Archive for March, 2011
by Bill Ives
March 29, 2011 at 3:42 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
In May 2010, Google commissioned Forrester to examine the total economic impact and expected return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by switching from legacy email and productivity solutions to Google Apps. The report is now out. As most of you know, Google Apps is a cloud-based messaging and collaboration platform that includes mail, calendaring, IM, as well as Web-based collaborative documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and sites. I have used it on several projects and it seems to work fine as a free SaaS alternative. This is especially true for efforts where a commercial cloud-based collaboration tool is not available for whatever reason.
I was interested in the report, not just for what is might say about Google apps but for any light it could shed on switching to cloud-based collaboration, productivity, and messaging tools. Forrester conducted a combination of executive interviews and two surveys targeted at both IT and end user groups.
The results were impressive as ninety-three percent of respondents saw positive, tangible IT and user impacts that drove concrete ROI. They also found that users familiar with cloud-based personal email transitioned more smoothly to using Google Apps at work. The business user productivity gains were even greater than IT cost savings. The research suggested that end users were able to use Gmail more efficiently than their previous email solution and collaborate more effectively with Google Docs and Google Sites than with traditional office software.
I have used Gmail a bit and it seams straight forward but not necessarily easier than other email systems. I did not need any training but then that can be said for other systems the first time I used them. However, if you are talking about the use of documents in a collaborative way, then I can see that the use of Google Docs is easier than traditional office software.
They certainly found some impressive numbers in the ROI. The three-year results of switching to Google Apps from traditional infrastructure included a “risk-adjusted” ROI of 307% with a payback (break-even) within seven months
Looking more closely at the details within these results, the IT saving included reduced spend on licenses and infrastructure, as well as reduced IT administrator time spent on system maintenance, upkeep, patching, and upgrades. The totals were savings between 38% and 56%. These seem consistent with the claims for cloud-based saving.
The user benefits included productivity gains around email search, spam filtering, archiving, organization of email, as well as improved response time within the messaging environment. In the collaboration space improved efficiency in terms of sharing and editing documents across teams and within teams, the ability to incorporate feedback more quickly, more efficient face-to-face and virtual meetings, as well pushing more timely and relevant information to distributed teams. There was also improved efficiency in interacting with external partners and suppliers. However, remember the comparisons were with traditional enterprise apps, not against the other enterprise 2.0 offerings. Google provided the customers to interview but Forrester maintained editorial control over the report.
I think the findings are an endorsement of using cloud-based apps. Since the comparisons were not between various cloud-based app providers it is hard to say if they are specific to Google apps. However, they do look good.
by Bill Ives
March 24, 2011 at 3:39 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
With all the publicity over IBM’s Watson, there has been a lot of discussion about how far computers can go to “replace” people. Of course, I think that is not really the question to ask. It should rather be conceived as how computers can complement people. This complementary nature is also the perspective held by Dr. Aditya Vailaya, Chief Scientist for Retrevo.com. He has a PhD in Computer Science with a specialization in Machine Learning and Statistical Pattern Recognition, as well as significant experience with business applications of this technology. We recently discussed the role of computers and people in handling complex topics that require some level of both learning and semantic analysis.
I have often covered Retrevo’s creative surveys and other work such as these posts: Electric Gadget Inter-City Challenges and Are You a Digital Spy? So I was very interested to learn some about what goes into their services.
Aditya pointed out that Watson has demonstrated that you can build a machine to handle some level of cognition. However, this takes considerable effort. Watson was built and trained by a team of experts over a number of years. It uses math algorithms. These coupled with semantic analysis allow it to understand a natural language question and determine the probability that its answer is correct. However, it is good for a very specific task. The years of training may make it better than most, if not all, humans in playing Jeopardy. However, it will fail against humans in most of the other tasks we face every day.
To put the human versus computer issues in some more perspective it is useful to look at the work of pair of researchers, Martin Hilbert (USC) and Prisicilla Lopez (Open University of Catalonia) who have been looking at the growth of computer power and storage over the past twenty plus years. Recent research noted that, “to put our findings in perspective, the 6.4*1018 instructions per second that human kind can carry out on its general-purpose computers in 2007 are in the same ballpark area as the maximum number of nerve impulses executed by one human brain per second.” So all the computers in the world have now reached the capacity of one person. Congratulations. Adtiya feels that these numbers are in the right ballpark.
So the issue is not whether computers will outpace people but how the two can work together. Computers are very good at doing boring tedious, repetitive tasks than would drive people crazy at a rate and scale far beyond what people can do even with a fresh start on their best days. This frees people up to do the more complex and interesting tasks.
James Taylor makes a similar point in his post, Decision Management in the New York Times, commenting on a New York Times article, Smarter than you think, on e-discovery. He concludes that, “automation of decisions sometimes reduces the need for staff. Much more often it innovates and allows companies to apply the same staff to more problems by replacing boring, mechanical work with more interesting, more difficult work that is hard to automate or where automation is not desirable.”
Aditya noted that as computers are able to handle increasing complex tasks this frees people to do increasingly more interesting tasks. He also noted one of the main differences between people and computers. People have motivations. They have the will to survive, improve themselves, and many other things. Despite 2001 Space Odyssey, computers do not have feelings or motivations. Perhaps this lack of motivation is one reason they do not complain about long work hours but even that idea might be giving them too much intelligence.
Aditya said that Watson takes what the e-discovery tools do a step further. They just run search queries and use semantic analysis to sort what is relevant. Watson takes in full sentences in a natural language format and provides results back in a similar format. However, it can still make errors, just as the e-discovery tools often deal with the probability of being correct.
As these tools require extensive training to get started and constant re-training to stay on target there remains a strong role for people even within the use of these tools. Perhaps most importantly, people need to determine the questions these tools are targeted to address.
I asked Aditya how Retrevo uses machine learning. He said they provide information to consumers on products available on the Web such as digital cameras. To offer the best information, they use computers to scan the Web for product information and reviews. Addressing the volume of content out there is certainly more than a person can do or even a large team of people, especially at the speed required to stay current.
This is a great example of the right place to use machine learning and semantic technology. People are still required to train the computers, point them at the right sites, and monitor the results to determine adjustments to the algorithms. I would trust Retrevo’s computers’ ability to find the wide array of current options and viewpoints in product category over a team of people. It is then up to the people at Retrevo to keep pointing them in the right direction, as well as pushing the capabilities of the computers further.
by Bill Ives
March 21, 2011 at 3:59 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
To help us better work with online documents Crocodoc provides an HTML5 document viewing and collaboration tool that operates out of the cloud. The new viewer can be embedded into existing web offerings and provides a fast, versatile document viewing experience without the need for Flash or 3rd party plug-ins. I recently spoke with Ryan Damico, CEO and co-founder of Crocodoc, to get a better understanding of their offering.
Ryan explained that there are several advantages of using a cloud based HTML5 document viewer over the traditional options of Adobe and Flash. First, it is faster and does not require large files to be downloaded or plug-ins to be installed. It is not prone to transmitting viruseslike the others and HTML5 will soon be available on many mobile devices. This latter benefit will become increasingly important as many pundits are predicting a significant increase in the use of mobile devices for business collaboration and content sharing. There is an app development arms race within mobile and Crocodoc’s ability to work with many tools will come in handy.
Ryan showed me how you can take a PDF, Word, PowerPoint, or other document and place it within Crocodoc for both viewing and collaborative commenting and marking up. You can make comments, as well as add highlights and texts. In addition to these editing functions, you can actually draw on the docs to suggest edits. This is very useful for visual images and formats such as PowerPoint. Below a side by side comparison between a document in Crocodoc and in the PDF format.
The drawing capability also provides a great e-signature capability. Signatures are the last vestige of the analog world and they can slow down things. I was dealing with this over the weekend trying to fax a signed document to a client and dealing with bad machines, a wrong number and other challenges. There are a number of commercial tools devoted to this need but now it comes as part of Crocodoc. And Crocodoc is free to individual users. Perhaps we can get rid of fax machines now.
Once you like your document you can share it by sending a link, an email, or embed it in a blog post or web site. This latter capability is useful as Ryan showed me how you can easily put a 15-page document in a scrolling window in the middle of a blog post. Here is a link to an embedded issue of the Hacker Monthly.
Ryan also explained Crocodoc’s new partner program. They are working with a number of application providers to embed Crocodoc’s capabilities within their applications. Yammer has already fully integrated Crocodoc’s viewer and online collaboration tools into its social enterprise micro-blogging application. You can see that integration in the image below.
I like the simplicity of this approach and think that it will catch on. I am looking forward to trying it myself
by Bill Ives
March 14, 2011 at 4:44 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
A major transformation is occurring with enterprise IT services. I recently spoke with Jake Sorofman, CMO at rPath, to get his perspective on these changes. Jake pointed out that IT used to have a local monopoly on IT services. Their internal customers were forced to accept poor service levels because they had no alternative. Now the Cloud is fast becoming and alternative channel. Instead of waiting weeks or months for a critical application, business managers can simply license and deploy many applications in minutes. Instead of incurring massive implementation costs prior to any performance, they can just lease apps on a monthly basis and stop at any time.
Faced with this potential competition, IT organizations are under pressure to transform—to replace bottlenecks and bureaucracy with on-demand IT service delivery models. But this transformation to IT-as-a-Service requires new thinking about old processes. Jake pointed out that the reality is that today’s manual and ad hoc IT provisioning and change processes will collapse under the weight of self-service, cloud and other on-demand IT models. Particularly vulnerable are today’s practices for constructing and changing system images. Jake added that those IT departments that fail to make this transformation will be outflanked by development organizations and business lines who follow the path of least resistance to the cloud.
The cloud is becoming more versatile. In a blog post, 6 IT Predictions for 2011, the first three that Jake listed were: private cloud proliferates, public cloud thrives, and hybrid cloud emerges. In the latter case, this will first be more likely simple shifts in deployment environments based on lifecycle stage—for example, dev and test workloads only in public cloud. This will set the foundation for the “dynamic data center of the future, where workloads can move fluidly between deployment environments. By enabling application portability, workloads become a liquid commodity and a marketplace emerges. IT can dynamically retarget workloads based on optimizations for price, policy or performance, and they achieve true leverage over service providers.” This makes a lot of sense to me.
To help IT departments become more responsive and operate successfully in the on-demand world, rPath provides capabilities to automate application deployments, updates and retargeting across physical, virtual and cloud environments to allow for the dynamic data center of the future. Their tools help break down the traditional silos between development and operations. It is increasingly important so that when development speeds up it does not hit a speed bump when apps are deployed. Jake said that often when Agile currently meets operations, it can become fragile.
Part of the challenge is to extend the Agile concept into operations. Traditionally, operations views change as evil. Because of all the hidden dependencies within applications, changes can cause things to break. Now the fast paced changes within today’s business world make constant change a competitive necessity. rPath provides the infrastructure and environment to support these new change requirements. It helps automate many of the traditionally time consuming IT processes.
rPath is based on a version-controlled repository that acts as a definitive software library for controlled reuse of application, OS, middleware and other system artifacts across development, test and production organizations. From this repository, rPath automates four key functions: automated generation of images for rapid deployment to physical, virtual or cloud, automated updates and rollbacks, compliance reporting and remediation, and controlled lifecycle promotion. You can see this illustrated below.
Jake closed his predictions for 2011 by suggesting that the new architectures that enable dynamic workload portability will also change CIO’s prime focus from operations to sourcing and portfolio management. He wrote that we will see some old-line CIOs cycle out in the face of change. At the same we will see “new stars born on the basis of a new vision for IT, inspired—and not threatened—by the rise of public cloud services.” This is very consistent with what I have heard from other sources recently. The times are changing.
by Bill Ives
March 7, 2011 at 3:05 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
Forrester and others have predicted a surge in mobile apps (see for example, Mobile App Internet Recasts the Software And Services Landscape). There is an application arms race brewing here. Wrike has joined the fray and announced free iPhone, iPad and Blackberry apps for project management. These were released on Feb 8. iPhone and iPad apps are already approved by Apple and are available on iTunes.
Wrike’s apps for iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry bring the some of the key project collaboration features onto the mobile devices: monitor and edit existing tasks, creating and delegating new tasks (including backlogged tasks without a fixed time frame, quickly accessing priority projects by using the “Favorite” tab, adjusting the project schedule, and contributing to task discussions. Here is a sample screen optimized for moblie use.
I have covered Wrike here before see for example: Wrike Adds New Features for Online Project Management and Wrike: Online Project Management for the Rest of Us.
Wrike’s native apps are built exclusively for each device, bringing faster collaboration for project teams. The supported devices include iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch with iOS of version 3.1.2 and higher and BlackBerry with OS of version 4.5 and higher.
by Bill Ives
March 1, 2011 at 3:02 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0
Harmon.ie has now released a cross-platform suite of enterprise collaboration products designed to boost user adoption of the dominant enterprise collaboration tools. These include bringing central components of SharePoint into both Outlook and Lotus Notes. The goal is to increase user adoption of the broader collaboration platforms now available and stop sharing docs as attachments to email. The company was founded as Mainsoft in the 1990s but recently switched their name to align with their main product, harmon.ie.
I spoke with David Lavenda of hamoni.ie who offered some interesting research. SharePoint’s adoption by IT departments has been pervasive with close to 80% of the enterprise collaboration market. I have seen this consistently reported from several sources. However, what are the business users doing? Harmonie had an independent firm look at the issue. They found that eighty-three percent of business users continue to abuse email, ping-ponging document attachments back and forth, thus creating document chaos instead of using SharePoint, Google Docs or other collaboration suites. In addition, the study found that one third of survey respondents with access to SharePoint refuse to use it, or use it about once a month.
One of the main obstacles is that business users tend to ignore new IT tools that require them to switch contexts, juggle multiple browser windows, and learn new collaboration habits. I have seen this happen many times. So harmon.ie was launched to bring the social collaboration capabilities into email where business users already work. With one client the implementation of harmon.ie allowed them to go from a 30% adoption of SharePoint to a use by 70% of their business users in a few months.
Another client, Amway, company, has 6,000 email users working in their headquarters. They used to send 73,000 email attachments a day, on average. Since deploying harmon.ie for SharePoint, the company reports a 42 percent decrease in the average daily volume of email attachments.
Several versions of the social email capability are offered. There is harmon.ie for SharePoint Enterprise, which transforms Microsoft Outlook into a collaboration console, with advanced access to SharePoint document collaboration, email management, and social features within the Outlook and Office Communications Server interfaces. This capability appears as a side bar within SharePoint. You can see a sample side bar below.
David showed me how it works. When you send an email with an attachment, a message pops up enabling you to put the document in SharePoint and send a link instead without leaving email as shown in the screen below.
Then others can go from email to work on the centrally located document within SharePoint. Access controls are in effect reducing the possibility of the attachment getting in the wrong hands. You can also see the profiles of the document author and all editors. Their presence can be observed and IM, video chat, or email can be sent to them as shown below.
You can also rate documents and sort them by ratings using that SharePoint capability but within hamon.ie within your email. Basically, harmon.ie brings many of the SharePoint capabilities within email.
For Notes users, there is harmon.ie for SharePoint, Notes Edition. Previously branded Mainsoft SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes, this email sidebar transforms Lotus Notes into a collaborative workspace through access to SharePoint documents, email management, calendars, and enterprise social networks within the Lotus Notes® and Lotus Sametime® interfaces. They have found that there are many companies that have Notes as email and also SharePoint. Some of them are quite large. It works the same as the harmon.ie SharePoint version with a side bar on the right.
There is also harmon.ie for Google Docs Enterprise, which enables people to collaborate on documents over the cloud, in their native file formats, using Google Docs and the Microsoft Exchange® email infrastructure.
They offer both a free personal version and a commercial enterprise version. In both cases, there are over 3000,000 users. The commercial aversion has been implemented in over 80 companies.
The time savings here is quite obvious. David mentioned a recent comparison they conducted. More than one hundred IT professionals and business users found that harmon.ie’s drag-and-drop access to shared documents is six times faster than the native SharePoint interface, which entails switching contexts and juggling several browser windows. People averaged 61 seconds to publish an email message on SharePoint via the SharePoint interface. However, they completed the same task in just 11 seconds using harmon.ie. I can see this happening.
Comprehensive SharePoint adoption remains a challenge. A number of firms are offering collaborative capabilities that sit on top of SharePoint to help with this challenage. Here is a different approach as the SharePoint capabilities are brought into the user’s prime workspace, their email accounts. I can easily see the value of this method. It will be interesting to see where this goes.
Thought...
