Jasper Westaway's Blog

Collaboration as a Supply Chain

Why do we manufacture things in China, rather than domestically?  Because it is cheaper.  The compromise is that a lot of complexity is injected into the manufacturing process via the new dependency on managing the remote supply chain.  If the cost of managing this supply chain was greater than the cost savings garnered by moving production to China then we would not do it.

Collaboration is remarkably similar.  I co-author a document with you, because it creates a better document – and theoretically faster.

But many people hate document collaboration because it takes longer and sometimes creates worse document.  Collaboration has to be a net saving if people are going to stick with it.

So at oneDrum we think about collaboration as a supply chain, where the benefits are understood but the cost through the supply chain threatens to be greater than those benefits. 

We look at the process (supply chain) involved in writing a document, analyze each stage for cost and squeeze the cost out.  Let me illustrate this with some simple examples:

Sharing the file: Several cloud companies I’ve spoken to recently, say that the biggest barrier they have to collaboration is getting the file on the server; users hate browser-based mechanisms.  Everyone loves DropBox.  Therefore, everyone is having to build their own DropBox type solution.  This is to say, the cost of sharing files (in pain and time for a user) is a significant factor in the overall evaluation of the collaboration supply chain.

Questions and tasks disconnected from the document:  I ask you to fix the amortization figure in a spreadsheet.  Where is that again?  Perhaps it occurs in multiple places.  The cognitive load in hunting for the thing I wanted you to fix puts people off responding; getting it wrong can have even greater consequences.  Google has done the best job in addressing this, through the now abandoned Wave project, and the new Docs commenting system.  oneDrum addresses this by allowing users to comment inside parts of documents (e.g. cells, shapes) and subsequently carrying a ‘deep link’ within the message to that part of the document.

Merging: This is the classic document collaboration hell.  I email a document asking for feedback; I get five copies back and have to merge everyone’s updated version.  oneDrum attempts to address this by ensuring people always have the latest version of the document on their machine, and can work on the same document at the same time, with changes coming through in real-time.

In general, email looks like it helps collaboration, because it helps me communicate and pass files around, but in fact it is a huge problem, obfuscating version history, proliferating legacy copies and generally operating outside of any kind of workflow.  I like the new generation of social enterprise tools like Chatter and Yammer but there is a danger that they exacerbate this issue rather than solve it.

I think though, that there are many more complex and subtle examples.  A CFO needs to produce next years budget.  He or she does not typically treat it as a major project, planned in a Gantt chart with the stakeholders around the table from the first moment.   Rather, they have some spare time, they dig out last years budgets to use as a template, update it to reflect experience or a new reality, start filling in the figures etc… etc… .  Finally, a few weeks later as the budget starts to bake and delivery moves up the priority list the CFO starts engaging with the other stakeholders, the VP of sales, the VP of engineering, to get the revenue and cost numbers that make it meaningful.

My point here is that collaboration has gears.  You don’t want to start in 5^th gear and you don’t want to stay in 1^st.  This is every much a critical part of the efficiency of the supply chain as the earlier, simpler examples.

In a sense, document collaboration looks like documents augmented for collaboration.  In five years I don’t think that will be the case; the collaboration UI’s will evolve in a way that more effectively focus on the supply chain efficiencies.  For example, in the case above where the CFO requires input from the head of sales: when he asks the question, why does the salesman even need to open the document?  Why can’t it be asked and answered inline with the organizations social tool e.g. Yammer or Chatter, and feed the answer back into the document automatically?

We need to move away from the document and focus on the components (data) and purpose (business objectives) of the document - the inputs and outputs of the supply chain, if you like - and find the collaboration mechanisms that most effectively support these.

Employer Flexible Working Fears

I want to discuss one aspect of our recent flexible working study: the fear many employers have that employee productivity falls if they work from home ‘unmonitored’ and ‘distracted’.

It’s a natural fear: I’m an employer and I occasionally share it, but I’m going to argue that it is misguided and disguises more fundamental and harder problems that we need to address.

The national study interviewed more than 1200 office-based businesses with less than 250 employees. It revealed a clear disconnection between employees and employers perceptions of flexible working: 80% of employees feel that they are, at least, as productive working from home as in the office. Furthermore, 33% of employees said they could do all or most of their job from home.  However, the majority (55%) employers do not believe it helps productivity.

This weeks Economist highlights similar concerns relating to office productivity in a slightly different context: access to social networking sites from the office.  The Economist discusses how employers were initially concerned that Excel would be a distraction as employees used it for creating lists for personal reasons.  Nobo

dy today would contest that Excel is a valuable productivity tool.
But how many office employers have metrics for measuring productivity, let alone changes in productivity that occurs through innovation?

For example, at oneDrum, we’ve hired everyone through contacts or (social) networking.  Not only does that save us the cost of a recruitment fee but I believe it assures higher quality employees through personal recommendations and shared interests.

My point is two-fold: Innovation increases productivity in ways we don’t normally consider; more generally how many employers actually have metrics around productivity.  If you can measure that productivity has fallen because somebody has been working at home two days a week then fair enough. But I don’t know any that can.

This is the first aspect that employers concerns disguise: We are very poor at measuring employee productivity.  This is a major problem and merits being solved in a first class way and not subordinated to a set of arbitrary constraints about how and where employees work.

In the UK, and across a lot of the Western world, we have put a lot off effort into equality legislation designed to encourage women back into the workforce (e.g. maternity leave).  The goal of this legislation is to increase the talent pool.  The effect of this for a business is to reduce the cost of talent.

One advantage of flexible working is an extension of this practice, encouraging people to work for you that otherwise would not and therefore reducing your staff costs, hence increasing the productivity of your business.  Have you factored that into your productivity calculation?

If you are unable or unwilling to invest in measuring productivity, and you do not trust your (talented) staff to behave, then you’re likely to object to flexible working.
This is the second aspect that employers concerns disguise: You have an HR problem!  Guess what genius, if they cannot be trusted to work at home then they cannot be trusted to work in the office and you shouldn’t have hired them.  This neatly returns to my earlier point about the productive value of social networks: they ensure employees with shared values more akin to current employers and employees.

Employers cited another reason for their concerns about productivity: Ensuring access to people and documents from remote locations.  I’m more sympathetic here, after all oneDrum was founded to address this specific problem.  But although existing solutions are clunky, and come with greater cost and overhead than I believe they should do, there are plenty of decent options.  You can find many of these listed at Web Worker Daily.

I’ve worked from home for the last three years, and sometimes I am distracted by the presence of my three-year old son, one-year old daughter and their mothers occasional squeals for assistance.  But that misses the point:  I was frequently distracted when I worked in an office by playing cricket in the cubicle, popping out to Starbucks, and worst of all, stupid and long, drawn out pointless meetings.  Even that misses the point: the balance of benefits and costs for flexible working is multifaceted but you don’t know how to measure them and you simply fear the unknown unknown more than the known unknown.

Twitter is the nose of the dog

Twitter is a niche tool and you love it or are bemused by it.  I think that it is best understood as a meme tool - its anthropological economics are geared towards the fast filtering and propagation of interesting ideas - as opposed to, say, analysis.

In this respect it is like the nose of a dog.  Dogs are constantly sniffing their environment.  The dog is trying to understand which of the options to take:

1. Ignore it
2. Lick it
3. Urinate on it

From the dogs perspective, the best result is that it has discovered something worth eating.  Sniffing is an efficient way of testing lots of objects for edibility.  If they pass, they qualify for the next stage - licking or chewing.  The dog can still reject it at this stage.  Once swallowed however it is more committed.

Even in the stomach though, even more serious (expensive) organs can still reject (vomit up) the consumed object, but this takes effort and discomfort.

Beyond this, the object is decomposed into materials that are either utilized or expelled.

If Twitter is the nose of the dog then blogs must be the tongue, mainstream media the gullet and academia the gut.  At each point we are filtering what is useful, useless and dangerous, qualifying for the next stage.

The nose is not the biggest organ, in fact it is a rather small one.  But it is supremely useful and digestion starts there.  Twitter will remain niche but it (and the services to come) will allow society to absorb more and higher quality information in this, the information age.

I am the future of search

What am I looking for again?

I can’t find my phone. What are my options for locating it?

1. Look for it
2. Ask others if they’ve seen it
3. Phone it

I would probably apply those strategies in that order as each fails. Of course, what I really want is for my phone to magically appear in my hand whenever I need it.

That would be nice.

Search on the internet today is somewhere between stages 1 (Google, and minor variations like Wolfram Alpha and Bing) and 2 (Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Amazon recommendations). One might stretch the metaphor to argue that RSS, Google Alerts and the like are forms of stage 3; I’m not sure I would agree.

Technology markets typically display the following characteristics.

- Incumbents are displaced by products that are an order of magnitude better, not just 20% better.
- Product evolution is about adding value by getting closer to the user

The Internet has evolved. It has become more personal, less about static home pages and more about communication and collaboration (behaviour rather than data). This is what we would expect: The Internet is moving closer to us.

But what most people think of search has not changed significantly.

For the first 10 years, the web was primarily just a bunch of pages) and Google was an excellent tool for searching primary data.

Then we started doing mashups and social networks; these are essentially derived and dynamic forms of data and it’s not that we search differently, per se, but that we simply don’t think about search in these arenas in quite the same way. How many links away from me are you in a social network? Who is listening to the same music as me on Last.fm? What relevant experience do we have within our business? What houses are for sale on my street?

Inevitably, search will move closer to these problems, because these problems are closer to us.

Context is King

The end game for search is recognizing a context where an answer should be presented rather than sought. There are a few candidates in this field.

The semantic web garners a lot of attention (or did haha!). It attempts to wrap content in more meaning by enriching it with relevant keywords (I know this is a simplification, but really, who cares?). It is a rather an old fashioned view of the web because it solves an old fashioned problem – find relevant pages. It’s not that there is no room for innovation in this arena it’s jut that Google does this so well, you’re only ever go to be picking at their leftovers. Start-ups entering the search arena should be focussed on a different set of use cases.

There is a lot of talk about real time search but I think it is confused. Nothing is real time, particularly the typical examples that are given like Twitter (go talk to guys that build trading systems about real-time!).

Further, it is a rather unattractive property. I want data to arrive at the right time and real time is a narrow set of those cases (you house is on fire!). But we don’t understand what right time means so we’ll shove it at you whether you like it or not, so that when you actually need the data, it will have disappeared down the drain with the rest of the contents of the firehose.

Which returns me to my opening gambit. I want my phone to appear in my hand when I need it. How do we know when I need my phone? We start with behavioural triggers (he put his hand to his ear!) and continue to layer in those activities that provide meaning such as task-lists (I must order my groceries) or conversations (they are discussing the price of tomatoes).

Put that way it sounds a lot like the future of search belongs to collaboration: ‘What am I working on with you?’ is a the kind of behavioural question we could hang a new form of search off. What do we have to do to complete this project? That’s a context begging for unsolicited answers.

The future of search is not about better text fields and faster, smarter indexing; the future of search is about you and me.

Context is King

God I hate the phrase “real-time”. It is misleading and frequently undesirable. “Right-time” would make more sense.

Very distracted by cricket today

A perspective on MS Office 2010

This week Microsoft started talking more about its Office 2010 release, specifically, changes to the desktop application, a new web-based version, and support for each in SharePoint. Since this impacts us at oneDrum, I’ve spent some time trying to understand what is coming.

Before I layout my perspective, let me first say that although I talk to the MS guys and had some visibility of what is coming, I have not seen an actual demo; this perspective is constructed from those conversations and reading the perspectives of other on the web who either speak to MS as well, or have access to the technical preview. That technical preview may yet change in significant ways, and the online version will not be available for another month.

The wisdom of the blogosphere holds that Google Docs and other browser-based applications are the future, and Microsoft Office is the past.

I never held to this because:

• Many, perhaps most, businesses hold a significant portion of their assets in MS Office.
• The ecosystem surrounding and supporting MS Office is a critical feature of the landscape (note that Google is attempting to replicate this ecosystem in order to drive Google Docs adoption e.g. through its development of resellers).
• The experience of browser based applications remains too bound to being online.
• The experience of using javascript applications remains weak compared to desktop applications.
• There are concerns surrounding the security and compliance of cloud-based tools. I have spoken to at least one major investment bank that has appraised Google Docs for collaboration with customers and outlying offices, but couldn’t reconcile their concerns.

Nevertheless, this is an extremely partisan arena (very few comments attached to articles below were neutral). But the Internet has been extremely quiet in response to the Office 2010 announcements relative to (the, perceived by some, competitor) Google Wave. The latter overwhelmed my RSS reader for weeks, while 2010 quieted down after a day. This is despite the fact that Office is a critical tool in many peoples lives, while only six people and their dog have ever used Wave. This might be because of any of the following:

• The blogosphere is populated by early adopters and freelancers predisposed towards new products and approaches.
• Office 2010 is another iteration, whereas Google Wave is new and shiny.
• Google Wave addresses a set of problems that engages audiences more readily.

What is coming in MS Office 2010

There are three categories of offering in MS Office 2010:

1. A new iteration of the desktop product:

   ~ The bulk of the changes seem iterative (e.g. consistent use of Ribbon interface, faster start up times).

   ~ A new feature called backstage that holds meta data (e.g. permissions, versions). More on backstage below.

   ~ Better support for collaboration when used in tandem with MS SharePoint (see below).

2. A free web-based version of Office. As I understand it, this is an entirely new offering and they have dropped Office Live Workspace. This product will:

   ~ Provide a subset of the features in the desktop version.

   ~ Support simultaneous authoring.

   ~ Be free and advertising supported, or…

   ~ Be free and self-hosted for Enterprises using volume licensing for the desktop edition.

3. Changes to SharePoint and associated offerings (e.g. MS Live Communications Server) that improve collaboration across Microsoft’s suite of tools.

   ~ SharePoint Workspaces (the incorporation and renaming of Groove). From what I know of Groove, and what I’d been told by the SharePoint team, I struggled to understand what’s on offer here. I watched the video three times and came to the conclusion – nothing. Maybe they just found it difficult to video simultaneous authoring.

   ~ Support for presence (e.g. Jasper is working here right now) and fine-grained locking (Jasper has locked this paragraph).

   ~ In document change notifications with synchronization options; this is the bit I understand least and struggled to find information on.

Taken together I think that Microsoft’s strategy is pretty clear:

1. A free advertising based model for the bottom end to compete with Google Docs and OpenOffice.
2. Nothing but iterative improvements for the home, freelancer and small business market.
3. A better story for the medium to large enterprise looking for better collaboration tools and attracted to (but dissatisfied with) Google Docs

The opportunity for oneDrum

All this leaves a great opportunity for oneDrum.

Firstly, Office 2010 is a response to, and continuation of, fragmentation in the office tools market where players include, MS Office 2003, MS Office 2007, MS Office 2010, OpenOffice, GoogleDocs, Zoho and Lotus Symphony. We believe that in time, oneDrum can provide a unifying collaboration experience across these tools.

Secondly, it is confirmation that collaboration is a (the?) critical driver in software for the foreseeable future.

Thirdly, I do not believe that Microsoft has cracked collaboration with Office 2010, specifically:

• Simultaneous authoring from the desktop application seems limited.
• The majority of Office users (pre 2010) won’t even have this.
• The collaboration tools remain reasonably basic (presence, chat and synchronization), but fixing collaboration is about blurring the lines between goal setting (the conversation) and the output (document). Potentially, Backstage could begin to address this – it is certainly the most intriguing aspect of the forthcoming release as it is extensible by partners to encompass, for example, context and workflow.
• Collaboration across organizations is badly broken and nothing in this release addresses this. Fundamentally, we believe that the corporate model of collaboration that SharePoint embodies is broken and that collaboration tools need to be built around people, not organizations. I have been told by Microsoft’s employees inside the Office Server Group that although SharePoint is selling very well, the conversion rate into deployments is very poor.

Lastly, I don’t believe people want point solutions - even for tools as central as MS Office; they want a single experience regardless of the tool. It is this need that has made email the de facto and ubiquitous collaboration tool.

Final Thoughts

Everyone’s take on Office 2010 will turn on the question they think it is intended to address: Can it help Office remain relevant? Can it fix collaboration? Who is it for? These questions are lines in a battle that will play out over 5 years.

Some people believe the competitor will be Google Wave. I don’t as it happens but, taken together, one can see a clear set of trends emerging:

• Unified communications around documents.
• The acknowledgement of the importance of context in collaboration (look, I did something, and that something is here and I did it in response to…).
• Simultaneous authoring.
• Support for multiple entry points to my documents.

These are all things oneDrum believes, and we think we’ve got the only story that takes users from where they are today to where they want to be.

Links

• PC World
• Microsoft
• The Register
• Wired
• TechCrunch
• PC Mag

Interview with me on Smarta

Click here to read it

Types of Innovation

A lot of people have been quizzing me about the relationship between collaboration and innovation. This got me to thinking about types of innovation over the weekend.

In my experience I’ve come across the following:

• Process innovation - deliver a product faster or cheaper; Dell was a process innovator through it’s mastery of supply chain management.

• Shop front innovation - sell a given product differently. Amazon is a great example, selling an old fashioned commodity (books) through a web browser.

• Product innovation - Improve an existing product.

I did a search on Google and - as you might expect - there has been a lot of study in this area. Although there are several different characterizations, to my mind, two other significant sorts were thrown up by my search:

• Business Model innovation - For me an example is Skype, who employs their customers computers as parts of their infrastructure for routing calls. This does not improve the product! This allows them to scale users for free.

• Marketing innovation - Discovery of new markets (who knew teenagers would buy stuff!?) and ways of reaching those markets. I’m tempted to roll this into the shop front innovation but one could still market to the same people, the same way but through a different shop front.

Wondering if lessons from supply chains can be employed in collaboration and innovation

RT @OneDrum: drinks are on us at the TechCrunch #Europas tomorrow

Article by me at Entrepreneur Country http://bit.ly/19BNxI

The economics of free

I attended Chris Andersons book launch for ‘Free’ on Thursday. I had low expectations of the panel discussion, but was pleasantly surprised.

While there was much discussion of marginal cost there was almost no discussion of marginal revenue.

Kevin Lomax (of Misys fame) has spoken to me, in the past, of the Valley of Death - a price point in Enterprise Software between USD20,000 and USD500,000. In this price range, you get all the pain of selling something as if it cost 500,000 (long sales cycles, lots of risk, expensive to manage), but insufficient revenue to justify.

It occurs to me that the real driver for freemium is a similar issue: people have nothing against paying for stuff that merits the cost - but there’s an entry bar of value. For sake of argument I’ll call this USD10. From a consumers perspective, the utility from anything that costs less than 10, does not justify the fixed cost of finding your wallet, taking your card out, typing in details and so on.

Therefore sellers are obliged either to charge nothing (and find a way of supporting the business) or gating with a fee.

Of course, this is really to say that the free model prospers only because no one is able to crack micropayments in a generic way. Micropayments work great in iTunes (one click, licensed from Amazon)- and this is attested to by the huge sales volumes (I’ve lost track; it was a billion songs a long time ago).

There were also representatives from one of the London free newspapers (handed out at every tube stop), and lots of extolling by others of what a great model this is.

But my guess is these models only work because both free newspapers are owned by existing newspaper publishers. Content creation is a fixed cost - it costs the same whether you have one reader or a million, so why not exploit the fixed costs by targeting unreachable markets (readers under 35) with a free paper? Essentially, this model only works right now because the free paper is subsidized by a paid (but generally loss making) product - and when the paying customers depart, so will their free proxies.

RT @webusermagazine There is indeed an article about OneDrum in Issue 216 of Web User, which is on sale from all good newsagents now…