I have decided to be ‘buzz-word’ compliant and used the venerable term ‘Enterprise 2.0′ as part of the title to the post.

Disclosure: I am a consultant working for a global consulting firm, and invariably I am interested in SELLING work to clients, by proposing VALUES to them.

Enterprise 2.0 is no different in that regard and nor should it be.

I think there has been quite a lot of articles out there covering the technologies and the concepts behind enterprise 2.0, and to some extend the underlying values it proposes.

There is even recognition that to make enterprise 2.0 successful in an organisation, it requires a cultural change, and you can read Harvard Business School Associate Professor Andrew McAfee’s description on the ‘Empty Quarter‘, where he describes the quarter where the non-adopters reside. I think his depiction of types of people in an organisation with respect to enterprise 2.0 is quite accurate.

In any organisation there are young graduates and IT professionals whom using facebook, del.icio.us, gtalk is simply second nature. Then there are those who generally (but not always) hold senior posts whom religiously uses e-mails with huge attachments and store everything in Word documents.

Andrew proposes the key challenge for enterprise 2.0 adoption is how to get the people from this ‘Empty Quarter’ to participate and more importantly get value out of it for themselves.

Now I am interested, because the people in the Empty Quarter are the very people, I and many others need to pitch ideas to, to sell consulting services and finally to bill our hours . How do we convince them the value proposition of enterprise 2.0?

Just like all the other works we have successfully pitched and sold in the past to our clients, be it a CRM system, or an EAI project or dare I say an SOA project, we need to travel through the same road.

Then I thought perhaps apart from funky demos and flashy PowerPoint presentations, we need to go for something we all understand, yes something even the people in the ‘Empty Quarter’ will immediately recognise and understand.

That is an economics angle, and more importantly the concept of a market. A market is where its participants trade with each other. Take a look at the stock market as a classic example, traders buy and sell shares. These trades happen as traders make decisions based on the information that is available at the time, and then make a judgement call. Economists devote large amounts time and money to analyse the behaviours of traders in such markets, and how information is shared and flowed and how that in turn influence the market outcomes.

In many economics text books, you will see the following lines quite often.

…assuming rational behaviour;

and everyone has perfect and complete information…

Hmmm… perhaps I was paying attention in my university lectures. It’s really this perfect and complete information that is interesting and relevant here. We now know (perhaps some of us always did) that in any real markets, it is often not possible to have perfect and complete information for all the participants, hence markets are not efficient.

Why? Because information costs money and time to obtain, and sometimes there are inside information whether we like it or not hence not shared, and sometimes information is tacit, and simply requires too much effort to organise and decipher.

Enterprise 2.0 provides a cheap medium of which information can be shared. The cost of participating in this ‘market’ is low, and there is no barrier to entry (at least not technological ones). From an organisation’s perspective, managers and executives need to ensure their time is spent efficiently. Since everyone’s time is finite, they need to ensure that the good set of information is arriving at their finger tips so that they can make sound decisions just like the traders in the stock market are making the right buys and sells.

If we can convince the key decision makers this, then we should be able to get management support to implement such systems and spread the good news.

~paul

Mountains and Streams
Chinese Paintings from the Asian Collection

A National Gallery of Victoria Touring Exhibition

13 April 2006 to 10 September 2006 Asian Temporary Exhibitions Space, Level 1. FREE ENTRY

THE WISE FIND PLEASURE IN WATER

THE VIRTUOUS FIND PLEASURE IN MOUNTAINS.’

The Analects of Confucious (c. 6th-5th century B.C.)

This exhibition is worth seeing as it draws upon material from the National Gallery of Victoria’s impressive collection of Asian art, in particular Chinese paintings. It includes objects from the 14th to the 21st century such as landscapes or `mountains and streams’ depicted in paintings on scrolls and on porcelains, Daoist (Taoist) mountain in jade carving, cosmic mountain in archaic bronze as well as black-and-white photographs of sacred mountains in China. It also includes so-called `dream stones’ (marble plaques evocative of misty mountains).

Artist Zong Bing (375-443) relates how he re-experiences his former travels as he painted from memory:

`And so by living in leisure

By nourishing the spirit

By cleansing the wine-glass

By playing the lute

And by contemplating in silence

Before taking up the brush to paint

Although remaining seated

I travel to the four corners of the world…’

 

A Taoist poem depicts nature as a spiritual refuge from the mundane everyday life:

‘…To tranquilize one’s mind is to nourish one’s spirit;

To nourish the spirit is to return to Nature.’

http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/mountainsandstreams

Body Language:

Contemporary Chinese Photography

14 March – 18 May 2008
Temporary Exhibition Space 1,
Ground Floor, NGV International. 180 St Kilda Road. FREE ENTRY.

“Over the last decade, Chinese photography has undergone a remarkable period of transformation and growth. Often reflecting an urgent desire to explore individual and social identity in a time of unprecedented change, a group of Chinese photographers have used their own bodies as the vehicle for creative expression and critique.”

This exhibition features photographs by Zhang Huan (To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond); Sheng Qi (Memories); Huang Yan (Chinese Landscape – Tattoo); and Liu Wei, whose massively scaled work Landscape will be shown in Australia for the first time.  Also included will be stunning photographs by younger artists, including Chen Nong and Chi Peng. 

http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/bodylanguage/

Recently my friend Jay introduced me to “Annie Hall”, a classic film by Woody Allen made in 1977. It just so happens that was also the year I was born, but I am sure my birth played no part on Mr Allen’s talents

I first got into Woody Allen’s films by accident. The first film was ‘The curse of the Jade Scorpion’ (2001), then there is “Deconstructing Harry” (1997), “Everybody says I love you” (1996), “Small Time Crooks” (2000), “Melinda Melinda” (2004)… I must say after this string of films, I am now beginning to see a trend… The bitter, somewhat helpless outlook on life which is quintessentially Woody Allen.
His exploration into failed relationships, love, betrayal, jealousy are fundamentally human, and hence funny and moving at the same time. I really liked Annie Hall and I could see the way Woody Allen depicts women in some way reflect in his own personal failures in family and relationships. His failure to adapt to the society he now lives in, and the inability for others (women mostly, and some male friends) to tolerate and embrace him for who he is. He appears time and time again on the silver screen as that frustrated writer, the failed husband and lover, the common man that strives so hard and yet achieves so little. This is in many ways his very own reflection of life, and I quote:

two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ‘em says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.” Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life – full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.

We as people respond to that, we as the outsiders to his life’s many catastrophes empathize to him, we feel pity towards him, that he who

would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member

I really liked this film, thanks Jay for the recommendation

I went to a POT (Proof Of Technology) at IBM a couple of weeks ago. The POT is looking specifically at IBM Datapower Appliances.

Here is my take on the subject:
1. The 3 Datapower appliances follow a ‘Russian doll’ model.
XA35 = offloads XML acceleration and processing
XS40 = XA35 + XML security support
XI50 = XS40 + Protocols Gateway

2. Appliances are there to compliment your existing Enterprise Integration infrastructure, not to replace it.
In fact, IBM has depicted several scenarios where Datapower appliances can be used. There is a red book from IBM called “IBM WebSphere Datapower SOA Appliances”, there are 4 parts to this redbook, you should be able to google for it, and I won’t rehash what’s already said in there.

For many of you that have existing integration assets in place, the appliance can be used as a security gateway to provide security measures at your corporate network’s edge. It can also be used to provide raw acceleration on xml processing, and the demo I saw at the POT comparing to traditional software based parser is quite impressive. Another usecase is for many small to medium enterprises, that do not have an enterprise integration backbone, the appliance can be used as a common hub to connect via common transport protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, JMS and FTP.

The argument that Datapower can complement on the connectivity of your enterprise integration is a weak one. From what I understand there is only a limited number of protocols supported, and at the time of the POT, only Tibco and WebSphere implementation of JMS are supported by the firmware. Unless this is improved, I don’t see Datapower appliance as a full fledged protocol connectivity gateway, but for organisations with no integration infrastructure at all, this may well fit the bill.

3. Deployment and Infrastructure support.
Datapower appliance is a network device. Although it has a very intuitive web interface, but most of the time you will be using the command line interface (CLI) to do most of your deployment. IBM seems to have done quite a bit of work to integrate its existing ITCAM product family with Datapower to provide the configuration management needed.

One further issue most organisations will have to consider for Datapower is the question of ownership for the device. Traditionally most network devices like routers, and SAN have been supported by the infrastructure team, the skills required to support these devices are a combination of network and hardware skills. With the advent of Datapower, a strong understanding in the integration and security areas are also required. But most organizations have separate groups to look after application and the network infrastructure. Now the question is “so who should be managing the Datapower devices?”, as it is at once both a network devices but also include applications within. This may seem to be a trivial question on the surface, but is still the ‘human’ element that needs to be ironed out to ensure smooth inclusion of such devices.

~paul

Q. when does a power nap cease to become a power nap?

A. the moment your 15-20 minute sleep turns into hours and you still feel like shit afterwards.