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."

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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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.

The Conversation is shifting to Real-time

"The conversation is evolving, from short bursts of declared intent inside a query bar, to ongoing, ambient declaration of social actions."  John Battelle

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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.