Eric Ries' Lean Startup started on a blog, became a best-selling book, and is now a thriving global movement. (There's a slick overview of the evolution here.) Despite the title, and some of Ries' arguments, its popularity can't be attributed merely to the relentless startup mania and the armies of 20-year-olds burning white-hot with dreams of instant Instagram billions.

In the book, Ries defines a startup as "A human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty."

He allows that anyone leading such an endeavor should be considered an entrepreneur, whether s/he's a product manager working with a team of 100s at GE or in a garage with angel funding. And yet he does attempt to exclude "most businesses -- large and small alike" on the basis that they don't "confront situations of of extreme uncertainty." He continues:

"To open a new business that is an exact clone of an existing business all the way down to the business model, pricing, target customer, and product may be an attractive economic investment, but it is not a startup because its success depends only on execution."

The problems is that Ries' characterization of the execution-centric business applies fully to only one very particular kind of undertaking -- namely, franchises -- and not to "most businesses." (Moreover, even if the success of, say, a new Taco Bell is largely a matter of sticking to plan, I can assure you that the bright men and women at Yum Brands (which owns Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut) are working feverishly (and successfully) to constantly innovate and respond to new challenges across their global consumer touchpoints as well as internal employee experiences.)

Remember The Jetsons? The flying cars and the automated kitchen and the food pills? Sometimes modern life can feel like that futuristic utopia. We've got robots in the home and a speech-recognition personal assistant named Siri built in the iPhone in our bag. IBM Watson, a supercomputer, beat its human competition in the TV game show Jeopardy! last year. How? By translating corny, nuanced questions into a format it could understand and compute.

But for most of us, our digital experiences at work feel like we're stuck in The Flintstones.

We wonder: "How can Amazon.com monitor my customer data so closely that it knows what book I want next, but after five years of daily use, my enterprise search engine doesn't get that I work in HR in the Chicago office?" We need to dig into our enterprise information so it is more rich and useful. Hal Varian, Google's Chief Economist, explained in the McKinsey Quarterly that "We have free and ubiquitous data, so the complementary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it." (He even goes so far as to say that statisticians will be the sexy job in the next 10 years!)

It's understandable to be cynical about semantic processing, especially if you've been told it relies on manually entered metadata.

In 1996, a would-be MIT entrepreneur pitched me on this idea: “What if we could package up huge files like engineering drawings and email them to people instead of FedExing them?” I listened politely, but it all seemed a little futuristic to me at a time when even email wasn’t ubiquitous. 

Of course, this is exactly the business YouSendIt launched in 2003. The nine-year-old company does this quite simply by using email to send the message and YouSendIt to carry the payload — the gigantic file that you can’t attach to the message directly. The company now has 23 million subscribers; according to Wikipedia, 500,000 of them pay for the privilege.

Today the company announced Workstream by YouSendIt, a set of business enhancements to its evolving set of file services. The goal, in the words of CMO Tony Nemelka, is to give enterprises “systems that extend their line of sight beyond central storage and beyond the firewall.” I found three notable things about this offering:

1. Integration with Outlook and SharePoint with plugins to make it easy to send and retrieve files. While this may not be unique, the integration is quite intuitive. In the experience of David Michel, CIO for Atlanta-based law firm Burr & Forman, giving employees tools they recognize makes it easier for them to use them. Further, it’s integrated into their common workflows such as eDiscovery.
2. Enterprise administration tools for user and group management. This is what IT needs in order to provide a business-ready alternative to consumer-focused Dropbox. It’s what drew Michel to the offering. Now, this is not lockbox-type security or administration that you could get from a virtual deal room product from IntraLinks, but it’s enough for email-level security and administration.

It's a technology big idea: that organizations can best serve their customers, partners, and employees with new "systems of engagement." (Thanks to Geoff Moore for permission to define and use his term.) Let us explain why.

First, the logistics. John McCarthy and I spent the last eight months sifting through the patterns that have emerged from firms that have harnessed mobile, social, big data, and cloud technology: 100 conversations; 61 interviews with experts; and Forrester surveys of 10,000 business and IT decision-makers, 10,000 global information workers, and 50,000 consumers. Out of that research we've just published a 28-page report for Forrester clients that we will deconstruct and re-assemble via blog posts over the next few months.

We began by looking for the unintended consequences of a successful mobile app, expecting to find some best practices in experience design, middleware APIs, server deployments, app development, and organizational alignment. We found those things and captured them in the report. But we also found something more important: a new  ability to empower customers, employees, and partners with context-rich apps and smart products to help them decide and act immediately in their moments of need.