Strategic Technology Analytics

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Verizon's New UC Service

Verizon just came out with a new Unified Communications service. You can read more about it on my ZDNet blog.  I first broke the news around the announcement back in May at Network Computing. Here's the original post and my analysis.

New "Team Think" Blog on ZDNet

Just started a new blog over at ZDNet called "Team Think" on new productivity tools for groups:

My mission, my promise, to you then is that you will gain practical, detailed, information about tools and technologies that enable organizational teams to work more effectively with one another. Think of it as the steps towards implementing the Borg’s Hive of Star Trek fame sans any sinister connotations.

Much of these tools and technologies fall into what’s being called “Enterprise 2.0″ or “Office 2.0″, those products that aim to enhance team collaboration through a grassroots effect, but with an overlay of IT management and control. These include Wikis, tagging and bookmarking products services, blogs, social networks and the like taken from the consumer-side, but with the right interfaces for you to deploy, secure and manage those installations within your organization.

Other tools defy the enterprise 2.0 moniker. Many are the real-time tools – VoIP, IM, and presence – that have been looked at by organizations now for several years. Some are conventional software platforms, such as project management packages. All though claim to help you achieve the kinds of results that will “transform the organization”.

Do they live up to their billing? Join me as we find out together.

Drop in for a visit and let me know what you think.

 

Enterprise Bookmarking: Tap the Power User

I just published an analysis of the enterprise bookmarking/tagging market. You can read it on EWeek here. I think I've hit everyone in the market, but if not drop me a line in the comments below and I'll add ém next time around.

My short take: Enterprise bookmarking is one cool technology that should help employees of already open, flat companies collaborate better and more effectively. Enterprise bookmarking and tagging though hinges on group collaboration, which requires enough individuals to achieve a network effort.  That means a large user base or or at least a small, but active user community, and all but requires removing the sorts of barriers you find in some financial institutions, for example. That's going to be a tough sell (more like a non-starter) in highly regulated industries.

But even in those organizations who aren't regulated or particularly hierarchical, getting user-participation will be a challenge to adoption.  Users don't bookmark or tag out of the goodness of their hearts. They do so because creating a log of important sites helps them. Only once that point is internalized will they feed an enterprise-wide bookmarking system.

What this says is that IT need to be exquisitely sensitive to the interface of these systems. "We're struggling with tagging even though there are some of us who think there's tremendous power [in the technology]," Clark Ritchie, director of Web development and information technology told me. Clark runs Jive Software's Clearspace, a tagging system, in his enterprise, which while not supporting bookmarking yet has similar human-interaction requirements. "We need the tooling to make it so stupidly easy that it takes off. "

Enterprise bookmarking systems are still far from making their systems so "stupidly easy" that they just take off. I list a number of the features in the story that are missing from today's systems, but suffice it say most have enough holes to make soliciting user participation a huge challenge. At the very least, users should be able to bookmark and tag site from the toolbar and not pop an additional screen to fill in the necessary details about a site.

Firefox's Enterprise Hangups

While Firefox offers scads of benefits there are lots of reasons why enterprises might think twice before deploying the platform. Here are some problems pointed out by  Mike Kaply, Yuriy Krylov, and friends. See the posts for suggestions as to how to address some of those issues. Much of this content will become a sort of working plan for the Enterprise Working Group

1. Release lifecycle is too short. Mozilla only supports previous Firefox version for six months after the next release is too short for many large enterprises. Most large organizations  only deploy new software once or twice a year, so half the support period could well be wasted if deployed at the wrong time of year. One year support after the release of the new version is critical.

2. Enterprise level phone support is missing

3. The business case for switching to Firefox is far from obvious.

4. Compatibility with many third-party applications remains a problem.

5. Intranet application  compatibility is its own challenge. Often internally developed applications will take years to write and then are incompatible with new  browsers.

6. Better Active Directory and Microsoft installer support is needed.

7. Better forms support. Mozilla this week was rumored to have cut off support for Xforms. (Can anybody verify?) 

8. No easy way to enforce corporate restrictions around information sharing between departments and yet share bookmarks.

9. No easy way to synchronizing bookmarks across multiple browsers.

And two others from a great post by Yuriy:

10. Enterprise Settings Management -

• How do we flip a setting on every Desktop in the event of a vulnerability?
• How do we prevent users from altering settings that are deemed risky?
• How can we enable and lock Security Zone-like implementation in Firefox

11. Granular Addon Management -

• How can we prevent a user from installing or uninstalling an extension without having to compile extensions into the browser itself?
• How do we internalize extension repositories so we can "Bless" extensions before our users get to them?
• How can we disable an extension or plugin on all desktops in the event of an emergency?

Group Adjusts Firefox for the Enterprise

Kudos to Michael Kaply and Yury Krylov for organizing the Enterprise Working Group. The first meeting will occur next week  The group goals to develop enterprise management and security for the Firefox. More specifically:

• To establish a unified governance body around Enterprise Firefox.
• To drive Enterprise requirements for the benefit of all Enterprise-scale firms and institutions
• To help each other succeed in deploying Firefox within our environments
• To recruit like-minded firms
• To share risk and cost
• To use industry influence to "raise the bar" on Web Browsers and push for WebDev best practices and open standards
• To offer perscriptive guidelines around Firefox to peers

The group's first phone call will take place on July 25th at 10:00am Pacific, 1:00pm Eastern. The meeting details are as follows:

• 650-903-0800 or 650-215-1282 x91 Conf# 280 (US/INTL)
• 1-800-707-2533 (pin 369) Conf# 280 (US)

Each call will be organized around a series of themes. The first call will be about "Experience" and Mike hopes to get folk talking about their experiences around Firefox and the importance to the organization.  Two weeks later the second call will be about "Wishlist"  where folk will have the opportunity to fill in what they think is missing from Firefox for enterprise deployment. Anonymous participation is possible and even encouraged.

'Eweek' and Enterprise 2.0

Next month, the good folks at eWEEK will run a feature of mine on enterprise bookmarking and tagging platforms.

it's very much a work in progress and would look forward to input you might have. Right now we'll examine the use cases for these platforms and share insights from major organizations who're in various stages of deploying them.

Got a use case, favorite vendor, or feature that you'd like to see covered? Drop me a line here or at dave@stanalytics.com and let me know.
Dave

Long Live the Uber-User

Stowe Boyd builds on a post in January, pointing out yet again that work is evolving away from groups and toward the individual:

First of all, I believe that because of the way that we live and work the individual is the new group [see my original post on this from January]. Stated differently, apps that purport to help us order our work should start by solving the problems of the individual, realizing that one of the issues involved in work is sharing with others.

So, I am amazed to see how many apps continue the old, old ways, where membership in groups is the primary (if not only) notion at work. All of these apps that support projects as a collection of folders into which we move documents and people get access to them through group membership.

All of which is a why you see startups -- such as JackBe, Coghead, and LongJump, and more recently BEA and IBM -- delivering mashups for the rest of us. These products assume that users, not traditional developers, will create the applications -- and business -- of tomorrow. The collective brain trust that is the user community is IT's greatest asset.

I made this point last year in an April 11th post in CMP's VoIPLine newsletter. By embracing -- even encouraging -- the uber-user, IT gets a homegrown SWAT team that can respond far faster to the business than traditional ITers because the members of that team are part of the business:

....Yet precisely those uber-users constituting the brain trust will help IT translate business requirements into technology imperatives. Group and department managers understand the needs of their respective business units, but they're vision may be myopic. In some instances, they may fail to grasp the working realities of their people. In other cases, they may lack the know-how to pinpoint what problems might be solved with today's technology.

Uber-users, on the other hand, are often pondering or grappling with the problems IT will look to solve in the future. "Power users are the bleeding edge of technology usage. By understanding the challenges and success of the power users, IT can develop the best practices and lessons learned before the technology is deployed companywide," says Zeus Kerravala, vice president of the Yankee Group.

By filtering technology suggestions and insights from this bleeding-edge group through its management, IT can received an in-depth, sanity-checked view of organizations' requirements from the folks in the field.

IT could then bring these early technology adopters into an extended 'first-strike team.'  This team would become the beta group for the enterprise, ultimately the organic support crew throughout the organization, and the watchdogs on potential security threats....

Off on My Own

Life changes are a bit nerve-racking but also incredibly exciting. Starting up Strategic Technology Analytics has been a dream of mine for years, but one thing or another got in my way. Now that I've finally left the mothership of Network Computing to launch this gig, I'm finding it awesomely exciting. New projects, new contacts... it's a blast! Tune in a bit later for details on what lies ahead.