Entries RSS · Social Networks : the third level of immersion
(French version)
The pitch: Enterprise implementation of social networks is the third step of a gradual immersion of the enterprise into the internet culture. This immersion occurs because there is the obvious truth : web works with amazing speed on an amazing scale.
I have been lucky enough to witness from the inside the major changes the IT industry have been going through in the last ten years. What is really interesting within the scope of Enterprise 2.0 is that these changes involve the adoption of tools, solutions and approaches that really came from the internet culture.
As Enterprise 2.0 activists, we keep on wondering where to find meaningful experience of internet culture adoption in our company. The IT department is the place to look because they already been through the first 2 steps of immersion ….
1 – Enterprise Systems foundations
In the IT world, the productive workforce is behind this revolution. Developed by geeks on their own time, in flat organizations with leaders who have emerged naturally, Open Source Software (OSS) has completely changed the IT business.
OSS market share
Who would have thought 20 years ago that an operating system created by a bunch of hackers (Linux) would have such a market share in operating systems for large banks and insurance back-end servers ? Who would have bet a penny 10 years ago that Firefox would have taken about 25% of the internet browser market share to Internet Explorer? That the most popular HTTP server (Apache Web Server) in the world would be free ? That most popular Integrated Development Environment would be free and hackable (Eclipse). That the White House would adopt an open source Content Management System for their web portal (Drupal)?
OSS success reasons
The reasons why open source solutions have been so massively adopted are multiple. Quality, efficiency etc … But the main one is the Darwinism of the internet : the solutions that survive are the ones that prove to be the most adaptable. Free software is open to anyone to participate : in order to survive, it has to be more adaptable than a solution locked by a publisher to a limited number of in-house developers.
Emergence of standard IT architecture for solutions developed by distributed teams
It’s worth mentioning that in terms of software architecture, the successful solutions have many similarities. The most flexible and modular software solutions has survived. They are built around a kernel offering the possibility of many optional plug-ins. Thus anyone can develop new peripheral add-on features independent from one another. This is the architecture principle behind Linux of course but also Eclipse, Firefox or the application server JBoss (solution of French online taxes system, the market leader ahead of vendors such as IBM or Oracle), .
OSS Developers rule
Even though major software vendor have stepped into the OSS market of the Java Enterprise Solutions (which is the technical area I know the most), it is still the open source community that rules the technical solutions. As I mentioned in my rant against bloated SOA : Spring became the new J2EE (over industry standards), Hibernate became the standard for J2EE ORM mapping (again over industry standard JDO). In other words : open Source Solutions started by single developers, each solving specific problems, have been massively adopted by the developers community and became de facto standard ahead of bloated theoretical solutions agreed by a consortium of major vendors.
As Martin Fowler reports it :
Tim Bray contended that the key decisions on technology are made by the programming community. (…) The reason we have so much bloatware in IT is because IT purchasing decisions are usually made on golf courses by people who have lost meaningful contact with the realities of software development.
2 – Project Management
Building on the success of the implementation of OSS in the enterprise IT, the productive forces have started to think about project management within the company. And a number of embarrassing questions have been asked.
Why do we concentrate so much on the process and so little on productivity ? Why so much time is spent on documentation (specifications) that are subject to interpretation, while these artifacts will be useless during the life of the product? Why do we waste so much time building contracts rather then trusting each others ?
Why phases of study, analysis, development and validation of products and services they are so strictly defined ?
Why should we wait so long before realizing that what we do does not match the business needs ? Or that it does match the needs identified 18 months ago but that the initial target has moved ?
Why not focus on simplicity rather than designing systems to manage the complexity ?
How come everything goes so well and so fast when we’re developing software for free on the internet and everything becomes so slow and complicated when we develop for our company ? Why not getting real , man ?
Agile adoption issues
Major players in software engineering meet in 2001 and wrote the manifesto for agile development.
This manifesto fell ill. It is considered with a lot of caution by a generation of managers who just get into the new the web techs (led by developers, ouch). These managers had to adapt to the Java platform, which is the core 70% of new IT projects since the beginning of the century. A generation of leaders not so keen to challenge their methods despite the disappointing results : in 2003, between 65 and 80% for enterprise Java projects are failures according to Scott Ambler.
Reasons of Agile success
This generation nevertheless had to adopt Agile methods because, again, it does deliver results. Pragmatism and performance of the implementation phase, adequacy between what is delivered and the constantly evolving expectations, visibility on projects progress throughout all phases of development, well-being of the teams thanks to constant user feedback and overall project visibility : all these combine to make Agile methods the most adapted ones for the constantly evolving context of IT development.
3 – Communication and knowledge management
For IT teams, after OSS and Agile project management methods, Enterprise 2.0 solution is the natural third step of enterprise immersion into the internet culture : the XXIst century way of getting things done for distributed teams.
What makes me think that this transition is inevitable, despite the rather considerable impact, is that executives are thinking about it. According to Forrester, 49% of the 2008 initiatives of CIOs of Fortune 500 companies focused primarily on collaboration.
They just hesitate as they are not sure how to handle this. Indeed, the problem remains the adoption in the enterprise. But there are teams around who have experienced that already in their daily work and within your enterprise.
It’s your IT people : they have adopted first OSS solutions, then Agile Project Management methods : they already have tested the amphibia nature of your organization. Just ask them how it went, they’ll be happy to help.
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Tags: enterprise 2.0, management, social networks
Consulting, Human resources, Organization, Project Management, innovation, open-source
I’m not sure if I agree with your argument conceptually. Are you saying that IT people in a company are the experts on social networking? Roughly 40% of internet users are using Facebook these days, the number is higher when adding all social networks together. Social networks are a users’ (by which I mean the general public) playground, which means that many people skipped what you call step 1 & 2.
There are plenty of IT people that I know that have real difficulty grasping social networks and why they work. That doesn’t make them experts in my book. It’s kind of like saying that dinosaurs are experts on planet earth, just because they were there first.
I don’t include you in that book, so I hope you’re not offended.
Hi Vincent,
Thanks for your comment. I'm not saying that IT people are experts in Social Networks. I'm saying that they have experience in importing internet culture into the organization because they already did so with OSS first and then Agile Methodology.
Everybody agrees that the main obstacle to Enterprise 2.0 adoption is not a technical one. It's a cultural one.
Enterprise 2.0 (i.e Social Networks within the Enterprise) IS importing internet culture into the enterprise. SO if you're lloking for people within your company with Enterprise 2.0 experience, you may try your luck asking IT people.
Hey I love this idea of being called a Dinosaur. First because I used to work on Mainframe and that's what I was called back then. Second because Dinosaur Jr is one of my favorite bands ever.
As someone who's seen Dinosaur Jr. live last summer, I can only say their name is well-chosen and should perhaps be changed to Sr.
As for the rest, I don't think culture and technology necessarily go hand in hand. Plenty of programmers that are completely stuck in code and never look out the window to smell the fresh air… and vice versa. I think technologists should get out more, it would make them better programmers, but somehow I think that always works out.
I see what you mean. Most of the times, geeks are only interested in technology when sometimes, they should also be able to think in terms of product, solution and service. Actually that's the point I raided in the Geek, Apple, IPad post.
However, the internet culture is theirs. Geeks invented, developed and implemented Wikis, Blogs, Forums on the internet back in the Web 1.0 times. It's not someone coming out of business school or with a real product/service/solution agenda and line of products that did so.
Geeks invented these solutions because they needed them badly to communicate and collaborate on open source solutions. In other word, the internet culture is originally a geek culture.Cluetrain Manifesto is a good read to put this into perspective.
Agile methodology is just about the same. So in that very case, OSS/Agile methodology cultures and technology completely goes hand in hand.
You could argue that it's easy for them to import this culture behind the firewall, since it's theirs, and you would be right. But that's another story I suppose.
I wrote two posts a long time ago on tech it easy asking whether software is high tech. High tech is something that I think geeks develop, e.g. when Steve Jobs & that other bearded guy developed Macs in the 1970s you could argue it was high tech to them, and when people developed boats to cross the ocean to the new world that was high tech to them. And finally, when the web was invented, that was high tech. The people who developed all that AT THE TIME were geeks.
But with web development, PC development, and boat development came standardization. Tools and knowledge are shared freely and while I do still consider code geeky, today's code is not nearly as geeky as binary code or let's say Pearl or C (I really don't know these languages, so correct me if I'm wrong). My point is that there are frameworks like Django, there are really simple abstracted quasi-languages like Ruby or even HTML, all of which is becoming less and less high tech. From a business standpoint, that means that the barriers to entry are virtually non-existent, which is why there are so many, too many apps on the iTunes app-store, only 2 years after its release, and why the same problem will occur on the iPad.
Culturally this means that everyone, geek or non-geek, can develop software today. And if you don't want to, you can hire developers to execute your vision via sites like eLance. The idea of geekdom, as far as it relates to software development is disappearing, it is being outsourced to code-monkeys working on modules of codes somewhere in China or India.
And that is why I think developing code ONLY is a losing battle. Everyday an iPhone or iPad is released we get a step closer to the underlying code becoming less and less important, to the whole PC industry, building harddrives, motherboards, and ram into computers, becomes a non-issue. High-tech is no longer software or Dell boxes. It is stuff like curing cancer, like developing micro-robots to clean oil from our oceans, it is complex algorythms that manage to both suggest the right book to you as well as plunge the world into a "mis-calculated" banking crisis. ICT, now more than ever, has just become a small screw in a much more complex tapestry.
Went on a little rant there, hope not too much.
Woaw man, that's a bit of a rant indeed. But I'm afraid you're ranting on your own.
I won't get upset by your writings. First I don't consider myself a geek. I admire geeks, I sometimes wish I was one, but I'm not. Second I kind of agree eventhough I think you sound a bit complacent with the code monkeys stuff.
Geeks are not only interested in developing code. They're insterested in harnessing the whole IT thing. Which involves coding but also security, networks, operations, data management, administration, quality, software project management etc … So I guess your definition is a bit narrow minded.
Actually I never said building software was high tech, nor did I sid that geeks were ruling the whole business or saving the world. I just said : internet culture originally is geek culture.
There are still some people making fortunes building code. But you are right, the key now is to develop solutions – which is basically what I said in the Geek/Apple/iPad post.
sorry Cecil for the late reply. I was on holiday and am currently quite sleep deprived. The definition of "geek" seems to be at the core of our disagreement, it's a word that can be interpreted many different ways. I'll maybe analyse it a little in a blog post or reply again later.