Chatting Cars and Enterprise Software
Earlier I stumbled upon a wonderful article by Zoli Erdos, posted yesterday, and entitled Chatting Cars and Enterprise Software that I would strongly suggest all of you read. Here are a few little excerpts to pique your interest!
By Zoli Erdos on May 23, 2011 Today’s big news is Salesforce Teaming up with Toyota to create a private social network where you can befriend your car and it will “tweet” you when it’s thirsty, need a checkup etc..etc..etc – see the details from @Krishnan’s post. The opportunities are really endless – more on that later. I have to get something off my chest first. I admit when Chatter first came out, I did not get it. Yeah, another activity stream, so what? I’ve long agreed with Chief Curmudgeon Dennis Howlett that activity streams without business context offer little value in business. Things started to get interesting when Chatter added the ability to follow documents, opportunities and other business objects.
[...]
Enterprise software companies have long realized only a fraction of employees of their customers will ever use their systems. What if they found a way to present key information, triggered by events to those users who might not even touch their systems? SAP tried it half a decade ago with Duet… but it was a half-hearted effort that did not take off big time. But now as the number of Facebook users soon exceeds the population of Earth we’re all familiar with the activity stream format: traditional enterprise software requires training and process manuals – activity streams don’t. There’s a real paradigm shift here, removing the barriers between structured and unstructured data and giving a much larger user community easy access to information that used to be locked up in structured databases and application programs. To me that’s what Chatter, Tibco’s Tibbr, NetSuite’s SuiteSocial and the like are all about.
[...]
But I think the Internet of Things isn’t so much about machines interacting with us, but machines interacting amongst themselves. If my car can be my “friend”, why couldn’t cars befriend each other? Hey, Google is experimenting with self-driving cars. Can you see the day when self-driving GooCars Chatter with each other? Now, if you can “friend” … you can certainly “unfriend”. Which makes me wonder about the day when a bunch of friendly GooCars gang up on an unfriendly Related articles (Cross-posted @ CloudAve) Posted in Featured Posts, Technology / Software | Tagged activity stream, application software, cars, chatter, Duet, google, Just for fun, netsuite, Salesforce Chatter, salesforce.com, Social network, tibbr, Tibco, Toyota, Twitter, unstructured data | Industry Observer, Blogger, Startup Advisor, Program Chair @ SVASE (Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs). In his "prior life" spent 15 years immersed in the business of Enterprise Software, at management positions with SAP, IBM, Deloitte, KPMG and the like.
Now then, reading this started me off thinking so I searched for some more articles on the subject and found some more greats. e.g. this post by Peter Kim, posted three weeks ago, over on Dachis Group :: Collaboratory:
In practice, email communication happens for work. Most office workers would gladly accept less email to deal with every day, unless they’re addicted to the dopamine rush of receiving new messages. A shift to dynamic signal moves employee mentalities and behaviors to communicate as work instead. Luis Suarez offers an alternative to email: activity streams. He offers five reasons why activity streams work better than email: They permeate throughout transparency and openness They help you, greatly, be done with the obsession to read AND respond to everything They facilitate serendipity and Informal Learning They help flatten organisations and traditionally hierarchical structures They inspire an open knowledge sharing culture In a recent IBM poll, 49% of respondents stated that they post status updates on social tools for work purposes either a few times a month or never. The data show that corporate inbox codependency is alive and well. But activity streams have started to flow inside organizations and social businesses are starting to architect the aqueducts that will allow them to flow out to the organizational edge.
Another fantastic post on the subject came from Jack Vinson on The Knowledge Lens posted three weeks ago and entitled Activity Streams: creating and consuming ? which is also certainly worth a look!
But it should not be my job to go find each stream for an individual – they should be part of that uniform feed for the person. These thoughts are inspired by a David F Carr article in InformationWeek talking about the proliferation of activity streams from enterprise social media products. He’s concerned about situation where every social media app wants to be The One Stream for people. Everyone Wants to Own Your Activity Stream [T]he question that’s more on my mind is how many activity streams we really need in our work lives.
[...]
As a stream consumer, I should not have to do the work of pulling a dozen feeds together from another individual. Of course, as I wrote this up, I discovered that there is not am agreed-upon standard mechanism for provisioning activity streams. So there is the Activity Streams project, trying to create the standard for syndicating social activities and overcome David Carr’s concerns. Learn something new every day.
It’s about time smoeone wrote about this.