::.. Timing ..::

:: 2003/02/28 ::

Microsoft Greenwich RTC Beta to be released 28 February

According to CRN, the beta of the Greenwich Real-Time Collaboration is to be released today. But as of 4:15pm it doesn't seem to have materialized.

:: Stowe Boyd 2/28/2003 04:16:41 PM [link] ::
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Cutter Reports

I have had a long time relationship with The Cutter Consortium, where I serve as a Senior Consultant. I will be developing an Executive Report on Real-Time Collaboration in the next few weeks, for publication on or before 1 April. Strangely enough, I am also finishing up a report on software reuse for the Consortium as well, currently entitled "Does Software Reuse Matter?" This is a real return to my roots -- I worked in the '80s and early '90s on software tools, programming support environments, and software development methods.

Contact Cutter for more information on price and availability of these reports, if you are interested.

:: Stowe Boyd 2/28/2003 02:09:27 PM [link] ::
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Darwin Prints My Guff

This week's Answering Machine takes me to task for taking them to task on IM.

"Scarlet Pruitt wrote about a new product that aims to help IT managers who want to Reign in IM. We received word that Stowe Boyd had taken the piece to task in his blog Timing:

A recent article in Darwin is riffing on the recent announcement by Blue Coat Systems on an application that can monitor, manage, and log employee's IM use. The fear factor related to "unsanctioned" IM use is kind of silly. It’s very similar to companies' fears about personal use of company telephones in the fifties, when they were being rolled out in the corporation.

You can read the rest of his reaction on his blog. We did have our revenge for his calling us "silly": Boyd has promised to write about real-time communication for Darwinmag.com."

Yes, it's true. They are better at revenge than I am.

:: Stowe Boyd 2/28/2003 01:36:58 PM [link] ::
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Oracle to Enter the Collaboration Wars

One of the most buzzworthy events at the recent Instant Messaging Planet conference was the entry of Oracle into what is an already fractious marketplace.

According to research from IDC, IBM led the $1.6 billion market in 2001 with a 49% share of revenue, followed by Microsoft with 39% and Novell with 6%. Oracle and other players, like Sun, were relegated to the 6% "Others" category of the pie chart. However, Oracle seems eager to get into the rapidly growing space, and seems to be using a low-cost pricing strategy to destabilize the market, arguing that "Microsoft Exchange 5.5 customers can migrate to Oracle Collaboration Suite for one-third the cost of migrating to Microsoft Exchange 2000" (see Oracle's product literature).

Oracle's attempts in past years to enter desktop application markets have not been nearly as successful as the company's activities that are more obviously linked to database applications, like financial or ERP applications. However, Oracle is seeking to shift the perception of collaboration by arguing that it is all about the database.

We'll have to see about that one.

:: Stowe Boyd 2/28/2003 11:53:26 AM [link] ::
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New Figures for Instant Messaging Market

"The steadily growing IM market is expected to balloon to close to $800 million by 2006 according to some estimates, and growth of IM use has been tracked at a frenzied pace, with Yahoo alone reporting a 50 percent increase in monthly usage over Dec. of 2001," according to Infoworld.


:: Stowe Boyd 2/28/2003 11:32:13 AM [link] ::
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Customer Collaboration

I see that Knowledge Management magazine (www.destinationkm.com) has a piece online that I wrote last year with Markus Zirn, entitled "Customer Collaboration Beyond the Help Desk" (click here).

An excerpt: "Like nearly everything that the Web has touched, customer relationship management has been changed forever. Companies must approach this challenge strategically and develop a customer collaboration initiative to decrease costs and increase customer satisfaction qualitatively and quantitatively. You can learn from what has happened at Compaq, Amazon and eBay, but you need to also learn from--and perhaps collaborate with--informal communities of your customers that already exist online."

Really good treatment of what Compaq accomplished for the Presario product line with voluteer experts in a well-managed on-line community.

:: Stowe Boyd 2/28/2003 10:31:27 AM [link] ::
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ROI: New Communication Media

I spoke at the recent Instant Messaging Planet conference in Boston this week, twice. The first of two panel sessions was devoted to the dreaded "ROI for Instant Messaging." The second panel, was on "eCRM and Instant Messaging", where I blathered about the value of real-time communities -- ideas explored elsewhere in this blog.

On the ROI panel, I tried to take a different tack that the usual tactical discussion of how to justify the investment in IM infrastructure, how to calculate hard savings, etc., so I retreated, like a cowardly and skulking consultant, to the shelter of a long-range strategic point of view. (The slides are available: click here).

What I Think I Said

(First, a nod to those whose hard work I appropriated: I lifted much of my arguments from Connections by Sproull and Kiesler, and In the Age of The Smart Machine by Zuboff.)

Looking at the history of business uptake of new communication media -- like email, fax, and telephony -- will quickly lead to the observation that arguments for increased efficiencies (read, cost reductions) are seen to be necessary at the earliest stages of adoption. Hence the desire for concrete return on investment calculations.

And while these returns may be calculable, and may be required by the technocrats running the corporate IT bureaucracies, these first order effects are ultimately irrelevant. The second order effects that arise from the social restructurings that communication media impose on their users are the real return on investment. And these effects are not based on a reduction of expenses, balance sheet oriented sort of value. On the contrary, the second order effects are additive, multiplicative: where people are able to do new things, not simply to do the same old things more cheaply.

The smartest and quickest companies will adopt the newest communication media most quickly, to realize both the first and second order benefits as soon as possible.

The wisest will look to gaining the second order effects -- where competitive advantage lies -- and are aware that these may take time. The wisest may not even require a first order ROI, but will be happy if it comes along.

It is almost heresy to argue that ROI is a waste of time, but the evidence from the adoption of email suggests exactly that. The majority of firms who required excrutiatingly complex ROI case studies to be generated prior to the roll-out of corporate email subseqently -- 1 or 2 years later -- did not in fact do the arithmetic to see if the reductions in expenses materialized as projected. Why? For two reasons:

• They realized that even if the savings weren't there, the genii could not be put back in the bottle, and, most importantly
• The company had shifted to a new model of operations, based on new ways to coordindate, communicate, and collaborate.

I paraphrased some conclusions from Connections, which is a work almost solely devoted to the uptake of corporate email, regarding second order effects:

• Full possibilities are hard to see
• Unanticipated social impacts trump efficiency benefits
• Second order effects emerge slowly
  
• Second order effects occur in parallel with changes in the society as a whole.

The last point is crucial: as social impacts of new technologies emerge, the yardstick we use to measure value itself changes.

It seems crazy to question the value, today, of having a telephone on every employee's desk, but this was a serious issue in the 1920s, when widespread telephony became affordable for businesses.

The direct and indirect impacts of corporate and later, Internet email are huge:

• Corporate reengineering and "rightsizing"
• The demolition of hierarchical, command-and-control management structures,
• The appearance of what David Weinberger refers to as the Hyperlinked Organization, where everyone is involved in a dozen projects, with different groups, geographies, and individuals, and
• A palpably higher degree of connectedness between individuals.

Real-time collaboration is another high water mark. It has all the earmarks of a disruptive communication breakthrough, and will have analogous effects on business and society to the impacts we have seen from email... but different.

Going real-time will challenge businesses in a new, and revolutionary way. It is not just normal operations sped up. Getting to real will force reevalution of nearly everything in business: from customer interaction, working effectively with partners and in teams, and managing the supply chain.

The value of real-time will derive from this new footing for business, and the new benchmark for competitive advantage that it represents -- and not from a reduction in travel expenses in the first two quarters following roll-out of your corporate instant messaging solution. By all means, keep the savings, if they come in, but don't fool yourself. The real value is yet to come.

:: Stowe Boyd 2/28/2003 09:38:41 AM [link] ::
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The Coming Power Shift

Attended the recent Instant Messaging Planet conference in Boston this week. A number of interesting interactions, but of the few that really stand out, David Gurle's keynote was the most far-sighted. In particular, his comments on the "coming power shift" in the instant messaging world are spot on.

His contention is that users and enterprises should own the identifiers used to designate individuals in the instant messaging metaverse. A screenname like "stoweboyd@aworkingmodel.com" should not be owned by AOL, MSN, or Yahoo -- which is how things are rigged right now. I, or A Working Model, should control that URL.

Gurle posits that a trusted registrar will have to play an intermediary role in the shifting frontier between so-called "public networks" and corporations. (The scare quotes indicate that these networks are private, although free for consumer personal use.) This registrar will mediate the name registration process, in a manner analogous to domain name registration, and will likely be the appropriate player to manage the payment scheme that will arise from cross-network cost sharing. Imagine that I am using AOL but I want to maintain you, on MSN, on my buddy list. This registrar/gateway could handle the cross-network presence traffic, and -- more importantly -- manage the cross-payments. Both my company and your company would have to pay their respective services for presence and message units, and they will have to share payments with each other.

Although some folks are talking about "federated" approaches to handling this cross network traffic, it won't scale. Every individual company will not want to spend the effort to cross link with every other company, manually, to be able to confirm the identity of every person of interest. There has to be a service that take the administrative load, and which can guarantee people's identities are what they assert them to be. The trust issue is enormous.

He suggests that this power shift will be happening in the very near-term.

My friend Todd Tweedy is working to create such a registrar/gateway company: IMVector. The concept is simply to make the power shift that Gurle is envisioning into a reality. Investors take note!

:: Stowe Boyd 2/27/2003 05:07:41 PM [link] ::
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