Business Two Zero

I had a great session yesterday with Sigurd Rinde on the latest version of Thingamy. We’ve been part of Sig’s ecosystem of consultants and partners working with his innovative business modelling solution for some time. Sig was showing off the product’s new interface and talking through the latest prototype he had been demoing at a media company while he has been in the UK. That demo crosses over with some of our own thoughts on creativity, because it was all to do with creating a repository for ideas to be captured, developed and actioned through to the point that they add value to the organization. It’s the kind of thing every organization does to a lesser or greater extent.

Sig’s philosophy on business is too radical for some who are entrenched in the transaction oriented systems we are all used to. Sig would argue that the reason that businesses are rooted to complexity goes back to 1494 and Luca Pacioli’s double entry bookkeeping. From that point on we’ve been obsessed with creating entries in the ledger book, pieces of paper for filing, or records within transactional software that add unnecessary objects and steps in to the business process. As you add each of these the complexity starts to increase exponentially, and the procedures become way too rigid for the way real business happens in the workplace. Sig’s thinking gets to the heart of what a business actually is - a social group with a purpose, and then cuts through the clutter to focus on the real value chain involved rather than the accepted way of doing things.

Sig talks about ERP as Easily Repeatable Processes and begrudgingly sees how conventional systems might work for some parts of the sales, distribution and manufacturing processes in certain enterprises. It’s very difficult for most organisations to “get it” and want to go back to basics to re-invent their systems from scratch. With the complete market for business systems and application sectors to aim at with Thingamy, he is quite rightly focussing on the kind of knowledge work that there is a lot of attention on at the moment. As has been widely reported and discussed, Forrester has released a report indicating that Enterprise 2.0 spending will reach $4.6 billion by 2013 - a healthy market! Andrew P. McAfee of Harvard Business School says:

“Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers. “

In this environment, Sig argues that Thingamy comes in to its own, because of the ease with which it tackles Barely Repeatable Processes or BRP. This kind of knowledge work is all about ad hoc processes that change and are adapted over time. It’s the sort of thing that, in the web 1.0 world, would be supported by emails trapped in your inbox, or semi manual systems based around Excel spreadsheets with macros. Most organizations still use this kind of approach for the gaps between their main ERP style systems. Sig says it barely scratches the surface of what is required, and it’s exactly why the use of social media tools like blogs and wikis are on the rise. However, he argues that this approach is still wrong:

“These are single task tools that are just used as a sandbox. You can throw out an idea, but without a process or accountability, most of the time nobody bothers. “

We can see that in the way that the success of adoption of these kinds of social media solutions is still variable, and heavily dependent on the expertise of the implementation team. Many organisations don’t understand the culture changes required to make this blog and wiki type of approach work well.

The best way of highlighting the difference in Sig’s approach, is to talk through the demo he created. This was built for a media company to place ideas in a repository, allowing all of the team’s dialogue around each one to be captured. This is the kind of thing you could easily do in a blog or a wiki, but Thingamy allows much more to be done. You can record the progress of the idea through different phases or statuses. You can add whatever process steps you need to route the idea to the right people, or alert others to add input. You can connect the idea to other concepts you might add, like the company strategy, and all of this can be adapted and changed as necessary as the requirements evolve - easily handling BRP. You get the proper accountability that Sig is looking for. His demo took no more than an hour to create from a blank canvass to a working prototype, but it’s more than a prototype - it’s a working solution that could be put in to operation by that company straight away.

All of us enterprise 2.0 providers need to take a leaf out of Sig’s book. We’re producing tools that support the capture and distribution of knowledge, as well as the dialogue that adds value, along with other content that we can bring in from external sources via RSS and other means. We are providing tools for team collaboration and real time communication. We need to start to putting the (barely repeatable) business process at the heart of our solutions.

I’m on LinkedIn, but I’ve never got round to putting much effort in to creating my profile. A few old colleagues have connected with me recently, and I started this week thinking that I needed to smarten the thing up. Yesterday I was browsing the blog of one of our new WordFrame partners - Des Walsh who is based over in Australia. I read the good things he said about the platform and the partnership, but then I spotted his latest post Spring Clean Your LinkedIn Profile, Part One: Basic Makeover. Perfect timing.

Des points out the importance that a LinkedIn profile can have in the current recruitment process, or in making connections for new customers and assignments. Like Des I’ll regularly use LinkedIn, along with ZoomInfo and other tools, to research a new potential client, or the speaker at the next conference. If I use it like that myself, why the hell haven’t I paid more attention to my own? Des carries on:

“For a good overview of what is involved in setting up or refreshing your LinkedIn profile, no one, as far as I know, has yet improved, for immediacy and clarity, on Guy Kawasaki’s January 2007 blog post LinkedIn Profile Extreme Makeover. This shares, with a detailed screenshot, the advice Guy had received from some very knowledgeable LinkedIn staffers, Kay Luo and Mike Lin, on how to make his LinkedIn profile more useful.”

As usual, Guy Kawasaki is properly in tune with the new world of work, and his well crafted extreme makeover is a great place to start. Guy says:

“If you’re going to use LinkedIn, you should put some effort into your profile. My original one reflected a minimal amount of effort. For example, many of my current and past affiliations were missing, and I did not craft good descriptions of what I stand for. This incompleteness made my profile ineffective for networking. Hopefully, my makeover will provide some ideas to help you.”

His current profile shows what can be done. It also reminds me of one of my favourite Mark Twain quotes which is:

“I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.”

Getting the same economy of language that Guy has used to capture what you are all about in few brief sentences is going to take a bit of thought, trial and error before you get it right. To help you, Des’s post has some good advice and some useful links to a step-by-step post at LinkedIn Life, an “insider’s guide to using LinkedIn”, or Scott Allen’s riff on Guy Kawasaki’s extreme makeover post. Have a go and set aside some time to improve yours (and think about doing it regularly). If you look at mine today you’ll see the before - check back later or in a few days and I hope it has improved. Don’t forget to look out for part 2 on Des’s blog too.

A while back, during the interesting time I spent as one of the blognation editors, I did my first ever video interview with the help of Vincent Camara of Intruders.tv. The victim was JP Rangaswami, the MD of BT Design (effectively BT’s CIO ). He was on great form, so my 10 minute spot stretched out to almost 30 minutes! Off camera we were talking about collaboration and social networking platforms. One of the things he said to me which really made an impact was:

“You know David, if you were talking to me about this stuff five years ago, I would have said that’s’ all well and good but can I have it inside my firewall. These days, if we are really serious about being a customer centric organisation, where does this firewall concept come in?”

Last week I noticed James McGovern highlighting the Jim Reavis open letter to the best and the brightest network security architects. He wants is to get some of the best minds together to collaborate and talk about key issues that the next generation firewall must address.

James said:

“Network folks need to realize that there time has come and gone when it comes to securing the modern enterprise. The enterprise is porous as we put more and more web applications on the Internet by exposing them over Port 80 (or 443). Reality says that there is only so much a firewall can possibly do to protect an application and that a better strategy may be to instead figure out how to make the applications protect themselves.”

He’s right - enterprise CIO’s need think differently in the world of enterprise 2.0, and application developers need to keep better watch on design and data security.

Zoho, who have a family of Software as a Service, or web based office applications, have just added a very smart looking HR system to sit alongside their CRM application. The office tools and the CRM application provide a low cost, function rich, but incomplete small business suite. Zoho People adds an HR or Human Capital Management application that looks, on my first quick play with the application yesterday, as function rich as a number of applications I’ve worked with in the past, but at a fraction of the cost.

It contains:

• A drag and drop interface to customize the database or for creating new forms
• Checklists - which provide configurable business processes - these are simple workflows
• An employee portal - with all your employees basic demographic data available to all your HR & benefits staff - this provides self service facilities for the staff, alongside the administrative capabilities for the HR department
• Recruitment & resume management
• An organization chart
• No download, no install, no coding & no implementation

The application is currently in Beta, and for the Beta period it will be free for up to 10 employees. The pricing is yet to be announced, but it’s rumoured to be low cost for the self service portal and of the order of $50 a month for administrative capabilities. I can see this being really useful for small companies who would probably never bother to afford a standard HR package and struggle with data on spreadsheets, but also have enough capability for many medium sized businesses. It’s well worth checking out.

I’ll be suggesting that my friends at MyPaye.co.uk take a serious look at this application, and investigate integration and maybe partnership opportunities. I’d like to play around properly with Checklists, but they could have useful applications outside of HR processes. It’s also an obvious next step for the Zoho suite to add an accounting application, or for the folks at Twinfield or Xero or elsewhere to see if they could fill that gap. Looking at the other commentary from around the Enterprise Irregulars, this move in to HR may make them even more of an acquisition target.

Zoli asks will it disrupt or fail in two parts?
Mashable think some larger companies might switch
Webware worries about Zoho releasing so many apps so fast
Larry Dignan suggests it’s a move toward the “M” in SMB
Dennis Howlett wonders where next?
Raju Vegesna on their own Zoho blog

Probably the main reason I’ve been inactive on this blog for a while has been because of my involvement in ITBRix, the launch of WordFrame, as well as a major WordFrame project. Let me explain a little. First, WordFrame is an enterprise 2.0 platform that helps you build web communities and manage content, that has evolved from Blogtronix. We have been a longstanding partner of Blogtronix, but the following change was announced on February 21st:

“ITBrix LLC, formed in September 2005 and headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado, has been one of the co-founders and joint owner of Blogtronix LLC, but now the two companies have decided on a friendly separation.”

As you might expect, the actual situation behind the scenes is a little more complex than can be explained in a few words in a press release. The split actually happened on 1st December 2007, and ITBrix have re-branded their version of the source code WordFrame. As well as D²C becoming a WordFrame partner for the UK and Northern Europe, which will be announced in a formal press release tomorrow, I’ve joined the ITBrix team as well. I’m really pleased to be working with the organization which includes George Athannassov, one of the co-founders of Blogtronix and ITBrix, as well as Boz Zashev the original architect of the product, Rumen Yankov, the chief programmer of the platform, and the Bulgarian based development and support team who have been working on it since 2005. From December last year we’ve been enhancing the product with some significant new functionality, and making sure our pricing works for small and medium businesses as well as larger corporations. You can find out more in the press release and at the new WordFrame website.

The major project I mentioned has been helping the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales (ICAEW) build web communities for their membership based on the WordFrame platform. We’ve been under non disclosure for quite some time, but the news finally broke last week in an AccountingWEB article when they publicised the launch of IT Counts, their community providing practical technology advice to accountants in practice and in business, which is sponsored by Microsoft. There is a growing volume of content, including Dennis Howlett and Simon Hurst who have been hired to blog there regularly, and contributors from Microsoft, the ICAEW and the membership themselves. It’s a very significant move for the Institute, and it’s great to see this kind of professional membership organization embracing web 2.0 technology in this way. I hope to explain more about what we are doing with them over the coming weeks, and we’ve already got plans to work on some case studies for publication.

Lastly, as I write this I’m in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, talking to the WordFrame development team with our latest customer - GroupCom / Neighbo.com. I’ll explain more about the community we are helping them build soon.

Related stories:

Dennis Howlett’s take on IT Counts

Philip Woodgate’s explanation of IT Counts

One of my fellow Enterprise Irregulars, Michael Krigsman who writes the IT Project Failures blog for ZDNet, was in London for a few days last week. The EI group talks every day online, but we aren’t often in the same city, so it’s always good to make time to meet up physically to say hi when we can. We grabbed a coffee and chat at a Coffee Republic near Earls Court tube on Saturday. Michael’s wife Elizabeth Shaw was there, and Michael invited one of his blogging friends Chris Dalby. By incredible coincidence I’d only been talking to Dennis Howlett about Chris and his company YellowPark the day before. Dennis has just moved his WordPress blog over to Chris’s outfit for hosting, and was being very complimentary about the excellent support and help he got to make the process painless. I’d got Chris’s details, but then suddenly, via a different route, I was meeting him face to face.

Of course we have plenty of blogging, Twitter and technology friends in common. During the conversation Chris mentioned the fact that Sam Sethi has surfaced on Twitter in the last few days - I’d seen that too, and Sam even responded to one of my emails on Friday. I haven’t spoken much about being part of last year’s blognation pantomime in the run up to Christmas, or about being one of Sam’s several creditors. I told them some of the story, and Michael related some examples of similar business people he’s dealt with in the past. I’m not going to say any more here other than it was an interesting learning experience, which had the excellent by-product of introducing me to some great bloggers and writers. That included, very briefly, just before his untimely death, Marc Orchant who seemed like a great guy. My condolences and best wishes to his wife and family.

Mike and Elizabeth talked about the Asuret products for evaluating IT projects. Chris told us about YellowPark, running the Live Meeting user group, and I learned that he used to rent office space to James Governor. We talked about the great benefits of home working, using Twitter to keep connected with your friends and colleagues, and then Chris did a bit of video blogging. He filmed us using his HTC touch, and uploaded the video straight away to Seesmic, using Shozu. Seesmic is Loic LeMuer’s brainchild. It is a video site that makes it ridiculously easy for you to create and post a video, maybe using the webcam on your laptop. Whereas YouTube is all about hosting and sharing videos, Seesmic is all about using the medium to have conversations and video blogging. The current use ranges from some great commentary and interviews from Davos last week, to Seesmic users saying hi over their morning cup of coffee - kind of like a video twitter message. I’ll be exploring how useful the service is over the coming weeks, so go take a look, expect more here, and this was Chris’s record of our meeting.

Holding a mobile phone while driving doesn’t make any sense from a safety point of view, but the recent crackdown here in the UK could make it damaging to your wallet and driving licence too. As well as fines and points on your licence brought in last February, there is extra awareness starting next month. In addition under the new rules, drivers could be charged with dangerous driving, which carries a maximum sentence of two years in jail.

So coming in to this year I decided I need to stop breaking the law and bought a Jawbone for my Blackberry 8310. I’d heard of these things earlier last year, and seen the delight on Thomas Otter’s face when one was brought across to Germany from the US for him. Basically the Jawbone is a bluetooth earpiece, with a nice, simple design, and slick operations thanks to its noise cancellation technology. The noise cancellation means that, within reason, you can easily hear and be heard, even when there is plenty of road noise, the radio on, or your favourite Hendrix track playing through the car stereo from the iPod. The device has only 2 buttons, but it’s easy to get the hang of performing all the various functions in the appropriate context. Battery life is good - I charge mine every few days or a week, and the device comes with various earpieces and clips to help suit your particular ear. I find it very comfortable. Pairing with the Blackberry just worked. The only real issue is that now I look like one of those business people driving an executive car with an Uhura style earpiece that Jeremy Clarkson is so fond of taking the p*%$ out of! However, it’s the price you have to pay for a bit of safety. Highly recommended, and only £70 from your local Carphone Warehouse.

On Monday, both in their trading statement, and to their personnel around the world, the well known mid-range and enterprise accounting software company CODA announced that they are in the due diligence phase of being acquired by Unit 4 Agresso. Unit 4 is a Dutch software company formed in 1980 that merged with Agresso, a Norwegian software company back in 2000. From CODA’s statement:

“CODA plc (“CODA” or the “Company”) announces that on 18 December 2007 it received an indicative approach from Unit 4 Agresso N.V. (“Unit 4 Agresso”) at 205p per ordinary share in cash for the entire issued and to be issued ordinary share capital of CODA (the “Approach”).  The Approach is subject to a number of pre-conditions including the satisfactory completion of due diligence and financing. 

The Board of CODA considered the Approach and concluded that a limited due diligence exercise should proceed.  This exercise is at an advanced stage.  There is no guarantee of any offer being made for the Company. Were such an offer to be made it is expected to be funded by Unit 4 Agresso’s existing cash balances and debt finance. “

Listening to reports from the Dutch market, and to insiders saying how relaxed senior management looked explaining this news, I would be surprised if this deal isn’t confirmed. CODA have been a likely acquisition target for a while, and I’m sure that as well as the excellent customer base, Unit 4 Agresso have been attracted by the recent Salesforce relationship and the fact that CODA have a Software as a Service approach announced and in development. To me it looks like they are paying a premium for the potential of that new product, although I’ve blogged before about the risks involved in execution of the SaaS strategy. As I said previously:

“This is the first new, green field development they (CODA) have done in 15 years, and they are doing it on Force.com, the renamed Salesforce Apex platform (which before that was the AppExchange platform). Apart from Salesforce’s own applications, I don’t know of any previous developments of this level of functionality using Force.com.”

I understand Unit 4 have made other acquisitions to help enter the SaaS market before, which haven’t worked out, so I’m sure CODA 2go is a big factor in their decision. However, back in the late 90s I was a partner of CODA when they were owned by another Dutch software company - Baan. During that period, many of us remember there were cultural differences and conflict between the Dutch management, their development centre and the CODA team in Harrogate. Unit 4 will need to take care on handling those aspects, particularly as they have development in Norway as well. On the operational side, CODA have a strong Benelux team which will have to be managed with care as the company’s operations are integrated and rationalised with Unit 4 Agresso’s home base.

I’d suggest CODA are a good fit for Unit 4 Agresso, as they have similarities of approach, tackle similar sizes of enterprises, have some overlap, but tend to focus on slightly different industry sectors and regional geographies. In the coming months I will be very interested to hear what they say about how they plan to rationalise their future product strategy. At the moment they are suggesting CODA will remain as a separate business, but it has been suggested that some rationalisation has already started.

CODA might have been a target of a consolidation company such as Infor, or the likes of SAP or Oracle, who would only have been interested in the maintenance revenues and the customer base. For the loyal CODA customer base, I believe Unit 4 is a better proposition, as there is more likelihood of some of the spirit and values of the brand being retained in the new combined company, although I’m very interested to see how the new positioning and naming will be presented. I mentioned that I was a CODA partner in the 90s which was at Science Systems, but I worked for CODA from 2000-2004, following Science System’s acquisition of CODA from Baan on 1 April 2000. I wish my old colleagues at CODA well, and I hope this works out positively for them and the customers.

Way back in October, that month’s London Wiki Wednesday on 3rd October  was hosted by the innovation consultancy ?What If!, in their rather funky, stylish meeting space called the Old Laundry.  This has a great atmosphere, rather like Skype’s Chill Out Lounge at their London HQ, with comfortable sofas and bookshelves full of books and other interesting stuff - examples of mobile phones through the ages, the first Amstrad Notepad NC100 computer from the early 90s, or yellow plastic hair that rather suited Toby.  My thanks go to Anne-Fay Townsend, and the wiki-chick Julie Callick for being such great hosts, and laying on the pizzas, beer and wine. 

Shelli Baltman, ?What If!’s CEO, kicked off proceedings with an intro to the type of strategy and creative consultancy they do, and we have to give her special thanks for funding the event out of her marketing budget. 
Toby Moores and I then failed abysmally to Skype/Video connect London Wiki Wednesday with the first meeting of the Bay Area CreativeCoffee Club, which happened to be going on at exactly the same time in a coffee shop in Menlo Park, California.  Maybe next time.

Anne-Fay Townsend and Julie Callick spoke about ?What If!’s own use of wikis in all of their projects, explained how every employee gets their own wiki page, and is encouraged to contribute.  They also gave their thoughts on how social media can be used within corporations.
I went on to explain the rationale behind CCC.  It’s an OpenCoffee Club style meetup, aimed at getting the worlds of business and academia together to talk about creativity, make connections, and discuss how we can encourage our organisations, public or private, to make creativity part of their everyday processes. 
Gordon Joly spoke about some personal examples of the injustice of Wikipedia’s approach, where some topics are deleted by “the editors”, even though there is clearly a user community interested in contributing or discussing that subject.  He also highlighted some successes he has had, like adding a page on 70s soul and funk band Kokomo (which just happens to be one of my old favourites - re-release of their first two albums out this month).
Paul Youlten talked through his experience of creating the first wiki style Yellow Pages - yellowikis - and then how his “Saturday morning project” fell foul of copyright issues.  Yellowikis still exists, but not in the UK. 
David Wynn presented the World premiere of Itensil’s new workflow and wiki based product Minuteman.  This is a free service which uses a subset of the Itensil product to automate meeting actions.  In theory you should be able to copy in your minutes from Word or some other text editor, and the system will automatically create a workflow from the actions to help you manage the process.  However, a bit of finger trouble invoked the first rule of live demos - that they invariably go wrong.  Derek Miers then chipped in to explain a bit more about the reasoning behind Minuteman, and its typical web 2.0 business model - a free service that is useful, but which might prompt you to upgrade to the full Itensil licence for project management and other business process functionality.  Even though the demo went wrong, everyone seemed to like the concept and want test accounts, which should be available in a few weeks.  (Disclosure - David is part of D²C, and we are the UK partner for Itensil.)
Richard Drake talked about the history and development of the wiki.  He highlighted that Ward Cunningham was the real genius and commented on how disingenuous Jimmy Wales has been in talking about the development of the wiki and wikipedia with no mention of Ward.  On Wikipedia he commented that sometimes the neutral point of view was a bit of a shame,  and predicted that it’s glory will peak. 

We finished earlier than usual at 8:30 and then repaired to the local pub for more chat and networking.  Everyone I spoke to thought it was a good mix of people and topics, and another great success.  The next event was to be on November 7.  Stewart Townsend and Sun Microsystems were kindly providing the venue, but food, beer and wine.  For future events, as always if you can suggest someone, or if there are any volunteers, please contact me.

My Flickr photos from the event.

Every 6 months or a year I like to freshen things up and change around some of my productivity tools and the system I use for getting things done. Coming in to the new year I’m using two rather excellent new tools.

I’d been searching round for a decent Twitter client, tried a few but not been happy, until Dennis Howlett suggested twhirl. This might be the best one around. It uses the Adobe Air cross-operating system runtime platform (so it’s Windows or Mac). It has a neat interface, with lot’s of configurable options. It’s really easy to see the timeline stream of tweets and then click on an option to twitter yourself, reply or send a direct message. If you are a Twitter fan and haven’t tried this, you are missing out. It will certainly get me back in to using Twitter properly.

The next addition is my new assistant Sandy. She works for free, 24/7 and helps me remember everything. I communicate with her by e-mail from my PC or my Blackberry, and she sends me reminders or the information I need, or a daily list of my things to do by email, or SMS. What’s more, she sends me information as vCard, iCalendar, and text files, so I can just click on her attachments and I update my normal PIM (I use Chaos Intellect, but it could be Outlook or anything that uses those standards).

Sandy’s very bright. I only have to send her messages in the following intuitive formats, and she works out what I mean:

remind me in 1 hour

remind me tomorrow

r me on Thursday morning

remember Peter’s wife is called Delores

r Dennis’s number is +34 607 482 739

Remember meeting with David planning 2008 on Friday from 14:00 to 17:00

She will sort all of those things out, send you reminders at the start of the day or 15 minutes before the event, and help you slot them in to your diary or your todo/task list if appropriate. She lets me tag anything @whatevertagyoulike, create lists, or use special tags like @daily, @weekdays, @weekends, @monthly, @annually or @todo. I can mail her and say lookup @tag or lookup John Smith, and she’ll send me back a mail with anything I’ve asked her to remember with that tag, or that text. Frankly, she’s pretty amazing. I like the fact that it’s easy to use her for the little things you need to remember - the kind of things that are really important, but you might avoid adding to your normal lists, project and todo systems. When Sandy’s helpful creators (thanks Rael, I know you’re working on it) work out how to link up with Vodafone UK, I should be able to add @sms and get her to send me text message reminders too. If you want to include your friends and colleagues in a meeting, you simply cc Sandy on the mail you send, and she introduces herself and reminds them too. She even integrates with Twitter.

If you want Sandy, and I’d be very surprised if you don’t, you can find her at iwantsandy.com. I don’t yet understand the business model for this free product created by Values of n, Inc, but I like what they’ve developed very much.

As an aside, I want Sandy uses Get Satisfaction! for its support system. They explain that Satisfaction is people-powered customer service for absolutely everything. More specifically, though, it’s a place where communities of customers come together to answer each others questions, share ideas with each other or with an organization, report and solve problems and generally talk about what matters to them around these products or services. That looks pretty good too.