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."

Business Users are driven to new experiences that are simple and useful

We've heard for some time how consumer innovations are shaping user expectations in the enterprise.  I believe this and see it in the evolution of a number of new enterprise solutions.   For me, the key is to distill the lessons learned from successful consumer innovations to create a number of guiding principles and strategies to frame investments in enterprise innovations.   

So, I found Fred Wilson's post on consumer adoption of new technologies interesting. 

Fred attempts to answer the question "What drives consumer adoption of new technologies?" in prep for a panel discussion with a major media company.   I liked his quick assessment: 

"Let's take ten of the most popular new consumer technology products in recent years (with a couple of our portfolio companies in the mix): iPhone, Facebook, Wii, Hulu, FlipCam, Rock Band, Mafia Wars, Blogger, Pandora, and Twitter and let's try to describe in one sentence or less why they broke out (feel free to debate the reasons they broke out in the comments):

• iPhone - mobile browser with a killer touch screen interface
  
• Facebook - a social net with real utility
  
• Wii - gesture based user interface for gaming
  
• Hulu - your favorite TV shows in a fantastic web UI
  
• FlipCam - a video cam that fits in your pocket comfortably
  
• Rock Band - everyone can be a rock star for a few minutes
  
• Mafia Wars - a natively social game built for social nets
  
• Blogger - a printing press for everyone
  
• Pandora - drop dead simple personalized radio
  
• Twitter - blogging everyone can do in less than a minute

In most of these cases, the breakthrough product or service delivered a new experience to consumers that they had never had before. Sure there were social nets before Facebook, but none allowed you to run your life the way Facebook does for my kids. Sure there were browsers on phones before the iPhone, but there hadn't been one that you could actually use like you use a browser on a computer. Sure there had been personalized internet radio services before Pandora but not one that was drop dead simple and delivered a great experience.

So it seems to me that consumers are driven to new experiences that are simple and useful and/or entertaining. It is not enough to be the first to market with a new technology. You have to be the first to market with a version of the technology that is simple and easy to use.

I agree with Fred.  Today, our Business User expectations are being shaped by our Consumer User Experiences with new technologies.   If we extend Fred's consumer lessons to new enterprise opportunities, we can add 2 more guiding principles to the Enterprise Edge Strategy manuscript:

1. Business Users are driven to new experiences that are simple and useful and/or entertaining.  

2. It is not enough to be the first to market with a new technology; you have to be first to market with a version of the technology that is simple and easy to use.

Social Filters shifting new value and revenue to the Enterprise Edge

We continue to see the migration of new user value, and therefore new revenue opportunities, to the edge of the enterprise where employees connect directly with users. 

As the enterprise becomes more social, the companies who make it easy for end-users and employees to jointly discover, capture, create, share and analyze their most important transactions, conversations and relationships will win.  Enterprise Incumbents and New Players are all actively pursuing this emerging opportunity (see Enterprise Edge Matrix-2009). 

Joshua-Michele at Opposable Planets agrees:

"The operating premise for all social filtering is simple; we trust the opinions of people more than companies. We build relationships with individuals (people) more easily than with companies. It is easier to be loyal to a person than a company. So when it comes to needing information people will more readily turn to people. This Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious (BGO) reinforces why companies need to continue to move towards a social model of business and a culture that empowers more employees to build relationships with the outside world. In a networked world communication choke points are lost opportunities."

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.

Work Smarter

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."

Webware 100 Finalists for 2009 - Communications Category

CNET's 2009 Webware 100 finalists for the Communications category are listed below.  Voting for your favorite closes on April 30th.

Which of the following finalists have you used... and which is your favorite?

As I look at the list, I find my self wondering how many serve as proof points aligned to my vision of the future state of enterprise comm applications.

AdiumJaxtrTanglerAIMJottThunderbirdCallWaveOtherInBoxVonageDigsbyPidginWebExDimdimPingerWindows Live HotmailFonPostboxWindows Live MessengerGmailPresentlyYahoo MailGoogle TalkRingCentralYahoo MessengeriChatSkydeckYammerJaJah DirectSkypeZimbra

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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A Vision of Mobile's Future

From Tim O'Reilly:

"Put these two trends together (sensors & cloud services), and we can imagine the future of mobile: a sensor-rich device with applications that use those sensors both to feed and interact with cloud services. The location sensor knows you're here so you don't need to tell the map server where to start; the microphone knows the sound of your voice, so it unlocks your private data in the cloud; the camera images an object or a person, sends it to a remote application that recognizes it, and retrieves relevant data. All of these things already exist in scattered applications, but eventually, they will be the new normal.

This is an incredibly exciting time in mobile application design. There are breakthroughs waiting to happen. Voice and gesture recognition in the Google Mobile App is just the beginning."

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.