thingamy is social software, duh

When using the term "enterprise software" about thingamy I am met with much blank stares and urges to change theme - enterprise is boring...

As said earlier - "boring is good" as it attract much less fluff as in money-willing-to-be-lost and fifteen competitors a week after you've launched a new service.

Looking at VC portfolios I cannot but shake my head - "how on earth do they think me-too products can yield the highest reward-to-risk ratio?". A mystery no less. Or a different economics professor than the ones I've listened to.

Add the size of the market being bigger by a double digit factor - and enterprise software seems to be a good place to be even when it never gets any "oohs or ahhs".

Quite a few started-in-consumer software firms have found out and are hard at making an effort to enter the enterprise market, typically among the "social software" crowd. And who can blame them? Not much willingness to pay for services coupled with a online advertising market about 1/20th of what banks alone will spend on IT this year, and where Google have like 77% of the market - that is tough. While at the same time, enterprise is social per definition.

Social software is thus interesting, so allow me throw out a few traits often used to define it:

• Allow users to interact and share data with other users.
• Social technologies or Conversational technologies used in organisations.
• Web-based.
• Knowledge creation and storage that is carried out through collaborative writing.
• Conversational technologies seen as tools to support work units and the individual knowledge worker.
• They create actual communities.

One particular paragraph that interests me in the Wikipedia entry is:

"Communities formed by "bottom-up" processes are often contrasted to the less vibrant collectivities formed by "top-down" software, in which users' roles are determined by an external authority and circumscribed by rigidly conceived software mechanisms (such as access rights). Given small differences in policies, very similar software can produce radically different social outcomes."

Precisely!

That's almost like defining the difference between ERP and BRP - where the last actually requires less rigid policies, the typical situation for the knowledge worker. Every step in a Barely Repeatable process has to be "free" in the sense of having a waste number of choices leaving the operator freedom to judge earlier results and choose next step from there. Passing the bucket kind of process; "Hmm, no sign of fracture in this Xray, time for a blood test." - but within limits of course, the MD would not suggest "...time to change mufflers". As enterprises have a purpose they will have some underlying structure, obviously.

This is precisely what the thingamy is good at, all of the above, including adding a snippet of structure - as little or as much as you want - tweak those policies to have radically better results.

Hmm, thingamy is in fact "Social software"... and solidly so.

• It needs no hierarchy nor any rules or policies (but you can have them if you must).
• It connects people when things needs to be done.
• It goes beyond sharing of data, it moves the data you want to have moved to the people you want at the time you want.
• It allows any kind of transparency.
• It captures all that happens and increases knowledge by every thing done. Nothing is lost.
• It automates the boring stuff like reports - that can be generated automagically from real activities.
• Web-based, check. Tweakable and changeable at any time, check. Social, yah.

Wonder if my focus is too narrow on the enterprise space, perhaps there is a consumer play hidden therein as well? Could it even enhance my social interactions with non-enterprisey folks? Time for some reverse idea-engineering for the fun of it? (Don't think there's any money in it though - but could be fun, good for learning, straddle the divide, sneak in backdoors, etc.)

But on the other hand, conceptually, better to be the enterprise Social software with the by far deepest well of features than being the simple (on the surface) Enterprise software that still have not produced a chocolate bar ever, not to talk about a million per hour that some of my bigger competitors can brag about.

Food for thought on a Tuesday morning... ah well, back to reality and testing semantic process engines and other radical goodies!

Comments

[Paul P Magee]

thingr

thingbook

mything

it's the future.

:)

[sig]

Hehe, sounds more like the past! Who's not leaving ****book these days :)

[Alan Wilensky]

I am so with you on this it's scary. How many cloned horizontal video and social net sites can raise how many rounds? I have proven to capital sources, the ones I can get to, that my sector for the the proposed product is empty of direct competition - an unrecognized and undeserved market. Not good from their POV, they need to see action in the sector, and my data might be compelling, they can't risk it on me, a lone idea man -albeit a technical savvy one.

[sig]

Alan, on first sight it's rather baffling, but if you look around and into history it's nothing new. We're social creatures, we live fr the peer pat-on-the-back which almost always means go with the flow. It's like my friend Hugh (of gapingvoid fame) says - "don't try to stand out from the crowd, avoid crowds altogether!"

And in fact the situation is a huge opportunity: I have a friend who's a farmer, every fall he goes to farmer's conventions and listens; if all say that next year they're going for crop B (usually because crop B made wads of money that past year) he'll go for crop C. And year after year the popular crop price takes a dive while my friend does good.

If the VCs and everybody else focus on one part of the economy it means many new firms will be funded and most of them will burn money and then loose - a sure-fire recipe for low margins and unexpected competitors coming up from behind the week after you launched.

That supplies an opportunity, do the opposite - a wide open barn door - for me enterprise software is not-so-very-popular which means higher chance of better margins and definitely few new and unexpected competitors coming from behind. I will probably have my competitors in front of me, in plain sight while they won't see me coming from behind.

The only snag of course, harder to raise funds - but the trade-off is not bad at all, I would say it's a trade-off I would take any day! So focus has to be shifted from "funding" to "bootstrapping" - itself a worthy and fun exercise ;)