 2007

It’s New Years Eve and this year for the first time in a long time, I’ve chosen to trade the pandemonium for tranquility. Is that a sign of the times (my times)? I feel that maybe I’m heading for that quiet time in life that some might even call retirement! Well rest assured, I am not in that space, although the past few months I’ve managed to grab a slice of what I perceive it will be and I have mixed feeling about that, but let’s not discuss that right now.

I made a decision in the summer that I would look to change the way I work, change the way I live and change the way I look at life.

I left my job at the bank, not to hop into another similar position, but to take a look from the outside-in and try to understand why, in this rapidly moving information age, I was experiencing that feeling of deja vu far too often, more often than ever before. I guess it’s what you might also call routine and some people are made for that, but I know that I’ve stuck around too long knowing that would happen, it’s called the comfort zone and I hate that.

I was part of an organisation that did well throughout the good times and the bad, even now in the current credit crisis we (they) have survived this year, of course there were losses, not huge in comparison, and not enough to hit the headlines resulting in casualties from the top down, for the time being anyway.

Each year, we focussed on the rising cost base and aim to reduce it through cuts only to reverse the process sometime through the year and inevitably practice the same cost cutting exercises at the same time of the following year. It begins to get boring year after year, and clearly no ability to stick to a strategy if there ever was one. Maybe this is a trend, but I see other organisations in the same competitive space making progress, where my peers are working towards a plan in a community that collaborates to reach the same goal, the same culture and ultimately successful results.

So, I’ve taken the decision to move on, as they say, and seek that opportunity that begs to evolve or move at the pace of change not by repeating the same rules, but by progressing and learning from those bad decisions and mistakes.

Here’s a prediction for 2008, now I’m no analyst (professionally) but I’m going to forecast that my previous employer is heading for an acquisition. They will be acquired. I see that in H2 2008. How can I say that? Well, whilst reviewing my employment history, I see that every organisation I’ve worked for has been acquired! Maybe they will change this tread that seems to follow me, but I doubt it, many analysts reports and articles I’ve read recently see that the latter half of 2008 will be an acquisition fair throughout, not just in the financial sector. Additionally prior to the sub-prime crisis in August, there were due diligence exercises being performed across the city, headliners such as ABN and Barclays, but some under the radar that luckily did not proceed.

There is a thought that I should stick around for this? It could be lucrative after all. Then again, I’ve been through a few and whilst they do bring a lucrative reward to some, what follows is pure frustration if you stick around. Ask the people at Bankers Trust who are still around in Deutsche Bank or those from Chase Manhattan who are still around at JP Morgan Chase, if they consider themselves part of the new merged organisation or still in a culture of the old, operating under an new name?

Of course this is a hot topic in my head right now, as I seek to find the next big thing. Considerations are to land myself in a new organisation, but one that aims to be acquired such as an innovative start-up firm or a large multi-national that will survive the years to come through their ability to evolve.

On another subject, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve reverted to religion not in a preaching sense, but like many people to simply practice my faith. Not something new for me being raised as a catholic, but I’ve found that going back to church has created a new avenue in my life that has called for me to believe in something and to have faith, it helps me to look at my life in a different perspective. It astounds me that I got this point just simply by going with the flow and following the routine, I call it a rut, but to me, I haven’t travelled very far in the last two years, I didn’t really have faith and I didn’t believe in myself because I think I felt defeated to some degree, but more often than not I felt I was simply in the wrong place, around the wrong people trying to achieve what I felt was right without the support and collaboration that is needed in a large organisation, if that makes sense. Of course I had achievements, but for me, these took too long and looking back (as you do), there really is no need. I’ve talked about pacing myself, but when no progress is made during lengthy periods, I cannot accept that and get paid for it.

I’ve come to the end of 2007 and suddenly I know so much more about myself. I am relaxed and I find that when I am relaxed I can think much more clearly and the thoughts are beginning to make sense. My weakness right now is my lack of concentration, but I’ve identified that and will work on that. I know my strength is my creativity (possibly not in my writings) and motivation is my ability to work with innovative people in a team that will make a difference.

Earlier today I played a gruelling game and a half of golf. During the game I thought to myself, golf is not supposed to be gruelling, why am I in this frame of mind? The gruelling part was indeed simply my perspective of the game. I began to relax, and enjoy the game as it should be played and surely enough in my positive frame of mind my shots were on target as I intended them to be. Later on in the game, I injured my foot (yes it can happen when you’re just walking!), and I although I was enjoying the game my thoughts switched to the pain and went downhill again, but I kept talking myself though it and learnt to work with the pain and surely enough my game came back and I began to enjoy it.

At home after golf today, my attention was drawn to one of my fish in the tank. It had been drifting on its side for a while, not constantly, but it was becoming more frequent. I’ve had this particular fish for about 4 years now, and, well, I can’t see it making it to 2008, but what I did notice, was that a younger much smaller fish, would occasionally swim into the drifter and they would swim around together for while until the smaller fish was diverted and the drifter would go back to drifting on it’s side. What I saw there I translated into me, sometimes I am can be the drifter, but also the smaller (notice I didn’t state younger) fish. I hate to see people fail and will push them to get the best out of themselves, and on the other side of the coin, I like to be pushed to. I saw emotions in a fish tank!

Maybe I have too much time on my hands

Well actually I have and I’ve decided to use it well. I’m going to work harder, I’m going to study further and to kick that off, I’m off to Singapore to visit my sister who has been in the region for nearly eighteen years and always visits me each year and I’m ashamed to say I’ve never been there. This time, I have no excuse. Besides, I really enjoy their company and I love the team spirit we exhibit when we get together and the intellectual motivation I get when we mix. Not something we can do right now on a social network, but I’m sure this will come in time. So that’s what I call enjoying hard work

Time to conclude. To all my reader (not a typo) Have a great time tonight and I wish you a very successful 2008, farewell 2007.

Pace yourself

I named this blog “Too Early” for two reasons.  Firstly, the time of day I created it and secondly and more importantly my habit of proposing solutions ahead of time. One might think that being ‘ahead of the curve’ is a good thing and may well be lucrative in certain professions, but in mine, this has become somewhat of a frustration.

I’ve come to realise that whilst I enjoy what I do, I need to construct a consistent delivery and realise the realistic time frames for delivery early on and work to them.

One recent example is based around the team I created and the solutions I aimed to deliver.  Two years ago, I formed a team called Strategic Architecture.  Senior management liked the idea of the team but were not keen on the name, primarily because of the lack of understanding of what an IT architect actually does.  I don’t blame them as this is defined differently everywhere you go, however, having recently dissolved the team internally, senior managment have decided to create a Strategic Architecture group!

One of the initiatives I set out early on was the importance of capitalising on internal intellectual property (IP) and the ability to turn data > Information into a competitive edge for an orginisation.  To achieve this I detailed a plan that involved a foundation of Enterprise Search and collaboration technologies built upon it with a presence backbone.

I believe that to achieve this competitive edge we could unlock the knowledge pools and break down the knowledge silos within the Enterprise in a similar way to the way Wikipedia achieves this across the globe, but with tacit knowledge being the value add through presence.

I’ve been working on this for two years and so far have managed to secure the funding to build the foundation of Enterprise Search.  The rest of the building blocks are of course based around Enterprise 2.0 where boundaries are broken down and communities are built up as it is in a Web 2.0 world, external to the Enterprise.

I aim to pursue this goal, but external factors are hindering the process.  Factors such as the crisis in the capital markets causing the lack of further investment into innovation particularly in the financial sector.  For that reason I see a lull and for that reason I’ve decided to take time out and work aggressively on what I recognise as my weakness in pacing myself against long term time scales.

Consumer meets Enterprise

I’ve written about the fact that many Web 2.0 applications out there in consumer land would be great in the Enterprise. Well, no sooner that those thoughts were published, I find that Worklight have or about to release a Facebook overlay for the Enterprise.

This is a big leap forward to adopting Web 2.0 within the enterprise. not wanting to go into the discussion of whether Facebook should be allowed from within the Enterprise, this product assumes that this is not an issue and looks to use Facebook as an Enterprise social network with all the security you would expect.

Secure sign-on into the application presents you with your corporate network in the same way you are presented with your private social network, but added to that, you are provided with corporate strength communications within the application. It uses the enterprise infrastructure within the application and outside the application it is raw Facebook.

Corporate I.T is the business

Corporate IT has become a cost conscious department over the years. I guess it always has been, but more so of late. IT aims to run itself like a business. Nothing wrong with that I say, but in reality if IT departments were businesses they would be unsuccessful and out of business.

So what is lacking? The fundamental basics, that’s what. There are lots we can learn from common sense and embracing the change that we in IT have been building for many years. When thinking of any business structure the following come to mind.

- Branding- Over the years in IT, I’ve come to realise that IT people love to personalise their products, this is certainly true of internal systems. The lack of imagination in naming conventions bugs me sometimes, and the consequences are sometimes costly. Within the IT infrastructure of a corporate there are organisational branding of servers, networks, directories etc, as IT aim to build environments that are familiar and makes sense to them. Potential logic there, for administration and management, however the organisation may experience a merger or acquisition that demands a re-brand and therefore re-engineering of some of the most complex of infrastructure.

Branding is a marketing term and in IT we seem to ignore this and refuse to see the link between Marketing and IT. Marketing and IT are no longer worlds apart. Externally facing or internally facing IT systems must be aware of the market and the evolution of that market and product.

- Strategy- Analysing the industry internally and externally provides a methods to constantly know where your products are and where they need to be heading for the next release. For example, Email systems were small isolated systems that grew into enterprise and global productivity tools within an organisation. As they grew the use cases changed and within each industry they became mission critical as part of the business. I tend to classify mission critical as a product or service that the business cannot function without. Many IT departments failed to understand the changing requirements in the user base and continued to run email as sideline rather than a core service, until their customers began leaving for free, ubiquitous services such as Hotmail, Gmail etc. The corporate IT departments have this competition throughout and cannot continue to justify their existence without marketing their services and certainly their value to the end user and of course competing with the external services.

- Target Market – Within an organisation the target audience is looked upon as static or as static as the organisation is. IT meanwhile are usually geographically located away from the target market. The collaboration between the end users and the IT departments is almost non existence and furthermore creates a divide within the same organisation. For IT to understand the business goals at all levels effective management must be in place to provide this communication at all levels. Providing clear escalation paths and contacts between the business and IT is critical to understanding the needs of the customers.

- Product Lifecycle-Many IT systems are evolved within an organisation based on the product lifecycle determined by the vendor. In house developed applications evolve in an ad-hoc fashion and are rarely superseded by something that provides new opportunities rather than additional functionality.

- Cost- Cost cutting strategies have always been an annual event within IT, but rarely do the proposed ROI figures get proved throughout the product or project lifecycle. Ensuring that tangible savings are made or the proposed increase in revenues is gained is critical to gathering investor’s attention. It’s all about the track record of effectiveness and the ability to deliver proposed value. Fat too many times we concentrate on cost cutting and tend to develop loss-making projects that are complex and ineffective. When putting together a proposal for a new product or additional spend on an existing product it is important to understand the business level strategy. Look at meeting one of four objectives: Does the proposal:
1) Save Money?
2) Make Money?
3) Reduce Risk?
4) Regulatory Requirement?

- Communication- Communication within an organisation is easy nowadays. We are now not just talking about 2.0 technologies we are actually using them. Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 is about communication and collaboration within communities. These communities have always existed within the organisation but they tend to be dispersed and therefore duplicated and as a result create competition within an organisation. Parts of the business are unaware that a technology exists that can help them perform tasks faster or easily and therefore employ consultants and developers to create a new product for them rather then investigate if it already exists. Communication is two way and requires both IT and the business to talk more often.

With the increase usage of internal blogs and wikis this helps, but far too often the majority perceive this as information overload and at this stage communication become ineffective. Getting the right information to the right people is target marketing and providing a platform where you can not only subscribe to the information you want you need to be able to search for the information you don’t know you want.

With more and more corporate services being created and offered externally, the competition is fierce and the Enterprise IT needs leadership that can inject the right business skills into it and work together to benefit the organisation and not just IT.