Spreadsheets,Mashing and Social Software

Oregon State University have developed a new way to tackle the problem of spreadsheet errors. If you're not familiar with the issue, spreadsheet errors are common and can cost organisations a lot of money.

Its interesting that they say Oregon State University say:

"spreadsheet use and development is so common that it is frequently being done by people with very limited training or interest in computer software programming. These "end users" of computer software don't have the background to investigate codes, programs or formulas, they just want the program to work, and often erroneously assume that it does."

Of course, not every spreadsheet is critical, but if we think of Web 2.0 mashing tools as the conceptual descendents of the spreadsheet (an early mashing tool IMHO) then its important that we have safe guards in place. Ideally these could be a combination of automated checks, tested templates and the wisdom of the crowds (which is the icing on the Web 2.0 cake). This is something I've talked about before.

Technorati tags: Spreadsheets, Spreadsheet Errors, Oregon State University, Web 2.0, Mashups, Mashing Tools, Social Software, Wisdom of the Crowds

Does EditGrid provide mashing for beginners?

I've talked a few times about mashing, superusers and spreadsheets. Now I've discovered EditGrid, which might give a glimpse into what a Web-enabled, spreadsheet-based mashing solution for the average user might look like. The kiler-app in this case is what EditGrid call Remote Data.

The example they provide shows a built-in function to pull live stock quotes into a spreadsheet, but Remote Data is quite capable of pulling in a URL and then you can in theory manipulate that data with cell functions. Unfortunately what it appears to lack is native functions to parse HTML or XML data, or macros. However, EditGrid does provide an API so the potential to extend its Remote Data capabilities are endless.

BTW EditGrid has some other great features to check out, and certainly raises the bar in terms of what a Web 2.0 spreadsheet solution should look like.

So, which approach is likely to win in terms of providing mashing capabilities for the average user - drag and drop GUI or a next generation Web 2.0 era spreadsheet?

Technorati tags: Mashing, Spreadsheets, EditGrid, Web 2.0, Web Office 2.0

Living Information Systems

I've talked about spreadsheets in the past - they interest me as one of the earliest forms of user-generation applications so this article from Forrester, titled Ouch! Get Ready — Spreadsheets Are Here To Stay For Business Intelligence, caught my eye for a number of reasons:

"For years, IT practitioners and vendors have tried to develop and implement applications that would eliminate spreadsheets from mission-critical processes... But that battle has been fought and lost. Rather than fighting the use of spreadsheets, application developers, information and knowledge managers,
and business managers must embrace them — but in an environment that provides much needed functionality while treating every spreadsheet as an important enterprise resource."

Despite the availability of a modern enterprise-grade Business Intelligence (BI) stack, the spreadsheet wins out because of its ease of use, flexibility and availability. There are some strong parallels here with the drivers behind enterprise social computing - in fact, the solution to the spreadsheet "problem" put forward by Forrester very much reflects an Enterprise Web 2.0 philosophy of social and technical controls, and pragmatic risk management that recognises that some spreadsheets are more important than others.

But this future state isn't one in which spreadsheets are absorbed into a better BI solution, instead Forrester starts to describe a vision of a "holistic environment" complemented by other technologies like enterprise content management. And I don't think its a big step to see how this vision might become one for an enterprise-wide living information system where structured, formal systems not only coexist with, but provide a supporting infrastructure for working with dynamic, informal social tools.

BTW You can currently register to download the full paper for free.

Technorati tags: Spreadsheets, Business Intelligence, Enterprise Web 2.0, Forrester Research

Social Data Analysis... But what about compliance?

OK, when I heard about Swivel the other day I thought it was good, but Many Eyes from IBM's Alphaworks is even more impressive because of the charts available, including network maps and treemaps - something even Excel can't do (as far as I'm aware).

Both Many Eyes and Swivel also hint at the possibility of providing private access to graphs and data (Swivel talks about a fee-based "professional" version), but I can equally see potential for a "social data analysis" tool like this inside the firewall with options to restrict data to groups or specific users. Of course sharing the data as widely as possible is what's its all about.

Its also interesting to consider with these social data analysis tools that not only are they making data analysis "social", but I can also see tools like begin to challenge our concept of a basic information unit like a "document".

Think about this - typically to create an ad hoc graph you might paste the data into a spreadsheet and use the tools in the spreadsheet to create the graphic. This activity is something people must be doing everyday all around the world and the net output of course is a spreadsheet file containing the data and the graph that gets stored somewhere. But in a Web 2.0 mashed up world there is no concept of a document with social data analysis tools. In fact it would defeat the purpose.

Unfortunately for an enterprise thinking of using social data analysis tools I can see that this may create a compliance and records management problem, unless the current generation of electronic document and records management systems evolve to automatically capture both permanent structured data and transient unstructured in context together. Now, that's going to be interesting to watch.

Technorati tags: Many Eyes, Swivel, Social Data Analysis, EDRMS

The Search for Application Perfection

Back in 2004 I co-authored an article that asked, does the perfect intranet exist? Now, as the dust mostly settles around the firestorm about "sexy" enterprise applications, I wonder if the problem with enterprise applications is that the enterprise is looking for application perfection?

Of course in some enterprise situations system "perfection" is not only desirable, but essential. However, when we consider the number of large organisations running on uncontrolled spreadsheets, despite the known risks, this suggests that perhaps people are more willing to trade off perfection for practical usefulness than we think. BTW I think "sexy" is a rather poor word choice, perhaps something like "utilitarianism" instead? I mean, like twitter friend Martin Koser I've yet to find a sexy wiki either:

"Are enterprise wikis sexy? Most people don’t think so - but I think they get it wrong...Wikis soon gain “cool tools status” - just because they offer room for flexible emergent uses, coupled with great simplicity."

However, here is the ironic twist with enterprise software... an "enterprise" is really a loose collection of individuals, a complex system if you like. Unfortunately large, heavy and decidedly unsexy enterprise software is produced by large, complex companies to be used by other large, complex companies. And its why right now people in organisations can't help themselves from buying large, heavy enterprise software, yet they know they will also keep using a spreadsheet (or equivalent tool) to fill the gaps. This goes for the vendors too, who often "don't eat their own dogfood".

You can see where this is going, right? If you want sexy enterprise software, look for companies - both vendors and customers - who are prepared to change the rules. And in a long winded way, I find myself back to James Governor, who had a hand in stoking the firestorm that Scoble started, and I'll give him the last word:

"In the 20th century economic success in IT was established by raising barriers to entry. In the 21st it will be about lowering barriers to participation. Economies are networked, and the invisible hand is a great one for random acts of traction."

Technorati tags: Web 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Enterprise Software, Nick Carr, James Governor, Robert Scoble, Martin Koser

From ODBC to Mashing

Mark Bower has written a couple of interesting posts about the origins of mashing, the first referencing a earlier post of mine about spreadsheets. Bower says:

"James Dellow wrote last week on spreadsheets as an early mashup tool.  I totally agree, and I don't think it was the first.  Before RSS and web services provided a standard way to access data, ODBC was the defacto mechanism inside enterprises. In my book, Access predates Excel as an enterprise mashup tool.  Information Workers truly embraced this, taking data sources from around their org, and pulling them together to create their own personal applications.

If anything Access was too successful, and in the post-millennium bug world, IT departments rushed to make their infrastructure more manageable by consolidating some solutions in centrally managed and hosted services, or mandating that these databases be removed.  Access was then frequently removed from the standard desktop deployment of Office."

Great point about MS Access! I think similar comments can be said about Lotus Notes too.

Today Bower has also offered a list of what makes a good mashing tool:

• Ability to get data from a variety of different data sources/services;
• Ability to aggregate and manipulate data;
• Ability to visualise data;
• Ability to create no-code mashups;
• Ability to create shareable solutions; and
• Ability to create mashups that can be used as building blocks in other mashups.

If I could add one more point then it would be something along the lines that mashups should allow real people to solve real world problems quickly.

BTW I used Excel to access the Technorati API... actually, that reminds that Google really should think about integrating Google Sheets with their new mashup editor. There's life in the ol'spreadsheet yet you know.

Technorati tags: Mark Bower, Mashing, Mashups, Excel, MS Access

Social Productivity: A strategic choice or Web 2.0 revolution?

A few weeks or so ago, Sam Lawrence via Twitter pointed me to a post he made at the end of last year about how office suite software (i.e. word processing, presentations, spreadsheets etc) hasn't changed in over 20 years but that:

"Traditional office software features are being absorbed into browsers and OSes. The next level of digital office work is shifting from a disjointed file exchange work model to one that's much more connected, contextual and collaborative. In the old model, users create documents in isolation and exchange them with other isolated users--all insulated from and out of sync with the bigger picture of relevant interpersonal activity. In the new collaboration model, connected people understand when, what and why to engage and they do it in a unified environment. They use file-sharing only as a supplement, when and if it's necessary. We refer to this collaboration model as Social Productivity, which frames our daily work activity in the "we" vs. "me" context and then delivers new functionality to help with these connections. This more accurately mimics our work-with-others activity vs. the produce-alone-and-distribute part of our daily equation. Now we can get context at a glance, work doesn't disappear once we hit "send," and we stay connected to the efforts most important to us."

It reminded me that many years ago I heard Dale Chatwin talk about the Australian Bureau of Statistics, a government organisations, as a Lotus Notes case study. A quick search actually turned up a case study (PDF) about this particularly story, which dates back to the 1990s. It makes interesting reading in light of Sam's ideas, since this organisation did exactly what he describes as "Social Productivity" - they developed databases:

"that permit all members of a group to work inside the same database simultaneously, so that a document that is being collaboratively created does not need to be emailed around to the members of the group with each person having a separate stored copy but is kept in a central location... The central repository and shared workspace of the workgroup databases is not only a freeing tool for collaborative co-creation of knowledge it is also a vehicle for transparency and knowledge sharing, as other persons not in the workgroup can still access the workgroup's database and see the information there and the work in its current state of progress... Almost all of the information and knowledge in the ABS is held on and processed through Lotus Notes® Workgroup Databases, and almost all persons have access to almost all databases, making the entire organisation's information and knowledgebase transparent, freely accessible and available to all members at all times."

Even closer to Sam's vision, the organisation's "elimination of desktop word processors" means that for majority of users at the time the office suite was embedded as part of the Lotus Notes "browser" (i.e. the Lotus Notes client). This doesn't mean everyone was happy with the decision - reading the case study, it looks a combination of issues affected their experience:

• Functionality in the Lotus Notes text editor versus a stand alone word processor;
• Dealing with upgrades that changed the Lotus Notes interface;
• The need to collaborate and share information externally; and
• The lack of choice.

Incidentally users still had access to a separate spreadsheet application, however one user commented:

"Lotus 123 is terrible with anything to do with Excel"

A reminder that not all office suite software is the same.

Now its been a while since I last saw Dale and I'm not sure where this organisation is these days with Lotus Notes, but I recommend you read the case study and draw your own conclusions to decided if you think their strategy was a success or not. Certainly some were positive about the approach. But what is clear is that they were unique in adopting this strategy and I don't know of any other organisation that has attempted the same thing.

I wonder if they were attempting to do this now, what would be more important - the strategic decision to implement a social productivity approach or the quality of the user experience in our Web 2.0 environment. What do you think?

Technorati tags: Sam Lawrence, Jive Software, Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes, Australian Bureau of Statistics, ABS, Social Productivity, Dale Chatwin

BigPond's private label version of ThinkFree

You might remember that I reviewed a portable version of hosted office application suite ThinkFree earlier in the year, however I don't remember hearing much in the media about this new service from Australian ISP, Bigpond, who have a launched a private label version of ThinkFree in November:

"BigPond® Office lets you create, edit and share word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents from anywhere you can use the Internet, any time. Simply login and start working. BigPond Office is BigPond's alternative office suite. And best of all, it's all free* for most BigPond members."

BigPond Office is currently only available to BigPond users, however the service is also un-metered for BigPond users, so it has no impact on typically restrictive broadband limits here. But it looks like a premium version is in the works:

"COMING SOON - STAY TUNED

BigPond Office DocBoss offers all the features of BigPond Office, plus you can also access it when you’re not on the internet. So you’ll be able to create all your documentation and save it to your PCs, without having to go online. You’ll have the same anywhere, anytime access as the current online service with added features and a higher level of technical support."

I wonder if the reason I didn't hear about this before is because they are trying to fly under the radar of Google and co? :-)

Technorati tags: Bigpond, Bigpond Office, ThinkFree, Web 2.0, Office 2.0, SAAS, Software-as-a-Service, Google Apps, Google

Don't just spend less on IT, spend smart

Last Friday, writing for the Australian Financial Review (AFR) (“Anxious CIOs keep tight hold of the purse strings”, 8/5/09, p.53), Mark Jones reported on what he called “a dramatic downturn in corporate and government IT spending.”

Mark included some quotes from a recent interview with Fiona Balfour, former Qantas and Telstra CIO, and Steve Hodgkinson, research director at Ovum, for his The Scoop podcast. However, listening to the podcast its not just simply a case of no spending. Instead, as Mark hints at in the headline for his article, these IT commentators suggest that its more about tightening controls on how and where money is spent. In practice, they say, this means organisations need to revise their plans to suit the new financial environment by focusing on delivering business outcomes (although you have to wonder what they were doing before, then?) and controlling the complexity of their IT systems.

Personally, when ever I hear talk about ‘standardisation’ and ‘out of the box’ I immediately think of the impact on end-users (or if you want to take a more hard nosed perspective, lets call it a negative outcome for group and individual productivity). While this won’t show up on the business case or the IT budget, I have no doubt that it will come down to people to fill the gaps in these apparently economically sound solutions. This means email volumes will continue to grow, more spreadsheet-based applications will appear and in the worst cases - where users are left with no options to ‘hack’ their solutions together - these systems will actually fail to meet their objective. And along the way, you’ll probably end up with a bunch of frustrated and ultimately unproductive people. Some of those unhappy people will be your customers too.

At the end of the podcast, Hodgkinson suggests enterprises look at the Web 2.0 cloud computing model and bring that approach inside the firewall, in terms of ideas like light touch, self-provisioning, etc. Unfortunately, Mark didn’t have time explore this line of thought but I think an enterprise Web 2.0 inspired approach is the counter balance to the problems a tightly constrained IT system will create.

This will require a little bit of out of the box thinking (dare I say it, ‘innovation’). This doesn’t mean you need to rip out your ERP system and replace it with Facebook. If this is what you think, then you really are missing the point. Its actually about enhancing and augmenting complex transactional systems with lightweight solutions so that the productivity gap I describe above can be managed as an above the line item in terms of:

• Supporting conversational collaboration (to help with problem solving and dealing with the bumps rigid transactional systems create or have been designed to support);
• Enhancing information management, by adding social networking and social information discovery layers; and
• Leverage data and information from underlying transactional systems into these social computing layers.
  

If you happen to be a CEO reading this and your CIO gives a business case or plan based on constraint and control, make sure you ask them what’s their strategy for helping staff and customers deal with the rigid, narrow systems they are proposing. Maybe that great TCO isn’t so attractive after all?

Tags: AFR, Australian Financial Review, Mark Jones, Fiona Balfour, Steve Hodgkinson, IT, Budgets, Productivity, Web 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing

Popfly, some bugs, but a step in the right direction

Popfly is Microsoft's venture into the world of visual mashing applications, and is a Web-based offering like Teqlo and Yahoo! Pipes. Currently in invitation-only alpha release, I signed up to the waitlist for Popfly about a week ago and my invitation to join arrived today. In between time I had seen this review on a Wired blog, so I had already reduced my expectations a bit of what I might find with this alpha release.

What has lived up to expectations is the interface, and while I can see a fair bit of room for improvement I imagine as a Microsoft product this can only get better. However, I won't hide my ongoing disappointment of Web-based applications that require the latest browser (Internet Explorer or Firefox only) and yet another plugin (in this case Silverlight) to operate correctly.

Unfortunately the main problem I had initially was getting mashups I tried building to do something and then run. My browser froze a couple a times or appeared to do nothing. I had a little bit better luck with mashups built by others, and then when I tried some simple mashups using RSS feeds. But with limited debugging tools or information, its hard to know as a user what was going on (or why something wasn't working). I did at least manage to get an RSS feed converted into a table. Problems with the mashing interface also caused a few problems, such as blocks that created outside the middle of screen and become inaccessible - all I could do in that instance was start over from scratch again. BTW I eventually worked out that the RSS input is a bit picky doesn't accept anything other than a true RSS feed, so forget Atom or even Feedburner!

Now, having said all of that what I do find promising about Popfly is that it provides the ability to create new "blocks", which are written in javascript. Blocks are packages of programming that a user can string together to do something new, or as Popfly describe it:

"A block is a piece of middleware that is contained in a single JavaScript file (.js), which provides methods for user generated code to invoke. A block may also make use of resource files such as XAML files, images, etc. A block can act as a middleman between externally provisioned services such as web services, or it may simply be a library of useful functions, e.g. a function that calculates the area of a circle given a radius. A block can also act as a display surface: something which takes data from other blocks and displays it in a meaningful manner, and allows the user to interact with it."

This means it is relatively simple for people who can script to add new functionality or data sources into Popfly. Hopefully because of this we will see more than just mapping and photo mashups, such as more options for displaying mashed up results in graphs, dashboards and spreadsheet-like tables. From an enterprise perspective, that really is an exciting prospect.

Overall, while I still not convinced based on any of my experiences to date that these types of tools will ever be easy enough for anyone and everyone to use (also see the "Difficulty Curve"), Popfly is another step in the right direction towards that vision.

Technorati tags: Popfly, Microsoft, Silverlight, Teqlo, Yahoo! Pipes, Javascript, Difficulty Curve, Super Users, Mashups, RSS, Atom, Feedburner

Why "Super Users" are the new programmers

Like Rod Boothby, I've also been thinking about Jason Kolb's argument as to why users are not programmers - Kolb says:

"I think you would find that a very minimal percentage of people would count "macro writing" or any type of "programming" as part of their repetoire, and I think many of them will recoil at the thought of writing an entire application."

and Boothby responds:

"Jason's skepticism is reasonable, if you assume that customized applications require users to write procedural code. What if, however, they did not have to write code?"

I'd like to suggest, as a counterpoint to both positions, that the line between simple macro writing (or recording), "scripting" (particularly Web-based applications) and (for want of a better word) real programming is a lot smaller than it used to be. This is important because even if the tools are available to create drag and drop Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 applications, it doesn't mean that every user will want to or have the analytical skill to create their own applications. However, what these new tools will do is further shift the power to develop out of the IT department and further into the hands of advanced users.

In doing this "super users" will be able to create far more powerful and wider reaching applications that they have done in the past. For example, the clever spreadsheet "macro" that they shared with a few users on the network drive will suddenly be available to everyone on the company intranet as an enterprise tool.

But this will in turn create all sorts of risks. However, as we've seen with other social software applications it is the actual social nature of Web 2.0 applications that provides a safety net for avoiding problems and continuous improvement. So here's the catch for organisations that want the kind of drag and drop programming championed by Boothby - Enterprise 2.0 is a complete package - you still have to implement the "social" bit too to get the benefits of the technology. If not, you better restrict them to the IT department.

Technorati tags: Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Mashups, Jason Kolb, Rod Boothby

If they aren't strategic, why are they so essential?

I've been thinking about a piece by Mark Jones in the AFR last week (IBM notes changing trends in bid to boost Lotus, 14 September 2006, Australian Financial Review) where he comments "chief information officers rarely consider Notes, or competitive software such as Microsoft Office, to be a strategic purchase."

I don't disagree with the observation - but it troubles me greatly that CIO's don't think much about the strategic value, or strategic impacts, of their decisions about the basic messaging and office productivity tools they provide to staff. Could this be why so many experienced Lotus Notes users are so passionate about their tool or why so many businesses run on the smell of an Microsoft Excel spreadsheet?

So if they aren't strategic, why are they so essential? Take these work horses away from people, and many organisations would grind to a halt. And perhaps this is why so many people inside the firewall are getting excited about what Web 2.0 technologies will let them do?

BTW The context for the article was to report on IBM's attempts to rejuvenate Lotus Notes by positioning it as a social software-friendly platform - the AFR's article isn't available online (except to subscribers), but this ARNnet article from earlier in the year gives you an idea of what IBM are planning.

Tags: enterprise social software, Lotus Notes, IT strategy

Setting boundaries on Enterprise 2.0

Andrew McAfee wants to define Enterprise 2.0 as "the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers" but is concerned that others are expanding the concept to include a discussion of software development models and delivery methods.

Similarly we see some uncomfortable overlaps between the concepts of Web 2.0, Social Software and everything that has gone before. Something I've always done to help deal with this issue is to consider the difference between function (what is does) and form (how it does it). Unfortunately in doing this we have to accept a grey area to exist between the tools and technologies used, the way they are used and how we attempt to explain them using management theory. In other words people don't use technology in such a bounded fashion - think about the spreadsheet, a classic user-driven software tool, and the different ways it is put to use. Another point is that if we separate function and form, then organisations can use what ever tools and technologies they want to achieve Enterprise 2.0, not just (for example) an open source Blog written in PHP and running on Apache.

From a management point of view I think Enterprise 2.0 is a good place to start a conversation about Enteprise Social Software, but if we ignore the broader picture of Web 2.0 inside the enterprise then we may miss out on another story unfolding. The trick is learning to discuss them as both form and function so that we understand the opportunities and implications.

Incidentally part of this other story is something my CSC colleagues have previously identified and labelled "Extreme Data".

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, enterprise social software

Suits, cardigans... but what about the users?

The suits versus cardigans debate in the Australian IT industry continues - a couple of weeks ago in the Australian newspaper's IT section Campbell Arnott's CIO , "suit" Craig Garvin, proclaimed that "It is not about whether I am technical or not, it is about whether I have a good team."

Later Aussie retailer, Woolworths, weighs into the debate in Computerworld, where their CIO warns that "If the people are not right, everything will be difficult" and advises us to "Emphasize leadership management skills over technical skills. Great leaders first, great technicians second."

However, it has occured to me that maybe what both the cardigans and the suits should really be worried about is the users. Users have access to an ever growing range of user-driven software tools (from the humble spreadsheet to mobile devices and Web-based social software applications, such as wikis) but they may not always be aware of the information risks associated with them.

For example, as social software tools like wikis evolve up and integrate other functionality such as workflow and complex access control mechanisms, the risk of users introducing a costly design mistake will grow. Just consider the recent history of mistakes with spreadsheets.

What can we do about reducing this risk? IMHO the technicians, suits and users all need to be included in the IT management equation. That way the right information risk controls and know-how can be embedded across the organisation, rather than resting within the domain of the IT department.