…and why start-ups should want to play with them.  Chris commented on my “Are you hearing me? Who needs a new metric post?” regarding my position that an Attention gathering standard (and more specifically an Attention Engine) would be ideal for Enterprises.  He made the valid points that Enterprises are not friendly to start-ups and costly to build the service infrastructue around that they require.

 I thought I’d answer this here as a seperate post, because this is something I’ve been thinking about and I suspect going to be referring back to regularly in the future.  While I’ve never run a start-up, I’ve certainly been around large Enterprises a lot, worked with them, consulted with them and studied them.  Like individuals, it’s hard to categorise Enterprises with the same broad brush, but I’m going to give it a go here.  I should make the point that none of this is aimed at Chris or his company in anyway.

Here are some of the things start-ups should understand about Enterprises if they want to play (and a bit at the end about why they should want to play).

1. There is no doubt that most Enterprises are risk averse, and start-ups can be risky, however this does not mean Enterprises won’t take risks.  Enterprises will take risks if the rewards stack up.  Start-ups need iron clad business cases AND have to be prepared to let Enterprises validate this for themselves by trialling software and assessing the benefit.
2. Enterprises do not consider themselves an endless pot of gold, in fact most of them are cheapskates.  Don’t expect an Enterprise to pay for trialling your software — they expect and demand as much as 60% or more discount off list price from billion dollar software companies.  If you’re selling to an Enterprise, be prepared and willing to let them trial it for free.  On the positive front, poor payment terms aside (they’ll make you wait 60 days for your cash), Enterprises do pay their bills and will pay what something is worth (see point 1).
3. No-one wants to pay twice for something.  Anyone selling software needs to appreciate that Enterprises have long term contracts with major vendors, may be privvy to information that the general populace is not, and generally have an overall direction they are heading in.  Why should you pay for some new software that duplicates functionality you are likely to get in 12 months, will fully integrate with your environment and have probably already paid for to some degree.
4. It’s changing as the world of WEB 2.0 evolves, but generally speaking, Enterprises like to bring things inside their firewall.  I wouldn’t let this stop you BUT you will probably get faster adoption if you can deploy your technology inside the firewall.
5. Enterprises understand that most of the cost of ownership in software is in the support.  Enterprises don’t implement version 1.0 of something, and the general trend of Web 2.0 start-ups to release pre-version 1.0 software or continual released product that’s really just beta builds, while good consumer sense, is foreign to Enterprises.
6. Enterprises LOVE a good open standard.  As Chris points out, Enterprises will want to integrate your product into their environment.  True LDAP support should be a mandatory minimum.  Make your product as open as possible.

So lets be frank, if you’re a start-up, Enterprises are a pain in the butt, they’ll push you round, demand features which are un-appealling to consumers (who cares about LDAP if you’re an individual) and drag out the terms.  So why bother?

Well there are several reasons I think that Enterprises are worth the effort for the brave:

1. No-one got really rich (apart from Google) off the back of ad-sense.  If you think Enterprises are cheap, consumers are even cheaper still, they expect everything for free.
2. Lots of users and big complex systems lead to lots of big complex problems.  Enterprises are crying out for GOOD solutions that help them address real business issues, and the business issues are not that different from those faced in the consumer world. 

So why bother? Well, if you have:

• A unique solution to a real Enterprise issue that no-one else does;
• If you’re willing to let an Enterprise trial it for a reasonable period of time;
• A solution that is robust and rich in its problem space;
• Support and promote logical open standards which will allow integration;
• Can consider letting your software hop the fence to the inside of the firewall (or are willing to jump a few extra hoops if you won’t);

then Enterprises will pay and they will pay well.

In finishing, not every Web 2.0 solution drives a good Enterprise business case, but those that do should be very open to a key market that I think will ultimately assist them in what start-ups want — to be successful and make money. 

You can make money and be successful in the consumer space only, but if your offering makes sense to Enterprises, then don’t be afraid to play.

Chris posted on the need for a new metric which could supplement traditional page-view metrics.

I’m going to add to the call-to-arms from the Enterprise point of view.  The ability to understand not just what people click on, but the attention they give to elements of the new, rich media world is crucial.  Detailed information that goes beyond “IP Address loaded page X” and various derivatives of this is crucial.

I touched on this in my earlier post about Syndication in the Enterprise, the model I proposed there includes an attention client and engine which collects the data independently of the RSS browser, but this could do SO much more.

Chris is correct when he says that there is a vast range of attention data, for example, YouTube videos, flash movies etc. etc.  An open standard here for collecting and analysing this information would be a real boon to the emerging Attention arena.

Elias took up the conversation over here as well and raised an interesting point:

So before we come up with new measurement systems, lets spend more time determining why we are measuring. Simply saying we are better measuring what consumers are giving their attention to, is only part of the problem. We need to first determine what value we obtain from measuring that attention in the first place.

My push-back to both of them is simply this — I think we DO need a standard for aggregating attention data from all the different clients people use during a day, for the very simple reason that in Enterprises understanding what people are using and how they are using it is a crucial part of the delivery eco-system for information.  It’s the feedback loop that lets you know you’re getting it right.

It may be useful for bloggers etc. as well, but I think the problem should be focussed on the Enterprise as this is where the “real” need is (I show my bias here, but I don’t believe I as a blogger need to know in great detail who looks at what, but as an Entprise of 160,000 people globally I do need to understand where and how my information is flowing).

What’s new in all this is not the concept — Advertisers have been doing this for years with demographics, TV ratings seasons, market surveys etc. etc., however what is now being proposed is a very finely tuned attention engine that understands (and helps others to understand) that most unique of individuals — you.

I came across Spock a few weeks ago and signed up for an invite.  At that stage it was just an empty web page with the promise of more to come, still the thought someone was tackling the problem of identifying people on the internet was refreshing.

Well Spock has moved to private beta now, and at first glance this is going to be the next killer app for finding and identifying people.  What makes it different from Google? Well a couple of things actually.

When I search for “Tim Bull” in Google, I get a hit for every web page that I (or someone with my name) happens to score a mention.  This is a long way from Spock, which acts in a person centric way — at a high level (and I’m interpreting here) a person is more akin to an object. Not a page, but rather a collection of references which relate to the person.

Where Spock is makles this process more intelligent is that you (and others) can interact with your person profile, voting on references, assigning references and generally collaborating to make a diverse, and complete version of “you”.

It’s another great example of how the new Internet is all about attention.  While some applications (Particls is one example) are looking at “WHAT” you should pay attention too, Spock looks at “WHO” you should pay attention to.

A brief post, but I wanted to share this excellent post on Principled Innovation.  I think Jeff D Cagna’s spin on this topic is a little differently focussed from where I’m taking it, but I think what he is saying is valid not only for associations and organisations, but Enterprises as well (perhaps he also meant this, I’m not sure).

He says:

 The real threat to our future is the way we’re thinking about and leading our organizations today.

I see evidence of this all the time - Enterprises are setup to preserve the status quo, breaking through the tried and trusted to approach something in a new way is generally considered a threat.  More from Jeff:

This is not a point I make lightly, but we must be clear on what is really holding our organizations and our community back, i.e., our inability or unwillingness to admit that we actually do live in a different time and that we must adjust our ways of thinking and leading accordingly.

I’ve been working with a number of bricks and mortar retailers in fashion recently, and one thing that’s come through again and again is a sense that while they believe that something might be happening, they can’t quite place their finger on what it is all about.

Are we holding ourselves back as Enterprises from embracing the new, and will our risk aversion to experimenting with the new modes of business hamper us in the near future?  Or is it a Tortoise and Hare race, with the Enterprise the Tortoise that will eventually adapt and win the day?

I’ve had my Nokia 6233 phone for about 6 months now.  Recently I’ve been wanting to buy an iPOD, but couldn’t really justify the extra gadget just for heading to work and back.  Anyway, in conversation with someone at work, they mentioned they’d been using their Nokia phone as a music player. 

I should point out that we all have the same model of phone here, they get upgraded with our laptops every two year, so there is some excuse (it’s not like I reviewed the feature set it just landed on me), but it struck me that after 6 months there was a whole set of features in the phone I’d never explored, even when the phone could address a need I had.

Sitting down with another person with the same phone today, I was telling them how excited I was about this (I bought a 2Gb micro SD card and now have some 20 cds worth of music or more loaded up).  Sure it’s not quite the iPOD experience, but it’s a big step up from where I was at.  They didn’t know how to do it, and pulled out their phone only to find they’d configured theirs using yet another set of options I didn’t know about.

It got me thinking about how yet again, tools and software are so feature rich that it’s just difficult for one person to know how to use all aspects of it.  I once heard a quote something along the lines that each person only uses 10% of the features available to them in Microsoft Word or Excel.  The problem is that everyone uses a different 10%.

What this leads to is tools which do many things — they are feature rich, but they don’t do all of them well — leading to them being both feature rich and poor at the same time.  I call them the Rich - Poor.

The Nokia is a perfect example of this — I really love having my music on the go with me, but for listening to music, an iPOD, with its navigation features built into the device is vastly superior.  With the Nokia, I get 150 tracks in sequential or random order.  I can build play lists, but I have to do them manually on my PC first and can’t just choose to listen to “jazz” or a specific album on the go.

Another story I was reminded about was the Firefly.  This is a great example of a Poor - Rich product.  What’s fascinating about this is that the product designed for 8 - 12 year olds became popular with senior citizens in the US, because of it’s limited (and therefore easy to understand and access) feature set.  Catching on to this trend the Jitterbug quickly followed.  A simple set of features, but a depth and richness in the market because it does them well and htis one need in a clear, specific way.

In the software world, we also see this becoming clearer with the move to services and WEB 2.0.   Instead of Rich - Poor applications, we are now getting Poor - Rich services, services that a feature poor in terms of the diversity within the one application, but rich because of the complexity and ability that the service provides.

Of course it’s no suprise this trend has already started, but the next two years is going to be a facsinating time as instead of Rich - Poor apps, we get a true diversity on the Internet with Poor - Rich apps to meet every niche popping up faster and faster as services become more prolific and the tools to plug them together move to new levels of maturity. 

Hopefully Akismet is up and running properly now.  The spam demons were getting to me.  Sorry for the inconvinience, but hopefully it’s better than trolling through caribeean cruise offers you were never likely to take!

I posted earlier about The Battle To Innovate in response to a post by Elias.   It was interesting to read on Innovation Zen about The Playstation True Story, which really resonated with me about the frustrations both Elias and I have been describing.

What struck me about this article is that it really illustrates many of the realities we observe day to day, that successful innovation / invention is hard work.  Large organisations resist change, particularly when they don’t understand it, but the power of one individual who never gives up despite the setbacks and obstacles CAN succeed.

One thing is for certain — it can be lonely leading from at the front.

I first became interested in the idea of prediction markets and ideas stock exchanges when I first came across the Hollywood Stock Exchange back sometime in around 1998 / 99.  It always appealled to me as something that would have some use internally in trading ideas, but brief investigations at that time didn’t reveal anything really suitable.

Fast forward to 2006 and I read Wisdom of Crowds, which convinced me that my inner belief there was some use for these kinds of tools could in fact translate to a real application.   I’ve been looking around again and recently came across Inkling Markets.   I had the opportunity to speak with them in my “day job” and I learnt a lot of things about how to apply a prediction market internally.

What I took away from this were three things:

1. No prediction market will function effectively without a metric on which you can measure the success of the prediction.
2.  Small prediction markets are pointless — it’s wisdom of crowds not wisdom of a few.  If you’re going to trial it, get as many people involved as you can.
3. The market has to be dynamic to keep peoples interest (ie. no point asking them to list 10 ideas and leave them open for 3 months — they’ll rank them in the first week and stop trading).  This means opening new markets all the time, and ensuring that there are changes to the stocks (either new IPOs or de-listings) in existing markets on a regular basis.

Some of the features of Inkling Markets which I like, is the tools that it supports to allow you to blog effectively about your market, including embedding graphs etc.  As soon as I can think of an effective public market I’ll have to start one up and try it out as well as the internal ideas markets that I’ll be experimenting with.

As we trial our internal market, I’ll be sharing some of the pros and cons of that experience here.  If you’d like to know more feel free to drop me a comment.

I came across two interesting sites by David Troy, http://flickrvision.com/ and http://twittervision.com.

 They are both elegantly constructed mashups that automatically match location from Flickr and Twitter to maps.  Apart from the pure simplicity, what struck me yet again was how this kind of location based information adds real depth to what is otherwise a photo board or shared SMS service.

Twitter takes on a whole new dimension when “Making my coffee” pings up on the map as day breaks in the US, and watching photo’s appear on the map from Flickr was surprisingly enjoyable.

Of course, the cynic in me is still not sure what practical use they serve, but they are both excellent sites and a worth spending 10 minutes to experience.

I was sent the following by a friend with the above title, I’ve tried to source it, but while many have quoted it (here is one), I can’t find who to attribute it to.  Originally it referred to programmers or web designers.  Although this is the first time I’ve seen it, Google found me copies dating back to 1997! Let me know if you have any good ideas where it came from, mean-while, it still remains so true it hurts.

Dear Mr. Architect:

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don’t have nearly enough insulation in them).

As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)

Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.

To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make certain that you contact each of our children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year. Make sure that you weigh all of these options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices that you make.

Please don’t bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet.

However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.

Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.

While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should have appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers. Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the population in my area that they like the features this house has. I advise you to run up and look at my neighbor’s house he constructed last year. We like it a great deal. It has many features that we would also like in our new home, particularly the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the final cost.

Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used only for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.

You must be thrilled to be working on as an interesting project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can’t happen very often. Contact me as soon as possible with your complete ideas and plans.

PS: My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I’ve given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can’t handle this responsibility, I will have to find another architect.

PPS: Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case

The pressure is on to find an RSS / News solution for the Enterprise.  But it’s not coming from the users (I think this is because users that want RSS just install their own client anyway).

Every time it’s been raised internally in the last couple of years it’s come from the “Knowledge Managers” (inverted commas indicate sarcasm at the use of this title) who see it as a new communications channel that can achieve cut-through over e-mail.  The two major requirements they present are:

1. At an Enterprise level we can force users to subscribe to their knowledge channel.
2. Any news reader has an alerting mechanism (pop ups) so that it gets peoples attention.

Primarily this is because the copious lotus notes databases, intranet sites, e-mail bulletins etc. are NOT getting the attention that they supposedly deserve (I try and argue that they are in fact getting EXACTLY the attention they deserve, but that’s not always well recieved).  I quickly point out to them that implementing a news reader for every staff member that allowed us to force feeds on them would be quickly swamped by the competing parts of the organisation with their individual information spam which would turn users off and leave us back in the same mess.

As you can see, it’s really not a subscription problem at all – it’s actually an attention one, and in an Enterprise there are two important halves to the attention equation;

1. Am I as a user being told about the things that are important to me?
2. And as an Enterprise how can I be sure that users are seeing the things that it’s important that they see?

After thinking about this for a few weeks now, I’m going to express the high level problem domain for the Enterprise like this. We need a solution that:

1.  Allows us to “declutter” e-mail and remove alerts and news from e-mail notification.  E-mail should be for inter-personal communication ONLY.
2. Provide a new channel (Enterprise RSS) for all “bulletin” or one-to-many styles of communication.  Satisfy the needs of the Enterprise by allowing sophisticated profiling of both RSS feeds and users, so for example particular alerts can be automatically subscribed to particular groups of users.  Most importantly provide detailed reporting and therefore added value on the read counts for each feeds and even the time spent browsing content.
3. The content aggregator needs to function like Technorati, allowing me to browse feeds by searching and by tags in a central location — I shouldn’t need to go to every corner of the organisation to find feeds, they should be in one place.  I also want some way of valuing the feed.
4. Provides RSS “connectors” to other sources to allows users to aggregate their monitoring behaviours into a single location (big thumbs up to Lotus who have added an RSS feed generator to do this automatically with Domino databases).
5. We need an Attention Client Engine (like Particls) which can monitor the news reader and provide two sophisticated features:
   1. Learns from peoples behaviours, profile and feeds what is important to them and alerts them accordingly.
   2. Provides this information back up to an Attention Server to aggregate and understand the attention profiles of the user base and then manage sophisticated alerting back to all users of information they may have missed that could be important to them all.
6. Finally, lets the users have a degree of control over the information they are alerted to, personalising their own attention profile so that they are interrupted with the things that matter to them, while still being able to browse the news client for the things that matter to the Enterprise.

Here’s one attempt at a high level model for this. Feel free to comment on it — I can already think of a few additions, so I’d love to hear from you on yours.

Of course the Attention Engine and the News Client could be combined, but I think back to the values of the APML work group and even some basic architectural principles, there is value in seperating these — I can select, train and tune an Enterprise Attention Engine seperate from my subscription engine, and I’m not beholden to one subscription engine, or even one attention engine if I can seperate the two.

I don’t think we are there yet — open standards would need to be created to allow News Readers to publish their attention statistics to an attention engine (ie. even simple things like feed read counts etc.), but a solution like this would begin to radically alter the way in which users in an Enterprise experience information.

I think Particls and News Gator are two companies both approaching this same problem space from different sides of the equation — I’ll be interested to see how they resolve the issues and the solustions they propose.

 So that’s what I’m looking for; I’m still to evaluate a number of vendors more fully, maybe my utopia exists, but I haven’t seen it yet.  If you think you have something in this space, then feel free to contact me or comment below — I’d love to see what you’ve got.

In the mean time, I’ll resist Enterprise RSS until I can be sure that we don’t just end up with another mess like e-mail has become — there’s only one chance to do this right.

In the real world where people don’t live on-line 24 hours a day, with their internet connection at least as vital as Oxygen, I regularly come across people who display some unusual traits.

1. They don’t blog.
2. They don’t read blogs.
3. They often read “papers” and trust these as reliable information sources.
4. The terms Web2.0, Wiki’s, Blogs and Syndication may as well be Japaneese to them.

There’s actually more of them than you’d credit.  So is blogging really the “new media”, or is it a frenzy of mutual self pleasure amongst a select few?  I realise of course the irony of writing about this in a blog — most likely the exact people who will agree with this point are NOT online desperately awaiting my next post.  Still, I can’t help but agree with many aspects of this argument as raised by Matthew Buckland at Poynter Online and the conclusion he reaches here:

I believe we have to keep our eyes wide open. Citizen media will probably never “replace” traditional media. Organized, corporate structures with incentives (such as salaries) produce quality and get the best out of human beings. It’s worked for centuries. But also in the citizen media sphere: the pressure of social ties, and the idea of doing good and maintaining a reputation is also powerful in ensuring quality.

 A high quality information source doesn’t need the infrastructure of the blogosphere to support it — yes there are lots of occasions I find something interesting through browsing Technorati or Tag Clouds, but the best and generally most reputable news doesn’t need a ping mechanism to broadcast it’s latest view on the world.  People go there because it’s reputable.  Blogs will enhance and maintain this, but they won’t replace it.

I think that’s why we often refer to the best of the bloggers as “citizen journalists” — that’s what they’ve become.  High quality, reputable journalists, just unpaid.