Andrew McAfee, the Harvard professor who coined the term "Enterprise 2.0" writes about the positive impact of social media technologies on the Intelligence community. Andrew makes a case that while massive computing power continues to be important, rich social connections between people in the intelligence community would enable better leverage of human pattern recognition.

I feel these two aspects are interdependent and self reinforcing. Picture this: Possibly, hundreds of terabytes of raw data flows into the US intelligence system on a daily basis. Thousands of "agents", both human and machine are responsible for the data. The data is then sliced and diced by super computers and the "intelligence" is dished out to analysts.

Why not enrich the data "socially" at the source and at the edges of massive computing? I don't for a minute imply that this would make computers any more human that they are. But the intelligence that comes out of the data would have more social context that would reinforce human pattern recognition. The intelligence could be further massaged at the edge to blend in with Ent 2.0 networks within the intelligence community. The results of human analysts collaborating over social networks could further be fed back in to the computers and create a virtuous cycle.

Another interesting application could be the area of psych ops. The old fashioned way is to drop pictures of a 5000 pound bomb with Bin Laden's face on it and scare people. The Ent 2.0 is to leverage the natural trust and high influence social networks have to influence and shape young people in vulnerable communities and prevent them from becoming prey to the bad guys.

What do you think ?

Gary Hamel of 'Core competence of the corporation' fame says "The Facebook Generation….. At a minimum, they’ll expect the social environment of work to reflect the social context of the Web". He goes on to layout web 2.0 practices that are most at odds with current management practices for large companies.

 I am listing these down below with my thoughts in italics on how it will affect Indian outsourcers:

1. All ideas compete on an equal footing.
Idea sharing itself is currently contained within well defined teams. Any sharing beyond these established boundaries happens as a result of management intervention or through rigid, formalized mechanisms like a KM portal. Fast forward 2020: Employees will expect organizations to encourage them to be part of virtual teams, freely contributing outside defined boundaries. Problems will be posted for anyone to attack and solve. Solutions generated in project X would be instantly accessible to someone in project Y leading to greater productivity. Web 2.0 technology would allow it!
2. Contribution counts for more than credentials.
Pay would get linked not just to designation as it currently is, but to your ability to contribute to the organization outside of your project. People on the bench would be expected to contribute to projects as part of virtual teams. Why can't it happen today ? Because the technology does not allow it. Technical problems that do not require the client or project context can easily be attacked by anyone in the organization. Future IDE's would allow this to happen. Metrics would be tracked around these and compensation linkages established.
3. Hierarchies are natural, not prescribed.
More power would flow to the developer on account on her increased ability to contribute. The power a given project manager has over her developer would decrease as multiple peer projects managers would have an 'indirect' relationship with the developer by virtue of virtual teams. The same would apply at all levels.
4. Leaders serve rather than preside.
I would modify this clause as "Managers would falter. Leaders would flourish". Getting things done through positional authority would take a back seat and skill would become central. Web 2.0 enabled virtual teams would make everyone stand naked. Measuring contribution would be easier and leaders would be forced to contribute as individuals and not just as 'bosses'.
5. Tasks are chosen, not assigned.
Virtual teams attacking problems would naturally allow individuals to choose tasks. People would gravitate towards tasks they are more skilled at doing. Individual work packets would get disaggregated into project contextual tasks and generic tasks. Generic tasks would get attacked by virtual teams who would choose the tasks they wish to do. I also envision a kind of 'competitive bidding' among employees for tasks.
6. Groups are self-defining and -organizing.
You won't always know who your project mates are. Skill and dynamic matching of those skills to tasks would define which group you belong to, who you work with and what you do.
7. Resources get attracted, not allocated.
Smarter projects run by better managers would command the best resources. People would have the freedom to choose.
8. Power comes from sharing information, not hoarding it.
Keeping knowledge to oneself and applying it to one's own task in one's own project would still be good. But applying that in a virtual team to a dozen projects would get greater visibility and recognition.
9. Opinions compound and decisions are peer-reviewed.
Web 2.0 allows you to be anonymous. This would allow real time review in virtual teams and poor decisions would get a public roasting.

Is any of this any good for us ? Well, there is good and bad in everything. :-)

How do you think Web 2.0 would affect the work force ?

Brianna echoes a dislike for the term "User generated content" for Wiki type content and suggests "Community Curated Work" as a possible alternative. Mike seems to think "curated" is inappropriate and suggests "developed" and "written" as alternatives. I would settle for "Ecosystem" instead of "Community" for the following reason "

Ecosystem: It's not always people who are part of the "known community" that contribute. Someone could refer to content from a totally unrelated article published by an individual who has no idea of Wikis and leverage that in a Wiki. So it is the broader "ecosystem" that contributes and not just the Wiki community.

So that leaves us with "Ecosystem supported content" !

The bubble has burst or what ?  Max Bleyleben over at Technofile Europe feels the party is over. "As I have commented before, most of the $1.5bn VCs have thrown at Web 2.0 startups went into cutesy but useless Web services.  Some went into infrastructure and enterprise services, but most of these didn't have defensible technology and were too easy to replicate"

Eric Schonfeld seems to concur.  "But did Web 2.0 deals peak last year? Take out the $300 million raised by Facebook, and the amount invested was up only 46 percent, a marked slowdown from the 132 percent dollar growth the year before. "

Martin Lamonica of Cnet says "Silicon Valley remains the hotbed of Web 2.0 activity, but the hipness of start-ups with goofy names is starting to cool in the face of economic reality. "

It's amazing how much money chases hype only to have the bubble burst. Yet again. Even the 17'th century had it's own bubble. The Tulip bubble. According to the Wiki "Tulip mania or tulipomania was a period in the Dutch Golden Age during which contract prices for bulbs of the newly introduced tulip reached extraordinarily high levels and then suddenly collapsed." You can read about it here.

BPEL4People was recently announced as a step towards narrowing the gap between BPM (Business Process Management) and SOA. As always, we have a lineup of biggies endorsing the new spec. Read this IBM white paper to know more. The justification for the new spec is given as :

Human user interactions are currently not covered by the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL), which is primarily designed to support automated business processes based on Web services. However the spectrum of activities that make up general purpose business processes is broader than this, because people often participate in the execution of business processes. To support a broad range of scenarios involving people within business processes, a BPEL extension is required. 

Makes sense and well intentioned, but begs the question if this is really the area where the focus should be. What is the point in adding a new layer of complexity when adoption is stifled with the complexity on existing layers ?  Just take a look at the number of specs in WS-* and you'll know what I mean. Time and money is better spent on rationalizing this spec spaghetti and thus promote mainstream adoption instead of adding to the mess.

I recently attended the JAX India seminar which covered topics like SOA and enterprise architecture. The organizers have put up some presentations online. I particularly liked the presentations by Tobias Israel, Ramesh Loganathan and Thilo Frotscher. Thilo is a top quality web services trainer/ architect and I richly recommend him for any web services related corporate training requirements. You can contact him at contact@frotscher.com. Note : I have no business relationship or personal friendship with Thilo. Just loved his sessions !  

There has been much talk about all the crap that comes loaded with a new PC and why this needs to go. There are six types of crapware if this classification is to be believed :

Adware

Foistware

Spyware

Hijackware

DriveByDownloaders

Porn diallers

While nobody would want spyware and the like, I see a lot of positive upside in allowing Adware and Foistware to thrive. Here's why:

They help reduce the cost of the PC by letting PC manufacturers sell real estate. While users in developed countries might rather pay a few dollars more to avoid Adware, the same is not necessarily true in the retail PC market in a country like India. Here, PCs are a luxury for most people. Every dollar counts and the mass market would not mind a couple of popups in exchange for cash. In fact, reducing the cost of the PC/other entry devices is critical for the retail market in developing countries to explode. I forsee Adware getting into mobile phones in India big time soon. The mobile phone will be the next biggest shopping mall in the world and there can be no mall without ads!


AdWares that gather browsing/usage can also be used to reduce end user costs. In a web2.0 world, user demographics and information on online habits are very very valuable. Google and Microsoft often ask users if anonymous information can be sent to improve software. I think there needs to be a bill of rights that lets end users charge for providing this kind of information. 


Commerical software than piggybacks on free ware (foistware) should subsidize the cost of free ware and thereby help the consumer get more choice and better software. 


Ultimately, it is for the consumer to decide what he wants, but Adware is just not plain crap.

The McKinsey report on Web 2.0 and the relative lack of corporate interest in mashups made me dig a little deeper. I pulled out some data from the programmable web and did a run of MsExcel and this is what the top ten mashup API categories look like.

Here are some quick thoughts:
All the categories are consumer internet based.

Mapping and search predominate thanks to Google and Yahoo

The enterprise potential of mashups is largely untapped at least as far as these stats go.

Sramana writes about how companies like Salesforce.com are reducing the cost of market entry with a ready made platform and an eager user base. Here's what I believe some of the strategic implications are:

Ecosystems versus monolithic products. Value in monolithic products would get deconstructed by several smaller niche players and re-aggregated into an ecosystem. The crucial enabler would be the existence of a common infrastructural stack that enables re-aggregation.

Market place fragmentation and accelerated consolidation cycles due to increased choices and easier entry. More number of companies would cross the early adopter stage but many would falter when faced with the challenges of mainstream adoption. This would force application vendors to add value or face the consequences of low lock in (see point below).

Lock in 2.0 : Increased switching costs for companies leading to lock in of a different type. Microsoft locked in people with the Windows API. Salesforce is trying to do the same thing with their "on demand" platform. But the catch here is that there is no monopoly as far as the applications that rest on the platform are concerned. They can be switched more easily to a competitor on the same platform because of the commonalities in the underlying tech stack.

Value migration within an app space. Since the infrastructural stack is the same, value will migrate from the back end to more customer facing aspects. Companies whose core competence lies in the backend might find this model unattractive.

New opportunities for product oriented services companies like Symphony Services with reduced selling and marketing costs. Get Salesforce.com as a customer and sell into the app base. You have a common platform to master and the expertise can be leveraged across the whole app community. Software delivery management in such companies would also need to evolve in step with the on-demand, perpetual Beta environment.

Systems integration will become "ecosystem gluing". The task of the integrator will be to provide services to build an ecosystem centered around the chosen SaaS platform.

Changes in the software developer marketplace with skills getting realigned to SaaS platforms versus the current orientation to technologies (J2ee, K2ee , L2ee and what not).

My prediction: Ebay will enter this space soon. The are already doing it in the consumer space with their API program. I see strong market and technology relatedness which will make it an attractive diversification.

This is a snippet from the McKinsey survey on corporate adoption of Web 2.0.

Not surprisingly Web services continues to be a hot favourite and why not ? This buzzword is as old as the internet itself but it would be unfair to club it under the Web 2.0 umbrella.

Collective intelligence comes in second and this one baffles me. The only time the wisdom of the masses has done any good is in the elections. Wiki defines it as "….an intelligence that seemingly has a mind of its own.". Duh! Even the world's second most shining example of "collective intelligence" needs a protection policy and administrators. The real collective intelligence is probably in the data that the masses generate, not in getting 64000 people to collaborate. The Google page rank algorithm is a good example. People link up to content that is good. The total number of links to a given item and the quality and relevance of those links has an embedded "intelligence" that Google uses to good effect. Good luck to all the CIO's who are signing cheques to funnel this hype.

The relative lack of importance given to RSS is also interesting. This has been around for a while and is a crucial link in the semantic web. I guess recent high profile blog fiascos have lead to corporates getting wary about blogging and the bad name has rubbed on to RSS as well.

Mashups bring up the tail, but this is one hype cycle that is still in the early adoption stage. I won't be surprised if corporate interest picks up after a while.

The complete survey can be accessed here.