A Meaningful Life

There’s plenty of frustration amongst social media commentators about the steadfast attitude of many enterprises towards the adoption of social tools. More specifically, accepting the philosophy of Enterprise 2.0.

Ross Dawson of Future Exploration Networks and Stephen Collins of AcidLabs amongst others have often commented in detail on this topic. They have pointed to some great successes and I also hear their frustrations. There is language, thinking and approaches around social tools that simply don’t fit into the corporate culture of old. Barriers need to be broken down to give people free open access to these tools, sometimes rules need to be put in place and even some situations call for access to be restricted during work hours. There isn’t a clear and general solution for all enterprises be they large or small.

I’m an advocate for open access for enterprise knowledge workers, as we do in Saasu. We’ve even built connections to social platforms from our online accounting web finance engine. We are building Enterprise 2.0 capabilities into our products and services. However I also hear the frustration of business owners and management teams who believe they are losing productivity due to Facebook and Myspace.

The main factor causing slow adoption by enterprises is productivity fear. Decades of workhorse enterprise culture has left management in fear of productivity declines from social tools. Just as SMS, Instant Messaging systems were perceived to be slowing productivity so are social networks at this early stage of their technology cycle.

Naturally they jump to no access for anyone. Well, they are totally justified to have this fear, but not to apply it to everyone unilaterally. If in managing the flow of information in tools like Facebook can only be served by blocking certain users and allowing others then that’s justified but far from ideal. Many roles in organisations may not be well served by these tools until either a self managing culture or a social communication workflow system is firmly in place that understands or controls acceptable versus unacceptable use.

I talked about restricting access to social tools some time ago in my post about Facebook in the workplace. I’ve witnessed first hand productivity costs in an enterprise environment. I still advocate restrictions and policy around access based on a role by role basis. Access to social networks should be no different to any other communications or knowledge tools used to generate productivity. Any approach to this which is not analytical and scientific in it’s assessment is simply decision making based on poor business intelligence.

Even in the Saasu business we are careful what each new system is that we adopt. It’s not about a free for all, an unequivocal license to explore for all employees. That’s nice, but an analogy springs to mind. If all the scientists choose to go out into the field because it’s fun then none of the lab work gets done.

Most importantly I’m committed to scientific rigor on the adoption of any tool in an enterprise. Anecdotal, emotional and social benefits are all important but what do the numbers also say about the social tool being employed. This is where enterprises should look at the usefulness in numbers and not just jump to conclusions. There is no substitute for at least some rough scientific checks being applied to any system, business or otherwise.

Many managers witness staff spending time working their personal Brand in Facebook. Plain and simple it often about entertainment, events and niche interest groups. So a manager in that situation adds that anecdotal evidence to their bag of reasons and moves on. That evidence is then pulled out of the bag when a decision is being made to block a tool or if thought leaders like Ross or Stephen happen to be giving advise and encouragement on adoption. The argument no doubt becomes tough in the face of this. My approach would be to:

1. Demonstrate why social tools are an opportunity and not a time waster in many circumstances.
2. Get them to adopt an Enterprise 2.0 framework with metrics or that connects to a system that has metrics.
3. Get the social flow managed via culture, tools and procedures.

The reality is that some jobs simply become less productive while others benefit. The job specs for a production line worker, retirement home salesperson or waste removal person probably don’t call for it. However, there is an argument that even people in those roles gain job satisfaction, get better communication with colleagues and possibly better access to management when using social platforms.

Knowledge workers should always be given access to platforms. I’ll leave it to Ross and Stephen to communicate this. Read their blogs, they are the experts.

One of Australia’s top IT Journo’s brad Howarth wrote Saasu up in his lastest Dynamic Business article on Automating Businesses. I’m a product person and often struggle trying to write how I feel about our product (I’m confident I’m not alone). Brad just seems to have the knack of communicating it without all the ‘tech’.

Many SaaS applications also feature in-built connections to other SaaS tools, quickly creating a web of interconnected applications that can automatically send data among themselves.

1. Telco’s online reach is smaller than they think. Sure Telco’s have large customer bases but the only time I have gone to my Telco’s website was when I upgraded my ISP plan. It’s anecdotal I admit. What’s your use of their websites like?
2. Telco’s have bad websites. When I did upgrade my plan, the website navigation experience was agonising. A good analogy is government versus corporate. Their web mail was one of the worst I’ve seen.
3. They are big but that doesn’t guarantee a win. When Telco’s spend to compete they serve up a high Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) number for their competitors to squeeze them against. Lean startups can squeeze margins tighter, and if they can hang on to triple digit growth rates then they can drop a big Telco Goliath with a very small stone.
4. Telco’s are good at being Utilities, full stop. This is appliance market versus utility market difference. Just because your toaster is an appliance on an electricity network doesn’t mean your electricity utility will be a good toaster maker. They are very different markets, very different sales approaches, very different products and require very different people to execute.
5. Lessons learn’t. Many Telco’s have already tried and failed. Telco’s, since 2000, have been desperately trying to replace falling fixed-line revenues. They just didn’t understand these web business, the appliances of the net. The revenue messiah didn’t come. Consumers were flocking to cool niche shops like iTunes not the big Telco department stores.
6. Telco’s had the wrong skill set. Telco’s are big ships. Changing the crew from sailors to steam engineers wasn’t and still isn’t quick or easy. Even worse, short web application lifecycles requires you to destroy your mother ship by building newer and better technology quickly. Telco’s extract long term value from long term fixed assets. Two years is frightening when you normally invest for twenty years in fixed assets.
7. Web business’s tend to invent. Telco’s tend to be slow followers while web startups who successfully commercialise have tended to come from the womb of inventiveness. University assignments (Google), for the fun of it (YouTube) or everyday business problems that need fixing (Salesforce.com). Telco’s tend not to think this way.

It was strange for me moving from a trading environment to the software as a service industry (SaaS). One of the biggest differences I noticed straight away was how sparse web pages were. Even the early web tools like online banking and broking portals were so inefficiently designed. They failed to optimise screen real estate and forced users to scroll, mouse, search, yada yada yada.

Traders Reuters/Bloomberg terminals and their spreadsheets were nearly always set to the smallest font size you could find (or read). You would use efficient fonts like Arial Narrow to try and squeeze a few more prices into the screens that surrounded you. You didn’t have the luxury of whitespace (actually it was blackspace). The vast majority of traders went for black background designs. This was interesting in itself.

In a way I miss that, it was extremely time and information efficient. It was also easier on the eyes and clearer for the mind. You had all your information laid out in front of you. It can be likened to ‘chess boarding’ your desk with all your paperwork so that you would know exactly where everything is and be able to grab it instantly.

You could see the markets and the world events unfold in realtime. You could be efficient, no transition costs, such as the need to navigate a clumsy mouse, tab through browsers, scroll down screens, drag and drop or refresh web content. Screen real estate was prime real estate. No cares for font-type, white space pixel counts and the finest navigation effects. Just jam it in was the approach so you don’t have to do a single thing except read it.

It dawned on me when I first came into the web applications space that financial markets traders had actually evolved their own designs. The result was quite different to web applications as we know them. Here’s some of my observations.

Traders designed and built their own screens

Traders designed their screen themselves, or ex-traders working for Bloomberg or Reuters helped them. Extremely user centric design, they got exactly what they wanted. There was no lost-in-translation, lost-in-budget or lost-in-design-ego issues to contend with.

Traders built their screens like engineers and not like designers would

Traders are generally left brain logical types which could be described as ‘engineering like’. So their screens were very matrix like. Information was given the best screen real estate if it was the most financially sensitive. Really important financials received the mega-font treatment.

Traders were bad designers, but did it matter?

Web designers and now usability designers tend to come from right-brain imaginative and creative backgrounds (in my experience). The traders didn’t care much for good looking screens. This wasn’t a male thing. There were plenty of female traders in the organisations I worked for and it made no difference. Design extended to font colour and that was it. A non-black background was an outlier in this crowd. Traders seemed to naturally design for screen real estate optimisation and minimal navigation choices (no navigation), so there was an element of design in usability.

I thought I’d write this post to highlight something which has influenced keeping features a click or two away in our Saasu application. It has been extended further in our next Saasu.com release with the new one-click menu.

Photo credit: Matt Seppings

Twitter is a community website where users post publicly or privately what they are doing during their day in succinct comments (140 characters).

In my opinion, the magic 140 characters and getting a feel for peoples day to day lives are the biggest reasons for it’s success. It keeps communication precise, moving it away from long emails and IM ping-pong.

Twhirl is a great app for getting your twitter feeds. Why? I work a fine balance of communicating with people and getting some coal face work done on Saasu.com. This productivity dilemma of being “fuzzy” versus “bundy-clock” in my work style is improved with the right tools like Twhirl. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn all require time to keep track so when a tool comes along that will at-a-glance give me the updates I need, then I’m on board. Thanks to @alegrya and @jodiem at BarCamp Sydney who pointed it out.

To learn more about what the fuzzy worker concept is read Stephen Collins acidlabs blog.

I’m at BarCamp Sydney 2008, get there if you can, lots of great people and content - a perfect storm. Clearly no-one has it nailed on what Web 3.0 will look like, including me.

The discussion turned to; web privacy, OpenSocial, OpenID, which device, on vs. off-line and semantic web. So many views and they all felt right to some degree but none felt clearly and independently correct. The one point of clarity was that Web 3.0 isn’t any one thing.

The discussion and comments just added evidence to my view that the organism or entity that is evolving out of the primordial Web 2.0 soup is so much bigger than the sum of it’s parts. It can’t be observed, it has a life of it’s own, we can’t comprehend it. Just as the flea doesn’t know it lives on a dog. We are building all the components, the cells in it’s body. Being many specialist cells, we don’t have the ability to conceptualise the whole entity yet. I’m increasingly convinced Artificial Intelligence is going to be a major component. If the web enabled applications are the cell specialisation using frameworks then the nervous system is probably somewhere in the region of AI engines and the semantic web. The cell nuclei or the distributed brain if you like.

Picture credit: Mike Licht

We have heard from our contacts that flooding in Mackay (Australia) recently caused accounting practices and businesses a major data recovery problem due to software based accounting files being lost in the floods. Obviously anyone using SaaS accounting (Software-as-a-Service online accounting) would have escaped the pain that data loss can cause a business.

Our Saasu.com data centre retains client data well clear of flood zones and data centres floors and entrances are purposely raised for localised flooding protection from burst water mains and other problems that can occur.

Datafiles for old style accounting software are only as good as your last backup. If you haven’t backed up recently here’s a knock knock reminder. Else, change to online accounting and other online services and outsource that task!

Beautiful design, for 2010’s market. This sums up my feeling. Love it, want one, but damn you Apple, you failed me on my three key user requirements:

1. Play/Burn CD’s to iTunes.
2. Internal optical drive.
3.Two USB plugs at least.

Any sales guy or gadget geek knows where I’m coming from on this last point.

To use the 0.76 inch thick MacBook Air I need my 1.0 inch thick Windows laptop. So being truthful, the user experience thickness is 1.76 inches. I see two patties in that whopper, not one wafer thin mail envelope.

The good news is we don’t feel too bad about the bunch of 24″ Macs we just bought at Saasu.com There is no “I’m missing out” envy present yet. The second someone brings one into work, that will change instantly, they do look great.

I hope market pressure has Apple bring out a two USB port version. This might entice me over the line. They won’t change their position on the internal optical drive and I agree with their direction as much as a I don’t like it. I was hoping to stretch CD/DVD support for a few more years so I don’t feel like the old guys who have vinyl. No offense meant.

Photo by Roger Jones

The old school software industry is under huge economic, cyclical and competitive pressure. Dogs growl and bite when backed into corners. Some comments I have been reading on recent posts about SaaS are highlighting the pressure which is now extending to CIO’s and CFO’s. These key decision makers are having to decide whether to keep paying big license fees to old school software companies in the face of much cheaper, safer and more reliable SaaS offerings. It causes decision stress I’m sure. In my opinion the smart ones are researching the topic and going to SaaS.

A recent survey by searchCIO.com saw some suggestion that SaaS might be fad like by a commentator. I would never consider SaaS being fad like due to the clear dependency many off us already have on the SaaS offerings such as online banking and online e-mail.

Here’s another 170 billion dollar reason SaaS isn’t fad like - Google. The world’s biggest SaaS utility.

I don’t know about you but Google has never sent me any software disks or cd’s. I’m pretty damn sure I sign into their servers with lots of other people at the same time (multi-tenant) from anywhere in the world (online) via a web browser. They maintain and backup my stuff (service). They upgrade their online applications without making me put a CD in my PC (service). This is SaaS plain and simple. They are a utitlity that I buy (or get for free) my software from, as a service.

Thanks to Ben at Diversity. His colleague, Paul made comment on that article which contained the flickr of SaaS resistance. It was spot on. Sorry I mean’t “flicker” not “flickr”.

p.s. Flickr.com is a SaaS photo album I use. Check it out, it’s very cool. They do all the backups, burn CD’s for me and and provide private access to my albums for my family and friends for less than $30 a year. Access, security, distribution, backups, upgrades are all part of your typical SaaS offering.

Time to clock off.

p.p.s if you need a SaaS Bundy Clock and Time Tracking system then check out 88miles.net (they just built a Saasu connector). If you sign up to both Saasu.com and 88miles.net then I’ll make sure you get a free three month Saasu.com subscription extension.

Seth Goddin’s Squidoo.com caught a little more than the eye’s of Google. Seth has an interesting firsthand Google experience posted on his blog. Seth’s Squidoo.com lets you create online content on a topic you have knowledge about that you would like to share online. Much like Wikipedia, but as the author you get rated by the browsing audience.

Google announced their alpha version called Knol via their blog last week. When I read about this I didn’t flinch because the news didn’t seem big. After all, Amazon invented customer reviews of authors content online years ago. Google is really just applying it to content instead of books, an inevitable outcome. This was my initial thought, and a shallow one. My second thought is that it is not the technology that’s interesting in this direction by Google.

There is a clear evidence now that Google does no believe that the search algorithm is a search God.

Has Google been fighting the trend set by Del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati and others for the last couple of years in democratic search rankings?

This could mark a peak in search algorithms as a primary method for information gathering. It’s nearly a clear admission that humans are better than robots when it comes to scrutinising content. A spammer can’t trick a human, by default the coder and hardware combination need to be better than your brain. Humans can tell when someone is selling via content or creating it for selling reasons.

Interestingly Wikipedia.org is getting a lot of mention from the bloggers out there as a threatened species because of the Knol announcement. I think Wikipedia will live on and actually stands to win this battle if they play it smart.

Wikipedia has a huge content lead time and volume advantage. Market penetration counts. Wikipedia could easily introduce author tagging and scrutinising features like voting, tag counts and referral counts. Some small changes by Wikipedia could address this weak advantage Knol has. Interesting times ahead.