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Gordon and I have written fewer blog posts in the past six weeks than usual. We’ve been testing and tuning Infovark for our version 1.0 release.
We’ve spent most of that time working with our installer. We want Infovark to work smoothly on Windows XP, Windows Vista and the upcoming Windows 7. We want Infovark to be compatible with recent versions of the Microsoft office suite. We also want to follow the Microsoft’s User Access Control (UAC) guidelines and other best practices.
Creating an installation package that meets these requirements will easily take 1/6 of our total development time for Infovark.
If you can eliminate the effort required to make an installation package, why wouldn't you?
Sadly, almost none of this work will matter to our customers. After all, who cares what the installation package does, as long as it does the job? From a customer perspective, any time we spend on installation issues is a waste. It doesn’t improve the product itself.
That, in a nutshell, explains why virtually every software program that can be delivered as a web application will be.
Most users love web applications because they can begin using the product right away. They don’t have to worry about system requirements. There’s nothing to install and usually very little to configure. The product is always up to date.
IT professionals love web applications because they run within a web browser’s “sandbox” environment. Since there’s nothing to install, and the interactions with the rest of the user’s computer are strictly limited, there’s little chance that a web application will cause support problems.
Programmers love web applications, too. As soon as they implement a new feature, they can give it to customers and start getting feedback. They can deploy bug fixes immediately. Their applications will run on virtually every platform with only minor tweaks.
Software companies love web applications because they save time and money. The faster they get their products into customer hands, the faster they can recoup their investment. Applications developed for the web have a broader reach, so they have more potential customers.
Taken together, web applications and Web 2.0 has compelling advantages over software built and delivered the traditional way. Read why I’m done making desktop applications to hear what an independent software vendor (ISV) has to say about the subject.
Knowing all of this has made our work on the Infovark installer even more painful. We’re putting a lot of effort into troubleshooting our install routine that we’d really rather spend on Infovark itself.
There’s only one thing that justifies this extra work and extra care: It’s the only way to solve the problem.
Our goal is to liberate the desktop. Infovark allows people to share valuable information that they’ve created with their other tools. To do this seamlessly and transparently, with as little manual effort as possible, we have to integrate with those business applications. We have to go where the information lives.
That doesn’t stop us from wishing we were building a web app, though.
Gordon described our upside-down take on Information Management priorities in his last post. We came to this topsy-turvy perspective after spending years implementing traditional business software and growing increasingly frustrated with recurring configuration, training and deployment issues. Infovark was born out of desire to try something different.
We decided to build Infovark from the ground up to serve the information needs of a typical knowledge worker. We consider the individual first, then the team, on up to the business level.
This led us to all sorts of interesting technical choices. But the hardest decision has had nothing to do with software at all. It’s a business decision, and one we’d been avoiding.
If we really want to put our money where our mouth is, if we really believe in a bottom-up, emergent approach to sharing and collaboration, Infovark needs to be sold differently than other enterprise solutions. After all, the traditional top-down focus on security, compliance, and cost is no accident. It’s a result of catering to the needs of the people that write the checks. If we really want to commit to making valuable, useful software for typical business users, we need to sell it to business users.
In my review of Keeping Found Things Found, I mentioned that I might want to check out some of the sources cited. Ambient Findability by Peter Morville was one of those books that appeared often in the footnotes, so I thought I’d check it out.
Ambient Findability is a brief and entertaining survey of search technologies and information architecture. In seven chapters, the author describes the current state of the art in fields of decision science, interaction design, and information architecture. He also speculates on where some of these technologies might take us in the future.
The central idea of the book is that we now live in an information-soaked environment. Advances in communications and information technology allow us to store and share far more information than in the past. As our tools and techniques for dealing with this flood of information improve, revolutionary new applications will emerge.
Most of these applications will enable near-instant access to volumes of information from wherever we are: Ambient Findability.
In the three decades since the invention of the personal computer, we’ve seen some amazing new products and services come into existence. Some of these are incremental improvements over existing technology. Shopping via the Internet is really just an improved version of shopping via mail-order catalog, for example. But some of these have led to completely new ways of doing things.
The best parts of Ambient Findability trace the evolution of these technologies to the current state of the art. You can read about early experiments, failed approaches, and the innovations that seem to have lasting power. This is the bulk of the book, so it’s definitely a worthy edition to your shelf if you’re interested in these topics.
The places where the author gets into trouble is where he tries to extrapolate from the current state of the art into the types of things we might see in the future. It’s these parts where Peter’s enthusiasm for the technologies lets him get carried away.
Sure, GPS is becoming a standard feature on our cell phones. And yes, it’s possible to implant GPS chips into our pets. And smart phones get smaller and more energy efficient every year. But I can’t imagine that I would want to go through surgery to embed a PDA-like device under my skin.
Then again, I can’t imagine getting a tattoo either, so maybe I’m just not cut out to be a cyborg.
One thing is for certain: the coming years will bring a lot of experimentation. We’ll slowly find out, through trial and error, what works and what doesn’t. It’ll take a while before we figure out the best ways to surf the information superhighway. (And maybe even longer to come up with sensible metaphors to describe the experience!)
Flights of fancy aside, Peter makes a great case that the Information Age is a technological revolution. It will profoundly change society, just like the Industrial Revolution did. And while the revolution thunders on, it’s anyone’s guess as to what the future will bring.
Unless you’re one of the lucky winners of the venture capital lottery, or happen to be independently wealthy, starting a new business is a difficult proposition.
It’s especially tricky for companies in the product business, because so many of their costs are front-loaded — they incur the charges long before they can recoup the money from customers.
Infovark is lucky, because as startup companies go, software companies are cheap to run. Computer software and hardware are relatively inexpensive these days, and you can work anywhere that there’s a decent Internet connection and few interruptions.
Assuming you don’t count the cost of labor, of course.
That’s the reason so many software start-ups are located near universities with good computer science programs. The biggest asset a software company can have is an endless supply of folks that will write code for pizza and beer.
Gordon and I can’t work for free, though. We’ve got mortgages and families and responsibilities and stuff. Which contributes to a problem I call startup schizophrenia.
We started Infovark with money raised from friends and family, but no matter how frugal we are that money won’t last forever. So, starting six months ago, Gordon and I started doing occasional side projects.
On one hand, it’s been a great thing for us, because it’s helped us preserve our cash during the downturn. It’s also kept us connected to the Enterprise Software community, the Enterprise Content Management space, and the larger arena I’ll call “corporate computing”.
We know that space well, and we know that organizations need the help of experienced consultants to keep their disparate software systems working together.
But that space, familiar as it it to us, is not really Infovark’s market. And while we firmly believe that something like Infovark would be useful to a lot of people in the business world, it’s not something that CIOs or IT directors would find very interesting. The folks that manage back-office corporate infrastructure have different concerns from those that work directly with customers or are out in the field.
So Gordon and I find ourselves switching mental models a lot.
Wearing our consulting hats, we’ll talk with companies about security, scalability, interoperability and then we’ll hold an Infovark conference call where we’ll talk about sharing, openness, and ease-of-use. It’s a different set of priorities, driven by different motivations.
It’s a strange disconnect. The cognitive dissonance gets to us sometimes.
While we were preparing for the beta release, we spent a lot of time dwelling on the subject of enterprise software. It’s what we know best. It pays the bills. And we’ll be more than happy to help folks with their ECM deployments or change management initiatives.
But over the coming months, I think we’ll talk less and less about corporate computing and more and more about personal productivity.
Our focus is changing now that the beta has been released. We can now get feedback from actual users that have tried Infovark. We’re hearing a lot about what features work and what things confuse people.
The folks at 37signals call it Getting Real. We had a theory about a personal information sharing application that was easy to install and use. Now we have to put it into practice. We’ll learn a lot about which of our crazy ideas work and which are just plain silly.
And as we do that, this blog will be less and less about the places we’ve been and more about the places we’re going.
In the meantime, enjoy our mental disorder.
The blogosphere moves quickly. You can find many excellent summaries of the events of the 2009 Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. But only now are more reflective posts emerging. What is the point of Enterprise 2.0? Can its benefits be measured?
Michael Krigsman started things by writing about the Kumbaya effect. The opportunities for better communication and collaboration afforded by Enterprise 2.0 technologies are interesting, but are they valuable?
Susan Scrupski followed up with some soul searching on the same subject. She makes the excellent point that E2.0 advocates’ fondness for dismantling the classic hierarchical structure of business is deeply threatening to senior management. And those are the same people that have to approve the use of these tools within the organization.
And just yesterday, Gil Yehuda lampooned E2.0 evangelists for getting absorbed in trivial debates while ignoring the big issue: Is there a need for these tools in the enterprise? Or do they just make us feel good? (Them’s fightin’ words, Gil!)
This has been the dominant, if unspoken, theme of the Enterprise 2.0 conference for the past few years. There are those who “get” Enterprise 2.0 and those that don’t. How do we get those that don’t get it to get it?
If I had to pick a starting point for Enterprise 2.0, I’d pick April 1999 and the publication of a provocative essay called The Cluetrain Manifesto. Its premise was that the rise of the Internet would change the nature of the marketplace. It predicted the decline of mass media and mass marketing. It asserted that companies would need to find new ways of interacting with their customers if they wanted to remain relevant — and profitable.
Many cyberutopians got the point right away. But it’s taken much longer for the rest of the business community to understand the implications of better communications and information sharing. It’s also taken some time to winnow the practical ideas from the more extravagant claims made by the manifesto.
Ten years after the publication of the Cluetrain Manifesto, we can see that the markets are changing, and that competitive pressure is forcing companies to interact with customers in new ways. Organizations now have corporate blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts. So far, so good.
But Enterprise 2.0 advocates go beyond the Cluetrain by positing that better communications and information sharing can also transform the internal operations of a business, not just the portions of it that interact with the outside world.
That’s a more difficult proposition. Internal operations don’t face the same competitive or social pressures that outward-facing portions of the business do. While there may be indirect links to productivity, effectiveness, and (ultimately) ROI, the case for E2.0 technology inside the company firewall is difficult to make.
So if you’re a line-of-business manager, you’ll naturally prioritize a project with measurable return higher than one without.
Which leaves most Enterprise 2.0 advocates simply arguing that these technologies will improve the working environment for the average Joe. It’s good for employee morale, or for talent recruitment and retention. And (whisper it quietly) senior leadership responds with, “Why should we care? We pay their salary. They do what we tell them to.”
So maybe we should consider Enterprise 2.0 a movement, a management style, or a vibe, instead of something intrinsic to the way business will be done in the future. Maybe we ought to treat it like the label “green company” or “family-friendly workplace.” A nice badge to wear when recruiting on college campuses. Something to make employees feel good, like sponsoring a softball team. Perhaps something worth a few remarks at the all-staff meeting.
If Enterprise 2.0 is to be something more than a few throw-away sentences in the annual report, perhaps we ought to look at things differently.
I think there’s a place for these Enterprise 2.0 tools within organizations, but I’m not sure they are organizational tools.
The primary benefits of increased knowledge sharing and communication are individual benefits: I am more productive with these tools. I can find the information I need. I am better connected to my peers and coworkers.
So maybe the right thing to do, if you believe in E2.0, is to engage directly with knowledge workers themselves. Maybe the business of Enterprise 2.0 is not about selling the CEO, CIO, or IT director on the merits of transparency, immediacy, and authenticity. Maybe it’s about winning the hearts and minds of business professionals with tools that make their work easier.
Maybe Enterprise 2.0 isn’t about the enterprise at all.