The Ultimate Steampunk Project needs $10

I heard John Graham-Cumming on TWiT #269 talk about the project he has started to build - 173 years later - a full scale realization of Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. Amazingly, it's never been done (only partial models exist).

Now, we are talking about a truck-sized, steam-powered machine that is Turing-complete and features (without silicon or electricity) "modern" ideas like instruction pipelining. The ultimate steampunk project. It also has a serious educational and academic aspect (including to digitize all of Babbage's plans and notes).

Due to significant private support coming forth, the pledge target has apparently been reduced from 50,000 to just 10,000 signatories. At the time of writing, John only needed another 6358 pledges of $10/£10/€10 each to get the project moving.

Now I don't often get behind fundraisers and campaigns, but this strikes me as one of those once-in-a-lifetime follies you cannot help but support. And all for about the price of the cheapest bottle of wine in the shop around the corner.

Blogarhythm: L.O.V.E. Machine WASP

Open Innovation

A provocative comment by Jason on This Week In Startups had me stop and think about the open innovation "fad".

He said something to the effect that all the open feedback and idea suggestion sites like UserVoice and GetSatisfaction were nothing but a great way for your competition to sponge on your success and out-innovate you by just pilfering all the good ideas. And you'd be a muppet to use one for your business.

The automatic reaction is that this makes logical sense. It is similar to the classic objection by the insecure and IP-obsessed to justify a closed innovation processes.

Certainly, innovating in public does expose you to some risk of IP leakage. That's undeniable. But maybe it's not so black and white: it's whether on balance you will gain more through greater engagement of an interested and motivated audience than you lose from competitors looking over your shoulder.

Personally, I think this is a false conundrum, for two reasons:

• Good ideas are not hard to find, it's what you do with them that matters


• Open Innovation is not just about the ideas

Good ideas are not hard to find, it's what you do with them

As Scott Berkun writes, it is a myth that "good ideas are hard to find".

So what if a competitor can look at all the ideas suggested and rated by your users? Who has the skill and determination to sort the wheat from the chaff and execute? Unless you have the balls to believe you can out-execute your competition, you should probably think twice about running an open innovation process.

And if you are up against a company that is running an open innovation process, Dilbert has the best advice for you.

Open Innovation is not just about the ideas

So you put up a site soliciting ideas and feedback, sit back and just implement whatever comes in. Really?

Unfortunately that is plain fantasy, perhaps with a certain appeal to (a) those who don't really like dealing with people, (b) the lazy, and (c) epic procrastinators.

Opening up to your customer base and inviting them to participate in improving your products or service is not just a cheap way to downsize the R&D group.

First, it may not be that cheap, and second, you may not get many new ideas you haven't at least considered before. But done well, what you are building is a genuine relationship with your organization's most important constituents: real and potential customers. You are giving them some power over your process, engendering ownership and loyalty.

It is also not a one way street. People will soon give up on submitting new ideas and lose any warm and fuzzy feeling if it appears their suggestions just disappear into a black hole.

In other words, closing the innovation loop with feedback is critical.

It doesn't take much effort either - just commitment. Dell use a simple blog (Ideas In Action) to showcase how IdeaStorm submissions have wormed their way into actual product and service innovations at Dell. Simple and effective, and reinforces the value of participation (hopefully accelerating the innovation process in turn). Contrast the success of IdeaStorm with other innovation forums that do not have an closed-loop process (Oracle's Mix for example).

A competitor looking over the fence into your garden may be able to steal ideas, but they can't steal the community you are building, and can't replace your role in the virtuous feedback cycle.

They can however steal your business if you screw up on execution, or treat your own customers with disdain. But if that's the case, they would have crushed you whether you ran an open innovation site or not, right?

Soundtrack for this post: With A Little Help From My Friends - Joe Cocker

#Amazon, #Audible: can you get your global act together?

I bitched about Audible for not doing a good job of serving the global audience.

Well. I just got an email today that reminded me not to forget lambasting Amazon (now audible's parent company).

Over 800 Albums for $5 Each..

..from the Amazon mp3 store. Or so it said. It was a lie and grand deception.

I so want to buy from Amazon's mp3 store - heaven save me from even considering the Apple iTunes Store - but guess what? I can't. Not authorized outside the US (even though I can buy the exact same thing on a bit of plastic and have it shipped to me).

Now, I know it is not Audible and Amazon that set these policies. It's the RIAA and the rest of the old-fashioned publishing industry (be it books or music). And judging by The Washington Post's recent article "E-books spark battle inside the publishing industry", it seems things may get worse before they get better.

But I wish Audible and Amazon were a little more aggressive in championing consumer rights. In particular, take close aim at the notion of regional distribution deals.

Once upon a time, it was reasonable to ink regional deals. After all, someone needed to provide the warehouse, retail frontage and so on. In far off, foreign lands. But in the digital age, we have global retail frontage. Local distribution deals (and all their attendant evils such as DVD region coding) are an anachronism.

To put it simply: When Amazon, Audible or any other internet distributor puts a product in their stores, it should be available (and have been sold on) a global basis. If publishers are not able to make such a deal, don't stock their stuff. Send them packing and tell them to come back when they've got a deal that works for a global audience.

But is there an incentive for Amazon, Audible and the like to take such a stand against the publishers? Well here's one: the other 80% of the world market. I loo-ve Audible (props @jason), and Amazon has been a favoured source for years. But if you keep jilting me under the control of US-centric publishers, I'll be the first to jump to a regional/truly-global competitor. Your future growth will be limited to the shores of the continental US.



Soundtrack for this post: Can't Take Me Home - Pink

The #joojoo is coming (with or without the true story)

Michael Arrington hasn't been shy about arguing his position on the CrunchPad/joojoo story, and until recently that's all we've really heard.

Reading the filing, I had the distinct feeling that everything wasn't so cut and dried as Mike claimed, and there's another story to tell.

Andrew Warner's Mixergy interview with Chandra (and subsequent discussion on TWiT) finally starts to bring some balance. I'm sure it all won't come out until the dust has settled around the court case, but I reckon there's a book in this story, a lá The Accidental Billionaires ("Crunch!"?)

Besides, now having seen it .. I want a joojoo! Short of an injunction, the joojoo is due to ship in the US in 8-10 weeks. It will be a real sad thing if the legal wrangle scuttles the joojoo's chances to have a serious shot in the market.

Business Tips via Mixergy, home of the ambitious upstart!

Project Nimbus: Gov.sg 2.0 gaining momentum!

I was excited to hear about the Project Nimbus initiative at last night's SRB meetup (Jason's the great Gladwellian connector)

When I wrote my opinion piece "Could Open Government initiatives help drive innovation in Singapore?", I had in mind a key proposition that it would be really smart for Government to push open data initiatives, as any costs or concerns associated would be repaid many times over by the resulting stimulus to local innovation and economic development.

With that in mind, it's really heartening to see that some cool cookies have gone beyond just talk, and established Project Nimbus with the goals:

• To unite the voices of Singapore Innovators and identify data sets and services we as Innovators want


• To work with content owner and government entities for the appropriate release of these data sets and services to Singapore Innovators

The main engagement point is the UserVoice page they have setup to collect and filter ideas (through the voting process). This is a great way of first making sure you are dealing with ideas that have real support and interest.

Once you have qualified ideas, the next steps are where Project Nimbus could make the difference from every other idea that ever got sent up only to have its wings fold on launch: make sure you have the idea packaged in a Government/agency-friendly way, and then ensure the message gets through to the right people (who care, and have appropriate authority).

As we were discussing yesterday, good ideas without execution are .. nothing but wishful thinking really. It seems like Project Nimbus has all the right bases covered. It will be really exciting to see the first successes start to come through (they already have two ideas progressed to the stage of taking to the agency concerned).

This could be a really interesting year;-)

Could Open Government initiatives help drive innovation in Singapore?

A few recent stories got me thinking about the status of open data in government, how that translates in Singapore, and in particular the importance of:

• open web publishing standards


• giving priority to open when developing web/data services

First, there was an interesting discussion on open government with Silona Bonewald, founder of the US League of Technical Voters, on the IT Conversations Network. Then the storm-in-a-teacup over a prematurely leaked LTA OPC announcement.

Tim O'Reilly made a convincing summary of the state of play and call for action in his recent O'Reilly Radar presentation at OSCON (and blog post Gov 2.0: It’s All About The Platform). Don't just use our voices to "shake the vending machine"; as technologists we should lend our hands to help prove that open is indeed a better strategy for Government.

And last but not least, Anil Dash posted a great review of the recent initiatives launched by the executive branch of the federal government of the United States in response to President Obama's Open Government Directive. Two notable achievements:

• Whitehouse.gov now publishes exclusively under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License


• data.gov is providing public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government, and I believe is the driver behind some incredibly useful services such as usaspending.gov

The President's CIO Vivek Kundra has since even outlined a vision where the default setting for information created by the government should be public, not secret.

President Obama is racking up some serious credibility for being able to push innovation and adoption in government, and raising the stakes for Governments the world over.

Getting traction in Singapore

As someone who has adopted Singapore as their home, my first reaction was: "it could have been us". It chaffs to see Singapore's world-leading ICT adoption not always translating into world-leading technology innovation and service enhancement.

To be fair, Singapore's iDA Infocomm Adoption Programme and the iGov2010 Strategic Plan encapsulate many of the right sentiments. The issue is timing and rate of change. But for that, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Long could easily have stolen President Obama's thunder.

But I guess the glory of being first isn't the point. Each government must run it's own race, with the focus being on sensible, timely initiatives to improve citizen engagement and stimulate innovation, the economy, and civil society in general.

There are two areas I personally believe deserve priority in Singapore, and are well within reach under the auspices of established strategies:

• Promote citizen engagement by adopting an open publishing standard for Government web sites


• Promote local innovation and technology development by giving priority to "Open" in all Government data initiatives.

Promote citizen engagement by adopting an open publishing standard for Government web sites

Case in point: Did you know that you cannot hyperlink to most government sites without first obtaining explicit permission?

I didn't believe it either until I started checking all the "Terms of Use" statements. This means, for example, that you can't post a link to the MOM list of Public Holidays on your corporate intranet without approval. To say that this flies in the face of how the web is intended to work is putting it mildly (remember what the H in HTML stands for).

mrbrown says it best in relation to the LTA brouhaha:

OPC scheme leaks online before Minister announces it. The internet is here, embargoes don't work. Tough.

Embergoes don't work, neither do attempts to prevent people from linking to a published, public internet website.

While trawling the various government Terms of Use statements, I was also struck by how widely they differ across all the government web properties.

Together, these failures to bring published government websites under some semblance of rational information rights cannot fail to hinder a real engagement of the intended consumers of the information.

Fortunately, the way forwarded has been mapped out clearly: with the example set by Whitehouse.gov, and the brave souls who have laboured over the production of the Singapore adaptation of Creative Commons.

I would dearly love to see the Government adopt a Creative Commons License (perhaps: attribution, no derivative works) as the standard for web site publishing and doing away with all the divergent and restrictive legalese in existing Terms of Use statements.

Why is this important? True citizen engagement and transparency (of the kind attempted by www.reach.gov.sg) will not succeed while Government terms of use still attempt to restrict access and use of information openly published on the web.

The results of my Terms of Use survey? 12 ministries prohibit unauthorised hyperlinking, 4 accept linking (at your own risk). I didn't count stat boards, but they typically have the more restrictive terms.

12 Ministries that prohibit Hyperlinking without Permission - 75% FAIL!

Wording varies, but generally you may only hyperlink to the homepage upon notifying in writing, and for other pages you must make a specific request and secure permission before making a hyperlink. Note that many statutory boards use similar terms. In case you think this may just be a holdover from the internet dark ages, note that all claim to have been "last updated" in the past 3 years, many in 2009.

www.gov.sg
www.mcys.gov.sg
www.mewr.gov.sg
www.mfa.gov.sg
www.mha.gov.sg
www.mica.gov.sg
www.mlaw.gov.sg
www.mof.gov.sg
www.moh.gov.sg
www.mom.gov.sg
www.mot.gov.sg
www.pmo.gov.sg

4 Ministries that are Hyperlink-friendly - 25% win

The heroes;-)

www.mindef.gov.sg
www.mnd.gov.sg
www.moe.gov.sgw
www.mti.gov.sg

Promote local innovation and technology development by giving priority to "Open" in all Government data initiatives

Earlier in August, I saw the latest press release from the Singapore Land Authority and Infocomm Development Authority concerning SG-Space (I would link to SLA's own press release from earlier in the year, but - you guessed it - according to their terms of use, I cannot without prior written permission. Here instead is the non-hyperlinked URL: http://www.sla.gov.sg/htm/new/new2009/new1002.htm)

The goals of SG-Space are laudible - "..to provide an infrastructure, mechanism and policies to allow convenient access to quality geospatial information.." and "..creating a transparent and collaborative environment.." - however it seems to be a good example of how closed, proprietary approaches to innovation still dominate:

• initial rollout will be limited to government agencies, this may mean for years given that this is now a $27m project over 5 years


• the scope seems not only limited to provision of data services, but also includes the provision of applications


• the intent is to extend to the private sector, and to the individual, but the timeframe and commercial basis for this are not clear

The approach has all the hallmarks of the traditional attempt to control and manage innovation through a series of government pilots, before gradually opening up a "fully baked" infrastructure for wider use. Valid, maybe, but one that ignores the lessons from successful API/service innovations such as flickr, google maps and amazon and so on. The open innovation route promises better results, faster:

• going open early drammatically accelerates innovation due to the network effect (a key theme of Patricia Seybold's Outside Innovation


• going open creates the opportunity for unexpected, unplanned innovation (who could have imagined a site like gothere.sg even 5 years ago?).


• by engaging a broader community in the open, much more can be achieved for less (an good example being how gothere.sg allow everyone to contribute missing or new location details)

As Tim O'Reilly put it: DIY on a civic scale (he since adopted a more civic-minded "Do It Ourselves" as suggested by Scott Heiferman)

Although SLA talk about wanting to "Start with pilot projects and be quick to scale up" (Mr Lam Joon Khoi, Chief Executive, SLA), by choosing a closed route there is the distinct possibility that quick just isn't quick enough. Rather than harness the collective energies of the technology community in Singapore, it's more likely to see private efforts stalled completely, or diverted into "Do It Ourselves" initiatives (e.g. OpenStreetMap).

A largely unsung example of how "open" can work very successfully in Singapore is BookJetty. By opening up it's information services, the National Library Board has provided the opportunity for an individual entrepreneur and technologist to combine government and non-government information and create an amazingly compelling service that is not only relevant in Singapore, but also has a global audience.

BookJetty is an example of service innovation that the NLB itself could not have attempted. Since the needs that BookJetty serves are at least one step removed from the core mission of the NLB, I doubt they would even be in the position to officially identify and imagine such a service. But by opening their information services to the private sector and individuals, they paved the way for others to innovate in unimagined ways.

Imagine what possibilities there would be for improving the efficiency and level of service if a similar approach was taken to Government Procurement by GeBIZ? http://www.gebiz.gov.sg (sigh, another site that prohibits hyperlinks)

I think it's worthwhile pausing to consider the restrictions imposed by data.gov:

data accessed through Data.gov do not, and should not, include controls over its end use.

This is fundamental to the idea of Government as a Platform. It recognises that government does not have a monopoly on creativity and innovation, and that promoting private sector innovation and entrepreneurship is a priority.

Here is an opportunity for Singapore to greatly boost innovation and ecomomic development by giving early priority to openness in all Government data and service initiatives. The community is certainly brimming with ideas (see what was discussed at a recent WebSG meeting for example).

Singapore seriously does have a small, but vibrant, technology "startup" community. The Government does a great deal to try and stimulate entrepreneurship in this sector, but I would say the results have been middling at best. The main support is in terms of grants and programs (offered by MDA, iDA, Spring and EDB for example), and the opportunity to secure standard government contracts to work directly for the public sector.

Why is this important? I think the time has come to seriously consider how Government can significantly accelerate local technology innovation and economic development by giving serious, strategic priority to opening up it's data and service platform. The iDA Web Services adoption strategy has in fact already lit the path, but it seems to miss the high level push it needs, and a recognition that it most definitely does not mean that Government needs to "Do It All Themselves":

..the programme targets government agencies encouraging them to make available information or services via Web Services. The end result would be citizens making use of richer services via their preferred access points.

Conclusion (or Hypothesis?)

I guess it boils down to a belief that "Open is Better" when applied to government data and services: both for the benefit of civic dialogue and engagement; and to maximise the stimulus for economic development in the local technology sector.

But I wonder if my thoughts are just "outliers"? I'd be very interested to hear more real examples from people of:

• successful innovations that have been enabled through the use of existing open data/services offered by the public sector


• areas you desperately would like to innovate in, but are being held back by closed or inaccessible services

Whether you agree with the priorities I am suggesting or not, I hope most would think that this is an important subject to be discussing.

Making HackerspaceSG: The Zouk of Geekdom

The technical/geek community in Singapore has been showing some vibrant signs of life in recent times.

• geekcampsg some 80 or so people gave up their Saturday for 12 solid hours of geekdom - from robotics, to natural language processing, to android development and more


• Singapore Ruby Brigade is going from strength to strength - last Thursday's meetup at wego packed in some 30 people (I guess). They had to kick us out after 10pm and 3 hours of presentations, questions and discussions. That didn't stop most from gathering around the corner for supper that ended after midnight!

The next project is more ambitious: establish a Hackerspace in Singapore. Hackerspaces are community-operated physical places, where people can meet and work on their projects (more)

In order to get this off the ground, a pledge drive has started. Find out how to pledge a donation.

Updated 5-Sep: pledgie no longer being used for the donation drive, so remove the badge

Launched: I Tweet My Way - Getting things done for the twitter generation

I Tweet My Way is a twitter application to help you to set goals and get things done with the support of your friends and followers.

It's an application I've had in stealth for a while, but decided it is about time to let it out in the wild.

Do you have a goal you really want to work on? Quitting smoking, losing weight, paying off the credit card, or learning a new skill - these (and anything else you can imagine) are all suitable objectives to set yourself with I Tweet My Way.

I've had a long-standing interest in goal setting and tracking, but I must admit it was the advent of the "twitter-application" fad that got me thinking about how you could do a "getting things done" style personal trainer with Twitter. Now I'm looking forward to see how it gets used for real. I'm very interested in any feedback you may have. Did it help? Does it work? Why didn't it help or fit your needs?

Technically, it was built with rails and uses the Twitter OAuth support for authentication (you can read more about that here). I have it hosted at heroku (my favourite rails hosting service, although I am a bit leary about performance in the Asian region at the moment).

NB: the site currently comes without soundtrack, but think "mbube, the lion sleeps tonight";-)

Yes, of course we have an open social media policy

We embrace openness and customer engagement using the latest social media tools such as twitter, facebook and blogs*

* subject to prior approval, review, certain topic restrictions and we reserve the right to change our mind, terminating your network or your employment, now or at any time in the future. Have a nice day.

Tom Fishburne perfectly captures the reality of how many big companies really work. This may be painfully funny, but sadly I don't think it's all fiction...

Idea #105: what name babby? (Dugg already pwned)

I just saw namemasher.com mentioned on programmable web.

It's a first step towards addressing one of humankind's biggest challenges: forget about running out of IP addresses, we're going to run out of usernames first!

What kind of handle do you think your children be able to get on Friendfeed? Under what name will your grandchildren be able to tweet? And do you think they stand a chance of getting the same nick across all their services?

There's a mad stampede for names going on, and any self-respecting parent (or prospective parent) who wants to bring up their children right ought to be out there buying up their progeny's place in cyberspace. Along with the tuition fund you need: website domain name, email account, twitter handle, skype, tumblr ... who knows which will survive, so get them all.

You never know: what if you kid gets famous, or even goes into politics? It wouldn't be very presidential if they tweeted as @spaceycasey123456.

Parents need something more than namemasher. In addition to the parents' names, it needs to munge in family and cultural background, existing baby name references like babynames.com (that's the one with the helpful definition of Espn), cross-check against existing accounts with something like namechk.com, and then go out and pre-register all the services for your unborn child. What an 18th birthday present that would make!

In short, the world needs wotnamebabby.com:

Oracle Community on Stackoverflow?

Stackoverflow quietly moved into public beta last week, and I'm stunned by how active it is already.

I'm looking at pages of really funky technical questions here that I haven't a clue how to answer ... and they all have at least one answer in response already.

There are even 106 questions in the "oracle" category.

If you haven't checked it out yet, Stack Overflow is simply a "programming Q & A site". As they say in the FAQ:

What's so special about this? Well, nothing, really. It’s a programming Q&A website. The only unusual thing we do is synthesize aspects of Wikis, Blogs, Forums, and Digg/Reddit in a way that is somewhat original. Or at least we think so.

I have big hopes for this site. The best developer communities I ever participated in were on the old network news/nntp, until it started getting overtaken by the web in the late nineties. Ever since then I've never really found an "optimal" community. It's either everyone (aka google), very specialist mailing lists, or web forums that tend to be too fragmented or low volume to be really useful.

I think this site has great promise to be a well-known meeting place for the world-wide developer community to collect and share knowledge. And I hope we see a huge "Oracle Community" presence (Open Metalink+Forums+Wiki 2.0).

There are two things that have really interested me about this site:

Firstly, it was started by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror). Nuff said.

Second has been the community engagement during the development process. They've had a podcast which I've been listening to for the past 21 weeks. It's a great fly-on-the-wall kind of experience, having the chance to listen to the developers discuss the site while they are still building it. I hope we hear more development done this way.

Do you have a question or maybe some answers? I really recommend everyone should take the plunge and test it out.

Any site that spawned a parody site even before it was launched can't be all bad!

OpenID - the missing spice in Enterprise 2.0?

I have been playing around with OpenID recently and considering its significance. OpenID offers a "single digital identity .. you can login to all your favourite websites", and its adoption is rapidly accelerating especially since services like Yahoo and Blogger have added OpenID support to the many millions of existing user accounts.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but I am surprised by the lack of attention OpenID is getting in the enterprise context.

And when it is considered, it is often as an either/or proposition. As Nishant Kaushik writes in his excellent identity blog:

.. simple web applications with minimal needs could get away with simply supporting OpenID. But that should not be confused with not requiring a full-fledged identity services infrastructure where appropriate.

I think this is somewhat misdirected; certainly not the whole story. OpenID-enabling existing applications for an external audience is already a trivial exercise. It's a simple API, and plugins or toolkits are available for most programming environments. I think the much bigger deal is looking at OpenID from the opposite perspective - using enterprise security infrastructure to support OpenID authentication.

In my view, OpenID is key to unlocking the true potential of "Enterprise 2.0", which is what I wanted to discuss here to try and explain my thoughts and get some feedback.

It may also lead us to think more clearly about what Enterprise 2.0 really is. This is the current definition up on wikipedia:

Enterprise social software, also known as Enterprise 2.0, is a term describing social software used in "enterprise" (business) contexts..

The "social" nature of Web 2.0 tends to get the headlines, and hence by simple transference must be to basis of Enterprise 2.0. Right?

However, I'm not convinced.

Expecting Enterprise 2.0 success by simply adopting social networking features of Web 2.0 just seems a little naive. For a start, it implies and requires phenomenal change in the social and organisational fabric of a company to get off the ground, and there is no guarantee the benefits will be worth the pain of change. In many organisations it may just be too much, too soon, and fail completely.

Much as I love them, I don't even think "mashups" will be the killer app for Enterprise 2.0.

I think the key is a much more mundane aspect of Web 2.0 that gets lost in the facebook frenzy: the simple fact that users are being exposed to just so darn many useful tools in the ever increasing range of web applications (or Rich Internet Applications aka RIA).

We see unprecedented utility in the applications on offer, approaching what we expect from desktop or dedicated applications. And there is an incredibly low barrier to participation - you can sign-up within a minute and with usually no immediate associated cost.

So my main proposition is that the quick win for Enterprise 2.0 is for companies exploit the RIA boom. Spend your time figuring out how to exploit the burgeoning Web Application offerings. Do NOT waste your time scheming how to clamp down on usage, or on replicating the tools yourself.

The real and immediate benefits include reduced IT spend, better utility and happier users .. and set the stage for moving to the world of "Advanced Enterprise 2.0" with mashups and social networking for example.

The caveat of course is that the enterprise must ensure that matters of availability, data protection, confidentiality and privacy are not compromised in making such a move.

But this presents a dilemma for the enterprise. A tough choice between undesirable outcomes:

1. ban and fore-go the benefits of adopting external Web Applications for enterprise use;


2. allow their use, but lose control of the data, identities and secondary use derived from using such applications;


3. or be faced with re-implementing all those cool features within the firewall (and risk becoming disconnected from the external audience).

This leads us to the present state-of-the-art in Enterprise 2.0, which must necessarily work around the constraints of the corporate boundary.

• Some companies are adopting External Web Applications where they address a largely external audience (a good example is the official Oracle Wiki which runs on wetpaint). But here they remain disconnected from internal systems.


• For internal adoption of Web 2.0 technology, IT departments are often re-implementing all the cool stuff inside the firewall.
  
  The CEO wants a blog? Customer support want to setup a wiki? Sure, we can install it. Where install means friggin' around for a few months to select and acquire the software, integrate it with the standard enterprise security/monitoring/hosting/blah environment, customise it to the corporate branding etc etc.
  

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more.. suddenly Enterprise 2.0 doesn't seem so exciting.

And I think it denies the dirty little secret that I bet exists in most organisation: your employees are already using these services for business purposes!

Using a personal credential for business purposes on an external service (whether OpenID or not) presents a whole range of challenges:

• It is a provisioning nightmare. What happens when the employee leaves? The company doesn't control the account, so it can't be disabled. Whether you can remove access from any corporate data held in the external service depends totally on the application itself and how it was setup.


• For the individual, there is a concern about keeping their professional and private lives appropriately separated. Too easy for your tweets to end up in the wrong hands in the wrong context.

So what's a girl to do? I'd suggest the answer is pretty obvious - we need corporate identities that can extend beyond the boundaries of the the organisation in a safe and controlled manner. This was the intention with SAML, but adoption has been slow - I suspect hindered by the complexity of its WS-Deathstar burden - and now OpenID is streets ahead in terms of acceptance (an interesting parallel to the adoption of SOAP v. REST for SOA Web Services).

In other words, the key to all of this IDENTITY.

Imagine for a moment the ideal world. I would have a corporate identity that works transparently within the enterprise and also for useful external services. And I could keep this quite separate from my personal identity (even though I may use some of the same external services on my own time).


The question now is whether we are far from being able to achieve this? I think not...

The call to Enterprise Identity Management Stack providers..

That means Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Sun and so on.. the companies that produce the security software that is managing your enterprise identity every time you sign in to an enterprise application.

Many of these guys are members of the OpenID Foundation, but on the whole it is hard to find clear statements of direction at the moment, and the initial focus has been around demonstrations of how they can use credentials from other OpenID providers.

We need to see two things in particular:

• OpenID provider support in their core identity management stacks, so that enterprise credentials can be used as OpenID credentials under the control of the company (e.g. they can be disabled when the employee leaves). Call that part of a "Service Oriented Security" strategy if you like, just make the option available;-)


• Include that ability to blacklist/whitelist sites that the credentials can be used for.
  
  There will always be good reasons why certain Web Applications may be off limits for corporate use. For example, a law firm may not be able to use Google Documents because of jurisdictional concerns.

Dion Hinchcliffe presented the case well in the recent article "openid: The once and future enterprise Single Sign-On?", along with a great visualisation:

The call to Web Application providers..

Firstly, the big guys like Yahoo! need to support third party OpenID credentials. This seemed to be the main thrust of Hinchcliffe's article. I hope this is just a matter of maturity and not business model pig-headedness, but to offer OpenID sign-in only if your OpenID provider is the same company is not really in the right spirit of things!

More generally applicable however is a major consideration for any Web Application provider that wants to target the enterprise market: addressing the security issue with OpenID support only opens the door. To step through, you must be ready to meet the specific demands of an enterprise customer.

First of these must be data ownership. I didn't want to focus on it in this post because I think it is an orthogonal concern to security. But if you want enterprise customers, be prepared to to consider requirements such as:

• Access to all data owned by the company's users on the service. For backup, export, and analytics.


• Audit and compliance


• Service levels

The call to Enterprise Software vendors..

The idea of a "Web 2.0 appliance" is I think very attractive to many organisations: an easy on-ramp to the space without the need to build up a whole range of specialist skills within the company. In the appliance category I would include Oracle WebCenter and the new IBM Mashup Center. Needing OpenID authentication support in these products is of course a no-brainer in order for them to have appeal in cases where you wish to mix internal and external user audiences.

Enterprise Software vendors need to go further however. The enterprise of the future, which expects to operate seamlessly on the web, will need the ability to "export" corporate identity to the world. Right now, that means capabilities like having OpenID provider support in your Enterprise Identity Management services.

Given the state of consolidation in the industry however, OpenID may present a dilemma for vendors who are faced with the prospect of OpenID support in their Identity Management stack cannibalizing sales of their application suites, as users start to exploit external Web Applications.

But to be recalcitrant and stand against the move to OpenID will only accelerate the onset of a winner-takes-all showdown in the enterprise applications market.

Personally, I believe the showdown is inevitable: with the combined pressures of RIAs, cloud computing, oligopolistic pricing and increasingly sophisticated open source alternatives, I think it is quite likely we will see the enterprise software market go supernova within the next 5 years i.e. blow itself to pieces after a few more years of consolidation ... but that's a topic for another post perhaps;-)

The enteprise software vendors that survive will be the ones who truly embrace being open, and that includes OpenID.

Conclusions?

Well, I wonder if I've convinced anyone?

To me it seems that the ability for enterprises to add OpenID provider support to their security infrastructure will be the key to unlocking the full potential of Enterprise 2.0.

Until such a facility is available from the mainstream Identity Management vendors, we will just be messing around on the fringe.

NB: edited for clarity 9-Sep-2008

The cutting edge of web applications? 280slides

It is amazing to see the art of the rich internet application (RIA) rocketing ahead over the past year or so, after a slow and troubled gestation over the past 12 years or so. Much of the progress has been incremental and focused on technical reimplementation of old non-web concepts (think event handling in a form GUI). Sometimes we take a big leap forward (think rails, prototype).

37signals arguably kicked of the current phase of web applications with basecamp that finally allow us to forget we are working in a browser (or was it writely? - now google docs).

Now we are seeing a selection of frameworks or products specifically designed for building modern RIAs. Rails is of course now fairly established in this space, but products like Flex, Air, Appcelerator and WaveMaker are redefining the envelope.

Well I'll be bold enough to say now that I think the guys from 280North have just redefined the cutting edge again with their powerpoint/keynote killer called 280Slides.

It's just out in public beta (isn't everything?), but I challenge you not to be impressed with just how much like a great piece of desktop software it is ... except you've also got the power of web access, sharing and delivery.


Perhaps even more impressive is the story behind the app, which you can hear in an interview on net@nite #57. When these guys set out to write web applications (like 280slides), they wanted a real development environment - like cocoa which they were familiar with having worked at Apple. So they built a cocoa-compatible/Objective-C like platform that runs in pure javascript. That's what is running 280slides, but building it is like building any old cocoa app. NB: the platform is still being kept internal, but their intention is to go open source when it is ready for the wild.

280North have only recently gone public with 280slides and the platform they have been building. Interesting to see at the same time we have Apple announcing a more conventional javascript library SproutCore. Can anyone spell a-c-q-u-i-s-i-t-i-o-n  t-a-r-g-e-t?

Exciting times!

Doing one thing at a time

James Shore discussed Agile Release Planning on this recent PM podcast, and it was refreshing to hear the benefits of agile pitched to a product management audience.

Like the best ideas, the tenets of agile appear almost too simple to be true. "Master of the bleeding obvious" Basil Fawlty would say. Yet most organisations seem structurally incapable of behaving along these lines.

James' presentation is very entertaining, and well worth a listen. He keeps the agenda short and well tuned to a PM audience. Although the ideas are born from a software environment, they are largely transferable to other domains. A discussion of five concepts to help you increase the value you deliver in business:

• Work on one project at a time .. it improves your ROI


• Release early and often .. get to market faster with a minimum, but valuable feature-set. Not only do you get to take advantage of the real customer voice sooner, but, again, better ROI.


• Adapt your plans .. to slavishly avoid change is to confound the opportunity to increase the value of your work as new things are learned along the way


• Conduct experiments .. your project can have many outcomes, and you will never know which is best unless you test options, collect data, and analyse


• Plan at the last responsible moment .. avoid costly planning that is basically trying to predict the future (unsuccessfully). The later the decision, the more information you will have available to make a good decision.

The one project at a time struck a chord with me, as I've recently been campaigning in a minor way along these lines. The classic "proof" is the positive impact it can have on ROI if you allow appropriately sized teams to focus on one thing at a time. This is of course in addition to any productivity benefits you get from avoiding task switching, and giving people the chance to get into a flow state.

Here's my version of the graphic to illustrate the point:

net.gain

..or "how to (try) and make the new economy work like the old one" I recently borrowed John Hagel III and Arther G. Armstrong's Net Gain: Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communitiesfrom a colleague for a quick read. It was published in 1997 by McKinsey & Company, and I must say it kinda shows. The book suffers from a myopic pre-occupation with the dual assumptions that: organisations must race to establish virtual communities: the spoils will go to the fast and the bold the aim is to profit from transactions conducted by the community while also garnering peerless customer loyalty Ah, the golden days of the internet bubble! This is an interesting read if for no other reason than to see how far we have come; how much has been learnt, and how much we have yet to learn.

As I studied the authors' recipe for profitable community-building I found myself challenging the principle that success requires an imposition of control by an organisation: the company studies the market, decides what community should be built, writes a business case for it, and appoints the expert team to design, build, launch, and market the community.

This is an astonishing proposition given the book's initial premise:

The rise of virtual communities .. has set in motion an unprecedented shift in power from vendors of goods and services to the customers who buy them.

"Over my dead body!" I can hear the voices echoing from the boardroom - undoubtedly the prime audience for this book, which I think could reasonably be subtitled "how to (try) and make the new economy work like the old one".

The idea of a "community" that is both external to the organisation while remaining under its control permeates the book, and is perhaps the primary misconception that has taken the past 10 years to rethink and recognise for the oxymoron that it is.

This is closely related to the fundamental yet unspoken assumption of a hard boundary between the corporation and the customer/community. In parts of the book that consider the use of communities within the corporation, the emphasis is very much on within the corporation, or at most, between business partners.

My comments have been a little disparaging, and it is perhaps unfair to find fault in failing to predict the future accurately. It does mean that this book is now little more than a historical curiosity.

However, the book I would be very interested to read is a "10th anniversary rewrite". For my money, I'd say that's Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (any other recommendations? I'm keen to hear..)

For now, I think I'll let Geek and Poke have the last word...




Originally posted on It's a Prata Life

Business Networking that Doesn't Suck

I really like Geoffrey Grosenbach's ruby on rails podcast, especially because it's not just about rails (even though Rails is a keen interest of mine).

On the latest issue, I was excited to learn about biznik.com. "Business Networking that Doesn't Suck" as they say.

I immediately subscribed, but was disappointed to find that there's nothing happening in my local area yet (Singapore), at least not within 6000km.


Something that we should change soon, especially given the attention paid to entrepreneurship in Singapore. Take the efforts of SPRING for example, or the investment that the government is making in Interactive Digital Media.

I love the idea of this site, and hope to find some local compatriots up there soon!

Innovation and Two Book Recommendations

There's a great quote in Chad Fowler's My Job Went to India which I just posted a quick review of: In business, ideas are dime a dozen. It's the blood, sweat, tears and money you pour into a product that make it really worth something. I'd extend that and link it to a later part of the book that focuses on Execution. To be successful, raw ability will get you only so far. The final stretch is populated by closers - people who finish things. As Theodore Levitt said: Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things. In other words, the key is doing. One of my pet subjects;-) I can come up with a million creative ideas, but without follow-through, its all just a bit of mental fun. An excellent companion read is Scott Berkun's The Myths of Innovation. Get them both on your bookshelf! The sooner, the better.

Got a License to Operate Your Brain?

Geoffrey Grosenbach took a diversion on the Ruby on Rails podcast recently, with a fascinating two-part interview with John Medina (part 1, part 2). Medina is a very engaging speaker, with some controversial but well researched ideas on how the brain works, and why so many of our social conventions in school and the workplace actually conspire against optimal brain performance. I gather its a discussion of many of the ideas from his book Brain Rules. Well worth a listen.

Does your team have "hustle"?

I was reminded recently of a quote from Frederick Brooks' classic The Mythical Man-Month

A baseball manager recognizes a nonphysical telent, hustle, as an essential gift of great players and great teams. It is the characteristic of running faster than necessary, moving sooner than necessary, trying harder than necessary. It is essential for great programming teams, too.

Hustle. You'll know it if you've got it, but if you don't, then how do you get it?

Knowing that you should even be asking this question is I think a good indicator that as a Project Manager you may even be on the road to becoming a great Leader! Peter Drucker wrote "Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant."

The term management has of course been so abused and ridiculed (thanks to Scott Adams et al and untold thousands who have assumed the title but not the competence) that its common usage is a far cry from Drucker's meaning, which I personally define as the nexus of (little-m) management [the science of knowing] and leadership [the art of making things happen].

So back to the question of hustle. Probably the most common problem I've seen in practice is that you have a team of really smart people, but they simply can't fix on what to hustle about. Either they've lost their way (like after a major release), or never found it in the first place (can't pin down some fundamental vision, design or architectural issues). Once you are underway however, a problem common to large projects is that your day-to-day/week-to-week work is just lost in this huge 18-month timeline. You can't hustle for 18-months straight, so why hustle at all?

Now anyone in the business of development will immediately think of a few methods-du-jour for tackling these kind of situations: scrum, prototyping, XP etc.

Common to these methods is the idea breaking problems down into achievable steps or iterations, and importantly emphasising the delivery of something concrete each time.

To generalise, they provide a sense of "where we are", and a series of tangible near-term goals for "where we want to go".

In other words, find a sense of purpose and you're on the way to unleashing some hustle.

Now isn't that what good leadership is all about? Having a clear vision. Understanding the people in your team, how they are motivated, how they are "blocked". And then creating the circumstances under which the team can realise the vision.

As a Project Manager responsible for delivering results, every tool deserves to be questioned and considered as part of your strategy.

Take something as fundamental as your project plan/gantt chart. Based on average software project success rates, there's upwards of a 70% chance your project plan is just lulling upper management into a false sense of security, while also serving as a daily reminder to the team of the impossibility of the task at hand. Why do you even bother?

If you are going to toil over one at all, consider whether it is really doing the job of communicating where we are/where we want to go to the team. Is the team reading it? Does the team even have access to it??

Is it posted up on the wall, and referred to whenever two or more team members are having a conversation? Or is it a crufty bit of detritus that lives in a folder that no-one other than the PM uses (and they don't have MS Project installed anyway)?

Worse yet, is the cryptic, mystical project plan actually contributing to the fuzziness of the team not really knowing exactly where we are or where we are going? And killing any hope of seeing some hustle..

An Ode to SOA - The Story of Eric the Architect

I recently discovered the following manuscript in my attic. It was an emotional moment, being my chronicle of the friendship I shared with a pioneer of the information age. Ultimately rejected and disowned by is peers, Eric was a champion of all that is good in IT. I share this now, in the hope that future generations may see the error of their ways...

I'd like to tell you the story of my friend Eric. Known amongst his closest friends (like Greg) as "Eric the Architect", a veteran of the Enterprisey Wars.

He's had an amazing career. If you are of a certain age like Eric, you have grown up with the explosion of information technology in the enterprise. You may even share his experience of the great putsch to create a new, better world in which order and control reign over chaos and individualism.

I remember Eric telling me of his early days in the cabala, just starting out as a novice. Duely consecrated, Eric got a job in the dungeons of a well established banking institution. A silver-tongued pin-stripe jockey from Manhattan had convinced the MD to jump aboard the new business revolution. Delivering your quarterly report was no longer going to be dependent upon legions of handle-cranking, visor-tipping clerks. Blechley Park had marked the path. The transistor was upon us! Eric was trained in the art of COBOL. As an accolite, he got to experience the power passed down from the denizons on high. Early assignments introduced him to the adrenaline rush that comes from raising sheilded wing over the hoards of minions in whose hands the destiny of the Comapany had been entrusted. "Show us the light, Master!" they called out. And Eric replied: 004900 MOVE STACK-FRAME (S390) TO CURRENT-FRAME

But little did the heathens respect the God-given mission of Eric. Newly promoted to Sturmbanfurher, Eric struggled with disention and mutiny. Did they not understand that by submission to the higher powers that be, all could enjoy the magnificence of the Corporation? How dare they challenge Eric's mandate to engineer a perfect mechanism through mystical manipulation of the mainframe? To think the proletariat would rise up and demand their rights to having their own Personal Computer on their desk!

And there lie the seeds of the Great Corporate War. Oh, the devastation! Corporate plans laid to waste, lives ruined, as the forces of good were trapped in pitted battle with the revolutionaries and their new fangled "personal" computing machines. Some said it was the war to end all wars, but devilish forces were afoot.

Recollections of meeting Eric after the war are not pleasant. Seeing him slumped in a wicker chair with but a thin blanket draping his legs while we swilled gluwein in the crisp alpine air was more than a man can bear. The scars of battle were deep, but I was surprised by the tenacity of Eric's spirit. It seemed that defeat had done nothing but steel him for battles ahead.

In restrospect, it is hard to comprehend the circumstances by which some hyphenated upstart in a minor European duchy could re-ignite the forces of war. But set the world ablaze he did, and by the devious means of dragging the perfect and sacrosanct SGML into vulgar gutterism of the bastard child, HTML. Eric found that the comfortable detante negotiated and sanctioned by the power of the Ring of Tokens had been laid assunder.

Once more, the civilized world was thrown into the evil clutches of revisionism and subversion. Gnostic apostates proclaimed the false god of layered architecture. N-tiers were shed in remorse. Uberlieutenant Eric, sufficiently recovered from his wounds, slew into battle with a fierce war-cry that was heard to the ends of the earth. "Eeeaaaaaiiii!" he screamed. Many rallied to his call, and became the vanguard of EAI corps. You may have seen a photograph of them valiantly trying to raise the flag under an undying onslaught. Island by island, Eric fought the demonic forces back into a corner. "There is, was, and forever will be only one way to honour the gods of business!" he lambasted.

But the forces of darkness were not so easily asuaged. Foresaking conventional means, they resorted to guerilla tactics. Casting a web to ensnare the world. Your workmates, family, friends, even the rental scum down your street are not spared from the tenticles of the terrorist's poke.

I remember Eric telling me how it was like trying to sculpt jello. Think you have one spurt under control, and you are faced with another outbreak on your flank. Eric's armoury was deficient. A new weapon was required.

"So ... what did you do?" I pressed.

"So .. ahhhh .." he replied. I'd be kind to say it was heart-felt. As I sat there listening to him prattle on about how his compadres were testing their so-called "SOA bomb", version 2.0, under ultra-secret development, I knew I was listening to the meandering ramblings of a Hero of the Revolution whose time had passed.

"There, there.." I said.

"You must continue the good work, my Son!" His spindrift fingers clawed at my new Armani shirt. A moment's annoyance passed in my eyes, as I looked into the well-pools of emotion that seemd to kindle his only spark of life. Depressing, yes. But what can you really say to someone looking over the horizon at the Gucci-robed sickler? Not exactly an opportune moment to discuss how he may have been misguided.

"Don't worry, Father. The world is in safe hands." I murmered. "Global Megolith 2.0 has sued for peace. The ruby rises high in the sky in the constellation of Venus, just as the prophet foretold. Bands of insurgents are joining forces around the globe as we speak. You have not faught in vain. We understand now that just as there is an enemy within, there is also a friend. We are learning to make love (it's complicated), not war. We don't need to fight anymore!"

"Your work is done..." I sanctimoniously purred as I lay my hand upon his forehead and gently pressed his eyelids down (it doesn't work like in the movies, btw).

Fact, or science fiction? SOA world domination is still within our grasp...