Fascinating book so far – as usual, bought the book wirelessly while I was having a conversation about this book, and was able to flip through it instantly. Ah, digital content… subject for another day.

Distributed Convergence

As I’ve been mentioning recently, and the reason the book came up… the vast majority of work we’ve been doing lately (and the ramp up into 2011 is astonishing, honestly) has been explicitly about taking various approaches (depending on the client) to do what I’m calling “distributed convergence.”

You’ll be hearing more from me about this over the coming days and months. It’s a massive trend, and in all seriousness, no matter what size organization you are, you need to be thinking about this.

Chapter One – Illusions of Synergy

In the very first chapter is a primary case of exactly what clients are looking to avoid. Now the majority of our clients are not facing potential failure (usually) at the scale of a true “billion dollar lesson” (we should all be so… lucky?). Regardless, it’s a long-rising trend that it’s high time is ended.

From the book, under a case study discussing the merger of two Disability Insurance companies with sharply different approaches and target markets – Unum Corporation and Provident Companies – and under the aptly title subtext of “UnumProvident: Giving ‘Disability’ a New Name”:

Unum and Provident talked before the merger about back-office efficiencies. But they began as a combined company with thirty-four separate information systems that didn’t talk to each other. As of 2005, six years after the merger, UnumProvident had managed to eliminate just four of those thirty-four systems.

The book is primarily about business management and culture failures – clashing cultures, misunderstood strengths/weaknesses, the fallacy of expecting 2+2 to equal 42 or more, in an overly optimistic timeframe… But, right up front, it’s a classic case of “un-convergence” or as we all typically call it “siloed systems” and the dangers lurking there. Silos aren’t necessarily bad – targeted functionality is what makes mobile apps, for example, so darn useful, and yes, those are stand-alone silos, essentially.

Shut down, Blow it up or Integrate?

Photo credit: muffinmaker / photocase.com

Now, does an aquiring company HAVE to shut down a system or many systems to make it more efficient? No.

Could they shut them down more quickly and systematically? No doubt – but big companies especially, tend to dance like elephants, as the saying goes.

Could they introduce integration layers, not necessarily BIG BUDGET integration layers, like an Enterprise Service Bus or SOA overhaul, but perhaps light-weight integration, say Business Process Management, Portals, Taxonomies, or Search technology to cut across systems? Yes. Rather… YES!

There’s no single clear path to untangle what is easy to see is an unholy technology mess – pre-merger, during or post-merger. But clearly, as this book indicates (based on lessons learned from extensive research into 750 major bankruptcies between 1981 and 2006, including Enron, Conseco, Texaco, Kmart, and Refco – as well as companies that survived, but were clearly hard hit in their businesses due to bad decisions and tragic assumptions), if you do not have your SYSTEMS in order, behind the scenes, not only are you crippling your ability to run the business on a daily basis…

But when you add extra fuel on the fire, through mergers & acquisitions, or economic downturn, or any other large shock to the system, it becomes all to clear how both fragile the new system is (2 merged companies that in theory are bigger, better and… more nimble? Contain that laughter!), and how resistant to change the old systems and sub-systems (departments, regions, vice presidents of divisions, suppliers, etc.) are.

Walk the Agile and Integrated Walk

I’ve been in working in and around IT/IS for a long time – and although I no longer (mostly) twiddle the bits and cables, much of my work surrounds strategy and implementation of technology.

Whether I’m brought in by IT explicitly (“I’m one of you, or least, was”), or by business sponsors as a bridge to IT (which happens far more often), I’m close enough to the problem that UnumProvident experienced to see it every day.

It is far easier to build systems, and groups of systems that are destined to fail… unintentionally… than it is to set up for both current and future success.

Looking too narrowly at a problem can cause serious pains in implementing solutions. Too often the BizTech problem that’s been solved is only a single pain point, and not the real, root-cause issues, or to be more positive, to enable the ultimate business goals of reduced cost/time/effort, increase revenue/profit, customer satisfaction/loyalty and the like.

As a result, the “systems” or solutions that are often put into place are a patchwork of solutions that are islands onto themselves, picking off a single or handful of issues, and (with luck and serious effort) those few issues or opportunities will be solved well.

But that leaves the organization’s systems as a whole as a fragmented minefield for the employees to navigate as the “human glue” between systems.

Scenarios like these are incredibly common – and very fragile.

Head Down, Prepare to Fail

When the economy tanks, and people are either laid off, or the company goes bankrupt, or the belts tighten and everyone fears for their livelihood, the only agile/flexible pieces in this “system” – the employees – suddenly become so rigid and fixed in their ways, with their heads down to play it safe and keep their jobs, that all of the break points in this wide array of systems stresses even further and in many cases, blows itself into a million bits.

I’m not trying to sell you on suites, or in spending a single other dime on “new” solutions – that’s not likely to help, really.

Our business is not in selling or re-selling solutions, nor in doing hands-on integration work.

That leaves us with the freedom to be able (in many cases) to tell clients that they probably do not need to spend much more in software/solutions, do not have to blow it up and try again, or spend thousands of man-hours to migrate from an “old” system to a new one.

Not to drop a “pie in the sky” strategic plan that’s impossible to implement… but actionable strategy.

My questions to you as we head into 2011…

• Is your strategy head screwed on tight, and focused on planning for both short-term pain elimination and longer-term integration opportunities?
• Are you laying bridges across systems and solutions so your employees can spend less time navigating the vast landscape of applications (a recent client estimated they have at least 20,000 applications in various stages of use/implementation), and focusing on delivering value to your clients?
• Are you taking a system rather than single solution point of view when you update, upgrade, replace or install a new solution from scratch?
• Can you take advantage of the trend of employees working from home or across wide geographic distances, but that can still function as a team and a whole system of coordinated brains?

Make  no mistake – this takes work, and no “out of the box” solution will make the lack of integration you probably have right now, just go away.

No pre-built strategy document with the best of the “best practices” is going to instantly move you out of the worst practices of DIS-integration that you may be struggling with right now.

This is knowledge work, plain and simple, and there are far fewer organizations who are doing this well than are doing it poorly.

As I said in a tweet at the beginning of the summer of 2010:

So the real question is…

Are you prepared to converge?

What are you doing to prepare? What have you tried, and hasn’t worked? What have you tried and *has* worked? Your comments are valuable not just to me, but to your peers and colleagues as well. it’s time we shed light on assumptions of that past that just aren’t true now, if they ever were.

As computing power increases, “mashable” and findable data/content grows, GPS shrinks, partnerships and individual innovation explore, and it all comes together in the form of a handheld device like the iPhone, Blackberry, and myriad Androids being rolled out on a weekly basis, we continue to see the rise of applications that only a few years ago seemed the stuff of science fiction.

Ladies and Gentleman, it’s the mobile content economy – and it’s going to impact your business one way or another. Isn’t it time get prepared?

The latest indication of this is Siri – Your Mobile Virtual Assistant.

Smartphones are not new, speech recognition is not new, but the concentration of power/content/data and location with contextual, “geographically smart” speech recognition, opens up interesting possibilities.

View the demo below (or download the app to your iPhone or Blackberry), before going on…

Just as with the business models of travel sites such as Orbitz, or Kayak, and similar meta-aggregators or “meta businesses” – new business model innovation is afoot!

It turns out that being *the* aggregation point for information, even given away for “free” (as far as the user is concerned at least), is quite the healthy business model.

The trick is to:

• Do it well = user experience and usability
• Do it with completeness = solid data/content partners
• Make it idiot proof = semantically smart speech recognition
• And not to presume that as the, in this case, mobile app provider, you have to create and own it all yourself.

Siri uses licensed data from allmenus.com, Google Maps, City Search, Taxi Magic, MovieTickets.com, OpenTable, eventful, Gayot, livekick, WeatherBug, BooRah, Rotten Tomatoes, Yahoo! Local, yelp, FlightStats, Vlingo and TrueKnowledge, and licenses the speech recognition engine of Nuance, and combines it into a self-contained application that is, as they say, a “person-centric app.”

It’s essentially the mobile generation of the “Single Point of Access” or Portal that had been all the rage in the 90s – it’s the “Personal Portal” – hyper-localized, and personalized, as it always should have been.

Of course in testing the application, there seem to be some data gaps, and some taxonomy work that needs to be done (hint: a wrap = burrito here in Boston, and vice-versa), but all told, it’s a sign of the mobile times to come.

Where to from here?

How are YOU approaching digital content strategies for a mobile world?

Is  your business found in the content/data aggregators for your market?

Is your business “socially connected” to applications like FourSquare and Gowalla

In short, are you leaving money on the table for your competitors to run off with? It’s early days, but disruptive innovation wins go to those who start the trend first, unless you’re an extremely fast follower.

Weigh in with your thoughts and concerns – and while we don’t do app development, at Information Architected, “there’s a consulting service for that!” (Need digital content strategy for your enterprise? Get in touch.)

The Collaborating Hordes

An additional 100,000+ of us have now had the chance to experiment with the Google Wave environment, and while my analysis is slightly more favorable than the initial view from June 1, 2009 (see IAM Alert: The Whimpering Google Wave) – it is clear that of any “early release” offering from Google, there is a lot more work to be done.

In fairness, this is billed as a “preview” and not “beta” (although also recall that Gmail only THIS year was stripped of it’s beta title, so Google is a bit loose with their release terminology), and has a much more limited set of people accessing the system than the typical Google offering.

As the continuing pounding and feedback of the invitees start to push the boundaries of what Google had expected, no doubt we’ll see refinement of the offering from many angles, including the ecosystem that springs up around Google Wave for open source and commercial offeirngs.

Usability Where Art Thou?

It’s ironic that for all of the fame of the “anti-clutter” interface of Google – the completely opposite approach of the search portals of the 90s such as Yahoo!, Excite et al – that the Google Wave environment is by far the most cluttered and complicated UI of any Google product.

In informal conversations with clients, and the many contacts I have both within the usability community and the software business world as a whole, I’ve heard nearly unanimously that Wave has the “most complicated and confusing interface” of any “2.0″ solution in recent history.

Reinventing Portals, Collaboration and Realtime

While it’s still incredibly early in the life of Google Wave outside of the labs of the Southern Hemisphere team behind this work, they’re clearly hinting at a trend that has been gathering for some time.

I’m speaking of the convergence of:

• Collaboration
• Social interactions
• Standards
• Fast, browser-based tools
• Mashups
• Multimedia
• Extendability and
• The ability to flip between (near) realtime and asynchronous communication/distribution modes

When I was at Delphi Group (for 13 years) we had at one time the “Realtime Reality Seminar” – somewhere in the 1998-2000 timeframe. We were incredibly early in calling realtime as an important trend. Frankly, far ahead of the capabilities of the Net/Web at the time, and even for proprietary/non-browser-based solutions.

It’s about YOU and NOW

But what was obvious then AND now is that realtime, while incredibly useful, is not ALWAYS the mode we need. But being able to blur the line and chose the tool/modality that fits YOUR business need, rather than being hampered by what tools are capable of or pre-determined by anyone, whether that be Google, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, or any other solution provider.

When you need realtime, you REALLY need it… right NOW. Collaboration in wikis for example, while a massive disruption to traditional collaboration tools (in a positive way), has suffered from an ability to do realtime collaboration, due to the natue of the single-threaded “lock” of the wiki mindset (that’s changing as well, more on that in a separate post).

Clearly the lack of realtime has not been the death of wikis or any other “2.0″ toolset, but with the addition of realtime, we are finally getting close to having the ability to work in whatever we want, whenever we want it, all within a single environment.

It’s about SPEED in the Browser

The underlying guts of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) which powers much of the snazziness and speed of the Wave interface is clearly gaining momentum, as other commercial software suppliers such as Traction Software (among others), begin to take advantage of the code investment of Google into high-performance Javascript and frameworks.

It’s about Expandability/Extensibility

The ability to add wavelets (ala widgets, portlets, applets, pick your meme from the past and drag it forward) to extend the general collaboration framework of Google Wave, or the ability to plug in “bots” as additional participants to conversations (to do automatic language translation, do lookups into systems, shorten URLs, etc.) both point to the benefits of standards and in Google not assuming that they can pre-determine exactly what people are going to want to collaborate on.

It’s about Social

The most obvious way to interact with someone on Google Wave is by what looks remarkably like an IM thread. My anecdotal evidence is that nearly everyone stumbles around being stuck in a reply chain before realizing you can edit other people’s comments – thus making it more like a real-time wiki than a discussion thread. (see the Usability comment – this seems to be a serious problem for adoption – although once the learning curve has passed, it’s not easily forgotten).

Yes, it’s about Collaboration

Collaboration is certainly the primary reason for Google Wave, but I believe we’ve only just begun to wrap our heads around what Collaboration online even means, as our tools have either been tremendously limiting, for geeks only (HTML warriors) or terribly expensive (e.g., traditional groupware and collaboration suites).

What are we collaborating ON?

Collaboration on a document? On a text-based project? On financials/spreadsheets? On revising business processes? On editing live video?

A larger world of options has opened up for collaboration via Wave, but getting over the hurdle of a text-based fixation for much of business content (what other reason is there for the vast amounts of e-mail and MS Word memo in any busines?), getting around to USEFUL outcomes of the ability to embed multimedia or apps of all kinds (remember the “death threat” style of desktop publishing when laser printers and web pages first came out?) while take some time, once we get over the thrill of the ability to embed all sorts of ridiculous content into our Waves. (see “Pulp Fiction Wave” [violent/questionable language - this is Pulp Fiction after all] and “Good Will Hunting Wave” for examples)

The Future is (Almost) Here

As science fiction writer William Gibson stated (ironically, typed, on a typewriter, at the time he’d coined the term cyberspace), “The Future is Already Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed.”

2008-2009 has brought an incredible amount of innovation in solutions, and adoption by businesses in all things 2.0 – whether Web 2.0 (witness the election) or Enterprise 2.0 (witness Google Wave, major feature jumps by SocialText, Traction Software, Jive, PBWorks, ThoughtFarmer, Spigit, and more).

But it seems to me that we are right on the precipice of taking that NEXT big jump into the future of collaboration – at far more sane price points, with a broader mix of TARGETED functionality, and in a direction that is less likely (but not guaranteed) to be tied to any single vendor by virtue of standards and open source activities such as OpenSocial, GWT, the Google Wave APIs, HTML 5, CSS, XML and more.

2010 and Beyond

2010 is going to be an interesting ride – are you doing your part to take advantage of the business/professional and personal possibilities?

If you’re pushing the boundaries forward, or dragging the laggards from behind, get in touch – we need to raise as much awarenes and action as possible if we’re going to make collective progress.

In the meantime, find me (among other places) on Google Wave as dan.keldsen[at]googlewave.com. No invites left, but always interested in seeing how YOU are using Google Wave and 2.0 tools in general, to take advantage of realtime as we all invent the next generation of the USE of collaborative tools.