Following on from yesterday: Tech Review has also posted an article covering ten new ideas for the Social Web. These are startups which could catch on, for a variety of reasons.

Have a look. There are some you might recognise, like Pownce. There’s a peer-to-peer traffic reporter based on contributed GPS data from gridlocked cars. There’s a new take on making mashup APIs manageable. And more.

But the one that caught my eye is Ushahidi: not just for its idea, but for where it comes from. Ushahidi is a not-for-profit that can aggregate reports by mobile phone and display them via Google Maps. The original was developed in Kenya, as a way of gathering reliable information in the troubles following the disputed election, from local people in areas where the news media couldn’t reach. And it wasn’t developed by someone in the west with a social conscience. It was developed in Africa, by African people, for an African situation; and it could be deployed in any trouble spot or disaster area where conventional communications are disrupted. In the west, even!

Links:
• Ten Web Startups to Watch MIT Technology Review, July/August 2008
• Ushahidi

I was catching up on a backlog of alerts from MIT Technology Review. Lots of stuff about social networking, and I’m not going to discuss that here. Some of the services reviewed are the standard ones (MySpace vs Facebook, Twitter and so on) and some are smaller scale upstarts which might be the next great thing.

But this one article is worth reading, and I thought I’d flag it here rather than just tag it in del.icio.us. MIT’s Technology Review discusses whether the level of traffic now being generated will kill the internet as we know it.

The surge in video traffic started with YouTube, but there is a lot of higher-quality user-generated video out there now and some of it gets insane numbers of hits just because it’s quirky and catches someone’s attention. And the broadcasters are in on it. In the UK, the BBC’s iPlayer is coming up for its first refresh; it’s been a wildly successful service, allowing programmes to be retrieved and re-watched over a seven day period, or retrieved and downloaded until the DRM software causes them to self destruct. ITV and Channel 4 have a slightly different model, but the key thing - in common with the US broadcast-linked services mentioned by TR - is that these are peer-to-peer applications. So, not all the bandwidth used is server-to-user; a lot of it is user-to-user, and the iPlayer T&Cs make explicit the permission for your iPlayer to be used in this way.

What’s the growth factor? TR quotes analyst Nemertes as saying 100% per year. An alternative academic estimate of 50% growth can probably be coped with by current technology trends. Watch this space … while you still can!

Links:
• Internet Gridlock (MIT Technology Review, July/August 2008 )
• The Internet Singularity, Delayed: Why Limits in Internet Capacity Will Stifle Innovation on the Web (Nemertes, Nov 2007)

As an ex-pharma employee I tend nowadays to be more interested in his work extending the infrastructure for health delivery, and the reach of drugs which need expensive R&D to develop, into areas of the world that otherwise the commercial model couldn’t reach.

Anyway, this blog is written on a Mac …

Symbian, the mobile phone OS, is currently celebrating its tenth anniversary. Nokia, the major shareholder, is to buy out the other partners and this news is featured in the mainstream press, not just the specialists.

Symbian is used on over 200 models. But even Nokia uses it for only a proportion of its devices. Nokia will move it into an Open Source project, to which it will contribute the Symbian and S60 software. Sony Ericsson and Motorola will contribute technology from UIQ, and DOCOMO its MOAP(S) assets. The press release says that the Symbian Foundation “will provide a unified platform with [a] common UI framework. A full platform will be available for all Foundation members under a royalty-free license, from the Foundation’s first day of operations.”

There’s more information about the new Foundation and its governance from analyst CCS Insight, together with some thoughts for the future which I think boil down to: good move, should have been done long ago, might be too late, watch this space!

Symbian’s OS competition includes Linux (LiMo) and, of course, Windows Mobile. But The Guardian’s view is that this isn’t really about handset technology. It’s about the development of a service-based model for the mobile Internet, where Nokia’s competition includes Apple’s iPhone, Microsoft’s smartphone and, perhaps, Google’s attempt to change the commercial model with Android. ChannelWeb quotes Jack Gold who sees the Symbian foundation as an attempt to challenge Android. Other commentators look elsewhere for the significance.

Nokia’s own press release talks about “setting the future of mobile free”. Significantly, it also quotes Kris Rinne, SVP of Architecture and Planning at AT&T, to reinforce this message: “Mobile phones have turned into sophisticated multimedia computers and smart phones continue to grow in popularity. The Symbian Foundation will reduce fragmentation in the industry and holds the promise of incorporating leading technology and the most mature software into a unified platform for the entire industry. This will … support AT&T in offering its differentiated services to consumers.”

For the enterprise, and the user-in-the-street, that is probably the biggest take.

Links:

• Nokia buys Symbian in web push The Guardian, 25 Jun 2008
• Nokia Squares Up to Software Rivals by Buying Symbian and Moving to Open Source CCS Insight, 24 June 2008, and comment
• Can Nokia’s Symbian Foundation Nuke Google Android, Others? ChannelWeb, 24 Jun 2008
• Mobile leaders to unify the Symbian software platform and set the future of mobile free Nokia press release, 24 Jun 2008
• Symbian
• LiMo Foundation (Linux Mobile)
• Windows Mobile
• Android - An Open Handset Alliance Project (Google)

Some 40 years ago the BT Tower (the Post Office Tower, as was then) was on the tourist circuit and I took in the revolving view from the observation platform. Then it was bombed, and was permanently closed to the public.

So last evening was the first time since then I’ve had chance to ascend the Tower. The occasion: a BCS Elite meeting, a fascinating and informative evening on Web 2.0. I’ve heard Euan Semple before (I invited him to give a seminar at GSK), so this was an update on his thinking but complemented by two other speakers: Ian Aitchison, Group Communications Officer for the Japanese shipping and logistics company NYK, and Richard Dennison, Intranet & Channel Strategy Manager for BT (who’d never been up the Tower despite working for the company).

Euan tells a compelling story about how he embedded social media into the BBC, which he left a couple of years ago. He used it to introduce the audience to the panoply of services, and to explore the issues which corporates face. Their people are already using the public platforms privately and for business, but the more far-sighted are adopting them to help people work better together - as internal look-alikes or, in some cases, directly on the external platforms.

Ian Aitchison and Richard Dennison both picked up these themes, in their very different enterprises: NYK a worldwide, very scattered, very physically centred organisation, looking to social media to help them realise their strategic vision; and BT, providing virtual products, UK-centric but increasingly global and also widely scattered.

As I wrote a little while ago: human beings are a gregarious species; we communicate. Almost any network technology goes person-to-person. Social computing, in this sense, represents the Internet coming of age as person-to-person services multiply and people explore the potential.

So, in business, senior managers use blogs, RSS or even Twitter to communicate with their teams. The best share openly in discussion: plenty of examples, from all three speakers, showing how risky this actually isn’t. No-one questions the manager’s right to make the decision, but it’s a lot more likely to be accepted and understood, even by dissenters, after this kind of sharing. The BBC’s policy on external blogging by employees was created in a wiki by those most directly concerned, before it was top-and-tailed by HR and Legal - most enterprises still do this the other way round, and require multiple meetings rather than being able to capitalise on ten minutes of someone’s time here, and five of someone else’s there, to evolve to a satisfactory conclusion. And have you seen the movie someone created of the creation of the Wikipedia entry on the London 7 July bombings? That’s a graphic demonstration of the power of the crowd both to create useful information and to rectify damage very quickly.

Euan’s material isn’t postable, though he’s bloggedf already; and I don’t have Ian Aitchison’s. But have a look at Richard Dennison’s blog for a very similar presentation. And, of course, we all then adjourned to the 34th floor for a buffet supper and to enjoy the unparalleled view over London as the sun went down and the city lit its lights.

Links:
• My slides from International Employee Communications Summit Richard Dennison, blog, 10 Jun 2008
• One identity, multiple networks ITasITis, 9 Apr 2008
• A Humanizing Influence Euan Semple, The Obvious? (Euan’s blog), 17 Jun 2008, with reference to the event
• New Horizon 2010 NYK strategy

If you click on the Gartner website at the moment, you’ll see the centre panel higlights their report on “The Modernization of IT”. When you click, though, it’s a disappointment. To judge from the headline (I don’t have client access) it is just encouraging enterprise IT to set up a programme office to manage a transformation programme.

Elsewhere, though, there’s a different story. Gartner Voice is Gartner’s regular podcast series, and you can hear these without an account. OK, so it’s explicitly “not published Gartner research”, but it’s worth taking a feed from it all the same. And there’s a different take in there, which I just caught up with, in the shape of an interview with British academic Prof. Peter Keen. Keen is going to be the keynote speaker at Gartner’s upcoming infrastructure forum, and he gets it.

The interview rehearses some familiar stuff. There’s a lot of new technology out there. “IT is in danger of becoming the corporate laggard” because it’s got stuck in corporate technology. do we have an architecture for mobile, for example? “We cater pretty well for the customer of today - people like ourselves.” Our customers of tomorrow (that’s real customers, not enterprise IT’s internal pseudo-customers) are different; unlike us, they’re using this stuff. Our wouldn’t-we-like-them-to-be next generation employees are using it, and some of our existing employees are too. Let’s have corporate IT get real about this stuff and, in Bob Dylan’s words, “don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall”.

But Keen has gone further than many thinkers in showing how this really applies to enterprise IT. Yes, understand your business’s customers and how to interact with them. But ask him how to get the thinking shifted about this, in the boardroom, and he says two things. Stop the “business” thinking that somehow IT isn’t their responsibility. And: stop letting IT be talked about as a cost; the best thing to do with a cost is to cut it. Get the conversation switched to investment, to be creative with or customers. R&D made that switch a long time ago. Get IT onto the same page.

We’ve often said these things separately. Saying them together is newer than it ought to be!

Links:
• Peter Keen
• The Business Blueprint for the IT Platform Gartner Voice, 5 May 2008
• Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Management Summit, 2008 (Orlando, 23-25 Jun)

I had a phone chat with Erica Driver yesterday about her new venture, ThinkBalm. Erica has been one of Forrester’s lead analysts for some time, becoming one of their most knowledgeable researchers in what she calls the Immersive Internet. That’s virtual worlds such as Second Life, serious games, virtual meetings and so on. Erica’s charted the possibilities of these technologies - as a participant, not just from the outside. She’s charted much of this through the Forrester Information and Knowledge Management blog, where her reports are still available and can be reached without a subscription (I believe …).

ThinkBalm, set up by Erica and her husband Sam, aims to help vendors and – if there’s a foothold – enterprises working in these areas. With the pressure on costs, the increasing quality of virtual interactions, and less willingness of employees to travel continually, the opportunities are enormous. At the simplest level: I spoke with Erica using Skype – a free call, and we could see each other. Again: the Open University course that I’m teaching has given me a group of students spread from the north of England to the far Mediterranean, and we rely entirely on online communication. With no real face to face time, we have chat rooms but not live video. Wouldn’t that be nice!

Erica is a recognised leader in knowledge and experience of these technologies. She reckons her first clients will be IT vendors. I would expect the more adventurous enterprises to be equally interested!

Links:
• ThinkBalm
• Tips From A Successful Virtual Conference Erica Driver, Forrester IKM Blog, 28 Apr 2008

A colleague in LinkedIn posted a question about how you determine your business partners’ business requirements, so that you can determine technology strategy. It’s only been out there a couple of hours, and it’s got a string of answers already. I’d like to spawn a more general thread.

Almost all the answers assume, I think, that “business partner” means “someone you want to sell to”. But there are many other kinds of business partners. In pharmaceuticals, where I worked for a decade or so, partners might be a research organisation you’re working with, a peer enterprise with a co-marketing agreement, your regulator, your upstream partners (important, because the regulator can demand to see information they supply about the compound they’ve sold you), a service provider, an information source … and no doubt some I’ve missed. And a partner may turn up in more than one role: maybe IBM provides technology to American Express, and American Express provides outsourced travel services to IBM (it’s a hypothetical example: I don’t know).

So: there are some fundamentals.

First: you can’t determine your technology strategy according to what your partners are doing, because there are so many of them. Think the ongoing Lotus Notes versus Microsoft Exchange debate for a very pertinent example. Nor can you dictate strategy to them - they have exactly the same variety, unless they are so small and so closely tied to you that they can be seen as part of your organisation.

Second: therefore, individual business strategies with particular partners in particular roles can’t be allowed to determine your overall technology strategy. Even if you decide to have one of whatever your partners use, that’s a strategy; and it has a very specific consequence, which is that your own technology base must be capable of doing the integrating, in-house, to present a single picture (to your executive management, at the very least). More likely there will be specific partners who have the power to dictate how you inter-operate with them: Walmart, say, and your regulator; some who you can dictate to, if you so wish; and others with whom you must inter-operate using a variety of specific technologies with neither partner dictating. Heterogeneity is the rule; and true business partnering is about respecting each other’s decisions and strategies, not dominating them.

Third, and inescapably, therefore: strategies based on product decisions are doomed to failure. Bar none. Not even Microsoft Office; I would lay odds you have several versions active in your enterprise environment right now, and your partners will add several more. Every changeover means conversion filters, or constraining users to the previous version’s formats. And the latest release of Office changes everything more fundamentally than most, with its XML-based formats.

So you need your business partners’ business objectives, and a definition of the business requirements which you and your partners share. But it’s perilous to define an IT strategy on the basis of current requirements with the current set of partners. Take a step back, and use these to create a higher-level business and technology strategy for your own organisation. It must be stable enough and at a high enough level of abstraction to survive partnership changes, new regulations, mergers, acquisitions and divestments.

And this makes a very strong case for open standards as the basis for architecture (which is IT strategy anyway: see Jeanne Ross of MIT Sloan School on the subject): at least at the interface where your systems meet your partners’, directly or (via the Internet, for example) indirectly. “Open” in this case is probably fairly close to the Microsoft definition. Not necessarily publicly created, or even in the public domain: this may help, but it can slow development down. But published, open to licence, easily accessible, widely implemented, and evolving in a backward-compatible way.

So: know your business partners; figure out how to work with them; but remember you’re also figuring out how to work with the business partners you don’t know you’re going to have. It’s what you don’t know that you don’t know, that kills you!

Links:
• Jeanne Ross MIT Sloan online profile
You may be able to see:
• Enterprise Architecture as Strategy Video View, Jeanne Ross, Forrester Forum, 15 May 2007
• Enterprise Architecture as Strategy Presentation, Jeanne Ross, Forrester Forum, PDF file, 15 May 2007
(these are Forrester Research excerpts from the 2007 Architecture Forum, and may be available to clients only)

There’s a discussion going on over “what is an analyst”, started by sagecircle and picked up in various places.

A great dal of what’s discussed is for IT vendors’ analyst relations professionals, rather than users. I’ve a different perspective because I’ve come out of a decade or so managing analyst services for a major enterprise IT function. So, rather than comment in the existing threads, I’ll spawn a slightly different one here and link back.

I’ve encountered a variety of attitudes among colleagues, ranging from those who see the output as commodity research papers to those - myself included - who looked for a longer term strategic relationship. We talk about research services, about information providers, about advisory services as well as about analysts. What enterprises want is insight - into a marketplace, into an IT-business issue, into a strategic question, into a technology future. So I talk about insight services.

From the enterprise perspective (so this isn’t relevant for vendor-oriented services), what does the client want? That’s another way of saying, how did I position the service I was managing?

Of course, you want eyes and ears in the technology marketplace. You want people who have the spread you can’t have, the time to develop the knowledge, and the ability to draw conclusions. You want people who know the connection between IT and business. That’s research and analysis, in the sense the threads have discussed it.

But you want something more. All the major insight services - Forrester, Gartner, IDC, whoever - will want to develop a closer relationship. The more understanding they have of your business, the more they can go beyond their research base (the written documents, and the work that went into them) and provide specific, tailored advice that is relevant to your own enterprise - not just your type of business, or your industry sector at large.

For me, the thing that’s been missed in the discussion about what defines an analyst is precisely this ability to go beyond the research and provide insight that makes the data, the analysis actionable in the specific context. That’s true whether you are speaking of a service company as a whole, of an individual analyst within one of those companies, or of a one person outfit. That’s what makes an insight service, rather than just an analyst.

Links:

• What is the definition of “analyst”? sagecircle, 1 May 2008
• Link to the above in Tekrati Keeping Tabs, which also links to the Wikipedia definition
and all the links in those posts.

The British Computer Society awards its Lovelace Medal to “individuals who have made a contribution which is of major significance in the advancement of Information Systems or which adds significantly to the understanding of Information Systems”. The award is announced at a lecture given by the previous year’s medallist. This year’s event was a little different.

Karen Spärck Jones, the 2007 Lovelace medallist, died shortly after the award was announced. She was a pioneering researcher in computational linguistics, and received many awards through a long and distinguished career which started, continued and ended at Cambridge University. If you use a search engine, thesaurus-driven retrieval, automatic summarisation, relevance weighting, the Semantic Web, or any technology which depends on language analysis, you owe a debt to her work.

The 2008 Lovelace lecture was given in her memory by Dr. Ann Copestake, Cambridge’s Reader in Computational Linguistics. The lecture itself was a tour de force, ranging across the areas in which Prof. Spärck Jones so often led the way right up to the time of her death. Dr. Copestake educated us, but never baffled us. The logic and algebraic formalisms which she shared were not to be understood, but to illustrate how complex a field of study this is; when she needed us to understand a principle, she used a simple English sentence or, at one point, a Sudoku puzzle.

But, additionally, we were treated to glimpses of Karen Spärck Jones the person, and of her long partnership - academic as well as personal - with her husband Prof. Roger Needham. Fittingly, the vote of thanks was given by Dr. Andrew Herbert, who was closely associated with Prof. Needham in Cambridge research and succeeded him at the head of Microsoft’s Cambridge research lab. In his short speech, and in tributes from Prof. Wendy Hall and Prof. David Hartley, we learned also of the enormous range of charitable activities supported by the Roger Needham Trust and the depth of their joint contribution to Cambridge University and civic life.

Her work has touched my own career more than once: most directly in the 1980s when I managed thesaurus-driven databases and wrote an internal research paper on the then vogue issue of natural language database interfaces. But to my surprise I learned that, through Andrew Herbert, she also directly influenced a completely unrelated field which I was involved in: architectures for wide area distributed systems, developed through the ANSA project into an ISO standard. It was through this project that I met Andrew, who was its technical director. Conversation with Prof. Spärck Jones guided Andrew to one of the principles of that work, that of under-determination (essentially, working with the partial knowledge you do have) which is one of the foundations of modern computational linguistics. In Dr Copestake’s lecture, this is where the Sudoku came in!

Prof. Spärck Jones knew that she would not be able to receive the medal in person; Andrew’s comments brought home to us how much it genuinely meant to her. Surprisingly for a medal named for the first woman in IT, Prof. Spärck Jones was the first woman to receive it; this gave her great pleasure. Computing, as she once said, is too important to be left to men!

Links (follow these links not only for Dr Copestake’s lecture but also for a video lecture recorded by Prof. Spärck Jones herself as an acknowledgement for the Lovelace medal and for the ACM Athena Award which she received at the same time):

• 2008 Lovelace Lecture: A tribute to Karen Spärck Jones British Computer Society (Dr. Copestake’s presentation will be accesible via this page)
• Obituary: Karen Spärck Jones University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory
• Natural Language and the Information Layer Prof. Karen Spärck Jones, March 2007 (video lecture, 30 minutes)
• Ann Copestake University of Cambridge
• Dr Andrew Herbert Microsoft, Cambridge
• ANSA project, 1985-1998 official record online