archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Using the automotive industry and an analogous variety of software mega-packages with three-letter acronyms as examples, we’ve been discussing the death of the traditional enterprise for a few weeks. We’ve observed that enterprise efforts relying on massive top-down approaches become inefficient and wasteful, if not counter-productive. They also either fail to support the health of the individuals or groups involved – customers, users, sellers, employers – or in fact directly reduce the relative health of these parties. With Conway’s Law as a guide, we discovered that the structure or form of an organization influences or determines the nature and quality of the things the organization creates.
This all concerns the past: so now it’s time to look ahead, at the new enterprise. Of course, scrying the future inevitably relies on a mixture of hand waving, vague pronouncements, and the occasional “it’s not possible yet to do what this implies” to point the way forward. What’s often lacking is a present-tense example to serve as clear harbinger of the future to come. I came across an example today, drawn from the debate surrounding the proposition that the U.S. Army is close to a breaking point. In an episode of On Point titled Are US Forces Stretched Too Thin?, several panelists (names not available from the program website yet) made three telling points about the Army that show it as an organization in transition from the old model enterprise into a new form, albeit one whose outlines remain fuzzy. I’ll paraphrase these points:

To support this practice, company commanders created a forum for sharing innovations amongst themselves, called CO Team: CompanyCommand. The description reads, “CompanyCommand.com is company commanders-present, future, and past. We are in an ongoing professional conversation about leading soldiers and building combat-ready units. The conversation is taking place on front porches, around HMMWV hoods, in CPs, mess halls, and FOBs around the world. By engaging in this ongoing conversation centered around leading soldiers, we are becoming more effective leaders, and we are growing units that are more effective. Amazing things happen when committed leaders in a profession connect, share what they are learning, and spur each other on to become better and better.”
It’s the third point that gives us a clue about the nature of the new enterprise. CompanyCommand.com is an example of a ‘knowledge marketplace’ created and maintained by an informal network within an organization. Knowledge marketplaces are one of the components of what McKinsey calls The 21st Century Organization. Knowledge marketplaces allow knowledge buyers “to gain access to content that is more insightful and relevant, as well as easier to find and assimilate, than alternative sources are.”
McKinsey believes that these markets – as well as companion forms for exchanging valuable human assets called talent markets – require careful investment to begin functioning.
“…working markets need objects of value for trading, to say nothing of prices, exchange mechanisms, and competition among suppliers. In addition, standards, protocols, regulations, and market facilitators often help markets to work better. These conditions don’t exist naturally – a knowledge marketplace is an artificial, managed one – so companies must put them in place.”
On this, I disagree. CompanyCommand is an example of a proto-form knowledge marketplace that appears to be self-organized and regulated.
Moving on, another component of the new enterprise identifed by McKinsey is the formal network. A formal network “…enables people who share common interests to collaborate with relatively little ambiguity about decision-making authority – ambiguity that generates internal organizational complications and tension in matrixed structures.”
In McKinsey’s analysis, formal networks contrast with informal social networks in several ways. Formal networks require designated owners responsible for building common capabilities and determining investment levels, incentives for membership, defined boundaries or territories, established standards and protocols, and shared infrastructure or technology platforms.
My guess is that CompanyCommand again meets all these formal network criteria to a partial extent, which is why it is a good harbinger of the forms common to the new enterprise, and a sign of an organization in transition.
Can you think of other examples of new enterprise forms, or organizations in transition?
In the next post in this series, we’ll move on from the structure of the new enterprise to talk about the new enterprise experience, trying to track a number of trends to understand their implications for the user experience of the new enterprise environment.

Related posts:

I first mentioned the ailing fortunes of the major U.S. auto makers as an example of the same pattern of decline common to old-style industrial organizations that’s starting in the enterprise software space. I chose American auto makers as an example of failing systemic health that offers insight because they are a visible cultural reference point, and not because I thought their demise was imminent.
But recent news from Ford and Daimler-Chrysler announcing dramatic job cuts and plant closures seems to point at exactly this in an eerie way. The article on Ford’s announcement even includes this quote from Gary N. Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass, “This may not be the end, but it is certainly the beginning of the end of the automobile industry as we knew it”.
It seems the Iraq reconstruction effort is turning out to be another example of an enterprise infrastructure effort gone awry, in the real world. In the NY Times article Iraq Rebuilding Badly Hobbled, U.S. Report Finds James Glanz writes “…gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting, secrecy and constantly increasing security costs” contributed to the ineffectiveness of the reconstruction effort.
That sounds like a classic enterprise software deployment to me
Glanz continues, “After years of shifting authority, agencies that have come into and out of existence and that experienced constant staff turnover, the rebuilding went through another permutation last month with almost no public notice.”
To close the circle and return to the realm of enterprise software, let’s compare the NY Times assessment of the reconstruction planning — “Mr. Bush said the early focus of the rebuilding program on huge public works projects – largely overseen by the office, the Project and Contracting Office – had been flawed.” — with James Roberts simple but very relevant question in Grand enterprise projects: why are we wasting our time?: “Instead of trying to eat the elephant whole, perhaps the better way is to take one bite at a time?”
Someone should have asked the same question in the early stages of planning the Iraq reconstruction effort, when the basic approach — bureaucratic, top-down, poorly structured — crystallized and was put into action.

Related posts:

A few months ago, I put up a posted called Tagging Comes To Starbucks, in which I attempted to make the point that it’s bizarre when a product’s metadata *overwhelms the experience of the product itself in it’s customary real world setting*.
My example was the metadata encrusted packaging of madeleines – “petite french cakes…” – at Starbucks. Like the famous toothpick instructions Douglas Adams immortalized in So Long and Thanks For All The Fish, this is a strong discontinuity of experience (though not necessarily one indicating things gone awry at the core of civilization) that implies new cognitive / perceptual phenomenon.
New experiences and frames of reference usually lack descriptive vocabulary, which explains why I can’t pin this down neatly in words. But this is surely something we can expect to encounter more in a future populated with findable things called spimes.
The balance hasn’t shifted so far that we’re living inside Baudrillard’s ‘desert of the real’, but we are getting closer with each additional layer of simulation, abstraction, and metadata applied to real situations and objects.
After all it is impossible to interact (smell, touch, taste…) directly with these very ordinary pastries without experiencing the intervening layers of metadata packaging.
Madeleines in situ:

The labeling:

From SLATFATF: “It seemed to me that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization I could live in and stay sane.” ~ Wonko the Sane

Related posts:

Over at uiGarden.net Don Norman clarified some of his ideas regarding Activity Centered Design originally published in the summer of 2005.

I’d like to be comfortable saying that I’m with Don in spirit while disagreeing on some of the particulars, but I’ve read both the original essay and the clarifications twice, and the ideas and the messages are still too raw to support proper reactions or to fully digest. Maybe Don’s working on a new book, and this is interim thinking?

That might explain why the contrast between Norman’s two recent pieces and Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things – which also is a sort of design philosophy / manifesto – is so dramatic. Halfway through Shaping Things, I’m left – as I usually am when reading Sterling’s work – feeling envious that I wasn’t gifted the same way.

Sterling is speaking at ETech, which this year focuses on The Attention Economy. No surprises with this matchup, given that Sterling’s devoted a whole book – Distraction – to some of the same ideas proponents of the Attention Economy advocate we use as references when designing the future.

Amazon is offering new Text Stats on “Readability” and “Complexity”, and a Concordance feature, both part of their comprehensive effort to translate the physical book[store] experience into the online medium. The new features build on existing capabilities such as Look Inside, Wishlists, Recommendations, Editorial and Customer Reviews, Citations, and Better Together to create a comprehensive book buying experience. In the same way that bookstores include kiosks to allow customers access metadata and other information on the books for sale in the immediate environment, Amazon is offering on-line capabilities that simulate many of the activities of book buyers in a bookstore, such as checking the table of contents and indexes, flipping through a book to read passages, or look at select pages.

The new features appear on product pages for books, as well as other kinds of works. [Try this intro to FRBR for a look at the conceptual hierarchy differentiating works from items, and it’s implications for common user tasks like finding, identifying, selecting, and obtaining items.]

Text Stats may be experimental, but it’s hard to feel comfortable with their definition of complexity, which is: “A word is considered “complex” if it has three or more syllables.” To point out the obvious, English includes plenty of simple three syllable words – like “banana” – and some very complex one syllable words – “time” “thought” and “self” for example.

The Text Stats on Readability seem a bit better thought through. That’s natural, given their grounding in research done outside Amazon’s walls. But with clear evidence that US education standards vary considerably across states and even individual districts, and also evidence that those standards change over time, I have to question the value of Readability stats long term. I suppose that isn’t point…

The Concordance feature is easier to appreciate; perhaps it doesn’t attempt to interperet or provide meaning. It simply presents the raw statistical data on word frequencies, and allows you to do the interpretation. Amazon links each word in the concordance to a search results page listing the individual occurances of the word in the text, which is useful, and then further links the individual occruance listings to the location within the text.

With this strong and growing mix of features, Amazon both translates the bookstore experience on-line, and also augments that experience with capabilities available only in an information environment. The question is whether Amazon will continue to expand the capabilities it offers for book buying under the basic mental model of “being in a bookstore”, or if a new direction is ahead?

Here’s a screenshot of the Text Stats for DJ Spooky’s Rhythm Science.

Text Stats:

Here’s a screen shot of the Concordance feature.

Concordance:

What happens when this classic vernacular interjection meets linguistics, data visualization, and the Web?
The Aargh page, of course. (It should really be The Aargh! Page, but this is so fantastic that I can’t complain…)
Here’s a screenshot of the graph that shows frequency of variant spellings for aargh in Google, along two axes:

Note the snazzy mouseover effect, which I’ll zoom here:

Looking into the origins aargh inevitably brings up Robert Newton, the actor who played Long John Silver in several Disney productions based on the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson. I remember seeing the movies as a child, without knowing that they were the first live action Disney movies broadcast on television. So do plenty of other people who’ve created tribute pages>.
Aargh may have many spelling variations, but at least three of them bear a stamp of legitimacy, as the editorial review of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (Paperback) at Amazon.com explains, “If you’re using the 1991 edition or the 1978 original, you’re woefully behind the Scrabble-playing times. With more than 100,000 2- to 8-letter words, there are some interesting additions (“aargh,” “aarrgh,” and “aarrghh” are all legitimate now), while words they consider offensive are no longer kosher. “
There’s even International Talk Like A Pirate Day, celebrated on September 19th every year. The organizers’ site offers a nifty English-to-Pirate-Translator.
Most random perhaps is the Wikipedia link for Aargh the videogame, from the 80’s, without pirates.

Related posts:

egosurf: vi.
“To search the net for your name or links to your web pages. Perhaps connected to long-established SF-fan slang egoscan, to search for one’s name in a fanzine.”
Now a consumable service at: egosurf.org
From the about page:
“egoSurf helps massage the web publishers ego, and thereby maintain the cool equilibrium of the net itself.”

Related posts:

Over at 37Signals, just before the new year started, David made the prediction that by the end of 2006, “Enterprise will follow legacy to become a common insult among software creators and users.”

I think this is already the case, unless the people you’re talking to earn their bread and butter by doing something related to enterprise software – but there’s interesting ground here that I’d like to explore for a bit. On the 37signals site there were some good comments to Dave’s posting – from developers, entrepreneurs, and quite a few other perspectives – but no one made the connection to Conway’s Law, from Melvin Conway’s “How Do Committees Invent?”, which I’ll quote here:
“…organizations which design systems… are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”

A good example of Conway’s Law in action is PowerPoint. As Edward Tufte says in Metaphors For Presentations: Conway’s Law Meets PowerPoint,”The metaphor of PowerPoint is the software corporation itself.” [Aside: As a hard-working consultant who spends *waaaayyy* too much time creating presentations to use as discussion vehicles when instead a direct conversation between relevant parties is by far the best use of everyone’s time and money, I can’t say enough good things about Tufte’s campaign to remind the business world how to communicate clearly, by avoiding PowerPoint unless it’s appropriate…]

It’s no surprise then that ‘enterprise software’ as it is installed and configured in many large corporations is generally massive, anonymous, byzantine in structure and workings, indifferent or hostile to individual needs, offensively neutered in all aspects of it’s user experience, and often changed arbitrarily to align with a power calculus determined by a select few who operate at great remove from the majority of the people who use the environment on a daily basis. After all, that is the nature of communication in many large (and quite a few small and medium sized) corporations.

That enterprise software is bad – excruciatingly bad, if you’ve tried to enter expenses using a generic installation of PeopleSoft or Siebel – is hardly news. But it is interesting that David from 37Signals, Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path, Jared Spool of UIE, and many others who are less visible but still important in directing the evolution of the Internet, would all say in one form or another that they see enterprise software as on the outs.

It’s interesting because I think it highlights a shift in the realm in which the Web community sees itself as relevant. If there were ever a potential enterprise platform, it is the Web – the new Web, Web 2.0, whatever you want to call the emerging information environment that is global, ubiquitous, semantically integrated, socially informed and / or collaborative, architected to provide readily consumable services, etc. But aside from occasional bouts of megalomania, and potential success stories like Salesforce.com, the enterprise realm has been pro-forma outside the boundaries of the possible – until now…

Will enterprise software die? Not right away, and not totally. Remember, there’s A LOT of big iron happily humming away like WOPR in data centers all over the world that will run the enterprise apps we all know and detest for many years to come. More important, let’s keep in mind that enterprise software is really just one part (the installable and configurable software part) of what is easiest to describe as a way of doing things. It’s a reflection of a command and control, hierarchical viewpoint on how to achieve business goals through standardization. That way of doing things comes from a way of thinking. Which comes from a type of organization that will (of necessity?) be with us for a long time.

But the new stuff, the things that new school CIOs and CTOs will commit to, will likely be very different in origin, manner of working, user experience, fundamental assumptions, and capability. It will come from different kinds of organizations; leaner and more agile multi-disciplinary systems and environment design consortiums or aggregates, perhaps. This matches well with some of Jared Spool’s observations on the nature of organizations that create good designs, from his keynote address at UI 10 last fall.

Closing the circle, Conway confirms what these creators will look like; “Primarily, we have found a criterion for the structuring of design organizations: a design effort should be organized according to the need for communication.”

Peter Merholz observes that enterprise software is being eaten away from below, by applications such as Moveable Type, and innovators such as SocialText.
“These smaller point solutions, systems that actually address the challenges that people face (instead of simply creating more problems of their own, problems that require hiring service staff from the software developers), these solutions are going to spread throughout organizations and supplant enterprise software the same way that PCs supplanted mainframes.
I sure wouldn’t want to be working in enterprise software right now. Sure, it’s a massive industry, and it will take a long time to die, but the progression is clear, and, frankly, inevitable.”
Indeed it is. Though there’s considerable analyst hoopla about rising enterprise content management or ECM spending and IT investment (see also In Focus: Content Management Heats Up, Imaging Shifts Toward SMBs), we’re in the midst of a larger and longer term cycle of evolution in which cheaper, faster, more agile competitors to established market leaders are following the classic market entry strategy of attacking the bottom of the pyramid. (The pyramid is a hierarchical representation of a given market or set of products; at the top of the pyramid sit the more expensive and mature products which offer more features, capabilities, quality, or complexity; the lower levels of the pyramid include lower cost products which offer fewer features.)
What’s most interesting about the way this pattern is playing out in the arena of enterprise content management solutions is that the new competitors were not at first attacking from the bottom as a deliberate strategy, think of MoveableType, but they have quite quickly moved to this approach as with the recent release of Alfresco. The different origins of Sixapart and Alfresco may have some bearing on their different market entry approaches: Sixapart was a personal publishing platform that’s grown into a content management tool, whereas Alfresco’s intented audience was enterprise customers from day one. I’d wager the founders of Alfresco looked to RedHat as an example of a business model built on OpenSource software, and saw opportunity in the enterprise content management space, especially concerning user experience annd usability weaknesses in ECM platforms.
There’s an easy (if general) parallel in the automotive industry: from American dominance of the domestic U.S. market for automobiles in the post-WWII decades, successive waves of competitors moved into the U.S. automobile market from the bottom of the pyramid, offering less expensive or higher quality automobiles with the same or similar features. The major Japanese firms such as Honda, Toyota, and Nissan were first, followed by Korean firms such as Hyundai and Daewoo. It’s plain that some of the older companies sitting at the top of the pyramid are in fact dying, both literally and figuratively: GM is financially crippled and faces onerous financial burdens — to the point of bankruptcy – as it attempts to pay for the healthcare of it’s own aging (dying) workforce.
So what’s in the future?
For auto makers it’s possible that Chinese or South American manufacturers will be next to enter the domestic U.S. market, using similar attacks at the bottom of the pyramid.
For enterprise software, I think organizations will turn away from monolithic and expensive systems with terrible user experiences — and correspondingly low levels of satisfaction, quality, and efficacy — as the best means of meeting business needs, and shift to a mixed palette of semantically integrated capabilities or services delivered via the Internet. These capabilities will originate from diverse vendors or providers, and expose customized sets of functionality and information specific to the individual enterprise. Staff will access and encounter these capabilities via a multiplicity of channels and user experiences; dashboard or portal style aggregators, RIA rich internet applications, mobile devices, interfaces for RSS and other micro-content formats.
David Weinberger thinks it will be small pieces loosely joined together. A group of entrepreneurs thinks it might look something like what Thingamy claims to be.
Regardless, it’s surely no coincidence that I find a blog post on market pyramids and entry strategies put up by someone working at an enterprise software startup…

Related posts: