Social Glass

On the topic of enterprise architecture, some colleagues of mine talk about defining a corporate lexicon to outline what a business does, or wants to do, as a business. The aim of this activity is to arrive at a desired future-state where the business can talk about its core functions in a language that is not tied to its operational or business support systems. The language becomes an abstraction on top of those systems, and further analysis shows where core systems don’t support the corporate lexicon.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Being a linguist at heart (I majored in Spanish in university) I thought I might simplify this approach by defining several business requirements for a telecommunications company:

1. Provision broadband internet for residential customers.
2. Provision broadband internet for small business customers.
3. Send customers an invoice monthly.

The first thing to notice is the lexicon has been standardized. When I mean “provision” I say “provision”, not “activate” or “setup”. “Customers” are not “clients” or “accounts”.

Next, sentence structure. All of the nouns in this sentence represent core data entities, the adjectives (attributes of the nouns) represent types that extend the core data entities, and the verbs represent actions that can happen to the object pronoun (data entity) of the sentence. Each of these needs to be supported by the enterprise architecture.

Let’s analyze the first requirement more closely: Provision broadband internet service for residential customers. Verbs are highlighted in yellow, adjectives in green, nouns in blue and prepositions in red.

• There are two core data entities, “service” and “customer”.
• We need a provisioning business function for services (”service” being the object pronoun of the sentence).
• “service” entities can be of type “internet”, and “internet services” can be of type “broadband”.
• “customer” entities can be type “residential”.

Furthermore, prepositions show us relationships between core data entities. In this case we see that “customers” and “services” have at least a one to one relationship (meaning a customer can have at least one service).

Applying the same analysis to all of the requirements, we’d end up with the following, semi-normalized data model:

We’d also end up with two business services (think SOA), one that sends invoices on a monthly basis, and another that provisions internet services.

Sure, this is simplified, but the requirements gathering process, when done in this way, can tell an Enterprise Architect a lot about the core data entities and functions an organization needs to support to do business. He can then perform a gap analysis to understand where his current-state architecture is deficient in supporting this future-state view.

A few days ago I got a request from my Managing Director (Partner) asking if I knew of anybody in the Enterprise 2.0 blogosphere who’d like to join our firm as a consultant specializing in Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 in Australia. We have the go-ahead to bring onboard 3 such consultants at varying levels of seniority.

Most of the work we do is strategic in this space, but we’re gaining a lot of momentum, and I’d be surprised if we’re not part of several E2.0 implementations next year.

If you’re interested or know somebody who might be, send me an email at jeremy.thomas at socialglass.com. I’ll respond with more information about the firm and the opportunities at hand.

I was talking with a colleague the other day about a major project that had been deployed to Production a few months ago for one of his clients. The solution is a “standard” J2EE application” (EJBs, JMS, Struts, JBoss etc.) and is used both behind the firewall for CSRs and on the internet for online order handling. While it is stable, there are a few quirks/bugs with the online component. Some of these bugs are discovered by testers, but interestingly the majority are discovered by “an industry community” which details them on a forum.

My colleague said the feedback they get from this forum is invaluable and has lead to many incremental system improvements. And best of all nobody has to pay an army of testers to find these holes in the system.

Talk about leveraging the longtail for business benefit.

A peer of mine within my company setup an external website (based on Wordpress) for us to blog about internal matters, industry trends, what we ate last night for dinner etc. He and I are both Technical Managers and, as such, are responsible for about 10 people collectively. We asked each of these people to contribute to the site on a regular basis. Without much prodding and within about a week we managed to create a vibrant system of communication and sharing with lots of blog posts and comments.
What’s fascinating to me about all this as a Manager is the insight I get into the knowledge our new hires possess. Some of these kids, fresh out of university, are in the pocket with Web 2.0 and are able to relate it to business value - ideas like using Adobe Flex, Silverlight and Java FX to break out of the J2EE MVC rut and change the way we approach UI development and user experience as a technology organization. We talk about Ruby on Rails and one of our very junior guys has launched http://enterprise20.rubyforge.org/, an open source Enterprise 2.0 project using this technology. This insight is valuable to me when staffing projects or understanding my people’s strengths and weaknesses.

In a consulting organization we spread out, travel the world, and often find it hard to create or identify with our corporate culture. A very simple blogging application has gone a long way to create a community amongst resources working in Sydney, Melbourne, Austria and the US - all for just $8 per month. To me that’s pretty cool.

Update: Paula and Jevon make a good point that Search on its own is not Enterprise 2.0.

I find it interesting reading about IT being clueless when it comes to Enterprise 2.0 (like Paula Thornton’s recent post over at the FASTForward blog). I do a lot of work in the Enterprise Search space (Search being the first “S” in SLATES), and more often than not we are approached by IT departments looking for a Search solution. They understand the difficulty knowledge workers face in finding enterprise content. I’ve worked closely with several IT departments to integrate Search on their intranets - a task that is very security intensive as Search musn’t expose knowledge workers to content they don’t have access to, and this means close involvement with IT.

I’ve written about this before as have others, but Enterprise Search needs to be the focal point of any Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem. Companies should invest in Search first - they must enable discovery - before collaboration can happen. I applaud the IT departments I’ve dealt with in taking this first step.

So no, I don’t think IT is really clueless.