The two related concepts of Enterprise 2.0 and Software as a Service (SaaS) have been getting a lot of attention recently, as both are seen as vital to the next stage of the huge enterprise IT market. The question is how and when will these trends begin to significantly transform the way people experience IT within large companies?
Dion Hinchcliffe is an informed and relevant read on matters relating to Enterprise 2.0. His predictions for 2007 were good, and in terms of existing practice, his coverage of IBM's excellent work in this area at the Web 2.0 Summit is worth bookmarking. Last week he picked up on Euan's popular and engaging piece on enterprise 2.0 that suggested the best thing companies can do is to "get out of the way" and "allow" their smart people do it themselves, and responded with some thoughts on where Enterprise 2.0 is heading:
Enterprise 2.0-style IT requires a shift to much more openness using a Web model, a shift in preferred end-user tools, and flat collaborative space in order for it to work and get reasonable returns. Or we'll just replace Microsoft Office and e-mail with E2.0 apps and mostly be right back where we started. Those that represent to be doing Enterprise 2.0 solely through tool rollout and no infrastructure remediation will almost certainly be among those reporting less encouraging results.
Some of the challenges to a completely bottom-up approach
Euan's vision is lovely of course, but the reality is a lot more mundane and a lot more complex - it is the prerogative of the thinker to make such statements and the curse of the architect to try to make them a reality ;-) As Dion implies, enlightened internal bloggers cannot easily evolve a company-wide Single-Sign On system that can support their grassroots efforts, nor solve the problem of internal data and application integration to make their externally-hosted wikis connected with the business. The key infrastructural elements are often inside the firewall and inaccessible from outside, and rightly or wrongly much IT policy is not really ready for the Software as a Service aspects of this. Without work on the level of infrastructure and data integration, there is a real danger that internal social computing efforts will fail to have the transformational impact that we believe they should.
On the technical level, the integration challenges are non-trivial:
- identity / Single Sign On (SSO);
- internal application integration;
- legislative obligations for data retention, privacy and audit; and,
- availability.
But the integration of people, practise and (dare I say) process is even harder, with challenges such as:
- devolving responsibility and promoting a DIY culture;
- encouraging people to grow their own internal and external networks;
- stimulating conversation and debate by overcoming fear of exposure; and,
- for many people, simply overcoming the idea that any form of online communication beyond email is "not part of their job."
Do we really think that companies should abrogate their responsibility to support positive change in these areas? Of course not, and Euan makes that clear as well. The problem is that right now the only people who are capable of growing their own social tools inside the enterprise, or by using externally hosted services, are the more technically adept. What about the others who we need onboard to create a representative ecosystem? In our work, we get more of a kick from empowering people who are less technically advanced to do things they could not previously imagine than we do from anything else in our engagement consulting - and we do this with the consent and support of our clients. Of course, in an ideal world, entirely new online social networks and capabilities would evolve of their own accord, but we have to get to that ideal world from this imperfect one.
Of course, there is a fine line between top-down encouragement and the kiss of death for social computing initiatives, as Dave Snowden reminds us in his discussion of this issue. But when approached intelligently, official support and bottom-up ownership need not be mutually exclusive, just as social tools do not seek to replace every piece of internal IT architecture currently in use.
Software as a Service
To what extent can Software as a Service (SaaS) make the process of bottom-up IT development easier and help work around non-cooperative IT departments?
It seems everything is going SaaS these days, with Cisco buying Webex and various players lining up to fight Google and Microsoft for the remotely hosted Office apps market (Office 2.0). In the world of social tools, the enterprise wiki platform Confluence recently launched a hosted version for companies who want to try the product without waiting for internal IT resources. A variety of blog and wiki services (such as Socialtext) already exist in hosted versions, and are widely for external communications, publishing, marketing and beyond-the-firewall collaboration. These uses are ideal candidates for SaaS as they do not require much integration with internal systems, nor do they contain mission critical or secret information. Other products in the social tools stack are also available remotely, such as social bookmarking tools and even newsfeed management systems.
In the software industry as a whole, there is a huge amount of energy and funding being invested in new delivery mechanisms for services, and the proliferation of tools goes way beyond what we might think of as conventional SaaS, such as salesforce.com, CRM systems and accounting packages. Adobe's Apollo tool, which could be the best occasionally-connected RIA tool yet, provides a compelling argument for managed widgetisation. There is even talk of Photoshop going virtual. The new Ning make-your-own-social-network looks gorgeous, and is very well executed. Will it be the next Myspace? Probably not, but it is heading in the right direction by recognising the need for intimate vertical social networks, of the type Lars refers to here.
SMEs are hungry for access to software they could not support themselves on a pay per usage basis, as David Terrar reports. But in larger enterprises, a lot of this growth is experimental, as Denis Howlett remarks about Gartner's recent 'buy SaaS' recommendation. Also, as my friend Sig suggests, larger companies need much greater customisation that SaaS currently allows for. SaaS will play an important role in the future enterprise 2.0 landscape, without a doubt, and there are areas that lend themselves to this approach already; but our experience doing this kind of work inside large international companies suggests there are still areas where SaaS is either not appropriate whilst the majority of mission critical corporate data lies inside the firewall, or needs to be better integrated with internal systems.
The challenges to enterprise SaaS adoption are gradually being addressed, and there are two areas in which we expect to see some progress.
The first is in the area of specialised appliances or systems that live inside the firewall, where they can happily integrate with internal apps ad data, but which can also be updated and fed by managed connections that extend outside the firewall. The Socialtext managed appliance seems to be a good example of this approach, which is a workable compromise between SaaS and purely internal systems.
The second area is enterprise software that takes advantage of managed connections with web services to add value to internal systems. Movable Type was a pioneer of this approach with its blog ping service to feed a public list of recently updated MT blogs. Their impressive roadmap for the enterprise version of this market-leading blog platform suggests they will take this a lot further in MT v4.
Despite the hype and hope invested in SaaS, at Headshift we still spend far too much time banging our heads against a brick firewall and sometimes overcoming the most absurd levels of bureaucracy to do some basic computing and networking tasks. Right now, it is far easier to integrate external data and application services and bring it inside the firewall to complement internal systems than it is to share internal systems with external applications. This is a problem for the SaaS model.
One of the biggest issues is of course identity. OpenID offers some hope that we are moving towards standards that will see widespread adoption, but OpenID can't yet solve the problem of how people in companies can connect their internal corporate IDs (LDAP, AD, etc) with external services on the internet. Mapping LDAP identities to OpenIDs through some kind of proxy service on the firewall is possible, but I am not aware of (m)any companies who are doing this.
It is also worth noting that SaaS is not the only game in town, and may not have it all its own way in the enterprise. There is also an alternative vision that poses a threat to the SaaS model: namely, Microsoft's "Software + Services" model that sees a central role (and choke point) for Sharepoint and other internal software, extended by their own Windows Live services. Sharepoint, whilst being largely unloved by users, is often seen as a life-simplifying move for IT departments because (a) it is what Microsoft is telling them to use, and (b) it is centrally managed with easy Office desktop integration.
Top down or bottom up? Internal systems or externally hosted services?
Technologists are never far from a sci-fi metaphor (so forgive me), but in Star Wars terms, I think that each new major generation of technology sees itself as nimble Luke Skywalker attacking the monolithic Death Star. I am sure email and even systems such as CMS and DMS were once seen in much the same light as wikis and blogs today. The problem is, we are not trying to blow up the Death Star, we are trying to make it better. We do not want people we work with in client companies to feel they are flying off in lashed together Wiki-wing fighters to take on the might of organisational enterprise software. We want them instead to take their rightful place alongside other internal systems and then let natural selection find the right balance and relationship between them.
Our best guess at how this will happen is to build a lightweight, social interface onto existing enterprise data and tools, so that people can find what they need more effectively, share their thoughts and ideas with their peers, and ultimately humanise the internal landscape. We have talked about this before, and we are making good progress. We work with individual groups, departments or networks to help them build blended, situated social software supported by data integration and connected infrastructure in order to take control of their relationship with corporate systems, connect and collaborate with others. It is not a completely hands off approach, nor is it a top-down approach, but it aims to empower people (not just geeks) and create network effects and organisational dynamics that are neither predictable nor entirely controllable from the centre.
With regard to SaaS, it seems the early wave of ASP vendors for traditional software models are simply a transitional play. Real SaaS should be built of the web. for the web, with all the iterative release cycles and user feedback that implies. But the emphasis will shift from software, which is just a mechanism, to services, which is the actual product. Some of these will be new and imaginative forms of what we might recognise as applications, but many will be pure data or data transformation or sharing services. The lines will be blurred. But whilst we will see adoption among SMEs for cost reasons, enterprises will not embrace SaaS for their mission critical systems or data until such a time as we find robust solutions for the key integration and data management challenges.
When the biggest obstacles to using SaaS inside the enterprise have been removed, regardless of whether it has been truly embraced by the enterprise mainstream, then can the fun can really begin. Lines of business will be able to extend their core systems by bolting on a variety of externally-hosted specialist apps and data services, with easy SSO and data integration across the firewall. Then, SaaS will become truly transformational as enterprises leverage the creativity and diversity of the web to create and extend applications in real-time. Putting IT in the hands of people with actual needs has got to be the most important goal in the technology industry, and SaaS will surely play a role in that.
So, whether the future is top-down, bottom-up, inside-out or outside-in - or (more likely) all of the above - the overarching trend is for software and IT to become more of an underpinning function, and for the actual data and interaction services to emerge as the real stars of the piece. If we can do this whilst making ordinary peoples' experience of IT simpler and more relevant to what they want to achieve, then perhaps a combination of Enterprise 2.0 and SaaS will fulfil the revolutionary potential that some analysts are ascribing to them.
"Euan's vision is lovely of course, but the reality is a lot more mundane and a lot more complex"
I wish I was a grown up......
If you read the post properly I wasn't actually advocating doing nothing nor am I saying things are bottom up!