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 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.

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.

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.