The Keene View on Web 2.0, Ajax and SaaS

If you want to see the possibilities and limits of Web 2.0 as they apply to the enterprise, there is no better place to look than a Wiki. In part because they are so easy to get started, they positively invite a fatal lack of planning.

Wikis start out wonderful but rapidly morph from a grand experiment in bottoms-up community to a wasteland of out-of-date marketing collateral. As such, they become exhibit "A" that the self-service concept only goes so far in IT.

Without up front planning, clear ownership and constant maintenance, the primary service offered by self-service IT is the ability to shoot yourself in the foot. David Precipio recently had a good post about the future of Wikis that got me thinking about ActiveGrid's own less than stellar corporate Wiki.

Six months ago, we launched a bold new corporate wiki that rapidly became an object lesson in why wikis get a bad rap. Here are some of the lessons learned from our own experiment in wiki-style self service:

1. Designate a wiki "csar": just like our communal refrigerator, every so often, someone has to come in with a big garbage bag and clear out all the stinky stuff.
2. Define required functionality: it is amazing what a wiki won't do out of the box. Ours doesn't keep people logged in on their computers, has bizarre navigation and an almost unusable search functionality. Some critical functionality for us is the ability to publish MS Office documents (particularly tables) directly to the wiki.
3. Pay for an expert who can set it up right: we are using Twiki, which needs someone with perl expertise to administer it and its many plug-ins.
4. Create a clear update process: in addition to an overall csar, there should be a clear owner for each section and a process for updating document on a regular basis.

Web 2.0 tools like wikis are just tools. Their value depends in great part on how they are applied. For Web 2.0 tools to be successful in the enterprise, IT will need to provide tested components, usable tools and a clear process that enables user self-service to provide a net benefit to the enterprise.

Adam Carson of Morgan Stanley made a similar point recently at the Office 2.0 conference (podcast here), when he pointed out that Morgan Stanley's use of wikis worked because of, not inspite of, heavy involvement from IT.

Labels: Enterprise 2.0, wiki

Nicholas Carr covered the recent Google/Capgemini partnership announcement here. We are seeing an "Innovator's Dilemma" market appear before our eyes - cheap but underpowered Google apps against expensive, full-featured Microsoft apps. While the feature bigots laugh, Google apps will creep into the corporate IT fabric around the edges.

It will be interesting to see how the SIs start to knit Google apps into the corporate IT environment. There will be an opportunity to create the equivalent of SalesForce.com's App Exchange around Google's apps/gadgets/storage. By driving an on-demand platform into Microsoft's turf, Google accomplishes two goals:

1. Keep Microsoft off balance so they can't put all their efforts into taking on Google in Search
2. Open up a "protected" market where Microsoft can't follow without undermining its own desktop business

Google recently announced pub/sub gadgets, which makes their potential role as an enterprise platform provider even more interesting.

Labels: Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Google, Google Gadgets

I had a great conversation today with one of my blog-heros, Jeff Nolan. Jeff recently finished a stint as the CEO of Teqlo, a pioneer in hosted tools for building Enterprise 2.0 applications. Others in this space include Coghead and Bungee Labs.

The nirvana we are all shooting for is a world where developers can assemble useful business applications with minimal coding or scripting. The idea is to take simplify certain tasks that are hard to do with code (e.g., visual assembly of page layouts, hooking controls to services) without making it harder than normal to do the things that will always have to be done with some sort of logic. The reality to date has fallen short of this nirvana.

We identified 5 reasons that Enterprise 2.0 apps today often fail to live up to the hype:

1. “Slowest man sets the pace.” Chaining together service calls to build applications creates bottlenecks where the slowest service call tanks the performance of the whole application.

2. Look but don’t touch widgets. Although this is changing (see here for the latest on Google’s pub/sub widgets), the vast majority of widgets can’t exchange data. This allows for an infinite variety of cute clock and horoscope widgets, but a paucity of useful business functionality in widget form.

3. Web service alphabet soup. There are a number of web service standards and even within a standard there are few rules for how the standard should be applied. This means that creating widgets to integrate web services is unexpectedly time consuming.

4. Still too darn hard. The world of widgets and building AJAX apps is still far too complicated for the typical end user developer. Current state of the art tools still require a knowledge of IDEs, standards and languages far beyond the grasp of casual developers.

5. Service throttling. At ActiveGrid, we have found that a number of web services like Google Maps are easy to mash-up for demo apps but much, much harder to use for doing real work. Given that Google has to pay for all the servers, it is easy to see why they would want to encourage people to use their web services in non-intensive ways.

Jeff believes a big market lies in creating “people, place, thing” applications like project management and time tracking. I would add that the killer app is tying Internet data presentation and collection with email workflow – sort of an updated Lotus Notes.

The market and the tools are evolving quickly, so in six months the landscape will look fundamentally different. For now, however, the vision of idiot-proof assembly of Enterprise 2.0 apps using rich business widgets has yet to be fully realized.

Labels: ActiveGrid, Bungee Labs, Coghead, Enterprise 2.0, Google Gadgets, Jeff Nolan, Teqlo, Web 2.0

Like many other technology fashions, the Rapid Application Development (RAD) process made many extravagent claims which crumbled under the demands of real-world development. The goal of RAD is to create a series of prototypes which incrementally close in on the ideal customer

The problem is not so much the RAD (or Agile, or Extreme) process itself, but the limitations of the tools used to implement them. There has always been a moment of truth in RAD tools when the team moved from prototyping to "real" development.

If the prototyping is done with a lightweight tool like Visio, the moment you move to a heavyweight tool like J2EE, you lose your agility to respond to user feedback. The ideal solution would be a tool that can create deployable prototypes.

Why do Enterprise Web 2.0 tools have the potential to support RAD where other worthy technologies have failed? There are several reasons:

1. Drag-n-drop web app creation: the ability to create a rich interface quickly makes the prototyping part of RAD much easier;
2. Assembly-based development: the ability to assemble lightweight applications that invoke more heavyweight web services keeps the development team nimble;
3. Web-based delivery: users are much more likely to provide feedback if it is easy for them to access and try out prototypes. Web-based delivery ensures better communication between developers and users, particularly for a distributed team.
4. Standards-based deployment: many traditional RAD tools like PowerBuilder and MS Access produce applications which don't meet corporate security and managability standards. Web 2.0 tools fit more naturally with IT requirements.

Along the same lines, I delicious-ed (to Haig-ize a verb) across an interesting link by Siorc proclaiming that Web 2.0 is the new RAD. I think his theme is right, but the more precise statement would be that enterprise Web 2.0 tools have the potential to fulfill many of the promises made by RAD.

Labels: Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0

One clear indicator of the state of the Enterprise Web 2.0 market is the dearth of real case studies. ActiveGrid's partner, Eljakim IT just increased the number of meaty Enterprise 2.0 success stories by 1.

Social Computing Magazine just picked up a case study on an ActiveGrid customer who used ActiveGrid to build Web 2.0 attendance system. To read the Social computing article, click here or if you want to Digg this, click here

The system is tracking 200,000 students and is used by 500 school administrators and social workers. The application itself contains over 300 web pages. The full case study is here.

Labels: Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0