For most avid blogophiles, RSS/ATOM is a simple means of publishing content in a format that content aggregators can easily read and interpret to provide us with news feeds when and where we need them.  It’s all about the article feed - or is it?

While it’s clear the predominant use of RSS/ATOM is really driven around article feeds, actually there is nothing to prevent the underlying payload from being any form of data that we like.  Data exposed by RSS/ATOM has some interesting architectural implications.

1. The most interesting one is that properly formatted and consumed RSS/ATOM feeds understand WHEN they were relevant and provide means to know WHAT you’ve already read.  While this could be implemented into a direct call Web Service, it’s nice that it’s already built into RSS/ATOM and abstracted away from the calling application. 
2. Interfaces become simpler — while applications need to understand the data, the exposed service is clearer.  Reading a RSS/ATOM feed is well understood without needing to know all the properties, use WSDL or other description services you can access the available information.

I don’t believe that SOAP based web services will be replaced, however there are opportunities to look at the use of RSS/ATOM for moving data when a complex service interation is not required, which is a typical issue most first time SOA efforts come up against.   Even then, services like Yahoo pipes, will provide a mechanism for extracting a interacting across multiple RSS/ATOM feeds.

In the services based world, we should be de-constructing objects to their simplest deliverable form, then aggregating them to maximise re-use where needed.  For data transfer options on a subscription basis, RSS / ATOM looks like a good choice.

Interestingly, ATOM is in fact one technology of choice for the underlying data synchronisaton capabilities for Lotus Expeditor

I predict it’s probably only a matter of time until Yahoo has a Pipes Appliance (something like the Google search appliance — a “black box” that can be installed on your own network) which Enterprises can use as a glue between syndication services within their domains.

If you’re considering a SOA strategy, then RSS/ATOM syndication is one tool in the box that can help with data synchronisation across applications, leaving your Web Service designers to focus on the real value of services which is complex, business services replication.

For some SOA implementations, particularly those not needing compensation, this is one more stragtegy to help remove the need for process orchestration services, allowing applications to use RSS/ATOM to pull data from one place to another.

Innovation is a battle, and at liako.biz , Elias has proposed that people think like two year olds with some good thoughts about ensuring the right people gain ownership of the process.  I provided some comments there, but wanted to expand on my thoughts a little bit more here.

I’ve had a few post on innovation recently, but to summarise, most people would seem to agree that there are a lot of examples of innovative new companies however there is a general question as to whether older companies can continue to innovate, or at least break their frame of reference.

We see this in people too.  In the work place the influx of new graduates each year bubble with ideas and ways to change the world, while those who’ve been around a develop a deep focus on the their field of expertise, shutting down what they percieve as “noise” getting in the way of the job at hand.

Innovation is really about frame of reference — it’s inevitable that people with significant experience in narrow fields tend to see deep and complicated issues that are not obvious to the rest of us.  Combine this with work overload and limited time to invest in understanding something that’s new, people often find they don’t have the right context to make sense of what they are seeing.  This leads them to dismiss ideas out of hand, it’s just too much hard work to understand them.

Organisations are also resistant to chasing every wild new idea.  Large organisations in particular can quickly lose focus on the bottom line, investing time chasing the white-rabbit-of-innovation instead of keeping the wheels turning smoothly.

There is a natural tension here that’s right to maintain — not every innovation is good, nor is every existing process always right.  In my experience, innovation is hard work, which is why I think it rests (for the most part — some of us still keep at it) with the young and enthusiastic who have yet to become battle-weary!  Overcoming the natural tendency of a large organisation to travel the familiar path is not for the feint of heart.

We need to appreciate both sides of the innovation equation, as the battle-scarred realise through experience that more good ideas fail than succeed, while the new bring energy to keep diving back into the fray. 

The important thing is that once good organisations are convinced of the merits of new innovations and see where it can help their bottom line, then they bring phenomonal focus to driving forwards.

Tying this back to architecture, paticularly around IT, we can help this by introducing new technologies in a framed way that helps the organisation to understand the benefit that they can bring — and engaging the enthusiasts who have the drive to take the hits and evangalise.

In trying to explain Web 2.0 to work colleagues and explaining why it’s different from Web 1.0, I’ve created this easy to use “spotters” guide of features based on the reading and research I’ve been doing.  It’s a bit tounge in cheek (not your usual list of “Ajax”, ”Wiki” and “RSS”) but you might enjoy it.

1. Glitz and glamour, every Web 2.0 site thinks it’s the next big thing.  Exception to rule 1 are sites that already KNOW they are a big thing (see http://del.icio.us as good example of a pretty ugly site that does a lot of good web 2.0 things in a visually unappealing way).
2. Visually compelling, with desktop type features on the browser.  Ajax enabled will often appear in this context.  If you don’t get some kind of type ahead or dynamic lookup on the page, it’s not real Web 2.0.
3. It’s all about the tribe and the community, who all appear to be living in a slightly off-kilter universe where somehow telling the world that you’re watching American Idol is big news, or that they can’t imagine that generations of businesses somehow survived without the ability to have a message transcribed by someone in India.
4. It has a blog.  All good Web 2.0 sites must have a blog.  Only blogs are not blogs, they are part of the “blogosphere”, form a “conversation architecture” and make up the ”attention economy”.
5. 1st generation WEB 2.0 sites are mostly free, and it’s not always clear HOW they can be monetised. Late comers (read most sites launching in 2007) Web 2.0 let you try before you buy but over-charge for what they are really tring to provide.  I like to refer to these as Web 2.0a sites and Web 2.0b.
6. It’s a large scale, device agnostic message routing service stupid! Underneath the glitz and glamour of the latest tribal love-fest, is a cool piece of technology that many organisations could find a use for, but very few will buy.
7. REpresentational State Transfer (REST).  This is just the Architects way of describing loosely coupled services that don’t really know or care if you talk to them or not, but when you do, they give you information you can use in a format that you can understand and represent (the common example is getting a HTML page which you can represent as a graphically rich page in a browser or an RSS feed which can be re-constructed as news).  It’s a lot easier to say REST, which says a lot about Architects too.
8. Richard Scoble has written about it, commented on it, been quoted on it, or in some way used it.  It’s not genuine Web 2.0 unless Scoble got there first (or maybe a close second).
9. It’s a mash-up.  Remember the old days when you used to write programs on your desktop, and call lots of different API’s which provided services that people had written? We don’t code anymore, we create mash-ups by writing programs in our browser that call lots of different services which provide information that people have written for us.  It’s very different.
10. It’s all about services and the winners will be those that control the data.  Compelling services that offer net new implementations of features that people want and don’t have alternatives for will be some of the biggest winners and the outstanding examples of WEB 2.0.

I blogged about Twitter here and alluded to the power under the hood beyond the glitz of the live-conscious that is the twitter-stream.  Well I found another potential interesting use with Twitterment, a Twitter search term engine.

I remember reading somewhere, (no link sorry) someone making the comment that Twitter has potential uses in trying to track what people are talking about — well Twitterment is a tool investigating how to help delve that potential information mine better.

This article by Heather Havenstein in ComputerworldUK reporting on Forrester research gives an interesting perspective on what is going through minds of CIOs as they face the wild wild web and the Web 2.0 revolution.

However, he added that he was surprised by the number of CIOs who responded that their use of the tools was driven in part by the risk of losing market share unless they keep up with competitors’ use of the technology.

“There is a lot of fear and uncertainty driving this adoption. I don’t think we have seen something like that since the last tech bubble and all those companies who said they had to get a Web site up and running and get online,” Young [Oliver Young, Forrester analyst and author of the report] said.

The article reports a an interesting view that:

CIOs were most likely to view social networking and blogs as unnecessary, and said that RSS, wikis and tagging had relatively clear user benefits.

The general feel I get is that while Web 2.0 technologies ARE making their debut in fits and starts within enterprises, it’s no real surprise that they don’t get it.   To quote Tim O’Reilly again:

“It’s really about data and who owns and controls, or gives the best access to, a class of data.”

I see the issue here as business not seeing the forest for the trees — RSS more so than all the other technologies listed is more than any other a platform on which other implementations are built.  How do you implement RSS? Does an RSS enabled website mean you’ve achieved Web 2.0?

Or is it using RSS as a glue in a deep network of services and sites communicating and talking to each other in a rich tapestry that demands your attention? Providing data that’s compelling and best in class in a format that’s portable and lets YOU take control.

Following on from my last post, I saw this comment from Tim O’Reilly stating that Web 2.0 is all about controlling data.  I think he’s spot on.

Well, obviously this is a market with a lot of froth in it already. I have to say there are a lot of me-too products and companies. Yet another social network, of the 15th flavor — that’s common in every new technology revolution. There are imitators who have marginal improvements….

…That goes back to a major theme of web 2.0 that people haven’t yet tweaked to. It’s really about data and who owns and controls, or gives the best access to, a class of data.

From wired.com interview with Tim O’Reilly

I think we are tweaking to this, however there is still a way to go and the more good quality sites we see that have at their core not just a great visual experience, but operating as a service, then the sooner we can clear the froth and find the coffee!

I’ll be the first to admit that some times I just don’t “get” it.  As part of an ongoing quest to understand lifestream tools and what they are about, I was investigating Twitter and wondering why the need to “broadcast” the trivialities of my life was actually important, when I read the following on their blog.

Meanwhile, the current issue of the MIT Technology Review explains, “Twitter is a system that quickly matches new messages coming in from members with the followers who have signed up to receive them, then retransmits them using each follower’s preferred channel.”

Yes, we’re building a large-scale, device agnostic, message routing system that’s the technical core of Twitter and it has many applications. However, we’re making it fun and social too. It’s the fun part that technology columnists occasionally get cranky about.

http://twitter.com/blog/2007/04/new-york-times-on-911.html

This I get.  It’s a lesson I find myself revisiting often and is increasingly relevant in the burgeoning web2.0 world, if you can get past the “pimp-my-website” mentality of many sites which focus on the general user community, there is real power under the hood.

There’s something in that for both the evangalists and the cranky columnists — Web 2.0 has to also speak the language of Business 1.0 just as much as Business 1.0 needs to understand it’s not just about the wild natives broadcasting the trivilaities of their life, there could be something important that we are missing in the dazzle and glare.

I’ve touched on location based services in a few articles on AGPS and Plazes.  All which has me thinking more and more about logical extensions for this — how do we get location “off the map” and into a real application?  I was pointed to GeoRSS which adds geospatial support to RSS posts which allows you to know WHERE a post is relevant to, amongst other things.

This is leading to some interesting applications, if you haven’t seen it, check out World Explorer from Yahoo Research Berkely which analyses Flikr tags to produce a geotagged map of the world, weighted by the number of tags for a location – explore the world through the eyes of others in a way that makes sense.

So what should Enterprise Architects be thinking about?  In my overly lengthy post on AGPS (I’m going to try get better at more succinct ideas I promise!) I suggested you should be thinking about location type services, but I’ll go one further — you need a consistent global taxonomy for location in your organisation as it will become crucial.

Some 16 years ago, I worked for a fertilizer company, and we experimented with MapInfo to map sales data.  What we found was that based on the invoice address, most of our product was shipped into the centre of the city.  Now of course, this was explained as farmers either being owned by corporates, or having accountants who are located in the CBD.  Still, it wasn’t what we expected.  Even moving to delivery address didn’t help, as product was delivered to one of 6 major national distribution centres where farmers sent a truck to pick up product.

The point is simply this, location offers unique opportunities, many which I propose we don’t fully understand at this moment in time and others that will arrive.  To some extent we’ve been doing this in business for a while (hands up who has systems that know what office a staff member is located in), but we probably don’t understand this to the same degree of relevance about customers and in particular our own information.

I’m still remain sceptical that LBS will prove to be a ”killer app” for office based corporates, but I’ve no doubt that it will provide some incremental level of benefit.

I’ve mentioned Touchstone a few times here and here.  Well it’s just been renamed to Particls and the latest beta client released.  The new client looks to be a big step forward and a few niggly bugs from the earlier beta look to have been addressed.

The current beta is invite only from current participants, if you’ re interested and link me or leave a comment, I’d be happy to drop you an invite.

Working for one of the largest global users of Lotus Notes, it’s been frustrating as an architect over the last few years to see IBM lost in wilderness since they aquired Notes and uncertain what to do with it.  I’m fortunate to have some visibility on upcoming Notes products around Notes 8 and beyond and I’m not revealing anything much when I say that at last, there seems to be a strong direction for the platform again.

Erica Driver of Forrestor research has an excellent article about Sametime 7.50 / 7.51.  If you are at all interested in Lotus Notes futures and can spend some corporate cash, it’s worth the $399US in my opinion, although my copy was already paid for.  It all points to the buss being back.

When a company like News Gator (a Microsoft Gold Certified partner and long time Outlook afficiando’s) release a client for Lotus Notes, well things are really looking up!

While it may not be a Microsoft killer yet, there are now good reasons for companies with Lotus Notes to continue to invest in the product, and those who have a heavy IBM / Websphere Portal environment to move to it.

I saw an article in the local free-paper on the train (MX), which spoke briefly about AGPS being launched by carriers in Australia in 2007.  There is some support for this in The Age which also suggests in an article there are plans for AGPS in  2007.  

If you are wondering about what AGPS, or Assisted GPS is, it’s essentially a better GPS service for mobile phones which takes advantage of the base station network to remove some processing power from the phone and provide GPS service even where you cannot get line of sight to the GPS sattelites.  iMobile has a great summary article here as well as coverage of some phones coming out with AGPS capability and more support that AGPS is on its way.

Stepping away from innovation and invention for a moment and back to the “true-purpose” of this blog (if it even has such a thing), I wanted to consider what some of the implications of AGPS might be in an office based business, if any.

It’s obvious that companies with traditional GPS based applications, like transport or logistics companies could benefit from AGPS, and from a consumer perspective, I think it may well be the next “killer app” on the mobile for any number of reasons, but what about corporate office users?

 No doubt, AGPS phones will eventually become the corporate norm, in the same way that despite limited business use and initial opposition, camera phones are more or less the standard corporate hand piece these days even when there are limited business applications for your average office worker.  This is a very legitimate strategy, even if only as a value add to your staff who will find “normal” uses for these things as the phone crosses equally between the boundary of personal and business use.

So what are some of the uses of AGPS technologies for different business sectors?  I’m going to ignore privacy concerns at the moment as undoubtably these would need to be resolved, or may in fact be prohibited.  Additionally I’m looking for applications where a “mobile” location is key — static information like “where is my store / customer” on a map can already be achieved.

1. Manufacturing: Potentially a use in occupational health and safety situations.  Personal GPS devices could identify where staff are located and act as an additional safety check to traditional tagging mechanisms.  While interesting, I doubt there is much in here to drive this use and phone have other distractions and use issues which should see them kept off the shop floor.
2. Retail: For retailers, there may be some usage in tracking store locations, shipments and other logistics type operations.  The biggest growth area here will be in sophisticated customer loyalty programs tied to stock control systems that can work magic like “a known customer is within 200 metres of my store, they have purchased x in the past, this top will match well and I’m over-stocked here — send them an SMS voucher to be redeemed in next 60 minutes”.  This is an area that I believe savvy retailers will look at very seriously.
3. Sales / Relationship businesses: I could envision a version of LinkedIn on steroids but I’m not sure how practical this would be — I don’t particular want my sales rep to know I’m walking down the street!  However, from a sales persons perspective, something linked to the CRM system that can alert them when they are within a set distance of customers, according to parameters, may be of use.
4. General Office use:  No killer apps that I can think off, but some location services may be of use.

Some of  the general location services that I think all types of users could use might include things like — who from my company is in this location?  Now this may seem a strange idea, but as someone who travels a fair bit back and forward to Sydney, it’s a reasonable bet that there is at least one other (and possibly many more) from my work in the queue for a cab at the airport.  If I could easily locate them, we could share a cab, reduce some green-house gas, save some money and more importantly network.

Similarly, I’m often in a hotel where I know there are other people staying — it might be nice to share dinner or something similar.

Touchstone has got me thinking a lot about attention based services as well, and I think that there is some merit in considering location as part of an attention profile.  This might mean that when I’m travelling for example, I get some local news.  If I could locate you to a floor in a building then I could SMS you as you enter the floor about things that need your attention now.  In effect an event trigger system, better known as Location Based Services (LBS).

LBS uses could be very wide ranging, from letting people know I’m at my PC (because I’m in my office), on my mobile, or just triggering a notification at a time I can do something about it, LBS offers opportunities for managing attention that broadcasting information may not.

From an architectural point of view, the best place to start would be with JSR179 which is implemented by both Nokia and Blackberry as well as a host of others.  This lengthy standard gives a great deal of information about what a LBS is capable of providing to a phone based application.

In researching this, I found an excellent summary here which talks about several different types of location services:

1) Location blind services – users manually enter their location.
2) Location aware services – location determined automatically.
3) Location precise services – accurate location, and a proactive system.
Geoff Hendrey. Managing the wireless internet. RF Design, March 2001.

We are now entering the first generation of level 3, with AGPS enabling accurate location.  I’m still searching for information on how the pro-active nature will work — while a system based of a JSR179  application on your phone might work, it’s not pro-active enough for real event based LBS which need to work without an application required to be useful.  Once I find some more I’ll post it here.

In summary, AGPS is coming, it’s not here yet, but there for some businesses it will bring significant advantage if implemented well.  For others, namely office based businesses, it may provide some interesting niche applications, but no real business drivers yet.  This isn’t to say something won’t happen, I believe in the war for talent that business is increasingly driven by the expectations of it’s staff, not just ROI in the traditional sense.

As Architects, particularly in retail businesses understanding how AGPS works, what location information is needed to tie the system together (is it just a mobile number) will be critical steps that can be taken now to ensure early mover advantage when it is launched for consumers later this year.

I want to discuss Innovation and in particular, how you can destroy it very effectively in my next article, but before I do I need to explain my own concept (I should note at this point it’s probably not a unique concept, but it’s my own words and I haven’t read it anywhere — that’s not to say nobody else hasn’t already thought of or expressed it better) of Organisational Oversteer as this will come up a bit in future postings.

It’s pretty simple. 

Organisations will drive towards desireable behaviours by implementing Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) which promote the change they are seeking.  Once reaching the desired performance, they will proceed to overshoot the mark by failing to review the KPI’s which leads to over steer and a new set of undesireable behaviours.

Imagine the circle represents a sphere containing the range of cultural, management and other options available to you in your organisation today.  For various reasons you decide you want to be centered around point B but are currently at point A.  To move your organisation from A to B, you put in place a series of KPI’s and other measures which reward and motivate behaviours which will move you in the direction of the arrow, from point A to point B. 

What I believe typically then happens is that once point B has been reached (which may be a process of months or even years), instead of implementing a new stabilising set of KPI’s, the originals that moved us from A to B are left in place. These cause the organisation to over steer as it now moves from B towards C which is often as undesirable as A was in the first instance.

This gradual change and realisation may take several years to achieve, during which time, the desirable point B has undoubtedly also moved within the circle in response to new pressures, at which point a new set of KPI’s and a new cycle of over steer begins.

In fact it’s a no win situation! Organisations that find themselves at point B and then put in place a new set of measures, no longer compensating, but instead stabilising, also find over-time that even by merit of standing still, the desirable point B has shifted and they are now back at A again.

I’m not proposing this as a bad or good thing.  I see it more simply as something that just “is”, a fact of organisational operation that we need to deal with.   To turn this back to innovation then, I believe innovation is the driver that lets us change direction quickly as we attempt to stay on the “B” spot.

When the rate of change outside exceeds the rate of change inside, the end is in sight. Attributed to Jack Welch here.

Adapting to quickly to change through innovation and allowing it flourish will keep the organisation humming on the “B” spot.  Failure to do so, and allowing organisational oversteer will see you floundering from point A to point C without adapting to the changes around you.  More on this to come!