Efficiency, Sustainability, And Digital Natives Accelerate Paper’s Path To Digital

  By Sheri McLeish

As people spend more time consuming information digitally at home and at work, reliance on paper continues to decrease. But how far are we across the Digital Divide? In 1975, George E. Pake, then head of Xerox Corp.’s Palo Alto Research Center, predicted that in 1995 his office would be completely different: “There will be a TV-display terminal with keyboard sitting on his desk. I’ll be able to call up documents from my files on the screen, or by pressing a button. I can get my mail or any messages. I don’t know how much hard copy I’ll want in this world.”

Thirty-five years later Pake’s vision largely came true for iWorkers, who today toggle between laptops, smart phones, and other devices to create, consume, and manage information. But an interesting thing happened along the way. With the initial rise in popularity of email and the Internet in the late 1990s, there was actually a bump in paper usage, not a decrease. People printed out their emails, receipts for e-purchases, documents, presentations – you get the idea. In fact, the World Wildlife Fund reported that some 10,000 sheets of paper are used each year by the average office worker in Western industrialized countries.

The other challenge faced by businesses has been the explosion of content types. Firms today need to support and coordinate multiple inbound and outbound channels. For processes like customer onboarding, paper persists due to lack of integration or reliance on paper by customers, partners, and staff. Today only a quarter of enterprises report that 25-50% of their customers are fully paperless, according to a recent Forrester Information Capture survey. Eighty-seven percent of firms have, are in the process of, or are planning to implement or upgrade information capture technology in their companies. The No. 1 investment area? No surprise here: integrating with enterprise apps.

This ongoing effort to remove paper from processes is driven by good, solid business reasons: For each sheet of paper used there are costs for purchasing, storage, copying, printing, labor, postage, disposal, and recycling. The ROI for capture investments is one of the most straight-forward for a technology investment. Driven by cost savings, increased productivity, and improved access and retention of electronic documents, companies continue to invest steadily in information capture to support business processes like registration, invoicing, and contract management.

Most Content Now Born Digital
But there’s another other huge driver of paper reduction in the enterprise: the iWorker. I know I still have a few piles of paper lingering at the office and more at home, but I haven’t looked at that stuff in years. I use my smart phone for a shopping list; I seem to have a hard time locating pens because I so rarely use them.

And I’m not unique. Forrester believes that well over two-thirds of content created today originates digitally. Consider:

• In our Forrester Workforce Analysis Survey, Q2 2009, 79% responded that they use word processing tools, and 60% report using word processing daily.
• Spreadsheets have similar but slightly lower use, with about half of information workers using spreadsheets daily.
• From the same study iWorkers are shown to be pretty happy with word processing tools – 82% indicate high satisfaction

This high level of satisfaction and ongoing use of tools to work with content in digital form supports the notion that most of the content being handled by iWorkers today is in electronic formats. And this will accelerate as Millennials who were “born digital” make up greater proportions of the workforce.

It’s Getting Easier To Be Green
Paper reduction also fits into the Green mindset. Along with embracing digital authoring tools, iWorkers indicate a strong desire to reduce paper in the workplace (75% strongly agree) and recognize the benefits of digital content such as facilitating quicker distribution and ability to reuse content. Paper-based or whiteboard content from collaborative work sessions increasingly are moving to the digital realm. During a tour of EMC’s storage manufacturing facility last week several of the process efficiencies touted were tied to digitizing information collection, including a widescreen digital whiteboard on the shop floor to replicate a physical whiteboard and an application that provides electronic access to the state of components as they are being tested, a task that previously required the technicians to walk through the test rooms and write down the information to then be inputted.

Custom development to automate and digitize manual processes remains core to ongoing process improvement. But for more informal content development, eventually iWorkers will take for granted originating this content digitally. Today adoption of wikis and blogs is still nascent, with under 10% of information workers using these tools. But as collaborative environments become more accessible via Web-based platforms like the Google Wave, Novell’s Pulse, IBM/Lotus Live, and Microsoft’s SharePoint and Office 2010, it will become even easier to live fully in a digital world of content.

Holdouts Hindered By Real Hurdles
There will be exceptions to the digital rule, however. Content captured via paper forms or that isn’t well supported for electronic input, such as math formulas or diagrams, will persist until better user interfaces make even these uses obsolete on paper. Most iWorkers today are not provisioned a stylus and tablet PC, so doing a first pass on paper or on a whiteboard remains faster even if eventually these drawings need to be captured digitally.

And there will be other holdouts as well: In an interview with NPR earlier this year, one of our era’s most prolific novelists James Patterson admitted he does all of his writing in longhand before turning it over to an assistant to be typeset. But in college classrooms, often the best barometer for what’s to come, more and more professors are allowing laptops and electronic note taking tools to be used in class. And as we look even further ahead, consider that penmanship has taken a backseat to keyboarding in the elementary curriculum at many schools. So for the class of 2025, Forrester predicts that their offices may not be just sans paper, but without a pen too. I guess that puts me ahead of the curve.

What about you? Are you farther along the paperless trail at home or at work? What’s driving paper reduction in your firm? What’s holding you back?

Social means business

by Rob Koplowitz

Last week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference we found more evidence of the changing nature of enterprise collaboration. Both customers and vendors provided evidence that social networking was quickly moving into the enterprise landscape and warrants the attention due a potential game changer. There are three trends that warrant attention:

• Forward thinking organizations are developing broad collaboration strategies that embrace social networking while recognizing and managing associated risk. In fact, it is becoming clear that a well managed strategy with regard to social in the enterprise should lower risk associated privacy, security and compliance. Sounds counter-intuitive? Well, transparency is a beautiful thing.
• The vendor landscape is vibrant. At many conferences these days, the standard refrain is "in this economy". Not here. Vendors are investing heavily in new capabilities and are being rewarded with robust business. 
• Businesses are getting real value. The early stage pilots of the last couple of years have proven to be successful and many organizations are moving from concept to broad deployment with high hopes for more and more value. The early adopters are also interesting. Defense, health care, financial services all sharing success stories and proving that risk is manageable even in the most stringent environments.

What does success look like? In almost every case, there are two parts to the story. First, a known process is addressed and the results are positive. It's common to hear stories that begin with " We used to do this in email...". Freeing organizations from the inefficiencies of chasing emails can provide a string starting point to realizing value. (No, email does not go away, it just goes back to doing what it does well which is not content and project management.)

The second part of the story is where the light bulb goes on. Now in fairness, this is generally not a surprise as most organizations PLAN for the light bulb to go on. However, no two organizations see this happen in quite the same way. The moment comes when broad sharing of information leads to a result that could not have happened otherwise. People-centric collaboration leads to the connection of people to content and expertise that they otherwise would never have found. Communities are very good at driving action because they free information and create a context for collective action. Sound a bit too fluffy? The wins are anything but. That's why the most traditional and risk averse organizations got up at Enterprise 2.0 and outlined their successes and plans to move forward.

Forrester predicts that social computing is one of the Top 15 Technology Trends and that it warrants investment now so your organization can begin to understand these transformational benefits. Where do you begin:

• Engage with a motivated business leader to create a pilot. Outline the criteria for success. Make it concrete but realize that it will be hard to measure exactly. "We expect to reduce the cost of proposal generation by 30%" is going to be difficult to prove. "We expect to have better access to information and expertise to get our jobs done" is too high level to be taken seriously. "We expect to be able to produce proposals more quickly and with higher quality" is just right. Why? Because your business sponsor can attest to that result and the result will be taken seriously.
• Start small. There is ample opportunity to this at a very low cost and with a small, albeit motivated, number of resources. Prove the value before moving to larger roll outs. Keep in mind that even a small pilot will require cooperation from some parts of your organization that might be skeptical, like legal and HR. Get them on board from the beginning.
• Plan for pervasive adoption. In the long run, the real wins will come from communities that self-identify how to determine value. Be prepared for huge serendipitous wins. The broader information is shared and the more widely networks connect, the more wins that will result.

And, you get to have fun.

Exchange 2010: Five Good Reasons To Upgrade

  by Ted Schadler

Microsoft announced the general availability of Exchange Server 2010 yesterday. For information & knowledge management professionals and for the productivity of information workers, there are five good reasons to upgrade:

1. Much cheaper storage. Exchange 2007 introduced a new storage model, where the email server manages direct-attached storage. Exchange 2010 extends that capability and in the words of one beta customer, "We have reduced the overall costs for our storage by 30% while increasing the usable disk space nine times." This benefit comes from using cheap direct-attached storage in lieu of storage area networks.
2. Support for much bigger mailboxes. Most firms limit mailbox size to 100-250 MB for good reasons: storage cost, nightly backup windows too short, eDiscovery hassles. Exchange 2010 has much faster I/O (Microsoft says 15 times faster than in Exchange 2003) and improved storage management that allows direct-attached storage and cheap disks. Net it out, and it becomes much easier to expand the mailboxes to 1-2 GB.
3. Cloud or on-premises: you decide. Exchange 2010 is natively multi-tenant, which makes it easier to run in the cloud. A single administration console makes it possible for firms to run some mail boxes on-premises and some in the cloud. And with a price war going on with cloud-based email, the cost of an Exchange 2010 mailbox in the cloud just dropped to $5 with a big mailbox.
4. High-availability and archiving features. In classic style, the company has enhanced Exchange to bring in features that were previously only available in third-party products. Site-level replication and basic archiving will displace some add-on products for some customers at least.
5. Full fidelity with three different browsers. Not everyone uses Outlook, and even Outlook users sometimes need browser access to email. With Exchange 2010, Microsoft is delivering on its commitment to rich Internet applications on multiple browsers. As with the Office 2010 Web applications, Exchange 2010 supports IE, Firefox, and Safari.

Seen other things? Have concerns? Please comment.

Cisco's Collaboration Strategy: Coming Through The Network Door

  by Ted Schadler

Cisco's John Chambers has made "collaboration" a strategy for the company's customers and employees. And enterprise GM Tony Bates is now tasked with driving that strategy. I'm writing from Cisco's launch event in San Francisco. (Well, it's actually still going on.)

There's a lot to digest and analzye, which we'll do over time. But I wanted to share some early thoughts . . .

This week's announcement marks Cisco's formal entry into the broader collaboration market, long fragmented and dominated by IBM and Microsoft for applications and by Tandberg and Polycom for video conferencing.

The company claims 61 products and features, but the key components are email, instant messaging, web conferencing, social software, and video conferencing as well as network-based services like a business TelePresence directory and policy-controlled content tagging. And in the words of Tony Bates, "a video stream runs through all of it."

Cisco's strategy for collaboration fascinates me because it's bold and frankly orthogonal to Microsoft's desktop productivity path and IBM's workgroup history. It's also enterprise-grade by default, unlike Google's consumer-first approach. But I'm fascinated and I believe IT pros should be interested in Cisco's solutions for three reasons:

• First, Cisco is tackling tackling collaboration from the network up. Instead of building on an architecture of installed software and applications, Cisco is starting with the network. This makes possible global cloud services, new content tagging services, video interoperability, any-device support, and business-to-business services.

• Second, only Cisco has the video stream running through it. I believe that video is a game changer for distributed teams. And by video, I mean video conferencing from the desktop to the conference room PLUS recorded video for sharing PLUS video distribution and interoperability across carriers, networks, and devices. And only Cisco can do that today.

• Third, Cisco has demonstrated its seriousness with an account acquisition strategy based on price. Cisco's cloud-housted WebEx Mail services goes head-to-head with Microsoft Exchange Online, IBM LotusLive.com, and Google Apps with a 5 gigabyte mailbox for $5/user/month.

While it's very early going for most of this, I think Cisco's in this for the long haul. Cisco's "new commitment" to standards and interoperability and its channel investments and product acquisitions (approaching $4B in the last two years) signal it's seriousness.

Stay tuned for more.

Telepresence Jumpstarts Video Collaboration

By Claire Schooley

Telepresence is the life-size, true color, no latency video meeting technology that creates a “wow” reaction from participants, especially those who have experienced some traditional videoconferencing that gave poor picture quality, out-of synch audio/video, and added no sense of presence to a meeting.  Here are some factors that make telepresence different:

• Video provides high quality 1080p pictures with hidden cameras placed to achieve eye contact no matter where people are seated around the conference table.
• Audio is full duplex with microphones and speakers that allow sound to come from the direction of the speaker.
• The environment is purpose-built with lighting arrays, speakers, and cameras all configured for the optimum experience.  Conference tables, chairs, and even the wall paint are the same at all sites to convey a uniform sense of presence. Managed service and support assure that this expensive system is going to work. Many organizations buy a concierge-type service model so participants just need to push a button to start the videoconference.

These kinds of telepresence rooms show up most often in board rooms and CEO conference rooms. The early traction of telepresence has been in connecting the global offices within an enterprise. However, the future lies in the external interoperability among different businesses and even competitors that use telepresence solutions from different vendors. This is only easily possible today among some vendors. Just as you can use your telephone to call people without thinking about the telephone carriers, companies need to have the same flexibility from telepresence providers.

While telepresence rooms have created the big stir, many companies can not afford such an expensive investment and don’t need such a large video presence.  This is where Telepresence is driving the advent of smaller HD conference room solutions, office units, and even desktop units that give the same high quality images and sound but don’t have quite the same ambiance as the large telepresence room. All units integrate so employees can take part in a multipoint call no matter what size unit they have. 
As my colleague Alex Cullen points out in his recent report, “The Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch”, there has been plenty of buzz around the technology but business leaders are still unfamiliar with it. However, as the telepresence movement re-ignites interest in videoconferencing especially upgrading to HD units, these are the major reasons for the renewed interest in videoconferencing:

• Travel is expensive and it also eats up work time. Once companies make the culture shift to using videoconferencing whenever possible rather than travel, the savings on travel costs is the largest cost saving factor in determining ROI. But the video quality must give users a “you-are-there” experience to be successful.
• Today’s global reach of companies means that workers on the same team are often located in many different countries. Videoconferencing allows them to do things like view a product packaging together, decide on the best colors, and in the end be more productive.
• The new generation of workers is comfortable with video and welcomes the opportunity to collaborate with a stronger sense of presence.
• One of the strongest growth areas is desktop videoconferencing. Spurred on by high quality HD desktop units, large companies are evaluating what knowledge workers will benefit most from this technology.
In the future with complete B2B and B2C interoperability you can expect:
• Accelerated commerce, globalization and outsourcing
• Less business travel which will impact financially airlines and hotels
• Expanded places where knowledge workers can live and work
• Major changes in business, education, medicine, branch government interaction, and entertainment

Pilots for many of these are underway now. For example, financial institutions are conducting wealth management or mortgage discussions with customers through bank to home videoconferencing. With the explosion of broadband to the home, there’s no reason to go to the bank when you can talk with a mortgage officer from your home HD unit. Medical experts located in facilities miles away can remotely review charts, and examine and talk with the patient remotely, and make a virtual diagnosis. And what about this one-- go out to a virtual dinner with friends located in a different city. Share conversation and discuss the food through the restaurants’ telepresence units!  (I would miss the bouquet of the wine from my friend’s selection.)

Microsoft Office 2010: The Odyssey Continues

by Sheri McLeish

Sequels never can match the thrill of the original. But the good ones offer a compelling story of their own, develop familiar characters, and introduce something new and exciting. Last week Microsoft gave developers a backstage pass to preview Office 2010, due out in the first half of next year. The drama unfolds with Microsoft and Google waging a multi-front war with each other in search, browsers, productivity tools, and, soon, operating systems. Glimpses of the fourteenth iteration of Office reveal Web-based lightweight apps along with capabilities geared at improving collaboration, multimedia content development, and email management.

Can Office 2010 save the franchise? Or will a simpler, better customer experience from Google draw in a bigger audience before next summer? And what does it mean for the bit players, independents, and sleepers like the Open Office suites from IBM/Lotus, Novell, and Sun, or for Adobe, Zoho, Thinkfree, Corel … that’s a lot of competition for a sluggish software market that Forrester sees as being down by 5% or more for the year.  The glimmer of hope for software vendors will likely come from subscriptions revenue for software-as-a-service (SaaS) products in 2010, which Forrester projects to grow by 7.5%.

Microsoft wants to lead that growing SaaS market. For enterprises, what’s notable about the Office 2010 story is that Office Web apps can be on-premise or hosted. The lightweight Web browser versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote will be free for consumers through Windows Live. Pow! But the bigger deal for enterprises is the option to host Office Web apps on-premises as annuity customers as well as via a hosted subscription through Microsoft Online Services. This option isn’t offered by Google today and, for the moment, may be what makes Office Web apps a hit in the enterprise.

To date, Microsoft’s dominance in large businesses remains mostly intact, with 57% of firms running Office 2007 and 80% supporting some version of Office.  Combined, the alternatives make up less than 8% of the enterprise market, according to Forrester’s March 2009 North America, Europe, And Asia Pacific Desktop Innovation Online Survey. And of those Forrester surveyed, 78% said they have no plans to look for an alternative to Microsoft Office. Real barriers remain for alternatives, from concerns about content control and security, sunk license costs, and online/offline issues for Web-based tools to fear of rejection by business users. Like it, love it, or not, people have a comfortable, familiar relationship with the Office apps. And that’s a critical edge Microsoft must maintain.

Technology Populism is fueling the collaboration and mobile collaboration markets and blurring the lines between work/life boundaries.  The influence of consumer experience can be equally powerful if harnessed by Google for email and productivity. Most enterprise IT departments rely on the feedback of their business users to measure the value of their productivity tools. Forrester data also shows upgrades generally driven by business demands (34%), because current tools are no longer supported (24%), are no longer compatible (16%), or because the culture demands it (15%). By promoting free access to Web-based tools, Microsoft seeks the sway of the public. Office 2000 ends support this month; Microsoft needs to get those firms on board with 2010 somehow. What will your firm do? What are your barriers to upgrading Office or moving to an alternative? Now is a good time to clarify your firm’s strategy, because 2010 looks like it could be a blockbuster year for buyers prepared to negotiate.

Calculating The Fully Loaded Costs Of Corporate Email: It's Bigger Than You Think

by Ted Schadler

Since colleague Chris Voce and I published a pair of reports on corporate email in the cloud (one on the infrastructure and operations and one on the cost of running email on-premises or in the cloud), we have had dozens of discussions with our clients accompanied by detailed cost analyses of the true cost of running email on-premises versus running it in the cloud.

While the cloud-based cost of email is pretty transparent (many providers, including Microsoft and Google, publish their per-user per-month costs), the cost of running email on-premises is often a big mystery to everyone, including most CIOs. The big challenge is that the costs are spread throughout the budget: some in the hardware budget, some in the software budget, some in the storage budget, some in the cost of capital budget, some in the staffing budgets, and so on.

After dozens of these discussions and after a survey of 53 information & knowledge management professionals to ask about the cost of email, it is abundantly clear that few firms know their true cost of running email on-premises. And this matters if you're considering a move to cloud-based email.

But it an accurate calculation of on-premises email also matters if you are contemplating upgrading your email to a more current version that might support cheaper storage, higher automation, or reduced email database size due to eliminating redundant copies of attachments. You can compare your current costs against the fully loaded costs of the new system with its higher efficiencies.

So we spent four months building and vetting a detailed cost model to help our clients and the industry at large understand how to calculate their cost of running email on-premises. Here's a clue: It's more than you think.

    

When you factor in servers, storage, server software, software maintanence, hardware and software administration, power, archiving, message filtering, mobile costs, even financing, you find out that the cost of email for 15,000-person organizations can be as high as $40 per user per month, and even for a normal information worker without mobile email, it can cost more than $27 per user per month. Of course, you can and should segment your workforce into different tiers — for example, mobile executives, information workers, and occasional users — and provision them with different size mailboxes, email clients, and mobile email.

 

With all of that as input, you can calculate the fully loaded cost of email for each workforce segment.

   

The same data, presented as a table looks like this:

  

Of course, the prices come down for larger organizations and not everybody needs all these services. And sure, we can talk about higher automation levels, cheaper storage, more efficient message filtering, and the lots more, but at the end of the day, you have to factor in all the costs of running email on-premises if you are going to make a decision about upgrading or moving email to the cloud.

Have other thoughts? Want to discuss them? Please comment.

BI Mashup Maturity Model? Oxymoron? Au Contraire Mon Frère!

By James Kobielus

In one of my recent tweets, I commented that Forrester has developed a maturity model for enterprise adoption of mashup-style, self-service development of business intelligence (BI) applications. Indeed, we have, and it will appear in my forthcoming Forrester report, “Mighty Mashups: Do-It-Yourself Business Intelligence for the New Economy.”

Another tweeter--an astute, but sadly, non-Forrester BI analyst--scoffed that “BI mashup maturity model” is an oxymoron. Respectfully, I must disagree. Enterprises are adopting self-service BI approaches for many reasons--principally, to cut costs in a tight economy, to unclog the development backlog, and to speed delivery of actionable, targeted intelligence to decision makers. Also, companies are providing users with BI tools to do interactive, deeply dimensional exploration of information pulled from enterprise data warehouses (EDW), marts, cubes, transactional applications, and other systems. Furthermore, organizations everywhere have adopted browser-oriented BI environments that leverage the full Web 2.0 interactivity and collaboration.

Sitting at the convergence of those trends is BI mashup, which Forrester sees as the new paradigm for truly pervasive decision-support systems. What throws off some people is the term “mashup,” which sometimes gets pigeonholed as simply referring to using, say, Google Maps to display geocoded performance metrics and sundry Internet-sourced data in a browser-based dashboard. Yes, BI mashup encompasses that approach to presenting and integrating diverse data, but its application is much broader.

Just as important, BI mashup is not bleeding-edge. Rather, BI mashup leverages the in-memory BI clients, semantic virtualization layers, data federation middleware, automated data discovery, and other next-generation BI tools and platforms.

No one vendor or user has yet put together an end-to-end BI environment that is entirely focused on mashup-style self-service development. However, Forrester sees the BI industry converging toward as mashup-oriented architecture over the coming 2-3 years. With that in mind, we sketched out a BI maturity model that encompasses the following four levels (the first 3 of which are represented in case studies in the upcoming report):

• Level 1: Lightweight presentation mashup against transactional applications: This basic maturity level is for companies that have no prior BI or EDW; have little in-house BI expertise; and are comfortable with allowing casual users to use their browsers to customize parameterized reports from data from packaged business applications.                                                                
• Level 2: Deep presentation mashup against EDW: This level is for organization that do have prior BI and centralized EDWs, but have an understaffed BI development group and/or  power users and data modelers urgently require the ability to mashup and explore historical and current data within sophisticated BI workspaces.
• Level 3: Full BI mashup in federated environment: This level is for organizations that have decentralized, dynamic data management environments, and have the expertise to design reusable, composite data services to seamlessly mashup internal and external information.
• Level 4: Full collaborative mashup with IT governance: This level is for organizations that want to encourage subject  matter experts and operational users to collaborate on analytics created through mashup, but who are also concerned that all mashups be controlled, governed, and monitored in accordance with enterprise policies and best practices.

As I said, it will take a few years before we see a substantial number of enterprise case studies that implement the pinnacle of collaborative mashup with tight governance. Nevertheless, when you follow the evolution of next-generation solution portfolios from leading BI vendors such as SAP, IBM, Microsoft, and others, it’s clear that self-service user-centric mashup, to varying degrees, is a core theme.

BI mashup has such a strong business case that we’re confident it’s more than simply a “down economy” theme. It will almost certainly grow in importance for information and knowledge management professionals as the economy improves.

Google Wave: Surfing The Future Of Collaboration

by Ted Schadler

Google is a remarkable company. Need proof? Just consider how reliant we are on Google Maps to find our way around the world. That didn't happen by accident. It happened because Google empowered a couple of brothers, Lars and Jens Rasmussen, to open up the developer APIs to the mapping engine.

These same two brothers announced yesterday at Google I/O developer conference a new technology for communication and collaboration. This new collaboration engine unites email, instant messaging, blogs, wikis into a single hosted conversation. Check out the demo here and the announcement here.

These conversations or "Waves" take place inside Safari, Firefox, or Chrome and look like email on steroids. (Lars said that they took the 40-year old model of email and redesigned it for today's Web-based world.) But it's way more than that. With Google Wave, Google has:

• Opened a new path to reinvent how we collaborate. You have to see it to understand, but why would you need four products when one Wave will do? It's a new conversational metaphor that will also easily support document-based collaboration.

• Put the code base into open source to attract investment. Google will attract the best and brightest developers and development with this move.

• Published developer APIs to allow others to embed "conversations" anywhere.In a hope to replicate the success of Google Maps, these APIs will make Google's hosted conversations a convenient way for anybody to offer these features to customers, members, employees, etc.

• Re-asserted its interest in hosting the world's conversations.Google will host these conversations. And that means Google will be curator of more and more of the world's conversations. An awesome responsibility for sure, and one that regulators should pay attention to. But someone has to do it. Why not a company with a founding culture of "do no evil?"

Now this will happen only slowly. The product will go into official beta later this year and be evolving for the next 2 or 3 years. But the path is clear, and the implications are coming into focus. For Information & Knowledge Management Professionals and for the industry, this is what it means.

• What it means (WIM) #1: Don't get too stuck on installed email clients -- they can't evolve fast enough. Notes and Outlook are fabulous tools. But they are installed software sold under a perpetual license model. And that means they can only evolve as fast as you are willing to buy licenses and deal with installation and change management. And that's too slow to keep up.

• WIM #2: Google Apps Premier Edition is worth keeping a close eye on. It's a guarantee that Google Wave will appear in the Google Apps sometime soon, so keep an eye on what it might mean if you want to switch providers.

• WIM #3: Microsoft will have yet another innovation hill to climb (and it will). Redmond will have to digest this advance, but it will shortly ramp up its own conversation-oriented online engine. It will have to make this kind of conversational advance part of its BPOS strategy at some point.

• WIM #4: IBM's approach to collaboration is looking pretty visionary. Lotus has been quietly reinventing itself over the past few years, and if you haven't looked at Notes or Sametime lately, you need to. And with lead architect Alistair Rennie now at the vision helm, these products with their REST-ful APIs, redesigned interfaces, and Web-centric design metaphors are looking good.

Friend and colleague Jeremiah Owyang brings a nice Web 2.0 angle into this analysis. It's about combining real-time, social, asynch, and multi-media/multi-device into one place.

Disagree? Have comments? Please share.

Making iPhone Work In The Enterprise

by Ted Schadler

If you had asked me three years ago whether the mobile industry would become a free-for-all of innovation and opportunity, I would have been forced to sigh and say, "can't see how -- the carriers don't seem interested in unlocking that potential."

I would certainly have been wrong as Apple has so impressively shown with its iPhone strategy (with first AT&T's and now 100s of carrier's support).

After 21 months in market, it's quite clear that Apple is redefining its third industry: first the computer industry, next the music industry, and now the mobile industry. With 25,000 applications (yes, mostly consumer applications today) available on Apple's private store and a reported 800,000,000 downloads, the iPhone has become a new platform for innovation.

At least one major enterprise vendor -- Cisco -- now treats the iPhone ahead of BlackBerry devices as a tier one device, at least as demonstrated by its WebEx and Cisco Call Manager applications.

But enterprises have been slow to adopt the product because of legitimate security and manageability concerns. Perhaps no longer. We found three enterprises willing to talk about their support of iPhone:

1. Kraft Foods uses iPhone support to signal new suipport for employee culture change. Adding 400 more iPhones a month, on track for 4,000 iPhones by year end.

2. Oracle Corporation responds to employee demand for iPhones. 4,000 iPhones globally and counting.

3. An IT senior director at a California-based pharmaceutical company makes iPhone a priority. January 2009 launch, adding 100+ iPhones a month.

There are issues to be sure, but none that they haven't been able to overcome, and with third-party support from companies like Cisco, IBM Lotus, Salesforce.com, and Oracle, the future of mobile collaboration on iPhone looks rosy. While BlackBerry devices continue to be gold standard for messaging and calendars, iPhones are rapidly establishing dominance for browser applications and native applications for content, data, and Web applications.

The capper is that Apple is not standing still. Apple is among other things a software company, and it has embraced the ethoses of developer APIs, rapid improvement, open source, and a simple path to market, the hallmarks of the PC and Internet industries. For example, unlike other mobile device manufacturers, Apple makes it easier to upgrade the software on existing devices. For example, with iPhone 2.0 software, Apple added ActiveSync support to allow iPhones to work with Exchange servers (as well as standards support for other email systems).  

And with iPhone 3.0 software, now in beta and free of charge for iPhone owners, Apple has made it easier for enterprises to support iPhones with:

• Better VPN security, including the ability to force a log-in every time.

• Better calendar and calendar synchronization support, including CalDAV and better ActiveSync support.

• Policies for locking down devices, for example to turn off the camera.

• Encrypted configuration files to protect stolen devices or PCs with iTunes from prying eyes.

What does this mean for Information & Knowledge Management professionals?

• WIM #1: Put iPhone on a list of devices to support. Apple has demonstrated enough support to merit a hard look by your CISO and infrastructure & operations group. The apps keep rolling in. For example, Web conferencing is already shown  to be an important collaboration application on iPhone. Training, access to team sites, and an inside-the-firewall access to corporate apps means.

• WIM #2: Smartphones will join laptops as a must-support device for mobile applications. Our consumer data is quite shocking here: While 53% of all smartphone owners brings a laptop home from work regularly, only 38% of iPhone owners do.
  

• WIM #3: Expect that individual employees will be okay buying and supporting their own devices. iPhone is but one more example of consumer IT being better than business IT. This consumerization or Technology Populism trend is with us forever. IT groups should harness this energy and ask their employees to step up and bring in the tools they need to get their jobs done.

Disagree? Agree? Have a success or horror story to share? Please comment.