Enterprise Initiatives

Web 2.0 social software and collaboration tools have drastically changed the way I work and learn. Whether it is social networking tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter or information sharing tools like blogs and wikis, access to information and lessons learned have never been easier to find. I have worked at the same place for 13 years and had a very limited network until I started using these tools. Now I am collaborating with smart people all over the world. I recently was contacted via Twitter to participate at the Gartner & SOA Consortium “User Panel: Measuring the Value of SOA”. This opportunity never would have occurred if I had not taken advantage of Web 2.0 technologies.

What I am discovering is that these technologies are still very foreign to many people in the industry. Others are aware of the technologies but have written them off as child's play and see no value in them. Meanwhile, the world is changing and the way people communicate is radically different due to these technologies. So I have been wondering out loud why so many people are in the dark? Here are the conclusions that I came up with.

1. Some people see work as a 9-5 necessary evil and are not motivated to learn new skills and keep current with technology.
   
2. Some people (especially us old timers) are resistant to change. They insist on using the methods that have worked for them for the last 20 years.
3. Some people fear change. These people are comfortable with the way things are and fear becoming obsolete if their daily routine changes.

All of these things are concerning to me if I am putting a team together to implement a new technology or to change the current way we deliver. To combat this I added a series of questions to my interview process. I wanted to find out if and how the candidates research trends in technology, if they are familiar with the tools that the younger generations are using, and how adaptable they are.

Whether I am interviewing existing employees to build a new team or potential new hires from outside the company, I now try to see how aware they are of how the web is changing the way information is shared. Here are some of the things I might ask:

• How do you keep current with technology?
• What tools do you use to collaborate?
• How would you go about researching how to implement SOA?
• What was the topic of the last technology article you read?
• What is one of the most exciting new tools on the web today?

There are many more questions that could be asked. If their answers are I use email and trade magazines then they probably are not keeping themselves current. If they are unfamiliar with blogs and wikis then they are definitely old school and further questioning is needed to make sure they don't resist change.

I remember when I first stumbled across Twitter a year ago. I just couldn't understand the value. As time went by I noticed more people in my network were becoming excited about it. I could have dug my heals in and said, "I have managed to survive all of these years without it" and just ignored it. Instead, I created an account and started using it. At first it seemed like a waste of time but as I started following the right people my eyes opened to a whole new world of communicating. Now I can't live without it.

So my point to all of this is if you are in a position to put together a new team or hire new people, do you want people who aren't ready and/or willing to change the way they work or do you want people who are comfortable adapting to new ways of thinking? A quick way to gain insight into which side of the fence these people sit on is to test their Web 2.0 knowledge. If they can tell you more about their favorite reality show then they can about Web 2.0, move on to the next candidate!

I read this post from Stewart Mader's blog on wiki patterns today and it talks about a challenge to the adoption of wiki is the fact that the new tools are too inexpensive or even free (open source).

Here is a key quote:

Sandy Kemsley’s fourth challenge to social media/enterprise 2.0 in organizations:

The fact that these technologies are inexpensive (or even free) and quick to implement causes them to be discounted by executives who are used to spending millions on information management systems.

Isn't it time that executives stopped running their IT shops like it is 1980? Spending millions on large vendors may make it easier for one to sleep at night, but it is not the best use of corporate dollars. I have been in IT for a long time and I have witnessed the same pattern across several companies over the last 20+ years. The pattern that I am talking about is IT puts more weight on "manageability" then they do on customer requirements. Some shops are so married to big vendors that they are not taking advantage of open source solutions or even worse, they are limiting the vendor selection process down to a set of tools that do not meet the customer's needs. When this happens, IT becomes its own worst enemy. First of all, adoption of tools that the users do not want or do not value as high as other tools can be a major challenge. I have seen my share of shelf-ware over the years. Second, forcing customers into solutions does not bode well for customer satisfaction and may cause the customers to look elsewhere next time. Third and maybe the worst case of all, sticking to the major vendors at all costs may prevent IT from selecting any tool due to high costs or lack of a sufficient tool. To put this into perspective, the user suffers because our favorite vendor can't deliver.

Here is an example. If you look at Web 2.0 tools today, most of the top tools are either open source or provided by startups or companies without billions of dollars in revenue. IT shops who still stick to principles from 20 years ago will simply not invest in enterprise blogs, wikis, and social networking tools. The big vendors either do not have the tools or the tools that they have cost a significant sum of money. Trying to justify spending a large amount of money on better collaboration tools is a major challenge. With open source or low cost alternatives, it is much easier to start small and grow adoption over time.

At the end of the day, we should understand that the reason that corporations fund IT departments is so that our internal and external customers have the tools, products, and services they need to do their job. The world is changing and IT must change with it. In addition to the normal technical requirements (manageability, scalability, etc.), the vendor selection process should consider the following:

• Buy vs. Build (is it a core competency?)
  
• Evaluate open source alternatives
• Evaluate SaaS alternatives
• What is the vendor's SOA strategy (integration and agility)

Is your IT shop still stuck in the 1980's? If so, what are you going to do to educate your executive team? Do the research for them and show them where technology is going. The worst thing that can happen is that people will learn something.

I have been blogging about my Web 2.0 experiments at work and recommended that we should just do Web 2.0 instead of trying to justify it. With so many open source solutions available for wikis and blogs, the best way to get traction with Web 2.0 technologies is to casually bring it in house, plant the seeds, and let it grow like weeds. You can have a large amount of people using these tools quicker then you can try to sell the value to an older generation of decision makers who are not familiar enough with the tools to understand the value.

In my post Leveraging Enterprise 2.0 I mentioned how we would launch our blogs. Each member of the architecture team is maintaining their own blog about their area of expertise. I am blogging about the vision of our enterprise architecture and SOA initiatives. The key to getting people to view these blogs is two biweekly emails. The first is a biweekly update from our CIO. The email is simply a short sentence and a link to his blog. On his blogroll is all of the architect team's blogs. The email goes out to all of IT which is roughly 200 people. His statistics show roughly 150 unique visitors. That's 75% of the staff that is reading the his blog!

On the weeks where the CIO does not update his blog, the architecture team sends their biweekly newsletter out. This email has a paragraph or two of current news and then has links to the latest blog articles with a brief summary for each team member's blog. My blog has reached roughly 40% of the staff where as other members of the team are falling in the range of 10%-33%. Not bad for our first 6 weeks.

Since launching these blogs, I have received requests from marketing, sales, and public relations to meet about possibly extending blogs to their departments. In an IT strategy session today, one of the teams working on our "people strategy" recommended more blogs to improve communications. Like I said before, build it and they will come.

My goal by the end of the year is to make internal blogs a normal part of our daily lives and have as many senior level managers as possible blogging at least once a month. The architect team has found that blogging has created several quality discussions with people who they don't get a chance to interact with that often. As time goes on, I expect to see more comments submitted and even requests for blog topics coming our way.

We are also leveraging an enterprise wiki where we are storing all of our enterprise architecture and IT Center of Excellence (CoE) content. Our company is in the infancy stage of SOA and BPM and we are loading up our wiki with tons of information like the developers' guide book, SOA best practices, standards and policies, etc. We are also using it as a collaborative tool as the CoE starts establishing our new SOA standards and design review processes. We are trying to develop these processes without using any emails. We are only allowed to use face to face discussions and the wiki to come to consensus.

In just six short weeks these Web 2.0 tools have started to make an impact in our ability to improve communications. There are still some people who laugh at the notion of blogs and wikis, but in time this will become as normal as email and the telephone. And the beauty of it is that we didn't pay a penny for any of it and we didn't have to sell it to anybody. We simply built it and they are coming.

A great blog for more information on wikis is Stewart Mader's Grow your Wiki.

I wrote a post several months ago called Tighter budgets mean more Open Source proclaiming that when budgets tighten up, more people look towards open source to get the tools they need to get their jobs done. Now we are in a recession and IT budgets across the globe are extremely constrained. Meanwhile, the amount of work we are being asked to produce is growing exponentially. We need to deliver faster, with more modern features, yet we have limited resources to meet these expectations. The smart folks who have already been leveraging open source software (OSS) have the edge.

When budgets were good, people who couldn't get over their perceptions of the pitfalls of OSS could easily turn the other way and continue to spend hundreds of thousands if not millions of shareholder dollars on commercial software without even evaluating OSS alternatives. Now, many of these same people are "opening their minds" because their budgets are limiting their ability to cozy up with their favorite vendors.

My company has already replaced a few commercial products with OSS. Recently our version control software was up for maintenance renewal and required an upgrade to a new version. We were already ready to move on to a different tool so we evaluated Microsoft Team Foundation Server and an popular open source alternative called Subversion (we are a Microsoft and Java shop). The Microsoft product was nice but was expensive and very proprietary. Subversion is free and we are able to use it consistently across both development platforms. We also use CruiseControl for the continuous build process that we implemented. These two tools have greatly enhanced our productivity for both the Java and Microsoft developers and did not add a single penny to my budget. No annual maintenance fees, no vendor lock in, no problem!

Last year we purchased a variety of tools in the SOA stack (BPM, ESB, Data Services). This year we needed to add several additional tools to assist the developers and testers. Here is a short list:

• Registry
• Repository
• SOA testing tools
• Run time governance

We have found very impressive open source alternatives to each tool in the list except for the run time governance (although we are still researching this one). It does look like the Mule project will be adding many tools in support of SOA in the near future. Centrasite has a good registry/repository tool and Testmaker is our leading test tool right now. We evaluated commercial products from Mercury, iTKO, BEA, and many others. All of them have outstanding tools but when you add the tools up for these four areas you quickly get a price tag around $1M plus annual maintenance.

We have also implemented some web 2.0 technologies and leveraged two popular OSS solutions. Mediawiki is our enterprise wiki solution. This is the same software that powers Wikipedia. We also use Wordpress for our internal blogging initiative that is starting to draw a lot of traffic. I am also testing Twitter and Bebo to see if social networking/messaging has any value at our corporation. Most of the top Web 2.0 software are open source products. It will be hard to justify spending tons of money on Web 2.0 software when the most popular tools are free and scale to support millions of users.

I believe that as the recession continues, more IT leaders will look at open source then ever before. Many will like what they find when they do their due diligence. Once they have success with one or two tools, they will no longer need a recession to evaluate OSS. For those companies that have a formal vendor evaluation process, make sure you update your process to include open source products. Just because Gartner and Forrester do not have OSS in their Magic Quadrant or Wave, doesn't mean that you shouldn't be evaluating OSS. Many OSS projects have become so dominant that they are being purchased by major vendors. Sun's purchase of MySQL is a recent example of this. As a matter of fact, OSS is becoming so mainstream that Gartner predicts 80% of all commercial apps will leverage open source by 2012. If vendors are leveraging OSS, why are some companies refusing to do so? I'll leave you with a good post from Matt Asay on CNet - Open source and the future of vendor-free IT.

I have been experimenting with a few Web 2.0 tools at work over the last few months. We are working on a big BPM/SOA initiative and are trying to find better ways to communicate what we are doing to a very large audience. Email is becoming more and more useless everyday as a tool for information sharing. We are using a combination of Blogs and a Wiki to improve collaboration and knowledge sharing. We are also formalizing our SOA governance processes. A small team of about eight people are working on defining and publishing certain processes and standards. This effort requires a great deal of collaboration and in an effort to "eat our dog food" we will rely solely on our Web 2.0 tools to carry out the collaboration. No email allowed on this initiative!!!

After reading many interesting blogs recently and seeing how other companies like IBM are starting to leverage these tools, I am going to take my experiment to the next level. Up next, Twitter. When I first heard about Twitter a year ago, I couldn't understand how it would be useful for me at work. I could see the momentum building as more and more people starting signing up for this free service which led me to believe that it would eventually find its way into corporations.

In my role as the chief architect, I am often working on various projects or research efforts that most people in IT do not have much visibility into. Most people in applications development work on a specific group of applications and don't have the luxury of time to see what's going on outside their world. At the same time, the architecture team is constantly getting feedback that we need to communicate more. We spend a lot of time presenting at team meetings trying to keep the company updated. The blogs have been extremely helpful getting information out. I think Twitter can be a great tool for "quick hit" communications. For example, in two weeks, we have the guys at Zapthink running their SOA Architect Bootcamp at our office for four days (register here). As I come across some good nuggets of information I could "Tweet" them and they will show up on my sidebar of my blog. After a full day session I can then provide a more detailed summary on my blog.

Here is another use case. Let's say that I am going to a board meeting to present a business case for the next significant SOA project. In the meeting I get the thumbs up to move forward. For the next three hours, I will sit through other presentations and attend two other meetings. I quickly pull out my iPhone and Tweet the news that the project is approved. Upon receiving the news, my project manager can then start moving forward.

I recently listed a number of events that I am attending and participating in. As I encounter interesting facts or viewpoints during these presentations, I can share them back at corporate via Twitter.

Think about all of the notes and action items that you write down in the old notebook that you tout around with you all day. Many of those notes could also be handled through Twitter. Having all of that information online and searchable is much better then thumbing through my coffee stained notebook, especially with my bad handwriting!

The use cases are endless. I am going to start experimenting with this next week and will share my lessons learned shortly after. I am also going to start researching different open source tools that provide similar functionality as Facebook. If you know of some good ones, please pass them on. I am also going to look at how Serena adopted Facebook as their intranet and see if that is something that could work for us.

Stay tuned for more on these experiments in the near future.

I have written about my wiki implementation in the past. We use Mediawiki, the same open source software that drives the most famous wiki of them all, Wikipedia. Initially loading content into your wiki can be an enormous task, but Open Office, another popular open source tool, makes this task much less cumbersome. The latest version of Open Office Writer 2.3 has the ability to export documents to Mediawiki markup code. We used this to upload hundreds of existing pages of content into our wiki.

If you don't use Mediawiki, have no fear. You can always download an Open Office add-on called Uniwakka to convert your documents to the wiki format of your choice. If you are interesting in launching a wiki in your organization I recommend you read Stewart Mader's 21 Days of Wiki Adoption.

For those of you who have been reading my blog, you know that my company has been working on various projects that leverage BPM and SOA technologies. One of the biggest challenges we have is dealing with culture change and providing the right level of communication to people at all levels. Next week, we plan on implementing a few Enterprise 2.0 technologies to address those challenges.

Enterprise 2.0 is a fancy term that represents a host of web based collaboration tools like blogs, wikis, social networking platforms, RSS readers, bookmarking, tagging, and many others. Dion Hinchcliffe has one of the best blogs that explain Enterprise 2.0 (also called Web 2.0 in Business). His article called Social Media Goes Mainstream does an fantastic job of explaining Enterprise 2.0 and its benefits.



Back to my scenario. On our corporate portal, we are launching an enterprise architecture community which will link to the wiki and our blogs. Members of our architecture team will blog about various topics to share lessons learned, tips and tricks, and various research information as we learn more about the technologies we use. Our project manager will blog about the project, our testing architect will discuss the ins and outs of testing SOA, our configuration management guy will cover his area of expertise, and I will blog about the EA team's vision and strategic direction. All of our governance information will be accessible via our wiki. We are leveraging Mediawiki, the same open source wiki tool that runs Wikipedia. For the blogging software we are using Wordpress, another open source tool. Our next step is to implement a RSS reader so people can subscribe to content that is relevant to them.



Driving traffic to this new community on the portal can be challenging. Our plan is to have our CIO send a biweekly communication to all of IT. He will distribute an email with a URL to his blog which should bring most people to the site. In his blogroll will be links to the EA team's blogs and the enterprise wiki. Our hope is that in addition to keeping people informed about projects and technology, people will start to collaborate on the site. Once the collaboration starts, fresh new ideas should emerge from the staff and knowledge sharing and collective intelligence will prevail.

If this new EA community is successful, we can take it to the next level and start experimenting with tagging and social bookmarking. This will allow people to tag and rank information that is relevant to them which in turn makes popular content easier to find. One of the challenges that many companies, including ours, have with their portal is that it is difficult to find documents. Tagging and ranking solves this problem.

So next week we unleash some of these Enterprise 2.0 technologies to the masses. I expect adoption to be slow since many people are probably not familiar with these tools. But the biweekly CIO communication should be the "killer app" that drives the traffic to the site. Hopefully these tools will improve communications. We will still use all of the other communication mechanisms as well, but the blogs will allow for frequent, short communications that can reach large audiences in a short amount of time.

I will share the lessons learned on this experiment as we encounter them.

I have been pushing wikis at work the last few months as I mentioned in a previous post called another wiki use case. Every time I mention the word to anyone outside of my architect team I either get blank stares or I get the rolling eyes followed by laughter. Today I even got a "I guess we'll see a blog about wikis" followed by laughter. What is so funny about Wiki anyways?

We are rolling out a new version of our brand new B2B portal in the near future. We were discussing online help and I recommended we use a wiki help system. We are currently creating another large user manual that nobody will ever read. We can take that manual, open it with OpenOffice Word 2.3 and export it to MediaWiki format. Then we can host it from an install of MediaWiki specifically for our B2B portal. Then from the Help function on the B2B portal we can link right to our wiki and just like that we have clickable online help at no additional cost.

Ok, I hear you laughing. Well if this is so funny then how come some of the most popular websites in the world have wiki-style help? They may be using more sophisticated technology like Adobe RoboHelp 7, but the look and feel is similar.
Here are a few screen shots of wiki-style help from some popular web sites.



So if wiki is not funny at Amazon, eBay, and Southwest, why is it so funny at my shop? I guess we need to get out more!

One of the challenges for selling Web 2.0 within the enterprise is explaining the value that it brings. To many long timers within IT, Web 2.0 technology is a play thing that the younger generation uses at home. Many can't comprehend the enormous potential that WEB 2.0 can bring to the table in the form of collective intelligence, social networking, RSS feeds, APIs, and folksonomies. You can show graphs and charts, talk about the intangibles and the tangibles, and power point them to death all day long but the best way to sell Web 2.0 is to do Web 2.0.

Here is an example. I am trying to sell the concepts of enterprise blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds. When I discuss these with many of folks within IT I get way more laughs then I get head nodding. When I sit down with various groups within IT and even within the business to explain SOA, I go directly to some of my blog posts and to specific wiki pages to show visual images to help explain the concepts. Look below for an example (single click for quick slide show, double click to walk through slides with captions).



Just today I was working with our SQA team to explain some of the differences in testing SOA applications versus the traditional client server applications that they are familiar with. I bounced around my blog to find a few posts that helped explain what an ESB is and what the layered approach to distributed computing (SOA) looks like. Tonight I took some of the images off those posts and created the slide show above with Google's Picasa. This is a great example of showing the power of Web 2.0. I put together another album from a presentation I did the other day that discussed leveraging some Web 2.0 tools to improve internal communication.



It you are selling the concept of mashups internally, take one of your internal applications that has a customer database and do a proof of concept that calls the google maps api and displays your customer on a map. This will easily allow you to explain the concepts of mashups to anyone within the organization. Here is an example of looking up ITToolbox.Com headquarters using Google Maps.


View Larger Map

Imagine if you could do this with your CRM application when your sales guy hovers over the customer name! Show the business what Salesforce.com is doing with mashups.

So in the words of fellow blogger James McGovern, don't just give presentations about technology, have conversations. By showing people what the technology can do instead of talking about graphs, numbers, and case studies, you can start a constructive conversation to explore the possibilities. Through conversation, people can bring ideas to the table that you never envisioned. Give it a try and feel free to use this blog post to prove your point. Remember, don't just talk about technology, do technology!

We are in the middle of implementing our SOA Governance model. We have put together a ton of lengthy reference documents like the architect guidebook, SOA roadmap, developer guidebook, administrator handbook, and many others. Our biggest fear has been getting people to read these documents. In order to enforce our SOA best practices and standards, people must be aware of what they are. Giving people 200-300 page documents is not an effective way of sharing information.

Enter open source wiki tool, MediaWiki. With a little help from OpenOffice v.2.3, we took the lengthy Word documents and converted them to Wiki Markup to create easy to use, clickable, and searchable documents. Now our architects and developers can easily maneuver through pages of pertinent documentation without being overwhelmed by large sequential documents. In addition, people can collaborate by using the discussion feature in MediaWiki to help the architect team improve upon the documentation.

Our next step is to implement an open source blogging tool. One of our challenges today is to communicate both technical and project specific information pertaining to our SOA initiative in a timely manner. I have held a number of meetings with several IT teams to walk them though various presentations and white board sessions. Unfortunately I don't have the bandwidth to do this often enough. We will start to leverage blogging technology to share daily information about the initiatives. People who are interested will be able to subscribe to these blogs using an RSS feed reader. This is much more effective then pushing more email on people.

And finally, we will create an Enterprise Architecture community in our enterprise portal. This will allow us to bring all of our content together in a one stop shop approach. The community will display our blogs, our wiki, project status, tips & tricks, announcements, and various other information.

One of my lessons learned so far on our SOA project is that we do not communicate often enough. I believe a combination of monthly presentations and white board sessions, along with our wiki, blogs, and portal community provides multiple opportunities for people to keep up to date with our SOA initiative. I also think it is more effective to publish content and let people "pull" it on demand then to "push" it on them.

I just read this article from eWeek which talks about who actually adopts Web 2.0 technologies in the workplace. The myth is that only the Gen-X and Gen-Y employees will use Web 2.0 but the reality is that age is not a factor in the adoption. It is upper management that typically does not embrace the technology while most everyone else does. Here is an excerpt from the article:

TobyRedshaw, chief technology officer of Motorola, said that rather than an age bias, he noticed more of an executive level bias to collaborative efforts: the higher up in the company's hierarchy the less social networking technologies get used. "That's a good thing," he said. "The real work gets done not in the board room."

So the question is, if the executive level is bias towards Web 2.0 technology, how can you get the backing you need to get a Web 2.0 initiative on the company's IT priority list? The answer is start small. Years ago when open source was still a mystery to most executives, I faced the same scenario. Instead of trying to sell people who were dead set against something that they didn't even understand, I took a different approach. One of my teams had been researching Linux (in their spare time) for a long time and were chomping at the bit to prove its worth. After failing to get any buy in from anybody in management and being looked at like we had a third eye in the middle of our head, we went into stealth mode and created our own proof of concept project that was low profile. To make a long story short, we built a low cost system that outperformed our existing production system for a fraction of the cost. We then went old and sold our ideas that were backed up by performance and financial data. The sale was a no brainer which eventually led to several other open source wins down the road.

This plan can work for Web 2.0. Get a group of early adopters together and implement a few Web 2.0 technologies like wikis, blogs, document tagging, etc. and measure the benefits. Once you have most of the major kinks ironed out, invite others to participate. Once you have data to prove your business case, then go to the senior executives and sell them on Web 2.0. The senior executives are typically very smart people who understand a good business case when they see it. The further up the chain they go the more focused they are on the financial aspects of the business and they tend to get further removed from technology. It is your job to show them the value but unless you have an incredible power to persuade, you usually need some numbers and/or a viable case study to sell them.

The beauty of this opportunity is that you can rely totally on open source technologies to put your Web 2.0 pilot project in motion and you don't need to spend much on hardware (if at all). Low cost, low risk, and high potential benefits. Why aren't you starting your Web 2.0 pilot today?

In part 1 of this series I asked the question, "Are you running IT like it's your business?" Then I highlighted five barriers for preventing IT leaders from being able to transform their IT shop into a well oiled, cost effective machine?

• Resistance to change
• Lack of resources (time, money, and human capital)
  
• Lack of tools
• Lack of metrics
• Lack of process

In part 3, I will focus on Lack of Tools.

If you owned your own construction company, would you equip your workers with hammers or nail guns? Many IT shops create budgets that focus mainly on business demands and infrastructure but forget about funding tools and initiatives that increase the staff's overall productivity.

Human labor makes up a large part of IT budgets. So why not invest in tools to allow your IT professionals to deploy faster, provide more visibility into operational efficiencies, provide better access to information, and automate administrative and repetitive tasks?

If you don't want IT to be viewed as a cost center, then look for ways to make your resources more efficient. There are vendors like Mercury, Rational, and many others that provide a suite of tools from project management, to development, to testing, to change management. These tools allow you to enter requirements, automatically generate test cases, and provide visibility into requirements traceability. These can be time consuming and error prone tasks without the use of tools. If you are a .Net shop, investing in MSDN, Visual Studio Team System, and the new Silverlight product provide tremendous productivity gains. If you are developing with Java, Ruby on Rails, or a variety of other open source technologies there are a ton of great development tools and they are free! But don't stop there. There are tools for configuration management, source control, defect tracking, modeling, and the list goes on and on. If you have home grown systems to perform these duties then you don't understand the term Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Why build and maintain these types of applications when there are companies and open source communities that have massive amounts of resources and R&D efforts to continually improve these products while ensuring they meet standards and keep abreast of modern technologies? Although some of these tools can be expensive, nothing is more expensive then having IT professionals performing tasks that can be automated by these suite of tools. And let's not forget testing automation. If done right, regression testing can be fully automated and executed as part of your daily build process. How many times has development delivered a build to SQA only to have it fail simple regression tests? I have seen several days wasted as build after build is failed by SQA and returned to development. With automation, all builds should have already passed regression testing before even showing up on SQA's door step.

Investing in PPM (project portfolio management) and problem management tools gives IT professionals the ability to proactively manage projects and production support. By having visibility into the progress of projects and the health of production systems, IT can prevent issues from occurring or at least address the issues early before they become catastrophic.

Access to information is an extremely valuable tool. This is often known as Knowledge Management. Tools such as portals, collaboration, wikis, blogs, and knowledge bases, are great tools for sharing best practices, training materials, standards, and various other forms of documentation. Investing in quality search technologies can be a huge productivity enhancer. Here is an article that claims that employees performing ineffective searches and wasting time looking for information can cost companies up to 10% in salary expenses. Ten percent of your staff's salary can easily justify the costs of search technology. Some enterprise portals, like BEA's Aqualogic UI, are implementing many of the new Web 2.0 features like tagging and ranking which are an extremely effective way to present relative information to IT professionals.

And finally, how many times have you seen your development staff rapidly develop and test some new feature only to have it take days or weeks to labor through a whole host of manual processes and procedures in an effort to deploy the functionality. All of these processes should be automated through work flow, including the approvals and audit trail. The work flow provides visibility into the status of the request and can automatically deploy the features if designed correctly.

In summary, when looking at tools think about the TCO. The more effective your staff is, the lower the cost of deployment becomes. In addition, by increasing speed to market you also create more throughput. More throughput means more business value. One last note. If you are still scared of using open source for enterprise applications, there is no better place to test open source's value at low risk then with development tools.

In part 4 of this series I will discuss metrics. Stay tuned.

I have been consumed in research on the topic of Web 2.0 the last few weeks. All of my research keeps bringing me back to the generation of kids born in the 80’s and 90’s. I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if I was born as a Gen Y (1978-1990’s)[1] or Internet Generation (1994-2001)[2] child. Much of what is driving Web 2.0[3] is the online expectations from these two generations. My two kids, ages 10 & 8, are Internet Generation kids. Here is my assessment of their generation in terms of their online expectations and abilities:

1. Technically savvy – I am probably the only member in my family who is more capable of using technology then my kids. From the web, to IPods, to cell phones, to Tivos, etc. My kids could use almost all of the features of these technologies before they knew how to read. As a matter of fact, and I am embarrassed to admit it, my daughter at age 6 had to show me how to use the “mouse” feature of my Nano when I first bought it. So much for my dual computer science degrees!

2. Technical from birth – This is slightly redundant from my first point, but I do want to point out that they resist nothing that is new. When they see something new, they embrace it. When I look at my parents’ generation, when they see something new they run from it. Do all of the clocks in your parents’ house still flash 12:00?

3. Short attention span – If it doesn’t work, if it’s too complex, or if it takes too long, they are gone.

4. Advertising is break time – They are accustomed to fast forwarding the TiVo, Adblock, and various other technologies that don’t force them to sit through or click through commercials.

5. Independent – They don’t need assistance, directions, or user manuals. They are very resourceful and learn with their eyes.

6. Low budget – Actually no budget. They don’t have cash, and they know that if they want something they have to perform some painful duty (takeout the trash, clean their room) to earn it. So they are accustomed to doing things at no or low cost.

Now take a step back and see how these characteristics apply to Web 2.0. Throw in Gen Y’s social networking demands[4] and you have described many of the characteristics of Web 2.0 technologies. Now look at some of the statistics of internet usage by age in the US[5] and the UK[6]. As you can see, the younger generations are heavy users of the web.

So why do I care? I care because I think most of corporate America is missing the boat[7] when it comes to embracing technologies like instant messaging, blogs, tagging, social networking, and AJAX to name a few.[8] How many of you have a magazine rack full of paid subscriptions to various trade magazines at your work? Do people actually still read these things? The younger generations and those of us who are “web 2.0 aware” use RSS feeds[9] to get the news that we want. If you depend heavily on main stream news and paid subscription services, you probably don’t really know what’s going on. These sources are controlled and influenced by big money. Blogging is free and Democratic. Here is an excerpt from Paul Graham’s article Web 2.0:

The second big element of Web 2.0 is democracy. We now have several examples to prove that amateurs can surpass professionals, when they have the right kind of system to channel their efforts. Wikipedia may be the most famous. Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they miss the critical point: it's good enough. And it's free, which means people actually read it. On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can't link to them. They're not part of the conversation.

Another place democracy seems to win is in deciding what counts as news. I never look at any news site now except Reddit. I know if something major happens, or someone writes a particularly interesting article, it will show up there. Why bother checking the front page of any specific paper or magazine? Reddit's like an RSS feed for the whole web, with a filter for quality. Similar sites include Digg, a technology news site that's rapidly approaching Slashdot in popularity, and del.icio.us, the collaborative bookmarking network that set off the "tagging" movement. And whereas Wikipedia's main appeal is that it's good enough and free, these sites suggest that voters do a significantly better job than human editors.

The most dramatic example of Web 2.0 democracy is not in the selection of ideas, but their production. I've noticed for a while that the stuff I read on individual people's sites is as good as or better than the stuff I read in newspapers and magazines. And now I have independent evidence: the top links on Reddit are generally links to individual people's sites rather than to magazine articles or news stories.

My experience of writing for magazines suggests an explanation. Editors. They control the topics you can write about, and they can generally rewrite whatever you produce. The result is to damp extremes. Editing yields 95th percentile writing—95% of articles are improved by it, but 5% are dragged down. 5% of the time you get "throngs of geeks."

On the web, people can publish whatever they want. Nearly all of it falls short of the editor-damped writing in print publications. But the pool of writers is very, very large. If it's large enough, the lack of damping means the best writing online should surpass the best in print. And now that the web has evolved mechanisms for selecting good stuff, the web wins net. Selection beats damping, for the same reason market economies beat centrally planned ones.

Even the startups are different this time around. They are to the startups of the Bubble what bloggers are to the print media. During the Bubble, a startup meant a company headed by an MBA that was blowing through several million dollars of VC money to "get big fast" in the most literal sense. Now it means a smaller, younger, more technical group that just decided to make something great. They'll decide later if they want to raise VC-scale funding, and if they take it, they'll take it on their terms.

I will continue this topic in part II of my next article where I discuss how IT management, who are typically in their late 30’, 40’s, or 50’s, need to start thinking more like their kids’ generation and start embracing Web 2.0 before they become as outdated as their old bell bottom jeans.