mind this - by Lars Plougmann

Big companies use the cloud to innovate

Photo sharing service SmugMug received much attention when they published their business case for using Amazon's S3 storage service. The 2002 startup describes how the service saves them between half a million to a million USD per year.

At Headshift, we have made use of the S3 service too, most recently on a project where video is a part of the user experience.

But it is not just startups that benefit from Amazon's cloud computing services. Techcrunch asks who the biggest users of Amazon Web Services are and quotes an Amazon source who reveals that big companies make up a large proportion of the 60,000 customers.

In my view, the reason for large companies to use cloud computing is not just the potential cost advantage, it is the ability to do new and exciting stuff - such as introducing social software. Like many other FTSE100 companies, one of our client's IT operations are optimised for steady state stability. Provisioning a server for a project takes several months and costs tens of thousands of dollars. They now have a two day process to approve and set up a virtual server using a combination of Amazon's EC2 and S3 services, with user identity provision tied to existing systems.

Look to the cloud to help innovation along.

All join in

In December, I had a delightful conversation with the BBC's Peter Day and his producer Rosamund Jones at the Headshift office in front of a microphone. The In Business programme about social networking aired on Radio 4 this week.

The interview touched on a host of subjects, but featured in the programme are:

• Negative feedback about a company's products and services on social network sites: Market signals are weak insofar that if demand dries up you don't necessarily know why. By listening to the discussions happening on blogs and groups on social networks you can get useful information about how your products and services are perceived and what aspects matter to your customers (I made the same point in August when I appeared on BBC News 24... well, I hope I did, it was aired live).
• The rise of the consumer-advertiser: A recommendation from people you know and trust is the most effective route to transaction. Social networks offer a powerful transmission mechanism for recommendations. It happens by itself but advertisers and social network providers are keen to monetise it.
• Declarative commerce: When you search for something on Google you are met with advertising linked to keywords because searching is one of the closest proxies to declared intention. But what if you could unequivocally declare your intention to buy a certain type of product or service? Imagine what companies would be willing to pay to offer you theirs. (The inspiration for this point is from Doc Searls and his thoughts on VRM and from John Battelle with his coining of the database of intentions.)
• Collaborating on ideas: Organisations can boost their innovative capability by sharing their ideas and inviting contributions from a wider group. This can happen internally as well as externally.
• Twitter in the enterprise: While a fair bit of traffic on Twitter could be considered mundane, I believe the use of ultra-short from-any-device-to-any-device no-action-required messaging inside the organisation has enormous potential to tie people together and spark relevant conversations. Let the stream of information flow by and engage when relevant. Low cost attention-wise. (Since the interview was recorded I have had the pleasure of reading similar thoughts much better phrased by JP Rangaswami.)

The programme also features Kara Swisher of All Things Digital, Peter Cunningham of Viadeo, Stephen Millard of Clearswift, Penny Davis of T-Mobile, Dan Black of Ernst & Young and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffmann. You can download an mp3 of the half hour broadcast from the BBC website.

Tags: BBC social networks consumer-advertiser declarative commerce twitter Peter Day podcast radio mp3

For everybody else's eyes only

Traditional access control or authorisation regimes allow you to set up rules so that content stored in a particular place can only be accessed by people with particular permissions. The approach has never quite met the requirements of professional services and other businesses and it is likely that the model will need radical rethinking to cope in a world where tags and other metadata, rather than folders, are used to navigate information.

In knowledge-based industries the value of sharing information is so immense that a 'for your eyes only' approach to authorisation impedes productivity and innovation. Requirements for confidentiality in professional services and other businesses is often linked to information barriers (aka Chinese walls).

Authorisation rules based on information barriers are very different from the traditional drive/folder/group permissions. We need access controls to deal with rules that can be expressed as 'content tagged with client A cannot be viewed by people tagged with client B'. The underlying exclusion principle and the dynamic nature of this kind of authorisation regime make it difficult to represent in permission schemes that follow the file structure paradigm.

The collaborative tools that are put to inspiring use on the open internet need authentication and authorisation in place before they can migrate to the enterprise. Or better still, they need to integrate with existing authentication and authorisation infrastructure. But what if the organisation's existing permissioning infrastructure does not reflect the way information barriers are put in place and content is profiled?

Tags: enterprise 2.0 permission information barrier professional services authorisation tagging compliance

Consumer services should focus on mini-2D before going 3D

Visualisation of data is the first step towards interaction with that data. In this case 'visualisation' needs to be understood in a broad sense, e.g. voice response telephone banking represents a way of making your account balance and transactions options understandable.

With ubiquitous web delivery to computer screens, 2D A4 type visualisation is well honed both from a design and functionality perspective. The Digg Swarm and Google's Gap Minder are inspiring examples.

The recent hype surrounding 3D virtual worlds has moved a number of companies to invest in virtual real estates. Most of them big consumer brands who want to be seen as brand innovators but also a handful of banks with other financial institutions talking about it.

There is a spot in virtual world Second Life where some of Amazon's book catalogue can be browsed in 3D. The problem with such an approach is lack of interface value. Everybody is familiar with the book format so buying decisions are influenced by information about books and recommendations, not an experience served in 3D. Banks setting up 'branches' in virtual worlds will soon learn that 3D graphics offer next to no advantage in interacting with customers. What customers really want is to access their bank accounts securely from their mobile phones, not from a virtual cash machine.

Tags: Second Life banking consumer banking mobile banking 3D interface 2D A4

Measuring business value from social technologies

In the span of a few days, Forrester and The Economist Intelligence Unit released quantitative reports based on surveys of social technology adoption. The EIU report, sponsored by Fast, a search engine company, is available for free if you register on the Fast website. The Forrester report can be purchased online ($279 - I have yet to purchase a copy, this article is based on extracts).

Forrester looks at consumer interaction in the age of the read/write web. Who are active participants (creators), who reads and comments (critics) and who lurks (spectators) - six categories in all. EIU interviewed managers in large companies about their experiences and expectations of social software.

A question I get asked frequently about social software is "How can we use it to save money?". While there are some specific business cases for cost reduction I have always felt that collaboration primarily fosters empowerment, innovation and the potential for better quality service; the EIU survey supports this notion with figures stating that 30% of executives expect social software to offer cost savings, nearly 80% see the potential for increased revenue or higher margins.

Mashing up some of the quotes from the EIU survey, it confirms what early adopters have known for some time, namely that social tehnologies "have significant implications for big business" and that "the world's multinationals [have begun] to see many web 2.0 technologies as corporate tools" not just "frivolous" innovation amongst "enthusiasts, especially the young".

Scott Vine extracts key figures and quotes from the EIU report while Charlene Li and Ross Mayfield share their thoughts about the Forrester survey. Although the Forrester survey uses a different classification, it provides a quantitative view of Ross's widely quoted power law of participation.

Tags: web 2.0 social software research Forrester The Economist Intelligence Unit EIU cost+saving power law of participation

How to avoid mysterious golfing cart accidents

Last month, I wrote about how companies without intranets are adopting wiki platforms. This week, I met with a client who wants to replace their existing intranet with a wiki. There are many reasons to make that decision, but two stand out:

• To cut the publishing cycle from days or weeks to minutes or seconds thus ensuring that the content is more relevant
• To move from content nobody wants to read written in corporate speak to information about what is really going on written in a human voice

The importance to the client of human voice reminded me of The Cluetrain Manifesto where I dug up a quote that sums up the intranet discussion nicely:

"The intranet revolution is bottom-up. There's no going back. If a company doesn't recognize this, the top-down intranet it puts in can breed the type of cynicism that results in ugly bathroom graffiti and mysterious golfing cart accidents."

What the authors saw years ago is starting to happen (the intranet bit, not the golf cart accidents).

Tags: intranet wiki human voice The Cluetrain Manifesto golf cart accidents

OpenID in open and closed environments

Electronic calendars had been around for a decade before the subject of interconnectivity between different calendar applications became an idea that could attract capital. Within organisations calendar interoperability is generally not a problem as everybody uses the same application. Single sign-on is another area where life is easier inside the firewall with multiple SSO solutions available to companies. OpenID, a decentralised open specification identity provision solution, may be about to make SSO services, and more, available on the open internet.

With OpenID, you choose whom to entrust with your identity. You can place your trust in the big internet players like Verisign, Yahoo or AOL. Or you can opt for several non-commercial sites setting up OpenID servers (such as MyOpenID). I wouldn't be surprised if governments start offering identity services based on OpenID at a point not too far into the future. For the truly paranoid the solution is to become their own identity provider by setting up their own OpenID server. A neat thing about OpenID is that it does not mandate the authentication method so if fingerprinting or mobile phone two factor authentication is your thing, OpenID will work with it.

Besides the convenience of single sign-on across multiple websites, OpenID holds a promise to provide further identity services. When setting up a user account on a new website, OpenID offers a nifty short-cut workflow. With time I would like to see OpenID develop standards to store extended profile information such as click data and social network connections.

Consider the social networking aspect. As more and more services incorporate social network functionality, setting up a user account on a new service becomes more than just choosing a username and a password: With every new site you have to link to the same people before the site becomes useful. Unless your social network can be stored as part of your identity with the OpenID identity provider and mapped onto a new site. If your buddy list is the centre of the universe, part of your identity ("you are who you know"), why should it be replicated in so many places?

While large corporations got a head start on single sign-on compared to the open internet, OpenID closes the circle and puts SSO within reach for all organisations (it's free). The OpenID specification also works inside the firewall which should please those organisations eager to escape vendor lock-in in favour of open standards.

(Fingerprint graphic by Markus Sowada.)

Tags: OpenID identity social network single sign-on SSO

The memory of you

Google are announcing that they are going to improve privacy measures by limiting the amount of data that can be used to identify you. With personalised services there is a trade-off between the usefulness of the service and privacy: The more data for algorithms to be unleashed on, the better the resulting recommendations, search results etc. Google are planning to introduce retention policies mandating the anonymisation of data after 18 to 24 months.

On Amazon, I can see orders that I placed in 1997 when I started shopping with them. My HSBC internet banking account only allows me to see transactions up to seven weeks in the past; if I am looking for earlier information I have to resort to printed statements which is annoying (of course, HSBC will retain that data for a lot longer but I don't have access to it). How can a service you subscribe to determine what a useful retention period is?

It can't. What I hope to see in future versions of many services is a way to set the retention period for your data as part of your preferences. As the B2B software-as-a-service market matures this will be a critical feature for many businesses with retention policies already in place.

What is likely to happen in the longer term is increased user ownership of your personal data and a choice of where you want to host it. A natural service area for identity providers to expand into.

Tags: Google privacy retention identity Amazon HSBC clickstream personal data internet banking

BusinessWeek tells CEOs about wikis

In 2004 when I introduced a hosted wiki as an experiment to the knowledge department of a law firm, adoption was almost instant. I primed it with a top level structure reflecting the things that mattered to our team: People, Projects and Ideas. Within a week, two projects had decided that this was the best tool to use for project management and communication, somebody started compiling a list of useful technologies and vendors, others started sharing ideas and links to articles. Most took the opportunity to provide a richer profile of themselves than the intranet allowed. The wiki clearly filled a vacuum, somewhere between email and the document management system. Yet, a few were not interested and didn't participate.

In short, a typical wiki adoption story. But the typical story may be about to change.

Many wikis started as an experiment by a small team, then spread virally. Now, CXOs and the business press have started to notice the power of simple tools like wikis. The success of Wikipedia explains part of the fascination (imagine having your own corporate equivalent) and a number of case studies are becoming well known.

BusinessWeek just published a series of articles on wikis as part of their CEO guide to technology (main article). Last month, InformationWeek reported on Enterprise 2.0, explaining that it is about "a new architecture defined by easier, faster, and contextual organization of and access to information, expertise, and business contacts--whether co-workers, partners, or customers." Their survey found that while a third were using the new tools, most technology professionals remained wary.

As the scales tip, collaboration centric initiatives are graduating from skunkworks to management sponsored projects engaging those communities eager to participate. This increases the likelihood of broad internal adoption of powerful, enabling technologies like wikis.

Tags: wiki law firm collaboration

Specialised social networks sprout

Each new technology that comes around offers us new ways to maintain our social networks and communicate with our contacts. The telephone, email, text messages and the web not only allowed new patterns of interaction but the reduction in the amount of effort required for each social gesture facilitated growth in the number of networks we participate in. With the accelerated development of social technologies, rather than just communication technologies, in the last ten years, a new trend is is developing: Instead of mere channels to support our networking, technology is providing us with virtual places where we can go interact with our networks.

The manifestation of networks as sites means that it is becoming more explicit which networks we belong to. Explicit purpose brings value over and above mere networking. Generic networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook are building groups within their networks to cater for higher value communities but a lot of the activity in the field are new networks being launched. Specific networks for specific communities with specific functionality.

If a community already exists, the natural progression is to support it with a social network. Reuters Messaging users is one such community in the financial sector, and Reuters recently announced the imminent launch of a social network for the finance community (presumably called Reuters Space). Run by the Messaging team it will be interesting to see if Reuters has plans to open the network to people who don't use their Messaging product. The company may quickly find that, if executed right, the social network is much more valuable than the Messaging subscriptions it generates - an argument for opening up the product. The potential is huge: A platform through which Reuters' research can be consumed and 1-click access to Reuters' own sales and trading tools. Of course, the killer financial social network would be vendor neutral, offering research and trading services from Bloomberg, Reuters and others; if Reuters doesn't build it, someone else will.

Expect lots of new social network sites to appear in near future. Some will be so specialised that only few of us will hear of them but most will try to strike the balance between a large membership and shared purpose. Some of the networks will be invitation-only, others will require special conditions for membership. A common theme will be added transactional capability: The fewest possible clicks from intent to shared research to recommendations to transaction. According to Stowe Boyd, "in the future, essentially all online consumer commerce will be conducted through social means." From community to market is a natural progression.

If you are part of a social network but there is not yet a website to cater for it (or you haven't been invited), it has never been easier to build one.

Tags: social network Reuters LinkedIn Facebook Reuters Messaging Reuters Space financial markets Stowe Boyd