Bruce MacVarish Notes

"On the Way Up" vs. "On the Way Down"

Jim Collins recently published "How the Mighty Fall" where he outlines his framing of early warning signs to the collapse of once mighty companies.

He likens the decline and collapse of a company to a staged disease infecting a person (in this case his wife who was diagnosed with breast cancer).

"I've come to see institutional decline like a staged disease: harder to detect but easier to cure in the early stages, easier to detect but harder to cure in the later stages.  An institution can look strong on the outside but already be sick on the inside, dangerously on the cusp of a precipitous fall"

Collins then outlines 5 stages of Decline including:

Stage 1: Hubris Born of Success - or "We're so great, we can do anything!"

Stage 2: Undisciplined Pursuit of More - or "more scale, growth, power"

Stage 3: Denial of Risk and Peril - or "We can explain away weak results"

Stage 4: Grasping for Salvation - or "Looking for Silver Bullets to save us"

Stage 5: Capitulation to Irrelevance - or "Atrophy into utter insignificance"

When in Stage 3, Collins identified ways to look at the dynamics of the leadership team to determine if the Company is "on the way up" vs. "on the way down".

Leadership Dynamics of Teams on the Way Down

1. People shield those in power from grim facts or brutal honesty for fear of penalty

2. People assert strong opinions without providing data, evidence, or a solid argument

3. Team leader has a very low questions-to-statement ratio and enabling sloppy reasoning

4. Team members acquiesce to decisions but do not support them or worse, undermine them

5. Team members seek as much credit as possible for themselves yet are not respected by peers

6. Team members argue to look smart or improve their own interests

Leadership Dynamics of Teams on the Way Up

1. People bring forth unpleasant and brutally honest facts

2. People bring data, evidence, logic and solid arguments to the discussion

3. Team leader employs a Socratic style with high question-to-statement ratio

4. Team members unify behind a decision once made and work to make decision successful

5. Each team member credits other people for success and enjoys the confidence of peers

6. Team members argue and debate to find best answer, not improve their personal position

The 5 Stage framework offered by Collins is interesting and helpful in understanding company and team strategy. 

In the critical Stage 3 of decline, being able to look at how leadership teams behave and the dynamic of their interactions could send early warning signs of where the company is headed... Up or Down.  

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.

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.

From Signal ... to Data ... to Enlightenment

James Kelway recounts listening to Google's Bradley Horowitz describe how he / they think about data and metadata:

(Horowitz) told of everyday devices that have achieved ubiquity - that can now record your entire life digitally. Ubiquity is here.  The mobile phone is everywhere.

The problem as he saw it was that you can record everything but you don’t get another life to review it all. The challenge is harvesting metadata and defining context to give meaning to what we do.

So how do you use the information to a useful end? Horowitz (and Google) knows that the big problem is that we are dying from the start. Moments evaporate from the start.

A very pertinent point was that technology needs to adapt and enhance the human life. He asked how do we solve attention management? The moments of life that need revisiting amongst the morass of spam and junk we all wade through.

A key observation was that metadata is as important as the data itself.

Then he briefly showed a mental model that reflected the Google approach to data, starting at signal and working upwards.

• enlightenment
• wisdom
• knowledge
• information
• data
• signal 

I like this model and have been thinking about this from the enterprise perspective. 

If I think about enterprise transactions, conversations or relationships as social objects with the ability to send real-time signals, what is needed to take the signal and associated data to add value for users?  

How do we help users leverage signal, data and information to create knowledge, wisdom and insight?

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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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)

Social Technographics of the Business User

From G. Oliver Young at Forrester Research:

The first full report from Forrester's recent survey of how business technology buyers use social media is now officially on the Forrester website. Its available to all Forrester clients, but if you are not a client here are some of the highlights:

The big takeaway: Technology buyers are highly socially active, the most active we have seen so far. Many technology vendors have been on the leading edge of social media marketing for some time (Dell and IBM come to top of mind) and for good reason. IT buyers — both in the IT department and within the line of business are highly engaged with social media, and use blogs, discussion forums, and rich media in many technology purchase processes.

It is good to see Forrester continue to assess the adoption and use of social technologies within the enterprise.  I like the break out between IT and Line of Business and the use of Charlene Li's framework.

I've been leading our own research into Business User behaviors and attitudes when it comes to communication, collaboration and social technologies.  By now, I think we all realize that consumer experiences are shaping Business User expectations.  Redefining enterprise communications based on Business User needs is uncovering a number of new opportunities in the UC and Collaboration space.  

"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