Bruce MacVarish Notes

Enterprise Flow

My guiding principles for the future state of enterprise applications are:

- hybrid cloud + premise

- end user driven

- social

- device agnostic

- flow based

- sense aware

An interesting example of some of these principles applied to the enterprise is Zenbe's "Shareflow" which allows enterprise users to build flows of communication streams around relevant people and topics.  Here's a summary from Matt Marshall at VentureBeat.

"For too long now, email has remained oddly stupid: We can expand an email, forward it, or reply. But for groups of people working together on projects, it’s awful — not to mention overwhelming. Google has implemented something called email “threads” into its Gmail service, which lets us see the back and forths of conversations. But that’s about it.

However, a rash of recent innovation is starting to challenge email as the predominant form of work-flow communication.

Zenbe, a New York City-based startup, is the latest example. The company today has released something called Shareflow. Shareflow is essentially a web-based dashboard that lets you see the flow of communication around a given topic (see image below). In many ways, Shareflow is like Google’s Wave product, released in late May. 

In each case, the page becomes a stream of things posted about the topic, with the most recent item posted at the top, and the previous posts moving down the page. However, Shareflow takes a step further than email by letting you incorporate your regular email into the flow."

VRM ListenLog

Keith Hopper outlines his vision for ListenLog as an example (and element?) of future VRM solutions:

A user-driven activity log works well for an application that pulls together audio streams and files from a number of different sources. Of course, online audio providers (vendors in the VRM model) can already track and aggregate listening behavior data, but only for the audio they control. When the user acts as the sole point of integration, pulling together audio from multiple sources, their own consolidated log becomes unique and powerful. Only when the listener is the point of integration does such an approach yield unique value.

Flow-based Triggers

Paul Golding does a nice job describing the opportunity and impact of flow-based mobile applications on our daily lives.  I like the way Paul talks about weaving the flow of our activity streams into how we experience "events" in our personal "timelines" and the "timelines" of others.  

For me, the most interesting of Paul's points is found in his last sentence - "The tools invented to seize the moment have begun to define the moment".  

We will increasingly be triggered to take action in our personal and work lives by the transactions, conversations and relationships found within our activity streams and the activity streams of others. 

The real opportunity for flow-based applications is to evolve from helping us capture and share the moment, to creating triggers for new ones... new transactions, new conversations and new relationships at work and at home that would not have been created otherwise. 

Below are a few sections from his article published in the recent issue of Vodafone's Receiver: 

"We are rapidly headed towards a new era of human interaction that is marked by perpetual conversations and perpetual info drip-feed, as enabled by the umbilical of the mobile.  With its always-on and always-carried potential, the mobile allows our streams of consciousness and related intentions to be converted instantly into actions with both local and remote effects.  Not only does the mobile enable us to seize the moment, but increasingly it is the cause of the moment, adding more and more events to our daily timeline.

Time is nothing other than the intervals on a clock face counted out by the advancing second hand. But this is not how we experience time. We experience time as a series of moments measured out by events. Our personal timeline is a series of events that happen moment by moment and are dominated by the events that happen in our brains – thoughts, contemplations, urges and emotions bubbling up from our sub-concious stream, some of them converted by the conscious into intentions and sometimes into actions. It is communication and self-expression at the speed of thought. 

Not long ago, phone calls ('ring ring'), texts ('beep beep') and the alarm clock ('brrr brrr') were the only ways that our mobiles might 'interrupt' us. With Twitter, other Flow based Apps (my edit) and widgets, this is changing. But don't mistake these moments as interruptions. These are the moments that make the stepping stones of our daily timeline across the ocean of people and info chatter. We weave them into our timeline and they weave us into theirs. The tools invented to seize the moment have began to define the moment."

Social-Enabling Voice Conversations

Daniel Berninger has a guest post on Jeff Pulver's Blog titled "The HD Connect Manifesto". 

In the post, Daniel highlights how text-based communications dominate voice-based communications and points out that the voice-based user experience in 2009 is essentially the same as it was in 1959:

"The growing adoption of text in the form of email, texting, and microblogging as the dominate mode of communication represents a remarkable development. It avenges the long ago defeat of the telegraph by the telephone. The underlying cause of declining interest voice communication represents a familar story. There exists no difference between the end user experience of a telephone call in 1959 and 2009. The wireless industry made telephone calls mobile. The VoIP industry made telephone calls cheap. Yet, every penny of voice revenue requires the sale of a 1950 quality telephone call."

I like Berninger's push to drive change in the user experience of voice based communications.  Importantly, Daniel is advocating that the combination High Definition (HD) audio quality, click-to-connect and unmetered global termination or collectively - HD Connect - as a foundation for a resurgent voice industry.

While improving voice quality and connectivity serves as a strong foundation, I also believe significant new value and growth can be found in over-hauling the user experience and unlocking new value found within voice-based conversations (not just connecting). 

Enabling users to store, thread and share conversations with relevance and context creates new value for users and new growth for the industry.  

Users want the ability to store voice-based conversations and manage them through tagging and indexing just as we do today with text-based communications.  Visual voicemail is an early proofpoint of this.  Once stored, users want the ability to see these conversations in the context of the real-time flow of personal and work activities and thread them (link them) appropriately.   In addition, users want to share important and relevant conversations with friends, co-workers and colleagues.   

While it is easy to subscribe to a person's blog, follow someone on Friendfeed or send a tweet to your followers on Twitter, the associated social graph is extended with many links that are weak and many nodes that may be irrelevant (to you or the conversation). 

The people we call and engage in voice-based conversations, in our personal and work lives, represent our active - and in many cases our most relevant - social graph.

To build a resurgent voice industry, consumers and business users need a new user experience that helps them unlock the value of their active, relevant social graph by social-enabling their voice conversations.  

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Enterprise Hybrid Clouds for Business User Apps

Six elements characterize my vision for the future state of enterprise applications.  

They are:

1. Applications delivered through Hybrid Clouds integrating private, public and premise based resources 
2. Applications that are Business User driven with a focus on UX of the Business User 
3. Social enabling transaction, conversation and relationship apps and associated data
4. Device Agnostic applications that synch across devices, web, cloud and premise platforms
5. Flow-ready apps that aggregate, filter, share and visualize user information and activity streams
6. Sensing apps that act on a user's voice, ambient context, declarative context or gestural input 

    

I keep an eye out for signposts that we're making progress toward this "future state" and was pleased to see Ed Sim highlight a proof point of the "Hybrid Clouds" element in his post :

Amazon has taken off with its cloud compute infrastructure but there still have been some limitations from an enterprise perspective.  Mainly, some enterprises are concerned about keeping their data private, about reliability, and storage costs over time.  

Any enterprise looking at potentially leveraging the cloud would love to have a hybrid solution which allows them to manage their own internal cloud and then burst over to a public cloud for either automated failover, extra storage, or to port an application over after using an internal platform for development.

Apperian brings iPhone to the Enterprise

“Number one is helping companies leverage their existing technology investments in smartphones more effectively, by mobilizing workforces and bringing applications to handheld devices; and number two, and more compelling and exciting, is helping large companies really extend their brands and provide transformative, next-generation, point-of-service applications to customers."

Chuck Goldman, CEO, Apperian

(source: Xconomy)

"Sensing" Voice

In my vision of future state for enterprise applications, the 6th element is "Sensing".   

I've used this term to capture how future applications will create new value for users by sensing relevance, context and personal preferences through analytics of voice, video, text, location, attention or other ambient and declarative data from the user.  The ability to capture, store, index, search and analyze voice recordings is fundamental to this future state vision.

Nuance, BBN, TellMe/Microsoft, Nexidia, CallMiner, Utopy, SER, IBM and others have invested to improve STT, TTS, ASR and Speech Analytics technologies that are all critical to this "sensing" end-state.

Recently, Microsoft announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona - Microsoft Recite -  a Voice capture and search application for Windows Mobile devices.

To get a sense of the UX and VUI, check out this video clip...

 

With Recite users can record voice messages and then, based on a voice interface, search for specific terms or phrases to find earlier messages... and I suspect with time... earlier conversations. 

It appears as if Recite uses some type of voice pattern matching or phonetic search engine.  There is not translation from speech to text and the accuracy improves with longer search phrases.  Both of these characteristics points to phonetic processing.  

You can download the app here.

The Enterprise 2.0 "Edge Matrix" - 2009

In January of 2008, I created what I called the "Enterprise Edge Matrix" that mapped players who were targeting emerging opportunities at the edge of the enterprise.   

My hypothesis at the time was that enterprise core vendors, emerging start-ups and enterprise edge visionaries were racing to create new value for enterprise users at the Enterprise Edge.   To capture these new revenue growth opportunities at the "edge of the enterprise" , players need to develop new viral adoption strategies and networked business models that create and monetize value from data found in networks, markets and communities of enterprise end users.

At the time, I thought one interesting question was:

Who will be able to drive and monetize a viral enterprise application first?  Today's enterprise "core" leaders or the emerging enterprise "edge" visionaries?

Since early 2008, I've also outlined my vision of the Future State of the Enterprise Applications that can be summarized as:

- Applications delivered by Hybrid Cloud delivery models, 

- Business User driven with a focus on user experience 

- Social enabling transactions, conversations and relationship

- Device Agnostic applications running across devices, web and premise platforms

- Flow-ready by aggregating, filtering and visualizing user information and activity

- Sensing-based by acting on user's ambient and declarative data

So, based on the above, and reflecting industry evolution, investments, acquisitions and product announcements, I spent some time updating my Enterprise Edge Matrix for 2009.  

While I realize it needs some refinement, I believe the updated edge map highlights at least 3 significant trends from the past 12 months.

• Enterprise Core Vendors ( e.g. IBM, Cisco, Microsoft and Nokia) have aggressively moved to capture edge opportunities by introducing and/or acquiring new social, collaborative and mobile applications that directly target and are adopted by enterprise end users.  These solutions are branded and packaged as extensions to existing products and revenue streams.       

• Enterprise Edge Visionaries continue to add users but have not moved to monetize. 

• Emerging players are moving to leapfrog competitors with applications representative of Future State characteristics.  

Even with current economic conditions in mind,  applications that target and deliver directly to enterprise business users will see increased viral adoption and monetization.   

It would be interesting to hear how you'd refine this year's Edge Matrix... and what you think it will look like in early 2010.

Extracting value from free and ubiquitous data

"I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it."

Hal Varian, Chief Economist, Google

Business User "Sensing" Applications

I like this insight into IBM's Social Networks & Discovery (SaND) research and their focus on filter improvements to identify contextually relevant people, documents and expertise within the enterprise.  

For me, this represents an early example of Phase 3 in my five phased roadmap of Enterprise communication and collaboration software.   Phase 3 is about adding filtering and sensing features that make enterprise applications "aware" (e.g. context-aware, location-aware and social-aware) based on simple analysis of our personal ambient and declarative data.

From Jeff Widman at TechCrunch:

"the IBM aggregation and filtering system works on any entity in a system–people, textual documents, or meta-information (tags). Like Google, searching on any term returns a ranked results list. But unlike Google, pausing over a link shows the relationships between people, tags, and documents"...

"As this information proliferation grows–on both sides of the firewall–filtering relevant people and content will only become more necessary"

(Thanks to Sam Huleatt for sharing through Google Reader)