BizTwoZero

Social Learning In A Dialogic Way

David Terrar — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 08:27:42 GMT

Earlier this week I joined a discussion group improvising on a theme around Richard Sennett's book Together and his recent RSA talk. I understand the book explores the nature of cooperation, the evolution of cooperative rituals through history and the politics of the tribe versus the complexity of modern society. Haven't read it - it's now on the long list. The Everything Unplugged: Learning Conversation group meets in London every Wednesday at 10:00 at the RFH Level 5 to discuss wide ranging topics from creativity to the learning process. This week's discussion on Sennett was titled "In a Dialogic Way" echoing Miles Davis. I was intrigued on three counts:

I miss the kind of wide ranging conversations we used to have several years back at London's CreativeCoffee Club (which I founded with Toby Moores) or when the London Social Media Cafe/Tuttle Club was in its energetic heyday at the Coach and Horses or the ICA.
The topic of cooperation is vital to the the collaboration solutions I work with and I wanted to learn more about Sennett's take.
I don't often have philosophical discussions about dialectic argument versus the dialogic approach and I figured I could learn something.

I joined a group which included Tony Hall, Fred Garnett, David Jennings, Annie Weeks, Patrick Hadfield, Muhammad Khaleel Jaffer, Mark Narayn, Paul Wilson , and Ian McCleave. The discussion ebbed and flowed and broke in to groups with no formal pattern or organisation - that's the way they do it. Here's what I picked up:

As preparation I read Patrick Hadfield's post on the RSA talk, then went to read a recommended Guardian Article which I discovered had been removed for copyright reasons (how ironic), and should have watched this video from The RSA.
At the other end of our 3 tables I heard David J, Patrick and Annie complaining about the Wikipedia definition of Dialogic Learning being all over the place and David thought it could be condensed in to a paragraph - symptomatic of Wikipedia I'm afraid- a lot of good content, mixed with the less good and the strangely edited.
There was some serious discussion about how debating in schools leading in to the University structure trains our politicians, business people and journalists in to the adversarial, dialectic approach - it's there from Parliamentary question time to interviews on TV.
There was a general frustration that a more dialogic approach wasn't considered more regularly.
Paul suggested that the complication was that even in a small group our size things break down too easily and it would get worse if we invited that large, noisy group in a neighbouring RFH session to join in.
I suggested that it didn't need to be that way, and that the social tools, that we are all fans of using, subvert the old hierarchies to help organise in a different way - there are examples of effective non-hieararchical organisations that work in self organised teams, like WL Gore where a group like ours would evolve a natural leader (who you would spot because she/he had followers), but that only works where everyone understands the vision and a common purpose (so I squeezed in a mention for Simon Sinek and "Start With Why").
Patrick complained that Gore always comes up but there aren't enough other examples - I agreed, but said there are a few such as Semco in Brazil, and Fred chipped in with Mondragon.
I learned a new word - Rhizomatic! Apparently Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use the term "rhizome" and "rhizomatic" to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation. Cool!
I had to run away to another meeting at 11:45 just when the discussion got exciting.

This all triggered some great thinking about the learning process itself and how important it is to teach our kids about dialogue as well as dialectic, cooperation as well as competition. Our education system is in such need of a complete overhaul for the 21st Century Inormation Age, rather than the 19th Century Industrial Age for which it was originally designed. We need to break away from traditional thinking and hierarchical structures and embrace the network, in our physical interactions as well as on the web. I'm glad I dropped by for some serious provocation.

Photo courtesy Fred Garnett

Social Business

David Terrar — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 12:25:18 GMT

After some soul searching I've just started updating my various personal profiles around the web to say I'm a social business evangelist rather than saying enterprise 2.0. I've got close to this before. I wanted to explain why now. For me that terminology change is a big deal because I'm not 100% comfortable with "social business", but it's not me rather the market that decides. If we move the clock forwards 5 years I'm sure we'll be using different language again, and I believe the way the smart companies use social media and social tools in their businesses today will be as natural and essential to any organisation as a website, email, phones or mobiles (cell phones for my US friends, handys for the Germans - language is so crucial!). I actually prefer the term "amplified enterprise" because the terms "social business" (as used by the likes of Dachis, Altimeter Group and IBM) or "social enterprise" (as used by Salesforce) are already occupied by a very different idea. Go ask the average, non-technology oriented bushiness person in the street and see what they say. Actually my perspective on this topic has 4 dimensions:

The social term applied to business is already occupied by something else
Business has always been social, right back to trading around the tribal camp fire
Use of today's social networking and social media tools inside and outside business is vital
It's not about specific technology or a particular platform (a tough thing for a software guy to say!)

The Social term
If I type social business in to the Wikipedia search box, the relevant page says this:

"This article is about a business with a social objective. For organization designed around social tools, social media, and social networks, see Social media."

If you go to the excellent ZDNet online debate from a few weeks ago titled "Social enterprise: Real or fiction?" between Dion Hinchcliffe and Dennis Howlett, in one of the first exchanges Dennis says:

"The notion of a social enterprise is at best laughable and at worst ridiculous. Enterprises are artificial constructs designed with one purpose - the creation of wealth for the benefit of shareholders. The fact that such enterprises may employ people doesn't distract from the primary purpose. That's why we have hierarchies, rules, command and control. They serve to constrain people into behaving rationally and only for the benefit of the enterprise."

he goes on:

"The notion of a social enterprise is merely the latest in a long line of fashion-driven management constructs designed to make employees believe that the enterprise cares."

Pretty cynical, and even back in 2009 Dennis was saying "Enterprise 2.0: what a crock". But there is a confusion that comes from the social word and the fact that the term was first coined by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Prof. Muhammad Yunus and he was talking about businesses built around a social purpose or a cause. Social media marketing is hijacking an existing term to make it become something different. It's a shame, because the principles behind this new version of "social business" are actually vital for all business.

The shift to using the term goes back to 2009. I guess it was probably Dachis and Altimeter that started using it around then, and I particularly remember Stowe Boyd's September 2009 post "Social Business: Why The ‘Enterprise 2.0′ Moniker Is Wrong", followed on the same day by Euan Semple talking "Social Business". The term has steadily got more usage in the intervening time, and then when I arrived at last September's Cloudforce event at the Royal Festival Hall, Salesforce greeted me with a sign over the entrance that said "welcome to the Social Enterprise". Two weeks ago I was one of IBM and Collaboration Matters contributors to the debates on their stand within the Social Business Expo strand of the Unified Communications Expo at London, Olympia. That pushed me over the edge in to realising explaining enterprise 2.0 to people just wasn't sensible any more.

Business has always been social
The best session by far a year ago at the March 2011 Dachis Social Business Summit in London was from JP Rangaswami, now Chief Scientist at Salesforce. He started by raising concerns over the term "social business". Why do we need business to be social? If it isn't social, what is it? Anti-social? He suggested that we need to rediscover a social dimension we've lost, and worried that people his age (and my age) might be remembered as the generation that gave us Excel and management by spreadsheet. I'm delighted that he talked about the importance of The Cluetrain Manifesto helping us realize that marketing has moved from one directional broadcast to two way conversations. He talked about how work is changing. Business used to run with a financial system largely to do with product and customer and largely hierarchical, with planning based on historical snapshots predicting the future. But business is morphing in to a network of relationships and capabilities. Investment related to human capital and knowledge capital were the kind of projects that used to get cut because we couldn't quantify their value, but today relationships and capabilities MUST have metrics so we can justify these resources. He talked about the transition from the agricultural age, to the industrial age, to today's information age, or knowledge worker age, but he worried that we:

"Insist on taking the detritus of the industrial age along with us!"

He's right. Business has and always will be social. That's why the social business term is a bit suspect.

Use of today's social networking and social media tools
Way back in August/September 2005 when Dennis Howlett convinced me I should be writing a blog we talked about this stuff as "web 2.0" - the web goes interactive and becomes conversational instead of broadcast. When I started to use blogs, wikis, forums and instant messaging in an around companies, the way of differentiating the "business" use of the tools from the "consumer" oriented web 2.0 term came when Andrew McAfee defined then refined the "enterprise 2.0" term. Wikipedia still didn't like it and redirected to "enterprise social software". That E20 term worked for me, but it always needs explaining, which has to be counter-productive. However, to hell with what we call this stuff, it's actually really useful. IBM used forum technology back in 2003 over a 72 hour period to get 10s of thousands of their employees engaged giving them the opportunity to redefine the core IBM values - ValuesJam. Around about that time Euan Semple was using a social networking tool, blogs and wikis inside the BBC as one of the early case studies of how this can work. Twitter only really took off at the SXSW conference in 2007, but today every news channel, most TV programmes, and every radio station will tell you how to follow them on Twitter or which hashtag to use to join the conversation. It's only in the last few years that organisations like Salesforce have been integrating Twitter style micro-blogging (Chatter), social media monitoring (Radian6) and web content management (Site.com) in to the business process flow of the business software (as a Service) that they sell. Pretty soon everybody will be doing it. At this moment in time terms like Social CRM are hot property. The reality is that every business solutions provider needs to be thinking about how to provide or link to this functionality to keep up with their competition. People need help and advice on this, and the social business term is the best we've got to describe the issues at the moment.

It's not about specific technology
As much as it pains me to say it as a software guy - it's not about particular technologies or platforms. There are some platforms that relate to social business that are significant and need to be part of your strategy and tactics, like Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, but we need to remember there have been major casualties within the "social" world like MySpace - too big to fail is a dangerous idea. Something like Tumblr or Pinterest can come up and become a big deal in a relatively short space of time. You need to watch these trends, because your target market may well be hanging out in these places - if they are, then you need to be there too. To run your business day to day you might consider business solutions that already cater for the kinds of social collaboration we are talking about, or you might overlay your business systems with products like Yammer or Jive or Google Apps. You might build communities for your people, customers and partners using something like WordFrame or IBM Connections. Somebody asked me on Friday which product I thought would be the winner in the Social Business space - Connections, Jive, Lithium - I really don't know, and that's the wrong question. Every business is different. Every business has pain points and social tools can often help with those pain points. If they can help us break out of the cycle of living inside our email in-box and management by spreadsheet, that has to be a good thing. But the most important word in the phrase is business, not social. Start with the quantifiable business objectives first. Then you can think on the ingredients that make social tools work more effectively, and how you encourage people to use them in the first place - answer the question "what's in it for me?" for your staff, partners, customers who are going to be using these social tools. It's all about changing people's behaviour, to think differently and work smarter.

So I'm dropping enterprise 2.0 from my vocabulary and running with social business. That won't stop me triggering some debate and suggesting the amplified enterprise term might be better.

Update:

Luis Saurez just reminded me that he posted his "Social Business, Where Do You Stand?" a week ago on the 12th. I'd read that, and should have linked in his views, which also reference Sameer Patel's “Social Business Facts and Fiction”. Sameer recognizes that CIO's will consider social business "Mickey Mouse" until they can see it add to the bottom line (and hence my suggestion above that measurable business objectives come first). Luis is very definitely in the "social business is important" camp.

And in addition, this post triggered a great Sunday rant on ZDnet from my good friend Dennis Howlett, who I quote above. He says "Sunday rant: social business? I'm still not buying it". I understand where he is coming from, but I'm with Marc Benioff, who says Salesforce has been "reborn social", along with JP, Dion, Luis, Jeff Dachis et al who believe social business is on the edge of the mainstream and important for organizations in their business models going forward.

Complicated Social Business landscape 2010 diagram courtesy Dachis/Dion Hinchcliffe

The cultural divide on data protection - USA vs EU

David Terrar — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 12:35:55 GMT

We are several months past the 10 year anniversary of the September 11 (9/11) attacks, but one of the significant consequences of that event a decade ago highlights the cultural divide between the USA and Europe on data protection. Data privacy has been hitting the news recently because of Google's changes in their terms and condition. Frank Jennings of DMH Stallard, who chairs the Governace Board for the CIF Code of Practice on which I sit, has just published a good analysis of the proposed reforms to the EU's data protection laws, and that triggered me to visit the topic here. Data in terms of security, privacy and sovereignty is still the number 1 issue for companies who are first considering Cloud Computing. As a buyer, you need to carry out your due diligence for any software, platform or infrastructure as a service - you should be checking how and where the provider will be storing your data, and how YOU will comply with legislation like the Data Protection Act.

Here in the UK, if your systems handle personal information about individuals you have a number of legal obligations to protect that information under the Data Protection Act 1998. That UK law was enacted to fall in line with the European Directive of 1995 which required EU Member States to protect people's fundamental rights and freedoms. If you read Frank's analysis of the proposed reforms you'll see that the act has resulted in 27 different interpretations and too much red tape, hence the need for reform. The current act protects a persons right to privacy including how their personal data is processed. With a Cloud service you have to ask the question - where is my data? That becomes important when you check the Information Commissioner's website which tells you:

"You may transfer personal data to countries within the European Economic Area on the same basis as you may transfer it within the UK. However, you may only send it to a country or territory outside the European Economic Area if that country or territory ensures an adequate level of protection for the rights and freedoms of individuals in relation to processing personal data."

So in the EU we're all about regulation and compliance protecting the rights of the individual. In the USA things are very different. The attitude to data is more governed by market forces along with the heightened attention on security issues rising out of those attacks 10 years ago. Just six weeks after the attacks "The Patriot Act" was enacted, or to give its full title "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001". It dramatically reduced restrictions on the various US law enforcement agencies in their ability to search telephone, e-mail communications, medical, financial, and other records including foreign intelligence gathering within the United States. It expands the Secretary of the Treasury’s authority to regulate financial transactions, particularly those involving foreign individuals and entities and broadened the discretion of law enforcement and immigration authorities. Search warrants can be executed without immediately informing their targets. There has been plenty of debate on the topic, and some would say the law has done more damage than good to the reputation of the United States. There is worry in terms of civil liberties and whether the Act is really good for peace and national security. Sadly back last year some of the powers were extended to June 2015. But what actually happens in practice? A New York Magazine feature last year highlights that the act had been used 1,618 times investigating Drug offences, 122 times for fraud, but only 15 times for the terrorism that it was intended for. The result is that any data stored in the US can be handed over to the US government without so much as a court order or even notice to the owner. But what about US companies operating over here?

I know this is hot topic with John Patterson, CEO of Europe's most successful Cloud based CRM provider Really Simple Systems. He told me:

"There is already enough confusion over whether UK companies are complying with EC data laws by storing their data on servers in the USA, even with companies who say that they comply with "Safe Harbor", an unregulated and fairly meaningless cop-out. But does the Patriot Act make Safe Harbor totally redundant? Nobody knows for sure, but it is safe to assume that US authorities won't be shy in assuming that the Patriot Act overrules any EC law."

The Safe Harbor John mentions is a framework under which US companies can self-certify that they comply with the obligations under EU data protection regulations. The framework allows for the sharing of data between the EU and self-certified US companies under certain restrictions, such as the promise of reasonable data security and informing the EU of the request for access to the data in question.

John's fears have been corroborated by two major US corporations. Back in June 2011 at the Office 365 launch, Gordon Frazer, managing director of Microsoft UK, gave the first admission that data stored in their Cloud, regardless of where it is in the world, is not protected from the Patriot Act. In August of 2011 Google also confirmed to Germany's WirtschaftsWoche that their servers in Europe have no protection from it. That means that some UK and European Cloud companies might spread some FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) and get a short term advantage over their US competitors. I've already heard of one UK government project being shelved 3 months in to development on a well known US PaaS once this issue came to light.

This highlights the need for Cloud providers to be transparent about the supply chain that underpins their service. For my own part, we use Google Apps and we are happy to trust our documents and data to that provider and the potential risk of The Patriot Act, but not everyone will be that comfortable. As a buyer you need to go in with your eyes open and check how and where your data is stored, consider the data protection implications and decide your own position on The Patriot Act. This is a big topic that, up to now, hasn't got the attention it deserves.

A version of this article was first published on Fresh Business Thinking and then on Business Cloud News.

Photo reproduced from Blame It On The Voices.

Using the Cloud for personal productivity with Evernote

David Terrar — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 07:53:36 GMT

I've just made a significant switch in one of the main tools I use for my own personal productivity which highlights a key trend for the industry and all of us - the personal cloud. Whether it is for work or our personal lives we use desktop computers, laptops, mobile phones, media players and tablets and a lot of the time we need to get at the same stuff from each device. For some time we've been used to setting up our smart phones so we can sync and access the same email as on the computer or the web, and the early adopters and geeky types have been sharing photos and documents too. The personal cloud will make that easy and more pervasive for everyone.

Let me explain more with the key tool that I use for all my writing, note taking, project documentation and capturing of ideas. Since January 2005 I've been using what I believe is Microsoft's best and most undervalued product - OneNote. OneNote is a free form note taking application with a user interface that looks like the Windows equivalent of a cool Moleskin notebook. I can type, draw, insert pictures or make screen clippings and capture my thoughts in multiple notebooks. Each notebook is organised in to sections by horizontal tabs across the top, and individual pages are tabbed vertically down the side. Each page is date and time stamped as I create it - in the days of paper note taking (and some like Euan still do that - from his latest newsletter he uses a Moleskin Squared Cahier and a mechanical pencil) I always used to envy those people who used notebooks that gave them a chronological view, but it was more important to me to file loose leaf by topic. With OneNote I get both. OneNote has far superior editing functionality for things like layout and tables compared to Microsoft Word, and can do really clever things like optical character reading of scanned images. It's also a fantastic collaboration tool too. If you've set up a notebook on your network or the web to be shared by a group of users, they can all work together simultaneously in real time. OneNote shows you what each person is adding or changing as they type and, like a wiki, makes it easy for you to have one version with all the revision history rather than tracking the changes made to multiple versions of an emailed doc trapped in multiple inboxes - who's got the latest version? By the way, exactly that same simultaneous, real time collaboration functionality is now available to anyone using Google Docs.

What triggered me to look at alternatives was the need to use OneNote across multiple PCs and my iPad. When a product called MobileNoter became available on the iPad a while back, which synced to my OneNote notepads via wifi or the cloud, that triggered my first iPad 1 purchase back in in 2010. Microsoft have come out with their own OneNote version on the iPad now, but haven't yet bothered to create a Mac version. I needed to share OneNote across two laptops and the iPad (as well as using cloud as my backup), and you can do that by upgrading to OneNote 2010 (I started on 2003 then upgraded to 2007) and using shared cloud storage like Microsoft's Skydrive, which gives you 25Gb of space for free. By the way you could use alternatives like Dropbox, Box.net or Sugarsync. I plan to do a comparison of these services in an upcoming article. The cost of the upgrade and the work involved in set up made me look around and revisit a product I'd tried back in 2009 called Evernote.

Evernote is a free or premium web based note taking service which they say helps you "remember everything". I can capture notes, screen clippings or save any web page I like. I can snap photos (of white boards, flip charts, anything), save voice notes or video from my smart phone, android tablet or iPad. The key to Evernote's success is that it is available as a web app, a Windows Desktop client, a Mac client, a BlackBerry app, an Android app, an iPhone app and on iPad too. There is no fiddly set up and sharing the right folders in Skydrive - I simply install the app on the particular device and log in to my account. Everything syncs across all devices and the web without you needing to think about it. For offline use, the free service allows sync of up to 500 notes. If you go Premium for £31.99 a year that becomes unlimited and you get a big increase in the amount you can upload each month and more. You'll end up using Evernote as your repository for anything you need to remember for later.

The Windows and Mac client's user interface has the list and detailed view "look" of an email client. It's not as elegant as the Moleskin style OneNote, but it works. I can store notes in notebooks and stacks of notebooks. Each note is dated and time stamped and can even pick up the location where I'm creating it. Each note can be tagged. Tags are much more powerful than OneNote's tabbed sections. Now I can tag the same note to appear in any section or topic I like. Searching is incredibly fast and starts as I type. Evernote does the OCR thing on scanned images reading text or even hand writing, but only for searching of that text, rather than the ability to copy it like in OneNote. I can also email content in to Evernote and send from Twitter - great for forwarding an email with attached documents that's the starting point for a new project. Notebooks can be shared with another user or made public. Each note has an individual URL which you can use for sharing (and the other person doesn't need to have an Evernote account). That's a particularly cool feature for connecting Evernote to other services. I use Remember The Milk for personal task management. RTM allows me to add a relevant URL to a task. Now I can drop in an Evernote URL and connect alll of the relevant content and notes for that task or project directly from RTM.

In terms of actual writing, the note text editor isn't anywhere near as powerful as OneNote, but I can choose font, highlight, indent, use bullet points, numbered lists, todos and create tables. It's got what I need for more than 95% of the time, so I'll live with those deficiencies and hope for future enhancements. That's more than balanced by the extra flexibility, functions and access I get. Evernote has a large, growing and loyal user base, so the product is definitely evolving and the future looks solid. There is a knowledge base, good documentation, how to videos, forums, and premium users get online chat support and faster answers through the online ticket system. Conversion from OneNote is a breeze, provided you are on OneNote 2007 - there is a wizard which allows you to select which notebook and which sections to convert, and notes just get copied in to an Evernote notebook of the same name with the section converted to a tag and the creation date retained. I still have my chronological view, but I can add as many new tags as I want to make classification as easy or as complex as I need.

I've only been using Evernote for two weeks but I think it's awesome! This is the way the personal cloud needs to work. I can store all of my writing, ideas, project documentation, anything and get to it securely in a choice of ways from whichever device I'm using or anywhere I can get web access through a browser. When I need to work offline on the PC or the iPad I can, and everything just syncs the next time I'm connected without me having to think about it. Apple's iCloud covers the same concept across the Apple family of devices and iTunes, and it's going to be big! You only have to look at the $1 billion investment Apple have made in their iDataCenter in Maiden, North Carolina. to see how serious they are about personal cloud. It covers 500,000 square feet and a second one is planned alongside! Evernote and iCloud show the way forward, but as well as access the vital component that so many software authors (coming out of the old world of conventional IT) don't pay enough attention to is the user experience of set up. For the consumer or general business user, rather than the early adopter and geek, you need to to be able to sign up, download and just start using the service with all that technical stuff hidden underneath!

If you're using Evernote, OneNote or some other personal cloud product, I'd love to hear from you.

A version of this article was first published on Fresh Business Thinking.

Social Business - use cases and best practice are pants!

David Terrar — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 06:15:50 GMT

At the IBM Collaboration Diner at the Social Business Expo we had a long conversation with my old friend Luis Suarez about use cases and best practice - he doesn't believe in them! Luis was there to do Wednesday's keynote address on the topic he is famous for - Thinking Outside the Inbox - There is no We in email. I was there as one of the invited thought leaders contributing to the cafe style debates IBM and Collaobration Matters had organised inside a 1940s American Diner styled after Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks. One of my customers, Janet Parkinson of The Smart Work Company, was there joining in the discussion with Luis, triggered by our belief that there aren't enough good case studies of businesses using social tools inside their organisations to show how Social Business can work. I commented that part of the reason for that is the difficulty of getting enterprises to share something that can be a competitive advantage, but Luis immediately declared that use cases are useless!

His view is that every business is different, every business is unique. Having a use case for some other firm doesn't really help much. He wants to go in to each company and find out about their specific ways of working. What is it that adds value? What do they really do? Then he'll ask about their issues and pain points, and see where social tools could be deployed to address those specific problems. Use cases deal with somebody elses problems, not theirs. He has a point, and I agree whole heartedly with starting with a deep dive in to what the business is all about, understanding their real processes. Luis added:

"Use cases and best practices seem to accelerate that process without doing much work along the way, and, eventually, in the long term, they are a huge time waster, because the business may eventually fail if the homework that needed to be done didn't happen and if the core needs of the business were not addressed we go back to square one, with all of that time, energy and effort gone by and still stuck on step #1. That's the issue with use cases and best practices that I have, that they just don't allow you to move on further along with your own ideas, mindset, experimentation, play and research whether they could work out for you or not."

I had guessed he would have the same kind of views about best practices. On questioning, he doesn't see the value in a generic, ones size fits all approach - I get that, but we began to disagree over the usefulness of a toolkit or a methodology of approach that will help improve the chances of success of getting the tools adopted inside the enterprise. We came down to specifics on blogging. I was wondering whether he believed, like me, that every business needs a blog and you need to look at how you make that blog work successfully for you. He thinks bogging is vital to get yor message across, either internally, like with IBM's new CEO Ginni Rommetty, or externally to connect with your customers. However, blogging isn't for everybody, so you need to find the right person to do it. Luis went on:

"Blogging is about sharing a passion, your ideas, your interests, your opinions, your thoughts on particular things that are happening around you and your passion, and no matter what methodology you may be using if you lack that personal, passionate view on blogging, you are just basically publishing on a specific platform 'without a heart'."

I have a softer view on some of this than Luis. A methodology, and a toolkit of different approaches and techniques to help behavioural change can definitely improve your chances of success. Case studies have a value in starting the conversation with the organisation that needs help, but I completely agree that the conversation needs to be around the unique things that the business is all about. However, Luis is making an important point that, used unwisely, use cases and best practices are pants!

The Cloud needs some standards (or a Code of Practice)

David Terrar — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 15:12:34 GMT

One of the big issues for a buyer today considering Cloud Computing is how do you choose a good Cloud provider from a bad one? Who do you trust? Maybe the Cloud Topic needs some standards? Well actually there are so many standards bodies and vendor groups that the picture is confused - something that I try to demystify with my company and with the various cloud groups that I'm involved with. If you type "cloud standards" in to Google, you'll find an alphabet soup of acronyms, and even the first entry in the list - a "Wiki site for Cloud Standards Coordination" - initially looks promising, but doesn't yet mention some of the key organizations that have something worthwhile to contribute to this topic.

When you do some research you find the International Organization for Standardization (their ISO 27001 on IT security is relevant for the data centre) or the IBM backed Open Cloud Manifesto or The Open Data Center Alliance, and many others, but most of their output seems to be about technical standards for set up, programming and interoperability of services - good for the industry as a whole, but not necessarily relevant to the average business trying to decide on a cloud alternative for email management or accounting or project management. Another issue is that some of these standards have a high barrier to entry for the small software provider. If it's going to cost tens of thousands of pounds (or more) to get a product ISO (or whatever) certified, that guarantees that only the big players will be able to afford it. The smaller, more innovative software developers might have great products, and deploy them on a safe and secure infrastructure making use of the benefits of Cloud architecture, but they'll be precluded from the shortlist because they don't have the accepted "quality mark". We need something that's focussed on helping the buyer rather than the developer, and which helps the innovative entrepreneur at the S end of SME just as much as helping one of the Enterprise level IT players.

That's where the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) comes in - an organization that Business Two Zero and D2C wholeheartedly supports (disclosure - actually I'm on their governance board - see below). CIF, a not for profit organization, was established in 2009 to provide transparency for the industry through certification to a Code of Practice for credible online Cloud Service Providers. The emphasis within the code is on best practice in the approach to service provision, rather than technical standards of programming. The code covers areas like contract terms, Service Level Agreements, data protection, data location, or transparency of the cloud service supply chain. These are the practical things that a buyer needs to know about the service they are signing up for. Organizations that apply for and conform to the Code of Practice get a "CIF Certified" quality mark. The process itself allows for a self-certification approach, although a full external audit can also be done if you want to pay for that. Self-certification brings the cost down to an affordable level (starts at £200 a year) for the smaller Cloud players, but it's still properly policed by an independent organisation.

Members of the Cloud Industry Forum include Microsoft, Dell, VMware, Rackspace, Fasthosts, Claranet, Ingram Micro, Interxion, Memset, Nominet, Star, Mamut, FrontRange, Unit 4 (Agresso, FinancialForce), UKFast, Webroot, and is supported by vendor organizations like Intellect, EuroCloud UK, the British Application Software Developers Association and the UK Cloud Alliance. The Code of Practice was agreed in 2011, and the first wave of Cloud companies have just gone through the accreditation process. One of those is NexusAB, a 10 person SaaS company - they provide integrated quality assurance and technical inspection services for sub-surface drilling and completion departments. They work with oil field asset data, the most precious data that an oil company has. Their customers trust that precious data to the cloud and to a small company like NexusAB, but if you speak to them you'll find that having CIF certification was instrumental in providing the level of comfort required to win their recent big deal with BP. That is exactly what the CIF Code of Practice is all about. Go here if you want to find out more. And please tell me if you think there is anything similar that companies should be considering.

Disclosure: I am on the Governance Board for the Code of Practice of the Cloud Industry Forum, a not for profit organisation, and I regularly speak on their behalf. In addition I chair Intellect's Software as a Service Group, and I am a Director of EuroCloud UK.

A version of this article was first published on Fresh Business Thinking.

Social Business at IBM's Hopper Collaboration Diner

David Terrar — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 10:45:29 GMT

This week I was invited by IBM (and Ogilvy PR) to join in the collaboration debates at the Social Business Expo, a new strand of the Unified Communications Expo at Olympia . This is not an event I would normally attend, covering everything from phone handsets through VoIP to tele conferencing, but I'm sure the social business component of ths show will get even bigger next year. The attraction was to be part of what IBM is doing, which moves a long way from your typical steel, white and blue corporate show stand. Their event was themed around recreating the late night downtown diner scene depicted in Edward Hopper's famous Nighthawks painting from the 40s. It represents loneliness and alienation. IBM are the sponsor, but their partner Collaboration Matters came up with the concept, created and hosted the stand. The front of the cafe was peopled with actors who remained in character throughout both days, and who alternated between the original solitary view, and using smart phones, iPads and Macs to collaborate and connect with people. Each character had their own Twitter identity so we could interact and break through the social isolation.

The whole cafe scene was a backdrop for a series of debate sessions with thought leaders, social business consultants, customers, and anyone who wanted to drop by for coffee or a Krispy Kreme donut. Very tempting! The debate questions were all triggerd by the 95 Theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto - theses 1 says "all markets are conversations" and is the basis for where all business and marketing sits today! This is a visionary book (you can read online for free or buy on Amazon) by Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Rick Levine which is as valid today as it was in 1999 when it was written. During one of the sessions I commented that it was written during the dot-com bubble, but it took until September (actually August) 2005 until we had Dell Hell and Jeff Jarvis triggering the first blog PR disaster, and even today so many businesses don't get how much social media has changed business and marketing - and Chris, Doc, David and Rick realised we were all on the Cluetrain 13 years ago!

The debates covered a wide range of topics. They covered the #McDStories Twitter campaign - some bright marketing spark does no research, thinks it would be a great idea to have a hashtag to collect people's experiences of eating at McDonald and the idea backfires spectacularly as it opens the floodgates to a series of horror stories. But the opposite can happen. Alex Homsi told us about PF Changs rewarding a loyal customer and getting some great, postive Twitter PR. We talked about collaboration, death by email, use of social media tools inside the business - generally called social business - barriers to adoption, knowledge management and connecting with customers and partners. IBM's new CEO Ginni Rommetty came up as an example of someone at the top who has embraced social tools and is really getting the message out to the troops effectively and making a difference. We talked about how these tools challenge the traditional hierarchy of the management structure. We mentioned other more democratic management structures that have worked like at Semco in Brazil, or WL Gore where they have a completely flat structure and self organise in to teams, from which a leader emerges. The social tools overlay a network over the traditional hierarchy, what my friend Jon Husband calls the wirearchy. Organisations need to be ready for the change, but need to recognise it's change for good provided they have the right policy and procedures in place. Every business needs to recognise that "social" needs to be part of their model, or they won't survive in this new information age.

At one stage they tried to demo some IBM product - the Connections stuff - great software, but it doesn't really present well on relatively small monitors up high. At another stage the wifi didn't work as they had published the log in details on the outside of the stand which meant delegates were piling in to the stand wifi instead of the show wifi, and so it fell over - ironic at a Unified Communications Expo! However, these are minor quibbles over what was an excellent concept that was executed extremely well.

Some of the friends and people I hooked up with were @elsua @JanetParkinson @RapidBI @RoovenP @decisionhacker @josephdarmi @alpeshdoshi @mikeeng1and @ahomsi @aashenden @StuartMcIntyre @joningham @oferguetta @mattalder @huwedwards @Chestec @Rose_at_O @IBMSocialBizUK - apologies if I forgot you or couldn't find your Twitter ID.

The IBM stand was completely different to anything else at the show. In and around the talk, the Ogilvy, Collaboration Matters and IBM guys were creating this series of six videos which went up on YouTube a few days ago - that's the power of this new publishing world. The converstaions were being live tweeted and displayed on monitors around the stand or for anyone to follow at hashtag #cbdiner. The many hundreds of tweets under that tag will be collected together on a Storify they plan to get out out soon. My photos are up on Flickr. The posts or the video can be out there same day and they can trigger more conversations with the community and the market. This is Social Business.

Back Blogging (again) and Fresh Business Thinking

David Terrar — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 00:27:36 GMT

I just want warn the Internet and social media addicts everywhere that I will be back blogging again on a more regular basis from today. I've left a big gap since my last post although I've carried on tweeting and RTing snippets and the good stuff - the Twitter community that I follow still gives me the best, filtered access to quality content and ideas from out there. I've been addicted to Twitter since 14 February 2007 - It seems appropriate that our 5 year love affair started on Valentine's Day!

I haven't been completely absent from publishing blogs as Cloud Advocates started a regular email newsletter called Cloud means Business over on Fresh Business Thinking. The newsletter goes out to over 70,000 subscribers, and each post goes up on the FBT site too. I write 2 of the 4 posts each month, and we are just about to publish the 8th edition. I'll repost some or all of those 16 articles here in the coming weeks, and I'll add links in a side column soon. As well as that I have half a dozen draft posts languishing in Evernote ready to be completed. Thank heavens it isn't a blank page....

The thing that finally spurred me back to action was contributing to the cafe discussion sessions on IBM's stand at the Social Business Expo at Olympia yesterday and today. A full post to follow, but the starting point for each collaboration debate Q&A session, with customers and thought leaders, was the Cluetrain Manifesto. The moderators would ask questions, each relating back to one of the 95 theses. I first wrote about Cluetrain back in 2005 at the start of my blogging journey, but the book was published in 1999. It's amazing how far ahead of its time it was, and every word is just as valid now 13 years later!

I'm not going to make any rash claims about how often I'll be posting. I marvel at Adrian Pearson and his commitment to post every day coming in to 2012. However, I'll try and get in to a regular rhythm. I really hope you join in the conversation, tell me what you think and tell me what I should be writing about.

Twinfield show their vision of the future of accounting

David Terrar — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 06:08:52 GMT

Two weeks ago I was part of a modest International stream as part of Twinfield's very impressive National Accountancy Day in The Netherlands. They have been running this Annual event for 6 years and it has grown from 30 attendees back in 2005 to 500 last year, and well over 600 attendees this time, along with an exhibition area where around 40 companies showed their Twinfield connected applications and services. There was a buzz of excitement, and a feelgood vibe you might expect from a Salesforce event, but not necessarily with a collection of mostly accountants as the audience.

The event was significant, both because of the size and the fact that this was the first event following Wolters Kluwer's takeover of Twinfield earlier this year. It gave me a chance to gauge the progress they've made and judge how well Twinfield will thrive under their new parent's regime. The initial indications are very positive.

The International stream was attended by UK customers like Goodman Jones, CWM, and Wingrave Yeats. Twinfield's Irish partner presented their Ezora reporting system. P2D explained their document scanning solution that is now live linking purchase invoice scans and automating data input for 2 UK practices. I was over there talking about Newbase, an ERP solution integrated with Twinfield, as well as about building websites and web communities, but the most interesting session for me was from the CCH team. They've got a lot further planning integration of their practice applications with Twinfield than I expected.

CCH, the most prominent Wolters Kluwer company in the UK sent 3 people - Wendy Rowe, Head of Product Management, Nick Longden, Head of Sales and Paul Brace, who looks after accounts and audit software. I didn't check how many local WK employees attended, but they had some of their senior guys from Europe. Within the CCH practice management family of products, Central is the hub that connects things together. Twinfield will have single sign on with Central and a home page inside for fast access to summary data. Creation of users and employees will synchronise between the two systems. Clients will be created in Central and transferred in to Twinfield. The Chart of Accounts will synchronise, and summary transactions from Twinfield will be pulled in to Accounts Production. Adjustments from Accounts Production will be transferred back to Twinfield. You'll be able to drill down from CCH back into the Twinfield transactional data. Of course you'll need a connection from your desktop PC or server out to the Internet to make this happen. All of this integration the CCH team presented is at the design stage, with development expected to start in January for delivery before the end of Q1 2012. I asked about CCH's own plans for the cloud. Their UK products are all on premise today, with no published plans to go cloud but they all said how excited they were by the opportunities to go online with Twinfield. I know they have already introduced Twinfield to some of their largest UK customers, and they are putting sales plans and incentives in place. All of this took me a little by surprise. It was what I hoped for, but not what I expected. Maybe my preconceptions of how conservative CCH would be are unfounded. It bodes well for Twinfield's future in the UK and inside Wolters Kluwer Internationally.

Although the main conference was almost all in Dutch, you got a flavour of Andre Kwakernaat's vision (Andre is Twinfield's co-founder, CTO and driving force) from the "Tron" style video he played to the audience. I'm delighted that they have rush released a UK version which you can see below. Take a look at where Andre expects accounting to be using his time machine to jump forward to 2014.

Early last week I had a session with Andre on the Twinfield product roadmap. He is taking an aggressive but very open approach inside Wolters Kluwer and encouraging the various parts of the organisation to get involved supplying "sprint" development teams to add the functionality they need for their division or territory. He is re-architecting Twinfied with an activity timeline, that he calls the bus. Applications from the WK family, or external apps like Twitter or Facebook, will be able to plug in and exchange data for that point in the business process. It's an approach that will help integration beyond the current comprehensive web service API and allow Twinfield to jump ahead of their regular competitors with social and collaboration tools plugged in to the process timeline.

Twinfield had a great proposition before the Wolters Kluwer takeover, but these plans, along with the extra resources of a 3.5 Bn Euro company behind them, make the case even stronger.

Tweet stream from the event

My photos from the event

Disclosure: My company D2C has been Twinfield's Partner in the UK since 2005.

Amazon's Kindle Fire diverges the Tablet market

David Terrar — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:20:38 GMT

In his book The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin called divergence the driving force that creates a new species. Last week Amazon enhanced their Kindle range of e-readers, but also applied some divergence to the tablet market by extending in to a new sub-category of mobile tablet devices with the Kindle Fire. I think it's going to be huge and spell a lot of trouble for Android tablets from the likes of Motorola, HTC and Samsung, and probably BlackBerry's PlayBook too. Up to now these "me too" devices haven't put much of a dent in the Apple iPad's market leading dominance. This particular step by Amazon is a flanking move on Apple, but in itself it won't harm iPad sales much. Amazon is going to take a very strong position at the bottom end of the tablet market, and whatever their next step is things are getting interesting. Let me explain a little.

Al and Laura Ries applied Darwin to marketing to explain how product categories diverge with their excellent 2004 book The Origin of Brands. In a follow on article for AdAge, Al wrote:

"In Darwin's words, "nature favors the extremes." The "sweet spot" of a market is an illusion that soon gives way to multiple sweet spots. So which spot do you want your brand to occupy?"

Up to Amazon's move none of the challengers to Apple's iPad seem to have worked out what spot they want to occupy. Sony and Samsung might have the best looking tablet products in terms of hardware and presentation, but all of these iPad wannabe's seem to be quoting features and technical specifications rather than saying what their products actually do for you. Their only attempt at differentiation appears to be "we do Flash". To add to their dilemma, they all seem to have come in at, or close to, the same price point as the "premium" iPad range. Apple have used the strength of their own retail distribution network combined with the muscle of their sourcing and procurement approach to create a superb product at a great price. Then they came out with the new improved iPad 2 at the same time most of the competitors were getting their first tablet attempt to market. If you are going to compete with Apple, you need to pick where to fight.

I watched the hour long announcement of the new Kindles by Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, chairman and CEO, and was struck by how much he was trying to emulate Steve Jobs and Apple. His whole approach, from the style of the slides, to the clothes he wore, to the way he introduced and demonstrated the new Kindles on stage was straight out of Steve's Apple play book. The key thing that Apple does is focus on and show what their devices can do for you, with hardly any mention of technical specifications. Jeff introduced 3 new Kindle e-readers and then the Kindle Fire. He got through the whole presentation without even mentioning Android, the operating system that the Fire runs on. He did explain how Kindle Fire will make use of the whole Amazon ecosystem - Kindle book store, MP3 store, Instant Video, Prime, Appstore and Web Services. All of your content is backed up in their cloud, and they have even created their own browser, called Silk, powered by Amazon Web Services. The browser deploys a split architecture with some functions running on the mobile device and others using the power of the cloud. Each time you load a web page, Silk makes a dynamic decision about what runs locally and what will execute remotely - they say it will make browsing faster, and get faster as it learns your browsing habits. It is completely logical that the company to really challenge Apple in the tablet market is one that combines a global distribution channel, leading edge technology, and an existing ecosystem for content. Jeff's not as charismatic a presenter as Steve Jobs, and one of the big differences was the audience. An Apple announcement would have plenty of fans there to applaud and whoop in the right places. The Amazon audience of journalists and analysts felt quite flat, even when he announced the incredibly low prices there was no reaction.

Kindle Fire is a 7 inch, WiFi only tablet with a great looking colour touch screen, weighing only 14.6 ounces and with around 8 hours of battery life. It doesn't have a camera or a microphone or slots for expandable storage. It's designed for you to consume books, full colour magazines, movies (with access to 100,000 movies in the US), music (with access to 17,000,000 songs from the store), documents that are sent to you, as well as giving you the ability to do your email, browse the web, and use apps from the Amazon store - all for just $199 PLUS all your content is backed up in the Cloud for free. Jeff calls this premium products at non-premium prices. Pricing for the UK has yet to be announced, but on past Kindle experience I would guess it will be in the range £175-190. At under half the price of an entry level iPad this will create a lot of new demand and effectively starts a low cost, no frills tablet sub-category. There is still a place for e-readers with paper style E ink screens that allow you to read in bright sunlight outside. Some people who might have spent around £100 on an e-reader will sacrifice that ability, live with the glare of a colour screen and spend a little more to move up to a Kindle Fire to do more than just books.

The announcement also covered a new low cost, WiFi only Kindle at $79 and two touch screen versions - all without the keyboard of the Kindle 3 (still on sale but now renamed Kindle Keyboard). Only the low cost version is available for pre-order in the UK so far, and priced at £89. The low US price is supported by adverts, but in the UK the entry level Kindle is ad free, and so costs a little more. The pricing makes these Kindle products very significant for the e-book market, but they were overshadowed by the Fire.

It's difficult to believe that the Apple iPad only shipped back in April 2010 and created a whole "post PC" revolution. Apple sold 300,000 units on the first day of pre-orders. Amazon took 90,000 orders for Kindle Fire on day one last week (and remember these numbers are real sales to consumers and not shipments to distributors). Not quite as dramatic as iPad's first day, but still an indication of how strongly this product is going to sell. I can't see the Fire impacting the iPad, but I do think it will steal market share form the lower cost Android based devices and the likes of the smaller Galaxy Tab or BlackBerry's Playbook. Amazon can afford to build a very strong bridgehead at one end of the tablet market before they think of the next step, leaving Apple to consolidate their position at the other. If you take the tablet market as a whole, it's just become a two horse race, but in reality those two horses are running on different tracks.

"Creativity is an operational idea."

David Terrar — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 07:58:53 GMT

Some of you may know that Sir Ken Robinson is a hero of mine. His 2006 TED talk on education, that I've blogged about before, is inspirational. Track down and read his book Out of Our Minds. Until doing some research on another topic I had missed completely this October 2009 Toronto, Canada event at which he spoke - Artscape's third Creative Places + Spaces: The Collaborative City conference.

Sir Ken talks about collaboration in the 21st century and creativity as an operational idea, which you can plan for and make happen systematically.

Here are some quotes from his talk:

"Creativity is an operational idea. You can plan for it and make it happen systematically"

"We need to make innovation a habit"

"Politician's say the trouble is you can't define creativity, and I say the trouble is YOU can't! That's the problem"

"We need to teach creativity in education just like numeracy and literacy"

"It's a key operating principle for the next phase of development in the 21st century"

"Creativity Is a step on from imagination"

"it's applied imagination"

"Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value"

"It's a process, not an event"

"Creativity is a real process. Like a strand of DNA where critical judgment wraps itself around the process of hypothesising - you're constantly testing out whether this is a good idea or not."

We need more of this thinking applied inside every one of our organizations.

Demystifying the Cloud

David Terrar — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 08:04:18 GMT

How do you spread the word about the benefits of Cloud Computing beyond technology enthusiasts, web "savvy" geeks and industry insiders to the general business woman and man "in the street"? The likes of Microsoft and Salesforce are certainly trying to do that with some of their advertising campaigns, but I believe they are missing the target by a mile. A group of us have got together to try and amplify our voices with an initiative called Cloud Advocates. Let me explain with a bit of an advert, tell you about our first event and our tie up with Freshbusinessthinking.com.

We are at the stage where Cloud Computing, from web based applications to on demand infrastructure, is just moving from being the next big trend to a mainstream technology choice. There are a plethora of events and announcements around the topic, and just to complicate things every technology provider is redefining whatever offering they've got as a Cloud solution. In the middle of all this noise we need some clarity on the topic. That is why Richard Messik and I decided to pool some of our marketing energy and form Cloud Advocates, an association of consultants who aim to demystify the Cloud and provide pragmatic help and advice for businesses, organizations and accounting practices . I'm already involved in a number of vendor organizations promoting the Cloud, but this initiative is specifically aimed at end users and buyers. Richard was one of the pioneers of Cloud solutions creating Easycounting, an online accounting system from back in the 90s, was a partner in practice at Vantis plc, though he now runs his own consultancy and practice - RFM Associates. We've been joined by Adrian Pearson, another blogging accountant in practice turned business advisor, who is soon launching a Cloud solution of his own. We each favour different online accounting solutions, but that adds to the message that we want Cloud Advocates to be as vendor agnostic as possible.

We aim to make our new Cloud Advocates website, CloudAdvocates.com, a destination for all things Cloud. It aggregates our three blogs (so BTZ article are published there as well as here) and we will be working together to add guides, highlight the best of the available Cloud resources and news sites from around the web. We will be resurrecting Dennis Howlett's database of SaaS apps and extending it. The site shows our Cloud Manifesto, which isn't just another definition of Cloud, but our roadmap for how you put this technology in to practice. Most of the Cloud providers and experts speak too much jargon, technical issues and always seem to focus on potential negatives. Cloud Advocates will explain the benefits in plain English and highlight the practical steps for a business or practice to make use of the best cloud applications and tools.

As well as launching the website, we've done two other things:

Set up our first Cloud Advocates event called "Cloud Accounting for the 21st Century", hosted in London by our friends at Mimecast. As well as debunking the myths of Cloud Computing, we're covering accounting, CRM, email, hosted desktop and the other areas a practice or business will be interested in taking to the Cloud.
We are pleased to announce that we are producing a monthly newsletter for Fresh Business Thinking. The newsletter, titled Cloud means Business, is being distributed to over 70,000 subscribers of Freshbusinessthinking.com, the business resource aimed at entrepreneurs, start ups and medium sized businesses which also runs the annual business conference, Freshbusinessthinking Live! They are owned by All About Brands plc, the full service marketing company that includes subsidiaries like Brand Faith, Brandsmiths, Ideal Interface. Influential Thinking and The Willard Group. You can see our first August edition here.

We're hoping that collaborating this way we'll be able to amplify the key message. If you've got suggestions of other things we might do, then we'd love to hear from you.

Why WordPress ISN'T A Good Choice For Your Website

David Terrar — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 06:19:13 GMT

Last month I did a guest article for Jemima Gibbons monthly newsletter on Freshbusinessthinking.com about Social Media Monitoring and Analytics. In that same newsletter Nikki Pilkington argued why WordPress is a good choice for your website. I decided I wanted to argue, passionately, the opposite, and my article has just been published there this month. Here is the BTZ version. First I need to disclose that I'm a stakeholder in a particular CMS/Platform developer (author of WordFrame and PageTypes). However, I'll try and explain my case as objectively as possible.

The first thing to say is that Nikki's article starts with a vital, core truth - whether your website is created by you, some experts in your team, website developers you've hired or an external agency, it needs a content management system (CMS) at its heart. You need to be in control of the content without needing technical expertise. You shouldn't be paying an agency or a developer every time you want to change a word, add a page, or move a menu option. But is WordPress the right CMS for your website?

It's a blogging tool, not a CMS
WordPress is great for blogging - I used it for my own blog for a couple of years, but it wasn't designed as a CMS platform. It can edit blog posts and static pages, but it has to be "bent" in to being a CMS, either by someone developing code, or by deploying a plug-in or framework add-on that changes the administration back end in to a CMS. Even then it may not be that user friendly. It's easier and more flexible to work with a product that was designed from scratch as a website CMS with usability for non-technical people as part of the design criteria.

There are lots of widgets and plug-ins
There is a huge library of add-ons and widgets for WordPress, but the quality of the code and the support available for them is a big variable. Some are great, but if the particular widget you need is developed by an individual programmer in the Ukraine or Hong Kong working in their spare time, getting support when you need it or when something goes wrong might be very tricky, and what about the documentation? Much of the time there isn't any.

Software updates can be problematic
WordPress software updates can vary in terms of upgrade complexity and time. You are also heavily dependent on the particular set of widgets and plug-ins you need for your site's functionality. Are they supported in the new version? Sometimes you may need to rework the entire site when a new version comes out.

I need my site to be Search Engine friendly
WordPress wasn't designed with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind, but there are plug-ins you can add to gain access to the internal areas and HTML tags that are important, or to create SEO friendly URLs for each page. That's OK, but they are add-ons with mixed levels of support - it would be so much better if the SEO possibilities were designed in to the core of the platform from scratch.

WordPress handles making my site social
WordPress is a blogging platform, so it's easy to provide a blog with a comment stream along with the conventional pages and other content that you need for your site. Things get a bit more complicated when you want multiple blogs, or to have a conversation around all of the content on your site, or to create a community. There are add-ons like BuddyPress that can help, but there are better platforms where the page management and blog structure have been designed for multiple conversation threads.

How about supporting multiple users?
WordPress started as a single user blogging platform. Over time it has added multi-user and multi-site capability and some user administration roles. As usual there are add-ons to get round some of the restrictions, but that brings us back to the integration and support problems. It would be so much better to have a CMS that has user security and flexible administration designed in from scratch.

WordPress is free isn't it?
The code is open source and you aren't charged a licence fee. However, that's just one part of the cost equation. You need the site to be hosted. You need design work. You need expertise to assemble and integrate the plug-ins and add-ons for your particular functional needs. Then you need to support the site and all of these widgets over time as new WordPress releases come out. Cost of ownership of the site soon adds up. Actually WordPress themselves offer 4 levels of VIP "commercial grade" support for companies. The basic package costs $15,000 per year per seat, up to Enterprise level at $250,000 per year per seat (yes, that's a six figure sum per year!).

There is a large pool of WordPress expertise
That's true, and their rates can be reasonable - but you are definitely going to need some of those experts to support your site, unless you plan on doing a lot of homework and website DIY.

There are loads of free or low cost WordPress themes to choose from
That's true, but a lot of them look so similar - it's pretty easy to spot a WordPress based site. Of course you can get great design from a good website designer too, but that will be pretty much the same cost as for any good CMS platform. The better CMS providers give your designer free rein over what they can do with your site.

It's Open Source - that's good isn't it?
The open source development approach can bring huge benefits to a product where you have a large community of developers all working on enhancing and adding to the product for free. But everything comes with a cost. The open source approach is probably the biggest weakness for WordPress - for me it's the killer. It means that the development community understands the platform inside out and can exploit the security flaws that are there. Take a look at the WordPress Pharma Hack - your site could be taken over by spam adverts for Viagra and Cialis. The WordPress developer community, large as it is, has not been able to fix this hack completely - sites get re-infected even after a clean re-install. Look at what you need to do if you get infected. I have many friends who moved away from WordPress for this reason alone. You know there is something seriously wrong when you see Google ads for companies like White Fir Design who make a living from cleaning up hacked WordPress sites. Do you want to leave your company or brand open to that kind of risk?

So in summary, WordPress is a great blogging platform, although the security concerns worry me. As your website CMS I think it is a poor choice, and I'm concerned that so many agencies build their sites on this platform. There are open source CMS products like Joomla or Drupal. They have their own strengths and weaknesses, but they are also infected by that same Pharma Hack (Joomla and Drupal). My advice would be to choose a good, proprietary CMS product, probably based on safe and secure technology such as Microsoft .Net and MS SQL Server. When you compare the total cost of ownership, they can be more cost-effective than a WordPress based approach, as well as safer, and more easy to use. I happen to know and support a good one (feel free to contact me), but please do some Google research of your own.

A version of this post first published on Fresh business thinking.

Good for HP (with a but!)

David Terrar — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 17:54:04 GMT

Last week the IT industry had a major bombshell. HP announced it's intention to get out of the PC business, drop it's WebOS smartphone and TouchPad products and buy enterprise software company Autonomy. If you don't recognize Autonomy they are a major success story born out of research at Cambridge University. Founded in 1996 they now have a $7Bn market capitalization. They are all about the software infrastructure that manages structured and unstructured data. The headlines on their website tell the story - powering the World's largest Cloud at 31 Petabytes, 25,000 customers, deployed by 77% of Global 100, used by all of the top 10 global banks, 400+ of the world's largest software companies. They've made lots of acquisitions, but they produce solid recurring revenue. In buying them and dropping PCs, tablets and smartphones HP is dropping their consumer lines of business, reducing their dependence on hardware sales, and shifting focus back to the enterprise and software in particular.

On one level it's a great shame that they are discontinuing investment in WebOS and the TouchPad. We're in a post PC World and just this week the Guardian was reporting the shift again. I'm a big iPad fan - the tablet sector has huge significance and none of Apple's competitors are making a particularly good job of challenging them. The only other tablet device that I've picked up and played with that felt like it could challenge the iPad was the TouchPad. I've not handled a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 yet, but the smaller 7 inch version along with all of the Android devices or the BlackBerry Playbook that I've held don't feel as "complete" as the iPad, even though they do the "Flash thing" and have some nice features. With Android fragmented over several hardware manufacturers, my gut feel was that HP properly investing in WebOS and the Touchpad hardware could bring them in to second place in the tablet market. Sadly the financial numbers don't stack up. Larry Dignan quoted CEO Leo Apotheker as saying:

"However, our WebOS devices has not gained enough traction in the marketplace with consumers and we see too long of ramp-up in the market share. Due to market dynamics significant competition and a rapidly changing environment and this week’s news only reiterates the speed and nature of this change, continuing to execute our current device approach in this marketplace is no longer in the best interest of HP and HP shareholders."

So Palm smartphones and the TouchPad tablets are too much of a risky distraction for HP and they are cutting their losses. Understandable for HP's overall strategy and stakeholder interests, but a great shame. Maybe someone else can take those brands (and the associated patents) forwards?

Around 10 years ago HP acquired the once great Compaq brand. As you might expect, the brand was diluted inside HP, and although the PC business is sound and generates a lot of revenue, it's not as profitable as other parts of HP. HP are doing something similar to IBM when they sold off their PC business to create Lenovo out of China. However, I cannot quite fathom why they would signal their intention ahead of finding a buyer. I agree with the strategy, but not the execution.

There has been plenty of mixed discussion and analysis on the HP strategy, and a lot of negative press for the man in charge. As Dennis Howlett says:

"Investors have not been happy since Leo Apotheker came on board as CEO. From their standpoint, Mark Hurd, the previous CEO was a miracle worker and a tough act to follow."

There are even headlines like "Leo Apotheker Has Totally Lost Control Of HP". I'd go to Robert X. Cringely's "Losing the HP Way" post to get a fuller history and context of the Hewlett-Packard company - one of the industry's greats - but I disagree with Bob's conclusion. They haven't lost their way, they are re-focusing on their core business. I was in IBM in the 70s and 80s when it lost its way because it had its fingers in too many pies, too many market sectors and tried to act as market leader in all of them. Leo will let someone else make a success of that PC and tablet business and narrow the focus of HP back to the Enterprise. Go take a look at Dennis Howlett's analysis and specifically his review of the numbers. That's what it's all about - the natural laws of marketing added to the financial numbers. HP haven't lost their way - they're making some painful decisions to get themselves refocused - apart from not finding a buyer for the PC business already I, for one, think Leo's on the right track.

UPDATE:
Whatever the merits of the strategy change it's been PR disaster:

An extreme example from Al Lewis on WSJ suggesting it's part of a One-Year Plan to kill HP
Leo Apotheker interviewed by WSJ defending his strategy
Chief Communications Officer Bill Wohl becomes a casualty of the proceedings
On a lighter note the HP strategy on WebOS and PCs have been given the Bruno Ganz/Hitler/Downfall subtitles treatment - it's hilarious

Twinfield change partners for a new dance

David Terrar — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 08:25:39 GMT

I was delighted to hear, early yesterday, that cloud accounting software provider Twinfield was acquired by Wolters Kluwer. I have to disclose that my company, D2C, have been Twinfield's UK partner since 2005 and so we have a vested interest in the success of the platform and some great customers and partnerships that have come as a result of our Twinfield connection. Over on the Twinfield blog, my good friend and one of the two Twinfield founders, André Kwakernaat, tells some of the back story and explains how proud he is. Let me give you my take on the acquisition from the perspective of someone who has been close to the story right from when Andre's idea started at the end of the 90s.

Andre and the team really have done a superb job building the business since starting on 5 October 2000. Today the platform supports 80,000 companies, with 40,000 subscribers and used by over 700 accounting practices. Although the product operates every day in 23 countries, the bulk of the users are in their home market of the Netherlands, which has been both their strength in terms of growth, profitability and stability, but also a potential weakness. Other commentators have talked about Twinfield's relatively modest presence in the UK or their International strategy. The biggest factor has been balancing steady growth and returns against the kind of investment required to take the product in to new markets. Twinfield have taken a more traditional route compared to some SaaS start ups who have raised a lot of cash with the IPO route and then gone for rapid International expansion with operational profitability planned for much further down the line.

Until yesterday Twinfield's biggest investor had been ITS, chaired by Richard Emanuael. Richard is the Glaswegian entrepreneur, now based out of Monaco, who made his fortune building mobile phone chain DX Communications. Richard's investment company works in both property and technology, owning a stake in companies like WeeWorld as well as Twinfield. I was delighted when they brought Bert van der Zwan in to the Twinfield team back in 2009, and since then they've made steady progress by investing more in the UK market, starting their own UK office, adding UK functionality to the product, as well as targeting the Nordic Region for expansion too. However, I've always thought that Twinfield should be moving faster in to other markets, and I've wondered whether ITS really understood the cloud applications space and Twinfield's potential.

I had a little inside knowledge about the potential next steps and companies that the Twinfield management team were talking to, but I have to admit I hadn't expected this move, mainly because I thought ITS would hang on to their investment for a while longer. However, now that it's happened and I've had time to think it seems both logical and natural. Wolters Kluwer will be a much better partner for the upcoming dance. First, they are a Dutch company and so will have an approach and culture that is much closer to the Twinfield guys. Second, they are better fit for Twinfield as they are such a significant player in the accounting space - they own software products like Viztopia or services from CCH, but they support many other brands in the areas of tax, accounting, legal, regulatory, financial and compliance. Third, I'm sure that one of the key reasons they've bought Twinfield is because of their technology and experience in secure and successful SaaS delivery that Wolters Kluwer can apply to their on premise software products. Finally, they are a €3.556 billion (2010) publicly listed company with the strength to invest in expanding Twinfield's reach.

I see Dennis Howlett's initial take, and Richard Messik's first thoughts (and I agree with him that the Cloud is coming of age here in the UK). I'll be interested to see what the accounting press make of this, but I'm really looking forward to what happens next.