Introducing Forrester's Web 2.0 Framework

By Erica Driver

One of my roles here at Forrester for the past year or so has been chief Web 2.0 cat herder. I'm by no means a Web 2.0 expert -- I've just helped to coordinate our coverage. A large team of analysts has put our heads together to try to create a well-rounded Web 2.0 research agenda and formulate a consistent way to conceptualize and communicate about this giant hairball of a topic. We hope you're seeing the results in our published research. Below is one result of our team meetings: a high-level Web 2.0 framework.

• Enabling technologies. Web 2.0 enabling technologies are the foundation underlying all the tools and applications you hear so much about, like blogs and wikis and tagging. Web 2.0 enabling technologies include things like XML, AJAX, Flash and Flex, mashup makers, and Web services.
• Web 2.0 tools and applications. Web 2.0 tools and applications allow people to create and share content more easily than ever before. These include blogs, wikis, social networks, rich Internet apps, mashups, RSS, podcasts, widgets, tagging, etc.
• Behavior changes. It's because of the behavior changes these technologies accompany -- or enable -- that makes us able to call out a Web 2.0 movement. With people using Web 2.0 tools and applications like those listed above, power has shifted from organizations to their customers. Not everyone is out there blogging and tagging; we've found that people fall into seveal buckets: creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives. Charlene Li and other Forrester analysts have published lots of great research on this topic -- and she and Josh Bernoff have a book about coming out in a few months, called Groundswell.
• Major Forrester themes. Here's where we get to the "so what?" Via our research themes, Forrester answers questions like "What does Web 2.0 mean for software developers? For marketers? For technology strategists and marketers? Information and knowledge management professionals? " Here are links to some of the more recent seminal Forrester reports (sorry, only available to Forrester clients) on Forrester Web 2.0 themes: Social Computing, Information Workplace, Web3D (coming soon!), Tech Populism, and Dynamic Business Apps.

Strange Development In Personal Information Management

By Kyle McNabb

Our research into the future of desktop productivity continues, and much of what we're learning suggests information workers want to more help tackling their work/life needs and managing their personal information. Interestingly, today, a vendor I wouldn't have immediately thought of as a possible savior for all of us drowning in our personal information (emails, contacts, social networks, work calendars, personal calendars, personal files, and so on) stepped up to the plate. EMC announced it had Pi Corporation, a stealth personal information management vendor. I can't figure out if this is misguided, or brilliant...

• Personal information is a personal affair, not an enterprise affair... EMC's an enterprise technology company. I'm convinced winners in personal information management have to appeal to us not only at work, but at home too. Outside of the IT workplace environment, who thinks of EMC? Microsoft, Apple, Google, sure. EMC?
• ...but EMC does know how to manage information... Okay, EMC does know how to manage information. They have storage, they have ECM, they have security, and they have virtualization (to name just a few things in their portfolio). EMC has plenty of trusted technology and knowhow enterprises utilize to help manage enterprise information.
• ...and they're taking steps to move to the cloud. EMC's moving into the cloud. Their embryonic Cloud Infrastructure and Services Division could -- emphasize could -- make them more attractive to information workers outside the workplace. Through the cloud they could obfuscate the complexity of setting up storage, content management, and security for the information worker -- hey, as much as I think it would be cool to have my own SAN or Centera set up in my basement, I don't have the expertise (let alone the capital) to do it.

Will EMC make a push to tackle the work/life needs of information workers? Time will tell -- and I'm sure EMC will let us know soon. More likely though, I'm betting they plan to build up a robust cloud based infrastructure they can take to more consumer friendly organizations. Organizations that have our eyeballs and attention outside of work like Apple, AT&T, Yahoo! (if they persist), or even Comcast (or regional players in Europe and Asia) -- could play a role in offering people personal information management help. We use them in many aspects of our personal lives. And these companies, worried about competing with Google and Microsoft for our attention as people (not just information workers), could offer us personal information management services on a platform built and managed by EMC.

Could be misguided...could be brilliant. What do you think?

Complex Decisions Driven, But Not Overtaken, By Events

By James Kobielus

As I may have mentioned before, I cover complex event processing (CEP) as it intersects with information and knowledge management (I&KM). Or, more specifically, as it supports real-time business intelligence (BI). Or, perhaps more pedantically, as it enables decision support systems (DSS) to facilitate business agility in response to dynamic conditions.

DSS is the term by which BI was known from the late 70s until the early 90s (fun fact: my first position as an IT industry analyst was in the late 80s, under Peter G.W. Keen, who, along with Michael Scott Morton, published a seminal work on DSS in 1978). DSS is a useful framework for thinking about BI, because it places your focus on the decision "agent," on the flow of that agent's decision-making process, and on the collection of static and dynamic evidence and events that fed that process.

In looking at CEP for I&KM/BI, I'm often compelled to take a DSS point of view. As an analyst, that perspective helps me model the phenomena in the proper context -- i.e.., the many layers of complexity:

• Each event may be quite complex in its own right, standing for a linked set of data updates, application state transitions, and process status changes.
• Each event stream is a complex, linked, ordered, transactional sequence of time-stamped      objects.
• Each event-processing engine may consolidate, cleanse, correlate, filter, and persist objects across a complex set of concurrent event streams.
• Each event-reliant decision agent (e.g., end user) may access, interact with, and/or consume events through a complex interface (dashboards, analytics, semantic layer, etc.), across multiple devices (desktop, laptop, Blackberry, etc.) and have a complex event-enriched streaming "experience" (see previous post authored by myself).
• Each event-reliant decision agent may be a complex creature in its own right with its own complex, convoluted, squishy decision-making methodology -- i.e., an individual human being with their own habits and cognitive/psychological dispositions; or a group making decisions collectively and collaboratively through workflow, or social networking; or a half-human/half-automated workflow behaving in the herky-jerky manner one would expect from a split-personality decision agent; or a completely automated orchestration of applications triggered by rules engines, etc.).

In fact, the organization/team/group/collective is the principal uber-decision agent in most businesses. The BI market is beginning to understand that basic fact, and to address it in their solutions. As you all may recall from a previous post of mine, BI solutions are growing more collaboration-oriented, in terms of vendors adding more workflow, instant messaging, social networking, and Web 2.0 functionality to their offerings.

As CEP increasingly permeates vendors' real-time BI/DW portfolios, I fully expect that real-time, event-triggered, under-deadline, continuously refreshing dashboard-sharing collaboration applications will come to the fore. Maybe we'll rely on social networking to make it happen on the fly (per Rob Koplowitz' great coverage of all this). Maybe we'll lean on our online avatars (per Erica Driver’s work in this area) to model various collective responses before we go "live" with it all.

Clearly, collaboration adds another level of complexity to an organization's ability to respond to events. Ask any news organization trying to coordinate the real-time efforts of diverse reporters, editors, photographers, and others on a breaking story. Or any analyst organization trying to whip together a collaborative blogpost laying out their collective position on some fresh industry development. Under deadline, events must be absorbed, responsibilities divvied up, and actions taken -- and pronto, by whoever's holding the baton. Decisions must be made under time- and resource-stress.

Where real-time event-triggered DSS is concerned, collaboration could be a showstopper, if we don't watch out. Collaboration adds complexity, hence the potential for more decision latency. But collaboration also builds buy-in, and, as such, can be worth the muss and fuss of versions, reviews, revisions, and provisional decisions.

Indeed, having your organization fully behind whatever action was ultimately taken is the best support system any decision could possibly have.

Virtual Worlds For Collaboration: When You Remove Constraints, You Change The Possibilities

By Erica Driver

This weekend I listened to a great panel discussion about virtual worlds and their impact on the future of work at the MetaverseU conference at Stanford University . The panelists were Byron Reeves, Co-Director of Stanford’s Human Sciences and Technology Advanced Research center, Christian Renaud, Chief Architect of Networked Virtual Environments for the Cisco Technology Center, and Reuben Steiger, CEO of virtual worlds agency Millions of Us. The key takeway from the panel: work is changing dramatically and virtual worlds have a potentially — though not inevitably — huge role to play.

• Virtual worlds can create more engaging interactions for distributed people. For traditional information workers, virtual worlds can deliver a far more compelling meeting experience than a teleconference, Web conference, or even video conference (as long as all participants have adequate bandwidth, video card, and PC processing power). Think about the last phone-based team meeting you were involved in where you had more than, say, 6 or 7 people dialed in from different locations — people tend to multi-task, have trouble identifying who’s speaking, and lose out on non-verbal communication. (See my Oct. 4, 2007 blog post about this: “3D Internet: From A One-Speed Banana Seat To A 24-Speed Mountain Bike — Someday.”) Christian Renaud of Cisco has been holding weekly one-on-one internal meetings in Second Life for a year now and says that virtual worlds add a level of fun to the job, which can have an influence on productivity.
• Serious games increase peoples’ engagement with their work. Imagine the increased engagement of an immersive video game-like work experience for task workers whose jobs are “tragically boring,” to use Byron Reeves’ words  — the examples he gave were customer service in a contact center, surveillance data analysis, or any job where you are categorizing things. Where’s the business value in increasing peoples’ engagement with their work, you might wonder? The bottom line: improvements in job performance and increased retention. Let’s say that your company has 1,000 contact center reps and their average tenure is 2 years. If you could engage them for on average 3 months longer imagine the bottom line impact from the reduced costs of recruiting and training. The picture Reeves painted was of a newly hired customer service rep sitting down in front of a video game-like virtual world that is his job. Here he initially engages with fake customers (they could be based on artificial intelligence or could be avatars operated by a trainer or other trainees) as well as other customer service reps. When he reaches, say, level 12, he gets to interact with specially-selected real customers via this same environment. When he reaches level 20 he can handle a higher level of difficulty, and by level 27 he can manage a team. One caveat Byron Reeves raised is it would be a huge mistake to provide a worker with this level of engagement in a training scenario and then return them to a really boring job.
• Virtual worlds increase serendipitous interactions among distributed people. Christian Renaud of Cisco commented that in his experience 99% of business happens outside scheduled meetings. This is how ideas are exchanged, teams are formed, and mergers and acquisitions germinate. And the way he put it: “You can’t bump into someone via video conferencing.” You could, however, run into someone, or meet someone, in a virtual world in a way that replicates what happens in corporate hallways and cafeterias all the time. (See my Feb. 4, 2008 blog post “Virtual Offices for All: Return of the Serendipitous Interaction.”)
• But we need more natural interface devices. A mouse and keyboard are non-intuitive ways of participating in virtual worlds. Participating in virtual worlds has to become a much more natural experience. I saw a demo of an extraordinary product at MetaverseU —  a company called Seeing Machines built a head tracking and expression recognition system called faceLAB. FaceLAB provides head movement and expression tracking with no weird-looking headgear —  in fact no specialized hardware at all. The only hardware used for the demo was an Apple MacBook with built-in Web camera. By tying this technology with an avatar, a person could begin to experience a virtual world and communicate with others in it in a very natural way. You turn your head and your avatar’s head turns. You smile and your avatar smiles with you.
• Many other technological barriers must be overcome, too. Businesses are taking a risk regardless of which virtual world technology vendor they spend a big chunk of money with because we are in such an early stage market. A vendor that looks promising today could be gone in two years. Another implication of the early stage of this market is that none of the available technology solutions provide 100% — even 80%, really — of needed functionality: secure chat, secure voice, access control, easy navigation, 3D content creation tools for non-technical users, and integration with the business software people use every day to get their jobs done. Also, even people who would be inclined to use virtual worlds for collaboration may suffer the limitations of their current technology. Their work-issued PC or laptop may not have a powerful enough video card or processor, or they may not have adequate network bandwidth.

Good Practices For Mixed-Reality Meetings

By Erica Driver

Mixed reality meetings are those in which some participants are gathered together in a physical meeting room (I’ll call these the “in-room” participants”) and others are gathered in a virtual meeting space, like in Second Life (I’ll call these the “in-world” participants). Mixed reality meetings are still on the bleeding edge for business use but will be increasingly used to connect geographically-distributed people for real-time meetings and events. The reason to do mixed-reality meetings is so distributed participants are fully engaged and everyone involved feels like they are together in one place. After participating in a few of these now, with Second Life the virtual world we used (see my Jan. 25th blog post about one of the meetings), I’ve begun to identify some helpful practices:

• Use high-end audio and video streaming and upload slides to separate display. Use the highest-end streaming technology you can so Second Life avatars have a good experience seeing and hearing the in-room speakers’ presentations. Upload presentation materials ahead of time into Second Life so avatars can view them via a dedicated screen; avatars can then zoom in on this screen if they want to. The experience in Second Life is degraded when avatars’ only access to presentation materials is via the video stream. And ideally the Second Life space has one video stream showing the in-room presenters and another showing the in-room audience.
• Choose the right physical meeting room. Choose a conference room or auditorium that supports multiple large-screen or on-wall displays. Set up audio/visual equipment to project the Second Life meeting room onto a couple of opposite walls and any presentation materials speakers will be using, again on opposite walls. In-room presenters and participants should be able to see both the presentation materials and the Second Life meeting without having to turn their heads and look behind them.
• Democratize Q&A. In a presentation-style meeting, have audience participants write their questions and comments on note cards and have a moderator frequently collect these cards. During Q&A, intersperse these questions with questions that come in from Second Life avatars. Use multiple large-screen or on-wall displays. This is how they are doing it at the MetaverseU conference at Stanford University this weekend and it seems to be working well. In a smaller more interactive session, have people who have questions for the speaker get in front of the video camera to ask their question so Second Life avatars can see them.
• Set Second Life chat ground rules. This is especially important if the meeting is open to the public. Some rules are so basic that you’d think you wouldn’t have to state them — but participants should be reminded, probably  at the start of each presentation, to treat others as they would like to be treated. The anonymity of Second Life sometimes leads people to behave in ways that I’d bet big money they wouldn’t if we were all in the same physical room. Remind people to keep public chats on topic — there’s always private IM for those sidebar conversations. I think it’s most effective when use of public chat is constrained to reporting technical problems, or to ask questions of the speaker. Off-topic public text chatter in the Second Life meeting room is just as disruptive to a mixed-reality meeting as in-room participants whispering and having side conversations.

Virtual Worlds: The World Describes, The Web Predicts

By Erica Driver

At the MetaverseU conference at Stanford University this weekend, Ginsu Soon, VP of Business Affairs at Linden Lab, shared a framework for thinking about the future of virtual worlds. He said that in some ways it’s appropriate to draw an analogy between virtual worlds and the Web and in other ways it’s appropriate to draw an analogy between virtual worlds and the world in general. His main point — and it’s a good one — is don’t mix the two analogies.

• You can describe virtual worlds by saying they are “like the world.” For example — when thinking about the emotional weight of being involved, peoples’ expectations of the experience, or social scale. There is strong descriptive power in comparing the way it feels to be in virtual worlds with the way it feels to be in the physical world. Even when you are interacting with avatars that don’t look anything like the people who are operating them, or you are in virtual space that looks nothing like real-world space, the immersion and interactivity of the experience allows you to suspend your disbelief and you feel like you are really there. Stanford professor Byron Reeves, who also presented today at Metaverse U, has studied the physiological response to participating in virtual worlds and found that a person’s response to its avatar being touched in the virtual world is the same as if the person’s actual body is touched. But when you try to make predictions about how virtual worlds will evolve using the “it’s like the physical world” analogy you start getting into realms like evolution, economics, government and politics, nature, and myriad realms of human behavior, and the analogy breaks down.
• You can predict what’s going to happen with virtual worlds by looking at the Web. Now we’re talking about things like business models, interoperability, usage patterns, and regulation. What’s my take on this? We might use technological aspects of the past to predict things like: Web3D will be the next major wave in the evolution of the Internet. Web3D will be a system of linked interactive 3D and 2D virtual environments, which will include everything from use-specific, private applications to virtual worlds targeting a segment of the population or workforce, to virtual worlds open to anyone who wants to join.Web3D will deliver an interactive, immersive user experience rather than the static, text-oriented or even interactive graphical user interfaces of today’s Web. People will be represented visually by avatars that can move in space and communicate with others via voice and text, gestures, user-directed motion, animation scripts, and social networking tools. And Web3D will integrate seamlessly with other tools and technologies (e.g., Web applications and Web 2.0 tools). But if you start using the Web to describe virtual worlds (e.g., you can IM with people, you can get information about companies, you can chat in chat rooms), the analogy completely breaks down.

Complex Events, Simple Experiences

By James Kobielus

Before the week is out, a few more thoughts inspired by various things I experienced at and around Forrester's Enterprise Architecture (EA) Forum last week in beautiful (but surprisingly chilly) Coronado, California.

What stuck with me was the presentation and demo by Kevin Lynch, CTO of Adobe. Though I was already quite familiar with Adobe’s Flex technology for rich Internet applications (RIA) technology, I liked the fact that Lynch presented Flex this time around as a business tool--in other words, as an interactive visualization technology for business intelligence (BI), business performance optimization, and event-rich analytics. All of which made perfect sense in a forum for enterprise architects.

As I was watching the demo, I began to think that RIA can be a double-edge sword, where BI is concerned, in terms of RIA’s potential to deliver meaningful, actionable intelligence for decision support.

On the one hand, as Lynch demonstrated, BI application developers can easily--if they don’t restrain themselves--craft any arbitrarily complex configuration of dashboards, scorecards, graphs, reports, query boxes, tickers, widgets, pop-up windows, and other visual (and audio) UI elements to deliver every imaginable form of intelligence to the user through every device or application at their disposal. And, in fact, as more BI environments begin to deliver more real-time event-driven refreshes direct-from-the-source, the more the potential for overburdening the poor end user’s overfull cranium. Where CEP for I&KM is concerned, this can easily degenerate into a nightmare scenario of information overload.

Or the BI/CEP application developers can deliver simplicity. They can use back-end event engines, business rules engines, and other infrastructure to conceal distracting complexities. Earlier that week, I was meeting with a vendor that provides real-time DW, plus in-database analytics, plus rules engines that can deliver, triggered by streaming data, simple recommendations through an Information Worker’s BI environment. For example, the DW/CEP/BRE/analytics environment might provide account reps with crisp, time-sensitive, context-sensitive recommendations to respond to an irate customer while they’re still on the phone--to keep them from bolting to the competition.

All of which brings me to a closing thought re this particular post. The problem with the term “complex event processing” is that it seems to imply a complex UI--hence, that CEP's potential user base is limited to rocket scientists, Wall Street quants, IT industry analysts (gasp!), and other folks who are professionally obliged to handle (indeed, embrace) complexity.

But complexity is part of the problem, not the solution, where CEP for I&KM is concerned. We can’t stop the world of business from growing more multifaceted. But we can and should filter it all down to the simplest, most meaningful, most actionable experience, targeted specifically to each user, and contextualized precisely to each and every occasion.

Down to a pure and beautiful crystallization.

Thoughts On Recession...And ECM Adoption

By Kyle McNabb

While we all wait and watch numerous economic indicators (my favorites are easily found in the WSJ) to see if the US economy, and possibly others, will head into recession, here's a thought - just a simple thought - on what you can do if/when you get the call to pull back on your ECM spending. Turn you attention now to understanding your organization's business context. I'm not referring to business requirements - most of you have business requirements related to your ECM endeavors. Instead, I'm referring to discovering how your business people and business processes work with and use content, not simply how they manage it.

Lack of adoption plagues many ECM initiatives - many of you live with this issue. And our ECM research over the past 18 months reveals a good reason why adoption's such an issue - most implementations fail to take into consideration business context. To put it bluntly, implementation teams know who their users are, but they know very little about the people that will use the technology. And focusing on users often leads to implementing technology in a way that materially changes the way people work...a big cause of poor document management adoption in particular.

We've learned from many enterprises with successful ECM initiatives that focusing on business context helps. How? It allows them to build up profiles on their people, not as users, but as people that just happen to use ECM technology to get their daily work. They've basically adopted, to a degree, the marketing practice of customer segmentation and persona design and applied it to their employees (more to come in the next few weeks on this topic...what information & knowledge managers can learn from marketing). As a result, they've been able to fit ECM technologies into how their people work, complementing they way their people work instead of materially changing what they do.

You may get asked the question "What can we cut?" Well, maybe, just maybe, focusing on business context will allow you to tell your management you may not have to replace that "unusable" ECM system with something new. You may find better ways to put what you already have to better use. Business context matters.

What do you think?

Help Us Help You

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What's in it for you? As a panelist you will get complimentary access to pre-published insight, comparative data, and best practices drawn from the surveys conducted, including access to Forrester teleconferences that result from the survey in question. In addition, as a token of our appreciation the next 100 people to sign up for our IT panel will receive a $10 Hallmark Insight gift card. Thanks for considering our offer.

SDL Goes Shopping Again

By Stephen Powers

SDL announced today that it has acquired fellow global information management services vendor Idiom Technologies. Both SDL and Idiom sell software and services to help organizations manage global content. This marks the second significant acquisition for SDL in less than a year; last year SDL got into the Web content management business with its purchase of Tridion.

What does this mean from a Web content management standpoint? If you're an existing SDL or Idiom customer, there will be some changes coming down the pike as SDL attempts to "combine SDL's and Idiom's technology solutions to provide better efficiencies of scales and shared intellectual property" (SDL's words, not mine, from this morning's press release). If your organization has a Tridion implementation integrated with Idiom, this announcement should be good news for you: tighter integration between the two systems is likely to follow. But if you're using Idiom with a non-SDL Web content management system (i.e., anything but Tridion), then keep an eye on your WCM vendor's preferred global translation services partner(s) — these vendors could be less than thrilled about partnering with a company that has essentially become the competition, and may more aggressive in seeking out partnerships for integration with non-SDL companies, such as Lionbridge.

Stay tuned.