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.

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.

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 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!

I wrote here about a quote I found and challenged its premise that companies no longer innovate once they find their “cash-cow”. I used Google as an example of an innovative company however Chris Saad made the very fair point that really Google’s “cash-cow” was not search, but rather advertising revenue.  Most of its innovation was about advertising, or product to drive advertising and not net new to the world. 

So is the original quote right after all? To summarise I’ll break it into two seperate ideas:

1. Companies innovate until they make money (their cash-cow), then protect this revenue stream agressively.
2. In protecting their cash-cow, they innovate only around this core idea and in doing so ultimately kill future innovation.

It seems useful at this point to define innovation.  Drawing together the various sources and definitions, I think innovation looks something like this in a business context.

Innovation: Reengineering existing products, processes and ideas to create novel applications that reduce costs or increase revenues.

And as part of the problem is confusing between innovation and invention, we should also define Invention.  This definition from Novagraaf sufficiently appeals that I’ll use it here:

Invention: An innovation that is both novel and non-obvious.

So, back to point 1.  I’m going to take it as read that this is fairly non-contentious. Companies start out with some product or service they believe is sufficiently different on some parameter (location, cost, scale, convinience, leverage, uniqueness etc.) from other competitors that they will make money.  In some instances, these initial innovations are sufficiently novel and non-obvious they qualify as inventions.

To the second point, that innovating around core ideas kills innovation, I just don’t buy it.  I agree that many companies have one good invention, but the company that fails to continue to innovate, improve and find new ways to generate revenue is dead in the water.

So back to Google – here’s how I now see it:

• They invented a new way of doing search
• They hit on their hedgehog idea which is to generate money through advertising
• They continue to innovate around this hedgehog concept to create more, and different ways of making money from advertising.

Chris in his blog post on Google raises some great points that are worth a read — and challenges us to consider if Google have moved too far away from their initial invention?  Have they diluted their value through continual innovation around revenue raising instead of focussing on a great search engine?

Wether they have or not, time will tell, but there are plenty of innovative and inventive companies out there ready to take advantage if they fail.  The web never stands still.  Even old hands haven’t given up the game although will they succeed or not? 

One thing I can safely say is that companies, Google included, will continue to try and be innovative.  With the internet, whether that innovation ultimately succeeds or fails is more than ever before bestowed in us as users to make the vote with our media consumption habits

Thanks Chris for the comments and material that sparked some ideas for this post.

 Just read this post here at Deal Architect about Vinnie Mirchandani’s MAGIC framework.

I’ll come back to this in a later post, but for now it’s just to note it here and say I think there is real merit in what he has to say,  in particular about the relationship between CIO’s and vendors.  For most Enterprises, the challenge is to close the gap between the innovation cycle in the consumer world and the needs in the enterprise.  I believe this gap is starting to close, but CIO’s and vendors are going to have to partner more to help it get there.

Touchstone popped this up from the blogosphere:

Every company innovates until it finds a cash cow. At that point only innovation that supports the cash cow is promoted. Further, any innovation that threatens or does not support the cash cow languishes or is actively killed. Eventually, most of the true innovation ceases as the innovators leave and start new companies and the cycle repeats. From The Walrus and The Carpenter

Certainly at first glance there is some merit in this. But is it really true? After all, IBM originally created calculators (although there is a good argument that the computers of today just do what these machines did but faster), but at some point ended up a leading hardware and software company — in fact they define their business principle as innovation.

My view on this is that I think it’s true to say that there are very few (if any) companies that change tack once they hit on their Hedgehog Concept (from Jim Collins in his book Good to Great). But does this mean they don’t innovate?

No.

Google continue to innovate and produce new web based solutions, some centered around search, others outside of this. But then their hedgehog idea would be something along the lines of being the worlds leading on-line software company. They don’t innovate around cars.

The challenge for all businesses is to ensure that having a sound hedgehog concept — knowing what you are good at — doesn’t detract from allowing news ways of doing what you are good at to creep into vision. Many of us would be familiar with the project mentality which is that when under pressure to manage costs, time and scope, the natural reaction is to do things the same way I did them last time. While sound project and business practice, it’s the biggest “anti-innovator” within corporates today in my view.

This is where Enterprise Architecture can help. I’ve created this diagram to show how I try explain the relationship between Architecture and Innovation.

Sound architectural practices are key to innovation. Without a view on the future, and a drive to ensure that projects comply and take advantage of newer technologies, innovation will always be constrained. Staying too focussed on what you’re good at, and not challenging the boundaries and introducing managed risk means you will never be innovative. Good Enterprise Architecture can help.