When visiting a local company last month, I was given a glimpse of their requirements for their new Knowledge Services Framework vision and requirements.  It was inspiring and incredible.  They had mapped all the functions that they perform, identified existing systems that matched, and then had measured each of them to the following vision.

Here is their requirements as presented.  The highlights are theirs.

leverage consumer applications proven to augment existing work processes (parity plus)

specifically targeted to business requirements and opportunities

access with only a browser and an internet connection

no reliance on proprietary systems or technology

development based on open industry standards

built upon a semantic web framework

embraces and enables BYOC model

no operating system dependency

provides web service capabilities

tuned options for mobile devices

no browser dependency

no net cost increase

no desktop footprint

100% cloud ready

Vision into Reality

Okay, very pretty and exciting, but we all know from experience that idealistic visions are usually really good on slides, but falter in reality.  Can this be made to work in a large (multi-billion dollar), established company with a full suite of legacy products?

After what I saw, I would say Yes.

They had looked at their existing systems and if they didn’t meet the requirements, the vendors were told the issues and given a chance, over 1-2 years, to update their product.  When they didn’t, they were replaced.  This isn’t the act of rash adopters.  This is planned and thought-out.

For new functionality, like blogs and enhanced collaboration spaces, they identified new products, many of them open source, that met their requirements.  With open standards, like CMIS, they were plugged-in to the architecture.

They are building a private cloud that allows them to install applications into either Amazon’s platform or locally based upon their needs.  They are currently using Amazon’s cloud primarily for development now, but will start mixing it up shortly.

Someone brought in a Mac and said that he now did all his work on it.  He had one Windows image to work with a legacy piece of software that needed IE, finance related I believe, but he demonstrated the freedom from the tightly configured company-owned laptop.  With a browser and Internet connection, he was good.

They are looking into Semantic capabilities.  They want to uniquely adapt the social web with the semantic web in context of [their] business processes.  They have a firm grasp of what they are trying to accomplish and are talking to multiple people about how do execute.  They aren’t leaning on one “expert”, but seeking a complete picture.

How Do You Measure Up?

I’ve read a lot of people talking about transforming the Enterprise with new technologies.  I’ve seen them talk about enabling people to work.  This is a complete transformation.  Will users leverage the new stuff?  Well, they’ll have to use a lot of it because it will be where critical information is stored.  The champions have also been selling the idea across the company as the technology evolved to meet their requirements.

It is some cool stuff, potentially the coolest I have seen in technology world to date.  I wish them all the luck in the world and hope that I get an opportunity to help out.

This is one project I would not delegate to my team.  I’m not worried that they couldn’t deliver, I just want to play with the cool toys in the beautiful architecture.

The management within a company finds it needs to replace their existing, custom developed ERP system with a modern standard ERP system. A major ERP vendor brings their best sales people to a meeting with the management, equipped to the teeth with the most impressive product PowerPoint slide decks they could up-bring (that is, bullet-rich slides with a lot of interconnected 3D boxes that makes the ERP seem very advanced and capable).

The sales people manage to convince the company management to buy the most expensive license of their ERP system. All modules they could possible use, and a few more, are included in the price. As an extra bonus, the license agreement also contains a few “Easter eggs”, including a free license of the vendor’s state-of-the-art and very versatile portal software.

The company – some folks at the IT department – discovers the Easter-egg with the portal software. Like boys with toys, they can’t wait to open it and see what it does. So, they install the software on a server – “for evaluation purposes”.

Sometime later, a business unit identifies a need for aggregating all the information and tools they need in one place. They’ve heard that some competitor does that by using a portal solution, and that a portal solution is just what they need too. So they turn to their IT Department, telling them they need a portal solution.

The boys at the IT department (not many girls around) get all fired up. They tell the business people that they in fact already have a state-of-the-art and very versatile portal software in their enterprise software portfolio. Since the ERP system is a corporate standard and is mandatory to be used by all business units, so must the portal software that came along with it. Besides, it is free of charge. In fact, it is already installed on a server. With an IT strategy having consolidation as a key component, introducing new enterprise software is simply out of the question (even if you could argue that the portal software is not officially introduced and used).

The business people understand they don’t stand a chance against this strong setup. Besides, when looking at the slide decks that the vendor left them with, the portal software seems to be pretty much what they are looking for. So, they decide to skip the part of the process where they define their needs and requirements in more detail and start looking for different alternatives to evaluate and eventually purchase. Instead, they invest their money in an implementation project, seeing the promise of a short time to platform and quick and tangible business results.

The implementation project is executed and eventually a portal solution is launched. Soon enough it turns out that they did not really get what they expected, but to ensure return on their investment, they decide to force adoption with directives and policies. Maybe they will also work out some the kinks, possibly by purchasing a bunch of 3rd party software.

It does not take very long until the following has happened: The users are unhappy and frustrated and do whatever they can do to find reasons for not using the portal solution. The expected results are nowhere to be seen, and the portal solution quickly enters maintenance mode. It is just too expensive to develop it any further. But as some people have invested a lot of prestige and their entire careers in this thing, nothing can be done about the situation.

A couple of years later, the business people identify a need for aggregating all the information and tools they need in one place. This time, they don’t need a portal solution. Obviously, portal solutions are not the recipe for success. Now success is spelled differently. Instead, they need a versatile platform with a lot of capabilities, from search to business intelligence.

So, they turn to their IT department…

It would be very interesting if you could list 5 faults you find in this story, and come up with 5 things to make it right.

(thanks @letterpress_se for inspiration)

My comment to the last part about ROI, as I argued in my previous post, is that most organizations are missing “current metrics” when it comes to “knowledge work” that surrounds, enables and supports existing business processes in, say, the R&D and Marketing & Sales departments. They either don’t have enough metrics, or the right ones to tell them how they actually perform. This means that there is no baseline to start from and from which to build your business case and calculate ROI. The challenge here is that we need to establish this baseline before we can prove that we can improve it. To be able to do this, we also need develop new or refined approaches, methods and metrics that allow us to establish this baseline because the ones that we have used when measuring performance in transactional business processes can’t easily be applied to knowledge work.