Social Glass

I liked the recent post by Chris Anderson called Who needs a CIO? From my perspective the following summarizes his point:

CIOs, it turns out, are mostly business people who have been given the thankless job of keeping the lights on, IT wise. And the best way to ensure that they stay on is to change as little as possible.

What Chris says makes sense, and I believe this is true for some organizations.  But I think that, in order to survive, organizations must innovate.  Technology is an innovation enabler, especially technology that fuels collaboration and knowledge sharing.  In my humble opinion CIOs can’t expect to keep their jobs unless they sponsor technology that helps improve the bottom line, and I don’t necessarily think web 2.0 has caused CIOs to be innovative as innovation would have been a mandate when the title Chief Information Officer was created.

Certainly, in my professional experience, I’ve seen a lot of CIOs have very innovative, or at least non-traditional, perspectives on how new technology might help their organizations.  Usually it’s the management layer immediately below the CIO that staggers innovation as they have the most to lose from disruption to their routine, non-value-adding technology silos.

This is one of the reasons why Enterprise 2.0 is so compelling.  Transparency means CIOs will have direct exposure to the 25 year olds who have great ideas for how the enterprise might become more efficient and innovative, and that certainly will upset the people in the middle.

Because we need another blog on a recent Information Week cover story about Enterprise 2.0, I thought I’d share with you my favorite quote from it:

Reticent companies ignore the movement at the peril of their competitiveness. Within a few years, rich, collaborative software platforms that include a slate of technologies like wikis, blogs, integrated search, and unified communications will be the norm. Employees will expect to work that way, and it’ll be up to IT to solve the still significant problems and deliver.

I couldn’t agree more. In a few years this stuff will nearly be ubiquitous, especially once the MySpace generation enters the workforce. To them this is the status quo. In fact over the holidays my younger brothers (16 and 18) asked me what I was working on. I explained to them that I was working on the next generation of collaborative software like blogs, wikis social networks, and how they’d add significant value and efficiency to the enterprise. Their condescending response was “ya, what’s so special about that, we do that every day”.

We’re starting to see a shift in the industry where software vendors package their products inside servers and deliver them as a single cohesive unit. The “appliance model” has a lot of benefits and makes sense for IT Managers who wish to deploy software that maximizes value but minimizes the infrastructural impact and the time required to implement.

The Benefits

• “Plug and Play”: Appliances are designed to swiftly integrate into the network and be up and running within minutes or hours. I’ve personally installed the Google Search Appliance several times and have had it up and running in 20 minutes with some content being indexed and served about an hour after that.
• Service Level Agreement: Generally license models bind the entire appliance to a single SLA. This means if something, anything (hardware or software), breaks, the vendor is liable. This removes a lot of risk from customers as traditionally liability was dealt with as follows:
• customer: “The software’s broken”
• vendor: “No, it’s your server that’s broken. You didn’t configure and scale it correctly”.
• customer: “No, I followed your installation instructions and it doesn’t work”.
• You get the idea

Trends in the Market

Google was the first company I’ve had experience with that’s offered appliance-based products. I’ve since noticed several Enterprise 2.0 solution providers with appliance offerings. These include:

• Suite Two
• SocialText
  

This is a fantastic idea and will dramatically diminish the complexity in deploying an Enterprise 2.0 solution. Companies won’t have to worry about sizing their infrastructure to meet internal demand and the total cost of ownership of maintaining these systems is reduced considerably. I’d bet money that the appliance model will be the status quo in a few years.

Last year I started work on a project and thought it’d be a great opportunity to run through the requirements process using a wiki. My cohorts and I quickly procured a server, downloaded MediaWiki and installed the FCKEditor plugin (which probably does more harm than good, but that’s a different matter). We then started recording minutes, requirements and action items in the wiki and used it to store shared documents as well. Internally the team, which was somewhat technical and exposed to this stuff, thought it was great.

We then exposed a portion of the wiki to the client who was largely unaccustomed to the idea of writable web applications. Almost unanimously they asked “what does wiki mean?” to which I replied “well, it comes from a Hawaiian word meaning ‘fast’…”

But once they saw us use it, once they saw how quickly content could be edited and how each page version was neatly cataloged they became very impressed with the software. I received several compliments from them on how helpful the software was and we’ve since adopted the wiki as a requirements/collaboration standard for the project.

In retrospect it’s neat to look back and see the reaction of first timers when the light-bulb turns on. Those of use who are used to blogging or evangelizing about Enterprise 2.0 often loose sight that most out there are “un-enlightened” and oblivious to the meaning of terms like blog, wiki, tag, etc. It’s important to spend time explaining the fundamentals for this stuff to gain mass adoption.

I recently wrote that I’m evaluating Enterprise 2.0 tools for internal use. Through my search I’ve noticed that most providers license their software. Few, like SocialText, offer opensource versions (but good luck installing SocialText Open!). I find it interesting given the popularity of opensource and the association many make with it and Enterprise 2.0 that there are so few opensource options. Not that I’m complaining or anything.

I then started to wonder if the recent discontinuation of free Skypeout calls in North America (which was replaced by an unlimited plan) was perhaps a precursor to trends we might see happen in the opensource space. Is opensource just a fad? Are opensource software providers going to disappear and be replaced by low-cost software companies? Time will tell but there are signs that are not so optimistic, like “wikipedia’s funding woes“, for example.