stoweboyd and the /messengers

[originally posted on Get Real, January 19, 2005]

[These are the prepared notes for my introductory remarks for
yesterday's Get Real Show, largely derived form a report I wrote for
Cutter a few years ago, called Time to Get Real: Growing the Real Time Enterprise (still seems fresh though).]

To imagine a zero latency organization – with near frictionless
communication between applications and people – you have to grapple
with an even more difficult idea: a network of companies, linked
through a cascade of commercial transactions and communications, which
all together represents a real time meta-enterprise.

Truly, no company can become real time enabled in isolation. And as
individual companies seek to improve their operations through the
operational application of real time techniques and technology, they
will find that the biggest payoffs come from the touch points with
partners, suppliers, and customers. The net effect of these thousands
or millions of partial solutions is a social transformation, as the
business economy moves from traditional, slow-time operational models,
to a revolutionary real time footing.

The real time organization is not a starry-eyed quest for the
unattainable, even though squeezing out the last iota of latency in
every business process and interaction is an unachievable goal. It’s an
adjustment to a new economic context, where new survival strategies
will need to be tested, refined, and applied, and where much of what
worked before will not only become obsolete, but dangerous. Business
processes and market positioning based on the premises of even a few
years ago could spell disaster today, in many sectors. The economics of
real time business will require a reassessment of sources of value, and
areas of risk.

What are some of the features of this new real time landscape? Even
without introducing the more esoteric, controversial, and complex
elements of my rants from the past few years, I can enumerate a short
list of principles driving the move toward the real time enterprise:

1. Today’s performance enhancements will largely come from
   cross-enterprise communication improvements, rather than the internal
   improvements of the past decades. Companies have invested billions to
   soup up internal processes, but they will need to revisit those
   processes again.
   




2. Real time communication is not just slow-time communication
   sped up. Linking applications and people around the concept of zero
   latency means that processes and applications will have to be
   rethought, rebuilt, or -- in some cases -- jettisoned. There is a
   qualitative shift in how things work when they’re moved to a real time
   basis, independent of the quantitative benefits of doing things faster.
   




3. Real time principles are applicable in all contexts. Analysts
   who suggest that companies that don’t compete “on speed” are missing
   the point. There is a qualitative change in all operations of a company
   when it’s organized around real time principles, not just a
   quantitative one. Even those who compete on customer intimacy or
   engineering excellence can cut costs, increase customer satisfaction,
   and increase innovation through the ‘side effects’ of applying real
   time techniques and technologies.
   




4. Real time organizations will be much more tightly linked to
   their commercial ecosystems to reduce the risks associated with market
   volatility, and to gain better information about market trends.
   Connectedness has its dark side, since tighter links means more
   volatility because of synchronization across the ecosystem: we have to
   relearn how to react in such a brave new world.
   




5. There will be much more communication going on in the real
   time organization, but fewer wasted communication, and less
   store-and-forward mechanisms. Many researchers suggest that as much as
   40% of all business phone calls lead to voice mail, for example. This
   is a glaring waste of time and money. Likewise, we will see much less
   e-mail, nightly batch files, and weekly inventory updates, but more
   direct, synchronous communication between applications and between
   people. We will soon look back on today’s style of business
   communication and wonder how it ever worked at all.
   




6. Perhaps the most disruptive factor of the real time
   revolution is presence, the Siamese twin of instant messaging. Instant
   messaging has exploded upon the world, growing to more than half a
   billion users. It is, however, still considered a teenager’s toy by
   many in the IT community, which is both silly and pointless. As Ed
   Simnett of Microsoft pointed out, those teenagers are entering the
   workforce today with the assumption that instant messaging is
   productive, cheap, and ubiquitous, not a novelty to be analyzed, but
   simply a tool to be used. The idea of presence – the ability to know if
   an agent is available to communicate – is being carried forward into
   group and corporate scope and past the ‘buddy list’ of today’s consumer
   IM networks, and will change business communication almost beyond
   recognition as presence is threaded into everything – every app, every
   phone, every device, every part on the warehouse shelf.
   




7. The Internet has become the Petri dish in which we’re
   creating a new business culture, and we’re entering the exponential
   tail of the value curve due to the connectedness that modern
   information technologies offer to business. The real time Internet that
   is emerging through several key technologies – higher bandwidth,
   wireless connectivity, voice-over-IP, and instant messaging/presence –
   that are amplifying the potential for creating more and richer social
   groups.




8. The value of the network has risen exponentially, and
   extracting that value requires mobilizing around real time Internet
   technologies.
   The means to tap the exponential value growth of the real time
   revolution is through real time communities – social groups linked
   through real time technologies. Integration of legacy applications or
   processes, even across enterprises linked together in complex value
   chains, will only yield linear returns on investment. This is a course
   that has been followed for years, and while the results are positive,
   they are limited. However, exponential value growth comes from the
   reorganization of cross-enterprise operations around support for real
   time communities – social groups organized around specific activities
   or functions. Rethinking applications and processes to support the
   needs of these meta-enterprise social groups will be the path to
   achieving and tapping this exponential value.
   




9. All this means a new model for enterprise architecture.
   Enterprise architecture has been approached in recent years as a means
   to automate the business processes within a company, and perhaps to
   integrate with the business processes of other companies. The new model
   for enterprise architecture will be driven by the goal of supporting
   social processes across the meta-enterprise, which will require not
   only new technologies (such as web services, mobile connectivity, and
   instant messaging), but a radical departure in how we architect
   systems. The platforms being rolled out by the companies on our panel
   today will form the basis of future real time enterprise architecture,
   but global services – global identity authentication and presence
   services, for example – will be threaded into every company’s
   architecture as well, so that social groups can be formed in real time,
   on demand, allowing teams of companies to respond collectively to real
   time events on the fly.
   




10. Operating in the new real time economy will be in many ways
    an extension of what we already know, but will also require the
    adoption of a new mindset, and a new set of management principles. In
    the past 10 years, we have witnessed a decision-making shift from “the
    center” or “the top” (centralized management) to “the edge” or “the
    bottom” (front-line managers and team members). This trend will
    accelerate as real time technologies come online and disrupt the
    corporate reporting topology. As such, senior management’s role will
    increasingly shift from time-based decision making (responsive decision
    making in the face of opportunities or threats) toward space-based
    decision making. By space here, I’m speaking figuratively, as in
    choosing the markets or market niches in which to operate, the bases
    upon which to compete, the alliances to structure, and so on. But space
    is not just an externally focused, macro-economic dimension; it also
    has an internal side. The other critical role for management is
    inward-focused: supporting the capacity of the organization to support
    rich social groups; to, in essence, create an environment in which the
    organization can monitor and respond to threats and opportunities
    effectively. And “effectively” will come to quickly mean “in real
    time.” The mechanism of monitoring and response will be much more fluid
    social groups, created in some cases on the fly to respond to real time
    events. This will be the end of the organization chart as we have known
    it. The lessons of successful online communities will change the way
    organizations work and how cross-enterprise work is accomplished.
    Management is being shown the path to a better way to manage for the
    real-time era we are entering.