iPlot

The Matrix Reloaded

Matrix sites have emerged as the consumer reports for the web 2.0 generation. Quite a number of these sites now allow you to compare web application in a side-by-side grid. Techcrunch just featured WikiMatrix, which is a site that delves in on the features of the many Wikis that are on the market. Also check out cmsmatrix.org, podcatchermatrix.org, or forummatrix.org. Decide yourself if you find them useful or just targets for spam.

Trading Attention Capital

In the “attention economy,” a term introduced by Thomas Davenport and John Beck in 2001 (also read Michael Goldhabers’ essay), attention is the scarcest resource and the strongest value driver. The concept has been around for a while; what’s new now is that businesses are beginning to understand attention as currency and are creating tools that help build and exchange “attention capital.”

The AttentionTrust is one of the pioneers in this space. The company offers the "attention recorder,” a Firefox add-on, which allows users to save a copy of their browsing history to their desktops as well as share it with any services of their choice that have been approved by AttentionTrust. Simply put, the application creates attention records that not only put users in control of their digital footprints but can also be traded. This kind of commodification is already taking place in the blogosphere, albeit in less formalized fashion. Ulises Mejias writes, “The blogosphere is a perfect example of how interaction has been commodified and reduced to the exchange of attention” – a link-for-link, eyeball-for-eyeball mentality that drives trackback, hyperlink, and blogroll trades and directs attention and thus determines winners and losers in the blogoconomy.

Internet start-ups are now poised to build a viable business based on this new form of capital. A spin-off of the Attention Trust Fund and supported by the New York Times, ROOT Markets is building the first online marketplace (ROOT Exchange) for selling and buying online leads, which are essentially records of online attention. The company marries the mechanisms of the financial market with the Internet advertising market (“somewhere between Wall Street and Madison Avenue lies the future of both,” goes the tag line on CEO Seth Goldstein’s blog) and trades leads in a win-win-win-win. Here’s the company’s pitch: “Advertisers can access a large supply of high-quality consumer leads from one source at a fair price. Publishers can access a simple means of turning their impressions into qualified leads, and selling these leads under their control to a network of lead buyers. Consumers can access, securely and conveniently, their personal data and share it with third parties for a variety of benefits. Investors can access a new market for trading. Most investment opportunities today are crowded with too much money chasing the same ideas.”

The Wired Business Trends

The magazine points out six key business trends in its current issue:

1. Democratization: User-generated content; amateur economy; brand hijack; wisdom of crowds; online social networks; crowdsourcing; popular popular culture (“the end of the blockbuster”).
2. Video Unlimited (I’d rather extend this to ‘content unlimited’): Any time, any place, any format, any screen.
3. Personalization (The “New Me” generation): My way or the highway.
4. Open-Source/All-Access (“Closed systems are dead”). Examples: salesforce.com, Firefox, Linux.
5. M&A as R&D: Make or Buy? Buy!
6. Carbon Killers or Going Green
7. I would like to add a seventh one: the new brand minimalism.

My Space in the Techworld

Is Enterprise Software Ready for People?

“Complexity is a place one passes through while searching
a very crowded world of similar but different things.
It becomes simple when one can safely ignore the
differences and pick one. Complexity is a property
of the space of choices. Simplicity is a property of
the act of choosing. “

-- Anonymous, from a Developer Mailing List

“Is your business people-ready?” asks Microsoft in its latest campaign, and it is no coincidence that the tech giant shifts the focus of its business vision from processes to “empowered people” who produce “high-value work” in teams. It is a smart campaign and an intelligent move that represents a paradigm shift in the way information technology and in particular software is expected to enhance individual and team performance in the future workplace: Information through collaboration, high-tech as high-touch social experience, and complex data presented in a human (inter)face. Behind Microsoft’s catch-all lies a deeper truth: The way businesses interact with information is about to change dramatically. Four core value propositions lay the foundation for a new generation of enterprise productivity software:

1. Information is most valuable when it becomes knowledge

Information is the most important currency of any business. While availability and security of information are fundamental requirements, the most critical factor is the information value, which is essentially the answer to the question: What does this data mean (to me)? Users are increasingly becoming unable to manage the number of communications mechanisms they rely on to access and distribute information. In the age of information overload, buried between e-mail attachments and feeds from a plethora of scattered databases, the ability to bridge the “too-much-information-gap” has become crucial.

Data alone—no matter how well protected or easily accessible—will no longer guarantee the key ingredient of successful business: knowledge. And because knowledge comes from the insights individuals derive from information, knowledge, unlike data, comes from people. Intelligent services are required to handle the growing volume of information; services that treat their users as people, recognizing the need for customization (the “process of me”) and simplification in processing information and providing a meaningful social context for its exchange. The future workplace will empower knowledge workers to individualize their information environment by assembling personalized tools, information and learning resources, and by tapping into wide-ranging social networks to enhance trust and thus knowledge.

Collaboration between people is key.

2. Collaboration is most valuable when it is social

Regina Casatona, a vice president at Gartner, contended at this year’s Gartner symposium in Barcelona that it would soon become mission-critical for enterprises to deploy software and organizational structures that propel collaboration and convergent information exchange among their employees: “Individual performance will no longer be measured by productivity per hour,” she said. “Within the next ten years, 80 percent of an employee’s daily work will no longer be routine tasks but non-manual and collaborative activities.” The analyst firm identifies globalization, dispersed teams, multi-tasking, flat hierarchies, and a growing complexity of business processes as the key drivers for this increased need to collaborate. Recent research that Gartner conducted shows that by 2009 approximately 60 percent of all projects will be collaborative and will need to integrate suppliers, partners, and customers (whereas two years ago only ten percent of all projects possessed this level of interactivity).

Collaboration is the cornerstone of the “high-performance workplace,” as Gartner Analysts label their vision of software that allows knowledge workers to perform better instead of being replaced by it. Until 2005, enterprises had already spent $6 billion for portals, collaboration solutions, and content management, and the Gartner analysts predict that this number will rise to $9 billion by 2009. Companies will also increasingly count on ad hoc projects to generate business value and will need IT systems that help eliminate so-called “non-technology gaps” that hinder collaboration. One of these gaps is context, which is typically missing in point-to-point communication such as e-mail but may be provided by shared workspaces with bi-directional features. Information is when you see relationships. Web conferencing and instant messaging have conditioned users to use and expect in-context communication.

Experts call for more differentiated solutions that allow knowledge workers to make connections between people and information more intuitively and thus collaborate more effectively (dubbed “Enterprise 2.0” in a widely recognized essay by Andrew McAfee). The key word is agility: The ability to react to ever-changing internal and external business requirements, distinguish the relevant information from the information clutter, and quickly shift from data analysis to action. IT ought to focus on enhancing peoples’ ability to do the non-routine, to foster tacit knowledge, exploration, discovery, and initial execution. This may even include real-time collaboration, rich media applications such as audio and video, and loosening restrictive policies for the use of alternative web 2.0 social software applications such as Wikis, Ajax, group messaging, or internal blogs. Online communities such as LinkedIn, Open BC, or Facebook (which now also accepts corporate users) as well as user-driven models of knowledge creation and sharing are increasingly considered critical factors for driving innovation and managing projects. Out-sourcing, open-sourcing, or crowd-sourcing tasks are becoming viable options for businesses. Highly collaborative environments draw from “collective intelligence” and make its output more visible.

Gartner expects, however, that the adoption of web 2.0 applications will occur gradually, first secretly behind IT firewalls, and not as an overnight revolution. While these applications offer apparent benefits for exchanging and processing information in a social context, cultural and bureaucratic factors will slow down their pervasiveness. It will take at least two years, says Gartner, before the majority of Global 1000 companies will leverage them organization-wide.

3. Software is most valuable when it is simple

Yet web 2.0’s message is understood: Software must get smarter about how people think and work. If all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. Too many tools for information workers add additional complications instead of personalizing and simplifying the tasks that drive productivity. The workforce needs leaner, simpler solutions with greater adaptability. Yet the question is: How simple (or human) can you make complex applications without compromising the integrity of the information they carry?

A new breed of software offers astonishingly simple applications to manage complexity and make sense of complex data. One of them is mind mapping, with Mindjet being the leader in this space. Mind mapping “can be used as a digital ‘blank slate’ to help connect and synthesize ideas and data—and ultimately create new knowledge,” wrote Bill Gates in a recent Business Week article. Other companies representing this new generation of productivity software are ActiveWords, 37 Signals, Jotspot, Socialtext, or the Google-acquired Writely. Google itself is also among those who prepare for the new age of collaboration, vying for a pacesetting role in the business of “software for real people,” as the Technology Evaluation Centers calls it. In addition to its web-based office programs, Google just launched an online spreadsheet program that makes it easier for “family, friends, or co-workers to gain access to the same spreadsheet from different computers at different times, enabling a group of authorized users to add and edit data without having to e-mail attachments back and forth.” (Google has not invented the idea of web-based spreadsheets; providers such as Tracker or Numsum have long offered similar services and the new WikiCalc provides even better functionality.)

All of these solutions help users manage their creativity to be more productive. They come with a certain consumer chic, and they make the term ‘user-friendliness’ (an odd one anyway, indicating that designing non-user friendly solutions obviously was an option for software developers) obsolete. The new enterprise 2.0 solutions simply work they way people think – intuitively and non-linearly. Instead of creating redundancies, they reduce redundancies by simplifying processes, interfaces, and features.

4. Software is most valuable as a service

“Software is dead,” postulated salesforce.com when it launched. These days, traditional server-based software is still alive, but it certainly smells bad. Software will move to web-based deployment scenarios. Software as a Service (SaaS) and Service-Orientated Architecture (SOA) have become the buzzwords for software delivery in the future, enabling customers to access programs via the Web and pay for only the amount of time they use the software. Ray Lane anticipated this trend in his prophetic article “The Future of Enterprise Software” published in Strategy + Business in 2001: “Through digital delivery, software developers will activate new application features on customers' servers, rather than require customers to replace an old version with a new one across multiple IT systems. Developers can sell software as a service, greatly lowering the costs of software distribution and increasing operating efficiency. No longer burdened with installation duties, customers can focus on how to use new features to transform their operations.”

In the same publication, five years later, Mitch Rosenbleeth, Corrie DeCamp, and Stephen Chen tie in this line of thought and predict an “enterprise software shakeup.” The authors argue that web-based software services such as salesforce.com will replace arcane server deployment in the mid to long term, mainly because of the lowered total cost of ownership: “As software prices rise, many chief information officers particularly those at medium-sized companies, will be unable to afford the huge, one-time hits caused by the purchase of licenses for large programs like enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management systems. Instead, they will seek to vary their costs so that their IT budgets grow and shrink along with their needs. That will increase the popularity of subscription pricing, in which companies pay annually for software licenses and reevaluate each year how many software ‘seats’ they require.” The authors have a point: About 25 percent of software is already sold by subscription; that’s likely to increase to more than 50 percent in the next four years.

Summary

People-ready enterprise software will unlock the front office potential in connecting information with processes and people while being delivered in a more flexible, customizable fashion. The new paradigms are knowledge, collaboration, simplicity, and flexibility. First, small or ad-hoc teams will capitalize on the disruptively social and intuitive next-generation interfaces to information without any involvement from IT. But over the course of the next three years most enterprises will adapt to the information revolution that is taking place at the workplace and introduce similar solutions organization-wide. The fragmentation of applications we experience at this point will be consolidated by a few big players, and fully integrated full-service solutions will eventually dominate the market. Software will become true peopleware, and the high-performance workplace that analysts envision will become the de facto standard for the enterprise.

Genius is Out of the Bottle

Genius is a new web analytics service that claims to tear down the walls between lead generation, the corporate web site, and sales. The Genius launch party last night at the San Francisco MOMA was remarkable in many ways. It was a true demonstration of “how do I create buzz without having any customers yet?”

First, the start-up managed to get the smartest guys in the room into one place and make them feel even smarter. Second, Genius lived up to its name: whoever expected a modest event was dead wrong by any standards. Instead, it was a celebration of BIGNESS and BOLDNESS (including the self-created Genius Awards for accomplished professionals in high-tech marketing). It was like reliving the gilded era of booze, sushi, and geeky glam in the heyday of dot-coms.

“Web analytics is dead,” boasted David Thompson, former WebEx CMO and now Genius CEO, in his State of Marketing address, “Here comes web analytics.” Thompson is smart, a real marketing genius indeed, and the confidence he and his company’s launch party demonstrated was genuine. Charisma is definitely back in the CEO’s toolbox. San Francisco 2.0: High-tech is becoming pop again. And the best way to become a pop star is to behave like one.