Orlin Monad's Library tagged enterprise → View Popular

My slant is that IT Departments WILL disappear, much like the typing pool has. My wife (my dad, my 3-year-old son ...) uses as much computing power as most office workers (browser, editing, video, homepage, search ...) and they don't have an IT department (not even me).

If they can then surely businesses can.
By relaxing its vise-like grip on the technological wheel, IT can actually save itself from the bend in the road. By adopting a different social contract, IT may thrive again as differentiator in business - not by its ability to babysit the workforce, but by its ability to educate.
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- The LEF recognizes enterprise IT as a social contract among individuals and outlines a maturation step for everyone - IT, employees and management - in order to achieve the next generation of technology and business requirements. What the LEF describes to me is IT developing into more of an interactive, bi-directional department that concentrates less on policing and more on supporting its employees. In return, employees will have the responsibility to educate themselves on best practices and even bear the consequences of their decisions. As a result, employees will be able to choose the appropriate tools for their needs, information technology will again provide corporations with advantages over competitors. Accordingly, Web 2.0, and the entire software industry, should explode as the next generation arrives and is adopted.
- But what if IT let technology be commoditized and instead focused on information? Could there be an 'educational' model whereby corporations may be able to compete less on technology and more on information - specifically interpreting, analyzing and communicating information; much like a university? We all recognize the value of a Harvard or MIT, for example. So could IT departments eventually hold similar prestige and value?
- Much like Joshua Bell playing violin during rush hour, you may have one of the great technical solutions in the world, but - as of today - the audience will be meager. And things will only get worse as CIO budgets constrict, solution providers winnow and IT slowly disappears.
- Unlike electricity, information has no inherent, physical properties. Information requires both interpretation and communication to give it value. As of today, that frames information technology as a wholly human endeavor. Furthermore, institutions such as working groups, professional guilds and even universities demonstrate that the best way to exchange ideas and knowledge is still person-to-person.
- If indeed IT is undergoing a transformation similar to a power grid, then it follows that the focus of IT is how to do more with less. This in turn means less resources for implementing anything requiring more pieces, hence the desire to purchase broader solutions from fewer and larger vendors. Taking things to their logical conclusion, it's not a stretch, and even quite probable, that in the end IT will be a department of one - choosing, among the commoditized solutions, the best fit for the company. However, while information can travel in bits and bytes at the speed of light, it is not electricity. And a person is most definitely not a lamp.
- business IT today is much like business power generation of yesterday - needed at the time, but better performed as a specialized entity that can properly scale. As businesses realized the superiority of commoditized and standard power distribution, they dismantled their water wheels and plugged into the grid. As a result, even though we take it for granted, anyone can go to any lighting store, purchase a lamp, plug it in and work well into the night. 'The End of Corporate Computing' makes a lot of sense when IT is compared to a utility.
- Every generation there's a company that CIOs can purchase from which is considered 'safe' - perhaps because it's the best solution; certainly because everybody else is doing it. However, this is, in the long run, a self-defeating strategy. If there is no variation, then there is no advantage. If there is no advantage, then there is no superior profit margin. And if there is no superior profit margin, then there is no way to treat IT other than as a cost center. Suddenly the IT Cheetah is suffering from too little genetic variation and a decidedly herd mentality. If a social, more collaborative gene is suddenly needed, how much effort will be required to grow and nurture it - or is it even possible?
- what if the next generation of business winners are selected by their ability to enhance communication - not just within the confines of business firewalls among colleagues, but outside the firewall with anybody that can provide an advantage? Furthermore, such choices in communication are highly individual. How will this square with IT departments that are trying to centralize every and all technology.
- Most corporate IT departments today are well suited to catching and devouring modern information problems.
- The IT Factor
  
  What is the current role of IT? A quick Google search gives us a few options:
  
  Includes all matters concerned with the furtherance of computer science and technology and with the design, development, installation, and implementation of information systems and applications;
  a term that encompasses all forms of technology used to create, store, exchange and utilize information in its various forms including business data, conversations, still images, motion pictures and multimedia presentations;
  Information technology provides the "engine" used to drive useful information systems. This includes computers, software, Internet/Intranet and telecommunications technology.

10 Apr 07

IT Opens Up and Lives On The Web

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enterprise it item web2.0

01 Apr 07

Rogue Wave® Hydra Suite

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c++ commercial enterprise programming sca sdo soa suite

OpenLexicon

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bpm enterprise opensource process technology workflow

28 Mar 07

Trampoline: Harnessing Social Behavior in the Enterprise

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ai case enterprise knowledge social software

26 Mar 07

Intelligent online task management | Smartsheet.com

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database enterprise spreadsheet web2.0

21 Mar 07

ThinkFree

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enterprise free office saas suite web2.0

17 Mar 07

E-Signatures, Signatures, Contract Management, NDA, and Document Management from EchoSign

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business document enterprise office signature web2.0 workflow

13 Mar 07

» Web 2.0 definition updated and Enterprise 2.0 emerges | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com

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def enterprise item web2.0

- Harnessing Collective Intelligence: Sometimes described as the core pattern of Web 2.0, this describes architectures of participation that embraces the effective use of network effects and feedback loops to create systems that get better the more that people use them.
- Data is the Next "Intel Inside": A phrase that captures the fact that information that information has become as important, or more important, than software, which has become relentlessly commoditized.
- Innovation in Assembly: The Web has become a massive source of small pieces of data and services, loosely joined, increasing the recombinant possibilities and unintended uses of systems and information.
- Rich User Experiences: The Web page has evolved to become far more than HTML markup and now embodies full software experiences that enable interaction and immersion in innovative new ways.
- Software Above the Level of a Single Device: Software like the horizontally federated blogosphere (hundreds of blog platforms and aggregators) or the vertically integrated iTunes (server farm + online store + iTunes client + iPods) are changing our software landscape.
- Perpetual Beta: Software releases are disappearing and continuous change is becoming the norm.
- Leveraging the Long Tail: The mass servicing of micromarkets cost effectively via the Web is one of the primary "killer business models" made possible by the Internet in its present form.
- Lightweight Software/Business Models and Cost Effective Scalability: Everything from Amazon's S3, to RSS, to Ruby on Rails are changing the economics of online software development fundamentally, providing new players powerful new weapons against established players and even entire industries.
SLATES describes the combined use of effective enterprise search and discovery, using links to connect information together into a meaningful information ecosystem using the model of the Web, providing low-barrier social tools for public authorship of enterprise content, tags to let users create emergent organizational structure, extensions to spontaneously provide intelligent content suggestions similar to Amazon's recommendation system, and signals to let users know when enterprise information they care about has been published or updated, such as when a corporate RSS feed of interest changes.

» Encouraging Enterprise 2.0: As simple as possible, but no simpler? | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com

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case enterprise web2.0

Make Enterprise 2.0 as simple as humanely possible for your organization in this framework, but no simpler.
The Do-It-Yourself era has arrived and it's flowing inside the firewall fast.
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- This is the call to action to IT departments where they can actually do the most good and use their top-down influence to find ways to embrace Web 2.0 by eliminating the intrinsic barriers to it without compromising the integrity of enterprise systems or our businesses.
- whether you get out of the way, actively encourage it, or do absolutely nothing, Enterprise 2.0 platforms like blogs, wikis, and related social, emergent, freeform Web 2.0-style apps are coming to your company, and in fact are almost certainly there already

Sramana Mitra on Strategy » Blog Archive » Enterprise 3.0 = (SaaS + EE)

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enterprise item prediction web3.0

07 Mar 07

» Repeating history, The Long Tail, and software demand | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com

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enterprise item longtail saas web2.0

History also teaches us that there will be an inevitable industry consolidation and a few very big players will emerge in control of things: the market, the software, the audience, and the information. But this time it might be a little different; the power of the The Long Tail might be set free and make real market dominance no longer possible. We will see.
Self-service IT can be done with either SaaS or Web 2.0. But lest we forget, SaaS and Web 2.0 are overlapping but different concepts. SaaS represents online, hosted software that can be obtained on-demand while Web 2.0 is essentially about enabling collectively built online collections of shared information. SaaS and Web 2.0 can both be delivered on the Web, but the former tends to provide more function than data, and the latter tends to provide more data than function.
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- Web Apps are sneaking in through Port 80 just as PCs snuck in the front door twenty years ago, a phenomenon that ultimately wrestled Model, View, and Control from IBM.
- Both SaaS and Web 2.0 can be delivered on the Web, but the former tends to provide more function than data, and the latter tends to provide more data than function.

05 Mar 07

» Tracking the DIY phenomenon Part 2: Mass customization, mashups, and recombinant Web apps | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com

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diy enterprise item mashup web2.0

DIY might become a major force for leveraging the largely untapped The Long Tail of software demand, instead of becoming a giant support headache for public Web companies and internal IT departments.
now we'll look at the consumption side of the DIY phenomenon
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- But one of the big outstanding questions is if widgitizing is mostly useful for gaining fast user adoption and market share, and not for building the fundamentals of a viable, long-term business online.
- DIY on the Web is looking to be a major trend; Newsweek recently speculated that 2007 will be the Year of the Widget.
- Companies are actively "widgetizing" their online offerings so that it can actively be repurposed into other sites and online products. And as we discussed in the last post, it's believed that letting users innovate with your online offerings by letting embedding them in their own Web sites, blogs, and applications can greatly broaden distribution and reach, leverage rapid viral propagation over the Internet, and fully exploit the raw creativity that theoretically lies in great quantities on the edge of our networks.

04 Mar 07

IT|Redux - The Temptation of Reinvention

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bpm enterprise intalio standards workflow

Performance is stellar

For quite some time, using a BPM system meant taking a significant performance hit, especially when compared to the use of straight Java development. Things have changed since the early days when BPEL was spelled BPML, and today, the fastest BPMS products can rival with any alternative technology you could throw at the problem.
If you are a software vendor, or the developer of a web 2.0 application, there is only one way you should look at the problem when it comes to cost: how many developers will you need to hire and train in order to develop and maintain your own workflow or BPM solution from scratch, or even from existing open-source pieces?
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- BPEL won the battle of standards, and any BPM product that is not natively architected upon it is doomed to fall into obsolescence faster than you will be able to migrate to one that is. On the notation side, BPMN really is the only game in town
- the next generation of vendors decided to tackle the problem at a lower level, came up with a generic language capable of executing virtually any kind of process (BPML, later replaced by BPEL), and developed frameworks that would allow customers—end-users and software vendors alike—to develop any workflow pattern, without having to reinvent the wheel each time they would come up with a new one. BPEL4People is one such pattern, but there are countless others that are worth using within the context of specific busiess scenarios, and using an open-source BPMS that supports workflow as a collection of customizable processes certainly is the easiest way of supporting them all.