Bruce MacVarish Notes

Adoption of Cloud Communications is an evolution, not a revolution

The emergence of cloud technologies and architectures has re-defined and re-ignited interest in subscription based Cloud Communication models.  There is no doubt that introduction of cloud enables many new and exciting experiences for end users and opportunities for productivity gains for enterprises. 

It seems to me, that while we will continue to hear how “the Cloud” is creating a revolution for end users and enterprises, adoption of Cloud Communications has been an evolution, not a revolution.

As enterprises and Communication Service Providers (CSPs) evolve toward cloud communications, each have different business and technical drivers that will result in a number of different deployment models based on their priorities, path and pace of introduction.

Many enterprises and CSPs have initially focused on deploying private cloud solutions as a complement to their on-premises communication and existing collaboration applications.  This approach enables enterprises to gain early benefits of decentralized communication applications while maintaining a private, secure deployment. 

Other enterprises and CSPs are considering the introduction of public, multi-tenant communication applications delivered as a hosted or cloud service. 

Still others are interested in the benefits of hybrid communication clouds that combine on-premises, private and/or public cloud communication applications and resources.  

While the concept of managed and hosted services is not new, the emergence of cloud architectures has re-defined and re-ignited interest in subscription based Cloud Communication models.  Every day enterprise executives, end users and IT organizations hear how “the Cloud” is a revolution and is transforming their industry.  Yet, when it comes to communication and collaboration solutions for mid-size to large enterprises, the reality is that the adoption of Cloud Communications has been an evolution, not a revolution.

Google+ @ work

From the Google Enterprise blog:

"today we’re launching an initial set of Google+ features designed specifically for businesses, and we’re excited to move into a full preview mode for Apps customers. During this preview period, organizations that have gone Google will be able to use the business features of Google+ for free through the end of 2013 while we continue to add more features and administrative controls designed for organizations."

Google+ features specifically for businesses include:

1. Private sharing for your organization
2. Video meetings integrated with Gmail, Calendar and Docs
3. Administrative controls to set restrictions

 

Cooperation Flows

I've posted before of the shift toward conversations and relationships within the enterprise and how new value and productivity would come from flow based collaboration apps.

I believe the enterprise is:

• Being redefined around people - not tasks or processes
• Improving productivity by unlocking people's conversations and relationships - not focusing on transactions
• Delivering new value through the flow of my many, loosely coupled interactions of cooperation - not tightly coupled, structured constraints of collaboration.

I found alignment and agreement with these points when reading JP Rangaswami's insightful summary of how workflows of the past are different from collaboration flows of today.

 

JP writes:

"Workflows, like trains, worked in well-defined, closed systems.

Collaboration flows, on the other hand, are like rivers and oceans.

As the Cluetrain guys said, markets are conversations. The oceans and rivers of collaboration flows include all these conversations. The conversations themselves are manifestations of relationships, some bilateral, some multilateral. Sometimes they lead to transactions, surfaced by the capability as seen in the context.

What are these conversations? There’s nothing special about them. Here’s a loose classification of the types of conversations one would see in the workplace:

• Questions needing answers (Hey, how do I do this? Here’s how. Where can I find this? Here it is. Who really knows this? Here’s who)
• Sharing of experiences (I just installed this app, and it was *useless*. Here’s why. I just read this book and it was *fantastic. Here’s why)
• Feedback (I really found your answer helpful. I couldn’t have done this without you.)
• Social filtering (I rate this answer more than the others. I think you should see this so I will +1 it or Like it or RT it.)
• Status reporting (I’m here doing this, I’m there doing that)
• Alerts potentially needing action (If THIS then THAT, coming from a litany of sources)

...and a little later...

These conversations have been going on for aeons. But there’s one major difference. And that is this: the conversations are recorded. Persisted. Archived. So they’re auditable. Searchable. Findable. Besides this, there are other significant differences:

• The conversations are made visible immediately , in real-time
• They come wrapped in context, auto date and time stamped, author identified, location mapped, topic tagged
• The context can be enriched by other participants
• They’re channel- and device-independent; conversations can start in one medium, move to another. They can start on blogs, move to twitter, move to synchronous sound.
• They’re time- and space-shiftable. Synchronous and asynchronous. Mobile in design.
• They work on “publish-subscribe” networked models rather than broadcast and hierarch

I'm also reminded of this comparison of Collaboration vs. Cooperation by @shiftctrlesc and a number of posts by Stowe Boyd about cooperation, flows and the future of work.

As a result of the above, while JP makes a distinction between workflows and collaboration flows, I believe we should make the same type of distinction between collaboration flows and cooperation flows.

For me, the enterprise is being rebuilt around people, conversations and relationships powered by many, many loosely coupled interactions and cooperation flows.

Not all Graphs are the same

Chris Dixon, CEO of Hunch, recently presented at a GoogleTechTalk at the Google New York office.

Chris talked about the value of Graphs ... as in social, communications, intention, taste graphs ... the evolution toward Graph Wars ... and strategic choices important to developing graphs.

 

I was particularly interested in his question:

"How are Communication Graphs related to Social or Taste Graphs?"  

While there may be some overlap in "nodes" that appear across all 3 graphs, there are many "nodes" that are distinct.  As a result, we should expect to see the use of each graph as the source for distinctly different services for users.

Because not all Graphs are the same, the value of network analysis and new graph based services will continue to grow.

Games @ Work

I wanted to refresh my thinking on the Guiding Principles of Game Design @ Work from my earlier post. 

 

The Guiding Principles for Games @ Work were focused on making it easy for collaboration leaders and business users to:

1. Define clear boundaries, shared problem(s) and a community of collaborative business users

 

2. Assign satisfying tasks or roles that enable business users to excel and be part of something "Bigger"

 

3. Build nonmonetary incentives into a game economy to strongly motivate individuals to accomplish group aims.

 

4. Deliver hyper- transparency of information about users' skills and teams’ real-time performance 

 

5. Create a virtual economic marketplace for information and collaboration

 

6. Open multiple real-time sources of information and communication upon which to make decisions

 

7. Structure as a project-oriented organization that can easily be disbanded and reformed based on tasks and skills

 

8. Recognize individual, group and company achievements in a clear, specific way

 

9. Open visibility into all skills / project / social networks of communication across an organization

 

10. Adapt multiple, purpose-specific communications mediums to improve speed and efficiency of collaboration. 

 

With a little vision, strategy and design, it is not hard to see how game design principles will be shaping the future of communication and collaboration applications.

 

Trust Deficits in Social Networks

"Social networks have something of a trust deficit, which will either limit or make “more expensive” its ability to offer new services.  The product teams at social networks have proven their ability to offer compelling services in exchange for personal information, but our research shows that people place a relatively low value on their social information. 

For social networks to offer products in exchange for higher value information such as health records, physical location, or email/IM history, they will need to offer even more compelling products, services and outcomes to consumers."

Timothy Morey,

Frog Design,

Who do we trust with our personal data

Evolution of the Enterprise Applications Industry

John Mancini, the President of AIIM International, provides his perspective on the evolution of enterprise IT in one slide:

Personally, I like the way John describes the shift from managing "a web page" to managing "a conversation" as we see systems of engagement emerge in the enterprise... but...

While the balance of the slide is specific to Enterprise IT and the companies that define the era include traditional enterprise players like IBM, Digital and Microsoft, it isn't clear to me that Google and Facebook have had the same level of ENTERPRISE impact (yet?).

If you dig a little at this line of thinking, you clearly see that each era was/is defined by a number of different sources of value and competitive advantage.  

With a hat-tip to insights gained from the work of Geoffrey Moore, Umair Haque, John Hagel, Valdis Krebs and others, I like to describe the transition we're seeing in the enterprise applications industry this way:

 

Combining the two models, we have a hint at the opportunity for enterprise application vendors moving forward.   Helping users manage conversations, relationships and transactions with and across the enterprise is a significant source of new value and growth.

A couple of questions to consider as the enterprise application industry evolves to a "network of information nodes":

1. Will Google or Facebook be "the best known" enterprise vendor as outlined by John in the Social and Cloud era?

2. What comes after the Social and Cloud era?

The "Future State" of Work - Changes & Skills for next 10 years

GigaOm has an upcoming conference Net:Work that will explore the challenges and opportunities presented by a new culture of work and key tools and technologies for collaboration.

They put forward a report from Gartner that outlines 10 changes over the next 10 years that will impact how we work and collaborate in the future.

It is interesting to consider how Gartner's report compares to a similar report from The IFTF on key workplace skills for the future.

Gartner's view of how work changes includes:

1. “De-routinization” of work.

“Non-routine” activities that cannot be automated, such as innovation, leadership and sales, will dominate employment: By 2015, 40 percent or more of an organization’s work will be “non-routine,” up from 25 percent in 2010.

 

2. Work swarms.

Rather than traditional teams of people familiar with each other, ad-hoc groups or “work swarms,” with no previous experience of working with each other, will become a commonplace team structure. Gartner’s “work swarms” concept sounds similar to the Noded philosophy, which describes how groups of individuals, often but not necessarily geographically distant, come together to form temporary or recurring project teams.

 

3. Weak links.

Weak links are the cues people can pick up from people who know the people they have to work with. Exploiting our own networks will help us to develop the ties that are required for participating in wider “work swarm” opportunities.

 

4. Working with the collective.

Being able to influence the complex ecosystem of suppliers, partners, clients and customers will increasingly become a core competence.

 

5. Work sketch-ups.

Informality will define most “non-routine” work activities; the process models for these activities will be simple “sketch-ups,” created on the fly.

 

6. Spontaneous work.

Seeking new opportunities and creating projects around them is likely to be an opportunistic, rather than strategic, activity.

 

7. Simulation and experimentation.

The culture of Google’s “perpetual beta” is likely to spread to other industries, with rapid prototyping taking place in very public environments.

 

8. Pattern sensitivity.

Extrapolating from history and experience will become less reliable; the ability to detect and parse patterns and trends in society will provide better insights.

 

9. Hyperconnected.

With formal and informal work diffused across organizational boundaries,  the support mechanisms for workers (healthcare, HR, IT) will need to evolve to support fuzzier, ad-hoc relationships between people and departments.

 

10. My place.

The boundaries between home and work life are already blurred. Balancing almost 24/7 availability against burning out will become a critical skill.

Relevance-Aware Activity Streams

 

Liz Gannes of GigaOm does a nice job summarizing a recent interview of Twitter CEO Ev Williams. Williams provided a few significant insight into how he thinks Twitter (and by extension real-time activity stream apps)  is different from email and search.

 

"Blogging (Williams was previously the founder of Blogger) and Tweeting can be different (and better) than email, he said, because people who have something to say can find their audience. That’s a much better situation for both the publisher of the information and the consumer of it. So recipient-based media can scale better “in a world of infinite information,” he said.

That’s also a contrast to Google, said Williams, which serves more purpose-driven needs versus Twitter’s focus on “an interest-based world.”

“Google is very good at ‘I need to solve a problem, I need to buy something, I need an answer,” he said. “Twitter is more ‘I’m interested in many things, I don’t know what I need to know.’” Where Google is more likely to be gamed by a company like Demand Media, Twitter is a different beast.

However, there’s still the problem of filtering information on Twitter. “What we need to get much better at is scaling that system so you don’t have to pay attention to everything, but you don’t miss the stuff you care about,” Williams said. He said more such products were on the way.

Williams cited Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who said recently that more information is now produced in two days than was in all of time before 2003. Williams said automated streams of information from services like Fitbit and Blippy —  in addition to the proliferation of media — will only add to that problem.

Williams also said to expect forthcoming products that would help filter relevant tweets around events, similar to what it’s doing with location. This would go beyond the user-developed convention of hashtags, he said, though he didn’t elaborate.

Developing relevance-aware activity streams will require a flexible filtering experience that enables users to filter across a number of different topics or variables.  It seems that Ev hints at developing certain types of filters - for example filtering based on events.  

Does that mean we'll see a slow roll out of category based filtering tools versus a broader, user-driven filtering tool capable of coarse and/or fine filtering?  Will it be an open-friendly approach or closed?

Developing relevance-aware activity streams is an important step in the evolution of the real-time web.  

If, as Ev points out, recipient-based media can scale better in a world of infinite information, then the relevance aware filtering model must be able to scale as well.

(image from johnhaydon.com)

 

Conversation Analytics within Companies

 

Sandy Pentland talks about how his research and his book "Honest Signals" can help improve business productivity by analyzing communication flows within companies.

Some key points include:

- All social species are alike and improve productivity through Discovery and Integration

- Higher access to information discovery improves productivity by 4%

- Face-to-Face networks improve productivity by 10%

- Conversation mining and User Dashboards are critical to identifying and understanding communication flow and opportunities for productivity improvements