Category Archives: Innovations

What to do when over-eager end-users bypass the IT organization

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From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

Technology continually invades IT organizations through the back door but that doesn’t have to be a problem. You just need to learn to manage renegade users.

As devices become ever-cheaper and more functional and the Internet presents tantalizing new options for application delivery, users have more opportunity than ever to make mischief.

Not intentional mischief, mind you, but the kind that comes about when over-eager users bypass the IT organization end bring new technology into the work place without proper approvals or protections. It’s a phenomenon that dates back to the early days of PCs: technology comes into organization through the back door and spreads like kudzu. The IT department finds out too late about the problem and then spends valuable personnel and money getting things under control.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. Tech-savvy users – I call them “renegades” –  can be great allies of the IT organization. Smart IT managers put their egos aside and focus on responding to the need the renegades are addressing, rather than shutting them down. Renegades often come up with innovative solutions and can be the company’s best salespeople for new ideas. You just need to listen.

Here are some strategies that I’ve seen tech departments use successfully to make the most of disruption.

Form a committee. Most users don’t want to fight their IT organization. Rather, their actions grow out of frustration with approval processes or the slow pace of change.  Instead of shutting them down, explain to them the importance of standards, controls, backed up and security. I invite them to form a committee with representatives from the IT group to figure out how to develop their ideas. Promise to put some budget dollars behind the initiative if the ROI is there. Set deadlines and deliverables and carry through on the users’ recommendations. Make them into extensions of the IT organization and turn them into your advocates.

Propose an alternative. Users are generally open to alternative approaches to solving their problems. Sneaking products in through the back door is just a call for help. Offer to study the problem and secure an appropriate solution, with the full participation of the users. Insist, once again, that users take a disciplined approach to measuring value. Promise action by a specific date, and plan on delivering on that promise.

Set up a lab. One way to get out front of the renegades is to create an advanced technology lab where users and IT professionals can experiment with new technology. Invite your most enthusiastic customers to submit suggestions for new products you should acquire for evaluation. Put the lab behind a firewall, set up a checkout system so users can take technology home or on the road with them and then let them play. This has the advantage of buying you deniability. If users fail to take advantage of this resource, you’re in a much better position to shut down their back-door maneuvers.

Hire them! This strategy is a little risky and politically delicate, but some of the best IT people I’ve known have started out in other departments. It turned out that they had a passion for technology and, given the opportunity to develop that passion into a career, found IT to be a rewarding profession. If you need someone to run that advanced tech lab, for instance, the person may already be in your business analytics or market research department. Don’t ignore the possibility that tomorrow’s valuable new employee may be today’s renegade.

Above all, keep an open mind. Among the mainstream technologies of today that came in through the back door are PCs, BlackBerries, local-area networks, the Internet, cell phones and e-mail. Managed properly, your renegades are your best scouts.

What tactics have you used to manage the introduction of new technology effectively?  Let me know in the comments area below.

Information Technology Leverage, Part II

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From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

When I was a kid, my world was changed by an inexpensive, portable device called a transistor radio. By the late 60s, every teenager had one. The sound quality was terrible and reception was poor but it didn’t matter. Transistor radios gave teens a way to escape from their parents while still indulging their passion for music.

Transistor radios did a lot more than that, though. They introduced businesses to a whole new audience and a channel that could reach them. New products began to be developed with portability in mind: cameras, CD players and later cell phones. The recording industry was changed as teens became a huge new audience. The Beatles were a transistor radio phenomenon.

Transistor radios tugged at our social fabric, too. Families no longer listened to radio together, which created new stress on home lives. Radio became an important news channel, making people better informed. Newspapers went into a long-term decline. New personalities like Don Imus in New York and Shadoe Stevens in LA began to influence pop culture trends. We became better connected with each other.

In short, transistor radio changed our lives in ways that very few people predicted when Texas Instruments brought the first one to market in 1954. That’s technology leverage at work, and it’s still a dominant force today.

Last week, I briefly mentioned camera phones. This technology will revolutionize the world, creating huge benefits in our ability to access information while will also introducing major concerns about privacy and legal exposure.

Imagine the changes: What if there had been 100 cameras trained on President Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963 instead of just one? How will sports and performance art change when spectators can “broadcast” a game or performance? How will our perspective on the news be affected when we can pay an individual to be our eyes and ears at an event? How will business and government adapt when customers and citizens can document poor performance of wrongdoing?

In the world of entertainment, the success of MP3 players like Apple’s iPod is already creating momentous change. It’s roiling the record industry, changing the business model for television broadcasters and enabling new artists to find audiences without a middleman. Companies will use this technology to communicate more effectively with employees and customers. People will be better informed. New uses in education will emerge.

How should you adapt the principle of technology leverage to your business?

You should constantly be on the lookout for IT innovations that can affect business in both good and bad respects. The most disruptive technologies are those that create new markets or make existing markets accessible to new customers. The bigger the market, the more explosive the potential.

Don’t dismiss or nay-say technology that people clearly want to use. Instant cameras, mainframe computers and long-distance telephone services are just three examples of the penalties of denial. Adopt new technology with enthusiasm, but let others make the first mistakes. Remember that it’s usually the second or third generation of a new idea that becomes commercially successful.

The most difficult change for most enterprises to accept is that possibility that an innovation may undermine their entire business. However, successful businesses are the ones that are most susceptible to disruption. It’s no accident that failed companies often enjoy their healthiest profits just before the rug is pulled out from under them. Read The Innovator’s Dilemma for more examples of this.

Be able to change your model before the disruption arrives. For example, newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post realized years ago that their fleets of delivery trucks and news dealers were no longer sources of competitive advantage. They made the jump to electronic distribution and national delivery, putting them in a much better position to survive the industry’s decline.

Finally, be ready to accept some pain. Make sure your employees and investors know when radical change is imminent and are willing to stick with you as you transform the business. You’ll come out the process smarter, more efficient and better equipped for the next round of change.

What information technologies do you think will be most disruptive and how will they change our lives a decade from now? Let’s hear your comments.

How Web 2.0 Tools Help in the Hiring Process

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From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

The arrival of the Web 2.0-style publishing and networking tools gives managers more options than ever to find, screen and hire the right people. Here are some ideas for using online tools to improve the recruitment process. Disclaimer: always stay within the law and the ethical guidelines of your firm. Using online aids to make discriminatory employment decisions can land you in hot water.

Finding candidates

Most job descriptions and recruitment ads are dry and boring, so why not start a personal blog or get a slot in your company blog to tell your story? Write enthusiastically about the opportunities in your group and make sure you register your blog with search engines like Technorati and IceRocket so you’ll turn up in search results. You can find a great list of social media search engines on Robin Good’s site.

I’ve never used professional networking services like Linked In or VisiblePath for recruiting, but I know people who swear by them. These sites enable people to find each other through mutual acquaintances. There are hundreds of other social networking sites organized around special interests. Wikipedia.org has a good list. Become involved in a professional online network and post your opportunities there.

If you’re looking for young employees, consider hanging out a shingle on MySpace or Facebook. These services are incredibly popular with the under-25 set, nearly 70% of whom have created an online profile somewhere, according to one recent survey. If you think you’re too old for MySpace, think again. More than half of MySpace visitors are over 35. You’ll need a college e-mail address to get on Facebook.

You can also search social media for candidates. Technorati, IceRocket, Google Blog Search and Feedster are popular blog search engines. Look for people who are talking about your industry or company. You can find a longer list of blog search engines here.

Screening

If you have a lot of resumes to sort through, consider asking candidates to answer some questions online. Services like Pre-valuate ask focused questions that can help filter out candidates who lack the knowledge you need.

You can also create your own survey form at one of the hundreds of sites that provide free or paid online surveys. SurveyMonkey.com, Zoomerang.com and WebSurveyor.com are some popular options. Be sure to ask more than just technical questions. Have candidates write about their experiences and attitudes so you can get an idea of whether they’d be a good fit for your organization.

It’s a no-brainer to Google a prospective employee’s name and nearly three quarters of employers already do, according to ExecuNet, a Norwalk, Conn.-based job search and recruiting network. The firm also reports that 35% of recruiters who do online searches have deep-sixed a candidate because of something they found online.

Always query the employee’s name in quotes to get a better match and don’t forget to try searching with middle initials and nicknames (Edward, Ed, Ted). There’s more to the world than Google, though. Ask.com’s revamped search engine is a powerful alternative to Google and includes blog search. Amazon’s A9 is also worth a try. These engines may find something Google overlooked or interpret your query differently enough to yield you a better result.

Blog search engines will show you what a candidate has been writing about lately and they can yield some interesting insights. The Boston Globe wrote of one woman who lost a job opportunity after she blogged that the job didn’t interest her all that much. A review of her server logs revealed that the employer had seen the post.

People leave a lot of digital footprints these days and searches can turn up after-hours activities or past indiscretions that may make you think twice about a candidate. While you should always give people the benefit of the doubt, it doesn’t hurt to be armed with information. At the very least, ask for an explanation for whatever you found. The Wall Street Journal recently wrote about the problems that online archives can create for candidates. If it’s online, it’s fair game.

Zoominfo is an intriguing new service that assembles a kind of ad hoc resume of people you search for using information on the Web. You can also find people with common interests or at other companies (a great resource for informal reference checks). You can also dig into hard-to-find public records with paid services like Peoplefinder. It may be well worth the $20 to $40 fee to check out the finalist for a job.

I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface of possibilities. Share your own tools and tips by commenting below.

Innovations 2007: Some Predictions

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From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

It’s the time of year when everybody makes predictions and who am I to buck the trend?

It’s actually been an exciting year in technology innovation and I think we’ll see that energy continue in 2007. We’ve got all the new tech we can handle right now, so next year will be more about  making choices and assimilating what we’ve got.

Expect virtualization to be a huge topic, with every server maker jumping into the fray.  You’ll also begin to see a lot of add-on products that build on virtualization platforms and provide for improved security, management and functionality. This is a hugely disruptive technology. For the first time, the operating system is being disengaged from the hardware, and that has the potential to change things pretty fundamentally This was the year that people got excited about virtualization; 2007 will be the year they figure out how to put it to work.

There’s no question that service-oriented architecture is going mainstream, and in 2007 we will begin to see public demonstrations of very impressive capability.  A lot of this new innovation will come from combining internal applications with commercial services. That’s one big reason software as a service (SaaS) is so important. We’ve talked a lot about the ease-of-deployment benefits of SaaS this year, but where it really gets exciting is when you start combining applications from multiple vendors and customizing them through a services interface.  We’re in the first inning of the shift to this new software delivery vehicle and I think the game is going to get very interesting next year.

Expect lots of action in mobile automation. There are some big wireless internet deployments in the works – more than 250 municipalities are working on them – and the prospect is there for an explosion of high speed services at little or no cost. This will become even more compelling as corporations make the move to voice over IP and equip their employees with phones that can connect to wireless networks. The cost of hard-wired bandwidth has been plummeting for three years while mobile networking has stayed stubbornly expensive. It’s time for that to change and we’ll all be better for that.

On the desktop, look for the first real signs of some action in Linux. The new distributions are simple and easy to install and use. For many business desktop users, they will work just fine. OpenOffice.org is a kick-butt office suite for the price and a lot of people have recently their first open source experience with Firefox and liked it. I’m not proposing that Microsoft’s franchise is in trouble but users to have a viable alternative to Windows for the first time.

If you read this column regularly, you know I’m fascinated by social media and the impact that personal publishing is having on business and society. There are 100 million people on MySpace already and the service is barely two years old. Forget the first inning, we’re still in the first at-bat of this megatrend. Social media will disrupt many of our institutions and assumptions fundamentally by giving ordinary people something they have never had before: the power to be heard at a global level. I don’t think we can even begin to predict the revolution this will kick off, but I sure want to be around to watch it for a while.

These are fun times to be writing about innovation and I look forward to continuing the conversation into the new year. Next week we’ll set the stage with a discussion of the exciting potential of small technology changes to kick off major disruptions in our institutions. Have a great holiday!

A New Business Model: Why Some Big Companies Will No Longer Have Big Workforces

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From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

In the fall of 1994, Fortune magazine published a cover story entitled “The End Of The Job.” More than a dozen years later, that premonition is coming true.

New communications and collaboration technologies are enabling businesses to completely rethink the way they are structured. Increasingly, they will decentralize and outsource that which is not strategic. This will be a difficult transition, but in the end will yield a much more efficient and competitive business model.

Consider eBay. More than 150,000 people now make their living primarily from selling products and services using the eBay commerce engine and more than $60 billion will change hands over eBay this year.  If all the people who depend on eBay for their livelihood worked for the company, eBay would be the second largest retailer in the world.  Yet the company employees less than 13,000 people .

In San Francisco, Craigslist.com is striking fear into the hearts of newspaper executives everywhere because it has conceived of a classified advertising business that is vastly more efficient than anything we’ve ever seen.  Founded just seven years ago, Craigslist today operates 300 web sites around the globe and is the seventh most popular English language website in the world.  It has a bigger web presence than the 133,000-employee Walt Disney Company and has been estimated to be worth more than $1 billion.  It has a total operating staff of 23 people.

Companies like these are creating a new generation of internet-driven business in which the company is a facilitator of commerce rather than a storekeeper. These innovators have figured out how to use the global network to connect people who would have otherwise never found each other.  In doing so, they are upending the proprietary and vertically integrated businesses that came before them.

These models will increasingly be applied to other industries. Already, many companies have relocated or outsourced their customer support operations offshore. The service rep you reach on the phone may be physically located 10,000 miles away, but it makes no difference because the network doesn’t care.

Customer service is just the first step. As the trends forecast in the 1994 Fortune article continue to play out, American businesses will increasingly be constructed on a base of partnerships, contracts and loose affiliations. We will move toward an army of sole proprietors.

In some ways, this is a back-to-the-future scenario.  Before the Industrial Revolution, very few people had jobs.  Most worked for themselves, plying their trade to anyone who needed them.

With factories came assembly lines and the need to keep the machines running. The job was born. But America has very few factories anymore and machines do much of what humans used to do. People work at all hours in all time zones. There’s no need to keep people busy 40 hours a week any more unless there’s work for them to do. In general, people are more productive when they’re looking out for their own interests then when they are looking out for their employer.

A full-time work force has its benefits and there will always be the need for payrolls. I expect, though, that businesses will involve in the future toward an increasingly decentralized model enabled by technology. Many people will serve multiple masters, bound to their clients by sophisticated communications networks. Businesses will learn to become more efficient by planning their resource needs around networks of contractors and partners in all parts of the globe. It will be a painful transition, but it will also lead to a better style of doing business.

The job as we know it may not end, but it will evolve into something very different from what we now know.

How do you see business evolving? Post your comments here.

Open-Source Software Model Is a Landmark in Innovation

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From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

The software industry is abuzz this week about Oracle’s audacious announcement last week that it would sell Red Hat Linux and undercut Red Hat’s pricing. Oracle baldly stated that it would strip out the Red Hat trademark from the underlying code and compete against Red Hat with its own product.

Such an act would be illegal, not to mention insulting, in the proprietary software world. But under terms of the GNU Public License (GPL), it’s totally legal. Any company that develops software under most open-source licenses faces the same quandary as Red Hat. And that’s why open source is such a great platform for innovation.

Open-source software is licensed under terms that require the developer to publish openly the programming instructions for the software. You can’t charge for open-source programs, although there are ways to charge for additions to them. Most open-source software vendors make their money by charging for support and custom enhancements.

Open source software has disrupted the software industry – for the better – in fundamental ways. It has removed the cloud of legal threats that hovered over the industry in the pre-GPL days. It was a cloud that led to enormous duplication of effort and sky-high costs for buyers. Most major software markets are today boiling down to one or two proprietary software vendors and a flock of open-source alternatives.

There’s no question that innovation flourishes when programmers get access to source code. Take SugarCRM, the leading open-source customer relationship management software. Its website lists almost 300 add-on modules that have been created by customers and developers to complement the core suite. A SugarCRM user gets access to this vast library by default and for free.

The Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail client, both developed by the non-profit Mozilla organization, are catching on like wildfire in large part because of the hundreds of extensions that have been developed for them. This dynamic is changing buyer attitudes.

But open source is driving innovation more broadly by lowering the overall cost of software. Open-source options today are available for almost anything you want to do. Sourceforge.net, the Library of Congress of open source, lists more than 130,000 projects, all freely available, much of it stable and reliable.

What this means is that software costs are no longer an inhibitor to good ideas. A creative person can now assemble the building blocks for a robust commercial application – operating system, database, programming language, web server and the like – for no money. That drives innovation up the stack to the really interesting stuff: the applications.

It’s no surprise that the Web 2.0 social media phenomenon has exploded recently. Hundreds of entrepreneurs have used open-source tools to launch services on the Internet at little or no charge. These services would have been impractical in the days before open source. The barriers to entry have been lowered by free software, as they have been by cheap storage (I wrote a bit about that last week). This unleashes innovation because developers no longer have to worry about intellectual property rights and patent infringement. They just focus on ideas.

Which brings us back to Oracle. It’s true that there wasn’t much innovative in the product Oracle introduced last week. It’s Red Hat Linux. But to square off against a competitor by selling its own product at a lower price, well, you’ve got to hand it to Oracle. That’s pretty clever. Even innovative.

Can Cheap Storage Spur Innovation? You Bet It Can

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From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

Today’s Web 2.0 companies are the fastest-growing part of the Internet economy, where cheap storage is one of its essential technology drivers.

Disk storage – that most prosaic commodity of computerdom – is giving birth to a whole new breed of innovative businesses on the Web. It can be a springboard for innovation in your company, too.

Most people don’t pay much attention to the disk drives in their computers or servers. Perhaps we’ve noticed that they’ve gotten a good deal cheaper in recent years, but storage is not the kind of thing that gets people excited. However, data storage has been one of the most exciting areas of innovation in computing for the last decade. The remarkable declines in storage prices – I figure them to be about 40 percent per year since the invention of the rigid disk drive in 1957 – have made what was once a precious resource into a cheap commodity.

Consider this: IBM figured that the amount of storage in a standard PC hard drive circa 2003 would have taken up more than a square mile of disk drives in 1957. And the prices have come down 90% since then. This is, quite simply, the most remarkable price deflation in the history of the world.

So what happens when a resource that used to be expensive becomes essentially free? A lot of innovative business ideas spring up. Consider YouTube, the video-sharing web site that recently sold to Google for $1.65 billion. YouTube and services like it enable people to store videos at no charge. Other free sites like Flickr, Blogger, and eSnips use a similar business model to let members publish and share their words and images. It would have been unthinkable just a few years ago for these businesses to survive. But today, the so-called Web 2.0 companies are the fastest-growing part of the Internet economy. And cheap storage is one of the essential technology drivers.

That’s just the beginning of the innovative potential. Marketers are learning to take advantage of viral marketing, in which information about products and companies is spread by people sharing links to interesting content. Many companies are now encouraging their customers to actually create multimedia ads for them and upload their masterpieces to a server. Check out The Nerd League and BoltBand for a couple of examples.

There are many other opportunities for businesses to innovate around the promise of inexpensive storage. You may already be posting manuals and documentation for your customers to download. Why not add video how-to courses? Start a contest and ask customers to upload photos of themselves using your products in innovative ways. Post video interviews with some interesting people who design your products or run the company, as Microsoft and General Motors have done. Or, for internal use, take on that big data warehousing project you weren’t previously able to afford.

Ideas like these will only proliferate as the cost of computing continues to fall. I call it the “technology leverage effect.” Small changes in technology can have a ripple effect that leads to massive changes in business and in our lives years down the road.


Tapping New Mobile Technologies to Spur Innovation

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From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

Can the day be far away when you’ll want to buy all your employees – and many of your customers – an iPod? Maybe it won’t be Apple’s ubiquitous little media player, but devices like the iPod will become part of every business person’s toolkit in the not-too-distant future.

The iPod and its competitors are revolutionary in their ability to take media offline. No longer do we need to be connected to be tuned in. Podcasting, the Internet radio phenomenon that is sweeping the consumer market, has spawned more than 80,000 programs, some with upwards of a half million subscribers. But the unfolding story behind podcasting is its use behind the corporate firewall.

Think of it: what if you could turn people’s downtime – the time spent mowing the lawn, waiting in checkout lines or working out at the gym – into a connection to your business? Why not podcast your weekly employee newsletter or an update message from your CEO? How about a weekly audio program for your customers giving them tips to get more out of your products?

This is already happening. Whirlpool is podcasting a weekly program – Whirlpool American Family – offering valuable advice on issues ranging from childcare to nutrition. Accuvue, the contact lens maker, is reaching out to young people through Download with Heather & Jonelle, a podcast about teenage life. IBM’s investor relations group produced a podcast called “IBM and the Future of…,” looking into the evolution of technology in different industries. It was so successful that the company created “ShortCuts,” a weekly podcast of tips for getting more out of personal technology.

The concept shouldn’t stop there. Podcasts can deliver new product information, business intelligence and sales reports to your reps in the field. And a new breed of device is just around the corner. Next-generation media players will incorporate small but functional video displays, greatly enhancing the kinds of information you can distribute. Your field service reps will have access to training materials or the latest repair manuals in video form. Sales people will be able to carry customer testimonials and promotional videos with them. Your partners will download demos of your new products to play back at their convenience.

You’ll want to make sure these influencers are connecting with you, and that’s why I think you should consider giving away the technology to make that happen. Digital media players are already cheap and they’re getting cheaper. For example, MobilBlu is selling a 2GB MP3 player for $130. Why not can load one up with your latest promotional and how-to advice, stamp your brand on it and send it to each of your top 50 customers? And shouldn’t every one of your field sales reps have a digital music player pre-configured to download the latest sales reports? Cost is no longer a big impediment to doing this.

Corporations are already experimenting with the idea. When General Motors launched the Saturn Sky, its media relations group shot a four-minute lifestyle video about the design of the vehicle. It packaged that along with a variety of other digital assets into a black video iPod and sent the devices out to key media.

Digital media players are important new channels to get information to your employees and your customers. Are you willing to be an innovator in putting them to work?

New Collaboration Tools Enable Innovation

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From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

Not long ago, online collaboration meant complexity.  The available tools required installation of proprietary server software and dedicated programs on each user’s PC.  Licensing costs were high, and it often took a small army of consultants to get things working right.

No more. An Increasingly popular tool called a wiki is making group collaboration cheap and simple; so simple, in fact, that I submit that every organization should be looking at one.  Many people know of wikis through the popular wikipedia.org encyclopedia, which is among the top sites on the Internet. Any registered user can edit a wikipedia entry, and hundreds of thousands do. The resource is many times larger than the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica.

The same technology that powers Wikipedia can be applied inside your organization to cut cost and clutter and to jumpstart innovation. Wikis are marvelously simple. They provide a shared workspace in which users can create pages and sub-pages containing text, attachments and even multimedia content. Any unauthorized user can change any page, with all changes logged in a journal for easy auditing and rollback. Users can subscribe to wikis via RSS or e-mail.

The wiki can unleash the creative power in your organization by providing an online brainstorming location. It’s more flexible than a discussion group, and it can be integrated with internal blogs to give users a place to share their ideas with a group.

Wikis also help solve the problem of e-mail overload. E-mail was never intended to be a medium for group collaboration. In fact, it’s a lousy way for groups of more than about four people to communicate. But everyone knows how to use it, and so e-mail is constantly applied to tasks for which it isn’t suited. How many times have you been caught in large e-mail exchanges about topics that didn’t apply to you? Wikis move those conversations to a central point, where users can simply subscribe to the discussions that interest them.

There are literally hundreds of open-source wikis available for you to download in use. A good directory of software is available on – where else? – Wikipedia. For the sake of time and reliability, though, you might consider one of the many commercial providers. They include SocialText, JotSpot, Atlassian, MindTouch and Near-Time. There are also many wiki services on the internet the cost little or nothing. They include Wikia, WetPaint, PBWiki and Wikispaces. You can use these sites to start your own wiki for little or no cost and experiment to your heart’s content.

Wikis are a great invention because they open up the world of online collaboration to businesses that previously couldn’t afford it. They’re also inexpensive enough to be applied to small problems. For example, Dickson Allan’s Business Technology and Consulting Group, based in Troy, Mich., uses JotSpot to track sales leads. Previously, the company gathered spreadsheets from across its national sales force and consolidated them for review prior to each weekly sales meeting, according to Kim Lesinski, VP and Practice Director. Changes would then be made to the spreadsheet after the meeting, bounced back and forth for correction and eventually sent out to the field. The practice was time-consuming and error-prone, Lesinski says.

With the JotSpot wiki, sales forecasts are now updated centrally and are available to authorized users at any time. The tool has been so successful that many other departments are now dreaming up their own uses for the wiki, Lesinsky adds.

It doesn’t take much to realize the power of a tool like this to foster innovation. Cut down on bureaucracy, minimize confusion and let people do what they do best. Wikis rule!

Are you using wikis in you business? Tell us about you experience by commenting on this blog.

How Software As a Service May Reshape Enterprise Computing

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From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

When Salesforce.com launched its hosted software service in 1999, few people gave it much chance of success. The class of companies then known as application service providers (ASP) was collapsing, taking with it hundreds of millions of dollars of investor dreams. Salesforce.com’s customer relationship management was dominated by Siebel systems, a multi-billion dollar juggernaut that showed no signs of slowing down. The whole idea of selling software as a service over the internet seemed crazy In light of the carnage that was occurring.

Now it appears that Salesforce.com has the last laugh. And the company’s eye-popping growth – revenue was up 64% in the second quarter – is only one indication of how right its timing was. Software as a service (SaaS), as the on-demand market has come to be known, may actually be the future of enterprise software. “SaaS will continue to pull the (overall) customer management market along with a 24% compounded annual growth rate,” said AMR Research in a recent report.

Few people saw in 1999 the factors that would lead SaaS to roil the software industry. Human nature is to look at failed ideas and assume they will always fail.  But history has taught us that innovative ideas often don’t succeed the first time around. The on-demand software model is fundamentally a sound notion. It’s just that a decade ago the technical infrastructure was not there to deliver it and users were not ready to accept it. All that has changed.

Users love this idea. Why should their companies have go through multi-year and multi-million dollar installation cycles to implement software that may be irrelevant by the time it’s in service? The SaaS proposition is simple: get started quickly with a reasonably robust set of features and then customize as you need. The ROI is fast and the setup costs are next to nothing. And SaaS companies, unlike packaged software firms, have a vested interest in keeping their customers happy and because it’s so easy for customers to walk away.

IT thought leaders were quick to shoot holes in the early SaaS proposition. Security was a problem, they said. You couldn’t customize the software. And what about reliability? I fell prey to this mindset myself. In a column back in 2000 I dismissed SaaS as nothing more than the second coming of time-sharing.

Most of the skeptics’ arguments were rubbish. Successful SaaS vendors are building world-class technology infrastructures that are as secure and reliable as any Fortune 500 data center. Customization is still limited, but I think a lot of technology people over-estimate users’ interest in that feature. Most of them simply want to make their lives easier, cut out the grunt work and focus on doing business. The fact that SaaS delivers benefits so quickly overwhelms the negatives.

Many people now believe that SaaS is the future of enterprise software. “ThinkStrategies believes that SaaS deserves to be viewed as a mainstream alternative to traditional on-premise packaged applications,” says Jeff Kaplan, Managing Director of THINKstrategies.

Adds Bill McNee, president of  Saugatuck Technology, “At the end of the day, the business users are focused around business value and that’s what this is all about.”

In the last year, we’ve watched the software industry begin to completely reshape itself around on-demand delivery. It’s the foundation of Google’s application strategy, while Microsoft, which is quickly reshaping its business around “Microsoft Live,” which is essentially its own version of SaaS.

This is not to say that packaged software is dead. Some applications don’t lend themselves to the online model and some users will always prefer the control that packaged software gives them. But there is no doubt where the trend is headed. The vast majority of new entrants into the software market today are delivering their products online. That trend is not going to change.

This blog is about innovation, so let’s see what lessons we can learn from this. SaaS innovators refused to kowtow to the skeptics in the IT world. They were talking to the business users, who were telling them a very different story. They learned from the mistakes of their predecessors and focused on getting the model right, rather than changing it

It’s difficult to tell how all this will play out. We’ve talked earlier about disruptive technologies, those that force dramatic and often unpredictable change on institutions. There’s no doubt in my mind that SaaS is a disruptive technology. It could completely upend the power structure of the software industry.  More importantly, it could give users important new options for deploying software quickly and effectively. IT organizations should get involved in this sea change. If they don’t, it will swamp them.