I’ve been posting on the new ZDNet blog. They tell me it’s live, but there’s a glitch in the technology that is preventing it from showing up in the blog roll. You can view it here. I’m very interested in off-beat IT Services stories, so please email me (susanATitservicesadvisoryDOTcom) with any interesting ideas.
Category: Consultants
OneDotOh Sucked for a Lot of Us; HOWEVER…
There I said it. Can we move on now? (I hope this blog isn’t getting streamed into the Crispy News aggregator yet. But blogging is kind of the HBO of published media, isn’t it? We can get away with the occasional bad word. IDG did let me write “bitch” once, though. I thought that was pretty brave.) I’m not one to use offensive language, but I’m done of bemoaning the web 1.0 crash and its band of thieves, especially in the B2B sector. The best quote I heard on the subject was Harley Manning from Forrester who said, “After irrational exuberance, there was irrational pessimism.”
I’m excited and not ashamed to admit it about web 2.0 and startup Enterprise 2.0 companies. I’m once again making stock deals with my clients. I’m thinking about the potential of a re-energized IPO market. Let’s hope second time is a charm for all of us that wiped out on the first killer wave.
What’s your take?
Revolutionary holdout… Maybe Bowie not Lennon. Definitely not Lenin.
What time is it when a consultant blogs? Time to turn and face the strain.
I heard Andrew McAfee say recently that he doesn’t think we’re involved in a revolution; that it’s more of a transformation. Sigh. I need to go on the record saying I respectfully disagree. He said revolutions are generally short and violent. (I’m paraphrasing.) To try and make my argument, I did what I normally do in these situations, I researched “revolution” on Wikipedia. I won’t argue the violent observation, but the short I will. Take the American Revolution, for instance. It lasted 9 years from 1774-1783. More importantly, it was a war for independence and overthrowing existing societal and governmental order. Am I the only one seeing the similarities here? Am I wrong, perhaps?
From Wikipedia:
1774–1783: the American Revolution establishes independence of the thirteen North American colonies from Great Britain, creating the republic of the United States of America. A war of independence in that it created one nation from another, it was also a revolution in that it overthrew an existing societal and governmental order: the Colonial government in the Colonies.
In fairness, I caught the revolutionary bug from Joe Kraus whom I interviewed for an article on the disintermediation of high-priced consultants due to SaaS applications in the enterprise.
JotSpot CEO, Joe Kraus admits, “JotSpot is trying to enable a Do-It-Yourself revolution. When you give people the ability to do something that previously only experts could do, I think very interesting things happen.” Kraus doesn’t think the impact will be overnight, however. He believes the adoption of the new technologies will take about five years. “I think we generally tend to over-estimate the impact of technologies in the short term and radically under-estimate them in the long-term. There’s a lot of racket and fear that this is going to displace traditional consulting, and my answer would be, in the short term, I don’t think so, but in the long term, I think there’s more risk.”
Yes, we’re transforming the enterprise with new alternatives, but there is an undercurrent of shall-I-say… Raging against the Machine… that is driving the move to self-help applications. I’ve been harping on the socio-cultural underpinnings on the “movement” and the freedom of choice that web 2.0 applications provide to users for months now. For whatever their reason (I hate Outlook, Excel, SAP, Oracle, fillintheblank for xxx reason), users are turned off by the establishment’s choices and are psychologically primed to look at alternatives. That smacks of revolution– not transformation.
Along these lines, before the rumors broke about Google and YouTube, I had wanted to publish some commentary from my old friend, Richard Holway. I’ve never known an analyst to be as prescient as Richard. Here’s what Richard (who publishes for the UK market) had to say about the ch-ch-changes taking place in today’s enterprise and for today’s enterprise suppliers.
McAfee is an incredibly bright guy. I’m ashamed to admit I disagree with him, but for ITSinsiders who’ve known me over the years, I have a hard time not stating my opinion. And, also for the record: Lord knows, I’ve been wrong before. But if I’m right, I feel we’re missing something more deeply philosophical in our discussions of Enterprise 2.0. It frames how truly remarkable this wave of “next net” is. I heard a lot of this talk during web 1.0 from digital evangelists who were inspired to subvert the prevailing paradigm. Today, we have the tools and the passion. The sad truth is, we won’t see the results until widespread user adoption takes root. This is something I’m sure McAfee and I can agree on.
Sweet Virginia
Thank you for your wine, California
Thank you for your sweet and bitter fruits
Mick and Keith might not be there, but you will be among friends. The kickoff conference for Web 2.0 for Business is definitely Dion Hinchcliffe’s New New Internet conference here on the East Coast in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. He has assembled an A-list set of speakers in web 2.0 including Michael Arrington (TechCrunch). If you (customer or vendor) are on the East Coast. DO NOT miss this conference. A first-mover event; will make it into the history books.
Hot Topic: Back to Backlash
I was reading Vinnie’s blog and he mentioned Tom Davenport’s pooh-poohing. When I returned to the business this year, and went to my first outsourcing conference in 5 years (see 3/30 post), Davenport was the keynote speaker. He was an excellent speaker and connected easily with the audience. As a matter of fact, he was talking about how the industry was trying to apply a CMMI-like model to the BPO market that I found intellectually interesting. I stopped him in the hall afterwards to ask him about it. I think I remember telling him the subject matter was actually insufferably boring to me, but I thought putting some structure to BPO that way was interesting, and I might like to write about it. Thankfully, he laughed at that and told me he thought it was boring too, but he gave me his card, and told me he would mail me something from the HBR he published that would explain it all.
Now Davenport has been around for a long time. I was impressed that IDC had him as a keynote speaker. He has McKinsey, CSC Index, Ernst & Young, Microsoft, board seats on Accenture– in his background, and his resume includes writing or co-authoring 10 best-selling business books about knowledge and information management. And this comes straight from zoominfo:
In the January 2006 issue of the Harvard Business Review, he wrote “Competing on analytics means competing on technology.” In the article, he highlighted companies that use analytical intelligence to drive successful decision-making and competitive differentiation, citing as examples eight companies that are Teradata Warehouse and solution users.
All that being said, with all due respect (and I so mean that sincerely), I want to say to Mr. Davenport and the others of his ilk: please don’t rush to judgment and dismiss Enterprise 2.0. First of all, it’s not just about blogs and wikis. There is a whole host of technology enabled by Web 2.0 (and it’s growing every day).
And, you might want to be aware of some of the more interesting knowledge-based Enterprise 2.0 products that are moving into your sector like Atlassian, Coghead, Intalio, Abgeniel, Illumio and even a little startup I’m helping right now, Experteria (in beta). And these are only the products I know about.
Yes, Enterprise 2.0 is a hot topic. But there is a difference between a hot topic and a fad. I’ve been harping on the youth culture that is driving the development behind these technologies and the attitudinal shifts that are taking place on both spectrums of the knowledge-worker universe. The fed-up, smart, hamstrung departmental users and a digitally comfortable, DIYYnot?-ready youth culture moving in.
In the 90s, it was Jim Champy who christened the Business Process Re-engineering movement. Fad. But it forced enterprises to think in terms of business process and led to BPO- today’s hot topic. Sustainable.
Last word on Hot Topics. My suburban mom friend and I would always nervously usher our kids fast past the Hot Topic store in the mall. It’s no Gap, trust me. I guess we were afraid they’d be seduced into the punk lifestyle if they were exposed to it. When the store first showed up in our local mall, I assured her, “Oh, that will be gone in a few months.” Wrong. The store has been here for years. And you know what? We all shop there now, even the kids (and no, they haven’t transformed). Great tee shirts and band paraphernalia. The lesson here is we all judge what we’re uncomfortable with, but cultural trends have a way of surviving and adapting around our unwillingness to recognize them at first.
REA-lly cool; check it out
On my pestering list on the hunt for “proof cases” has also been JackBe. By now, I’m sure Mike Wagner wishes he never commented on my blog. This little firm here on the East Coast, however, has some rock’n blue chip, international customers. I’ve been doggin’ Wagner for case studies, and he’s been patiently telling me they were about to launch a new web site with “new Enterprise 2.0 positioning.” If you want a good explanation for why IT and non-IT folks should be interested in Enterprise tools, read this white paper on Ajax from JackBe.
The new site launched yesterday. What I really liked was the initiative the company took to coin a new acronym, “REA.” It stands for Rich Enterprise Applications. Read for yourself what it’s all about.
I’m trying to wrap my head around this, but it appears JackBe has the secret sauce to unite SOA with Ajax. Read this excellent article written by Deepak Alur JackBe’s VP of Engineering published this week for a better explanation. All I know for sure is JackBe “already counts among its satisfied clients more than 30 industry leaders worldwide supporting more than 4 million end users. Customers include Forbes, Citigroup, McKesson, Tupperware, Sears and Banamex. The company’s deployments and deep expertise span the financial services, government, e-commerce and telecommunications sectors” according to its bio line, and that’s pretty impressive to me for a company exclusively focused on the Enterprise 2.0 sector.