The natural tendency of people around me is that simple is easy, and that they don’t want anything that’s too simple. It’s in our nature to over-complicate, and start adding features and doodads in an effort to make something look sexier. The approach that I aspire to is a little bit more different:

What is that one thing that I can help people with, and how do I focus on that and make that so simple that it becomes sexy? A reductionist theory in an odd sense. That might not work for everyone intuitively when they are off building products, or solutions… but that approach, as far as I can see, has worked for me (while the former approach of adding odds and ends at a whim without having a clear idea of THE ONE USE for the tool/site/service has been, well, kind of disastrous…).

It’s hard. It’s often much harder to pour your soul into one thing than to dabble in many (that just about sums up men & commitment heh). But I think at least it’ll put me in good stead moving forward.
Thus, I wanna get my hands on the book (I haven’t read it yet, so can’t really recommend it yet).

• Keeping a low profile because things are getting a little insane project-wise. (Pure laziness and procrastination to be blamed as well!).
• I’ve also been kept busy on the music side of things by writing some more songs, re-writing old songs and playing a handful of impromptu and ad hoc gigs at hideout.
• I’ve also been trying to get a few ideas off the ground, and majorly focusing on trying to focus my efforts instead of spreading myself way too thin across too many things.

I know the update’s a bit general, but we’ll see where it goes from here .

Which brings me to another topic - Wow versus Good Enough. This is something I spotted over at Uncommon Sense for Software. I do agree with Craig. A product CANNOT be just good enough. Just CANNOT.

I (and I suspect most customers) am not impressed by most of the stuff that’s currently out there. And something like an electric car that beats a petrol sports car doesn’t come by very often. Even the iPod took a while to grow on people.

Wow requires the 1% inspiration (the RIGHT inspiration) followed by the 99% perspiration, but both are equally important. One can’t go with the other methinks. To compound that, a management guru type said, geniuses are all heretics, but heretics are rarely geniuses.
For the rest of us plebeians, life has to go on, and we have to go on impressing, and ship not good enough, but MORE than good enough products out the door. Therein lies the crunch - Betting on how much more good enough will tip the scales is the make or break.
My creed: Look for WOW, aim for WOW, dream of WOW, work for the WOW, but don’t starve to death. Same principle applies to the other WOW (World of Warcraft) come to think of it…

Just another random musing.

This is hilarious. Check out this gem from the blog:

we’d like to make clear that you should please only use “Google” when you’re actually referring to Google Inc. and our services.

I’ll not go into the marketing aspects of a genericized trademark since Google has put it so succinctly. But they must be joking… asking consumers to “please” not overuse the word google as a verb

Yeah right. Sure I won’t.

Edelman was primarily there to listen, and soak, and shared a bit about how bloggers (as media) were gaining importance and that the focus should be pushed more into the long tail than the short head. Interesting stuff, but to add my two cents:

The SHoMNoLT!

From this psuedo-marketer’s point of view, a PR agency isn’t quite equipped to handle the tail and the peer conversations like that. Or at least, it can’t be approached just from a PR point of view. What do I mean by a PR approach?

When you try to identify the Short Head of a Micro Niche of the Long Tail (SHoMNoLT?!?!) and approach them for (unbiased) product tryouts (a la Nokia with several bloggers), you are taking a traditional PR approach. Get your word out. Get your product out. Make noise!

But how many bloggers are you gonna approach? I don’t have as many readers as either popagandhi or mrbrown, or miyagi. But I guess I am the short head of a micro niche of the long tail. Do I get one? Off the top of my head, I know like 10 other bloggers who should get a pitch as well. Hmmm… that’s quite a lot of effort actually.

The BR Agencies

And that brings it beyond the realm of PR. It becomes a marketing game. Talking to influentials. The sneezers. Bloggers in the SHoMNoLT are not the media. Bloggers are people (to quote brown in the dinner). A whole group of people in fact. They have to be marketed to… and yes, with the special care and attention given the journalists as well. Except that bloggers have a greater chance of being evangelists if they like the product. And, in the end, only the product and/or its brand matters.

Which means that PR agencies attempting this are at the mercy of the clients, more so that in the world of press releases. Which means that PR agencies need to become marketing powerhouses, conduits back into the client-side. And good luck finding a client like that!

Of course, people ALSO get confused and mistake media that use blogging (Stomp, The Pitch - sorry Debbie!!!), for the SHoMNoLT that Edelman is apparently after. Media is media, bloggers are bloggers. Similarities are shared of course, but viewpoints are different.

Media need advertising, and (wittingly or not) tend to be more susceptible to message massages. Bloggers are consumers first. They don’t give a damn. If it sucks, it sucks. Of course, some people are more forgiving than others.

Treat these two differently. Be a PR agency to one, and a BR agency (an agency marketing to influentials really) to the other. I’m an influential, a sneezer, an early adopter! Market to me! Give me products to try out! Have a conversation with me! Don’t stick me into a hotel ballroom.. I’ve got work to do during office hours!

The Finale

Yup. That’s the conclusion. Two different segments of bloggers requiring two different approaches. That’s my take. And it’s probably a synthesis of the comments that were going round the table yesterday, so I could have inadvertantly stolen some ideas. 

So if you are in a PR/BR agency… please e-mail me and I’ll tell you where to send the products for me to try out.

technorati tags:PR, Blogosphere, Edelman, Marketing

What actually struck me is that Chris Anderson, the creator of the Long Tail meme, actually does know how to code. By himself! It’s heartening: I don’t know how many of you guys out there are always typecast, but I know that I’m always the “Tech” person. I actually hate that, because I don’t want to be pigeonholed. I write music. I think I grok marketing. And PR. And I code.

So you have to pigeonhole me as a “Tech” guy?

At least now I feel like, yeah, there’s a kindred soul - I’m like Chris! Except maybe 1/100th as smart. Heh…

How many of you guys get pigeonholed on a daily basis?

As far as misunderstood terms, I think Enterprise 2.0 has even more misunderstandings behind it than Web 2.0. As for me, I’ve decided to spend a little more time in this space as that’s where I earn my bread and butter now, and I’m learning from the bottom up (i.e. users up not CIO down) the real needs of company users out there.

And among all the stuff I read on Enterprise 2.0, I agree with this one the most. However, while I do agree that the Enterprise space is highly highly complex, I do believe that the solution is to simplify.

More about that in my next post.

]]> http://www.adrianlee.info/2006/10/20/enterprise-20-the-closest-definition/feed/ http://www.adrianlee.info/2006/10/19/enterprise-20-whatever-happened/ http://www.adrianlee.info/2006/10/19/enterprise-20-whatever-happened/#comments Thu, 19 Oct 2006 14:47:28 +0000 pallid Ramblings Enterprise 2.0 http://www.adrianlee.info/2006/10/19/enterprise-20-whatever-happened/ It seems that the Enterprise 2.0 meme has not gained the momentous heights of Web 2.0.

I’ve got my own thoughts around it… To me, the new wave of innovation in the Enterprise (as what the term Enterprise 2.0 implies) is not only in the realms of Knowledge Management. But reading most of the more influential stuff on Enterprise 2.0 (check Technorati out) implies that it’s only about Wikis, Blogs and collaboration.

That, I think, has and will continue to curse the term. Here’s my version of The New Enterprise Landscape (short of writing an whole essay on it - because I’m not as brilliant as Mr. O’Reilly):

• Rich user interfaces (AJAX and what not) and web-based applications in the Enterprise as the de-facto standard.
• A focus towards usability within the Enterprise, and applications that users will actually enjoy using instead of dread using (overheard in my client’s company - A: “So you have to use SAP?” B: “Yup” A: “Condolences” B: “Thank you! You feel my pain!”.
• The adoption of consumer technologies. Blogs, wikis yes… but so much more than that. IM has been around and gaining ground in the Enterprise. Salesforce.com has led the way in integrating Skype into its CRM. Why can’t Google Maps be mashed up into an Enterprise application for instance? Or creating a social network in place of an Exchange or Notes address book? Or consumer search relevance technology for Enterprise search? Or Peer to Peer?
• A shift from large “enterprise” solutions, to small purpose built applications fulfilling single purposes each.
• Shifting workload (or power) from IT departments and senior management to the common worker on the ground - empowerment of the lower levels through technology! That’s going to happen, and management guru-types are already evangelizing empowerment of staff. And the technologies that are going to make that happen won’t be collossal enterprise suites.
• Price correction. Top dollar is paid for top brands right now (SAP, HP, EMC), but the price differential between big brands and mid-tier solutions are at too much of a disparity right now. In the future, it will be much cheaper. Economics demands it, shrinking budgets demands it, but company politics will hamper that since top brands have a lion’s share as reliability continues to be a main concern - and big boys exude reliability whether its real or imagined.

In fact, the shift has already been happening. And it will gain momentum. However, it will gain momentum slowly. After plowing millions into suites, the transformation is going to be slow. It’s kinda like replacing a city with all new buildings. But surely, the Enterprise is undergoing a sea change slow as it might be.
And I want to be there as that happens.

I do agree with the post, but as I’m working on a document-related project right now, experience teaches me that it’s not really as clear cut as this. In a lot of cases, the company actually needs technology to help them define the processes, because a process is either currently lacking, or needs to be improved.

Here’s my take - choosing an off-the-shelf (or an off-the-sourceforge) solution and deploying it as is into an enterprise is not very wise. The enterprise will definitely have current work-styles and processes in place that will not fit into the system, and forcing people into a box has always proven to be a failing endevour.

However, thinking about processes from a technology point of view (or rather a systems POV) will help identify gaps in the processes that needs to be fixed. And for that, some off-the-shelf features will help, because they fix a gap in the process that was ignored in the first place.

For example, if let’s say a Mandy wants to send something to her boss Joe Luddite to approve, but Joe does all his approvals through his PA… what is the system supposed to do? That’s a gap. Forcing Joe to do the approvals himself might not be the solution (lack of time, and practically speaking nothing will get approved if the volume of requests are too large). Giving the PA access to approve isn’t the solution either. So it’s a gap in the process but it has to be addressed.

There isn’t a clear cut solution to cases like this, and in most cases do depend on other factors (work-style, audit and governance concerns, company policy etc.).

Here, thinking of content management (and here I mean Enterprise Content Management in particular) as discrete products falls apart. However, thinking of ECM as a customized solution is also prohibitive - in terms of cost, configurability and variable quality - the customized solution in the wrong vendor’s hand is disaster for sure.

Instead, the system will have to be a bit of both off-the-shelf and still be flexible enough to customize to the way people work (people first and foremost before all else!). I’m hoping I’ve achieved a bit of that in what I’m working on right now.

I’ll now try to explain it in really simple terms that web designers (by that I mean Imageready-junkies and Dreamweaver-dependents) can understand. And I’ll state it out in point form (a vestige from my army days I think):

1. Love your colleagues - Show your programmer colleague some love. You can’t imagine how torturous it is for a developer to work through 500 nested tables just to find out where the data goes. Imagine reading a book where the words “the” and “is” are repeated 500 times for no apparent reason. It’s like that - infuriating. So your colleagues may be like geeky and all, but doesn’t mean you should torture them for their lack of fashion sense and what not. Learn CSS!
2. Love your design - Do you love your own design? Enough to protect it no matter what? Then you might be better off expending the effort and learning how to do CSS-based designs. I think anyone who has worked with programmers on the team have witnesses how the lazier programmers have this tendency to shred through designs, leaving 1-pixel gaps between sliced images where there were none, and totally ruining a design so painstakingly sliced into HTML by your trusty Imageready program.Only you can stop this insanity. Not by threatening the programmer with death, but by adopting CSS-based design. You see, the programmer has absolutely no need to touch your CSS files in 99% of cases, so in essence he/she has no need to touch your designs at all, down to the last pixel in your layout. So your design is untouched.
3. Love your users - There are a multitude of reasons why CSS-based websites are better for users. CSS files are cached across pages, the code-base becomes neater and smaller in size, and it becomes easier for search engines like Google to read your sites. I’m not going to be the guru on this, but just Google for the reasons why XHTML is better than HTML and you can find a multitude of other reasons. And get this - designing in CSS makes it much easier to allow blind people to hear your site, or to let the older folks with poor eyesight like me in increase the font size (something called accessibility). Oh, and trust me on the poor eyesight thing… my monitor is set to 1600 x 1050 pixels on a 15.4 inch screen. Words are mighty small, and I know how it feels!
4. Love yourself - This is pretty important. If you know CSS-based designs, you are going to be pretty hot in demand job-wise. In fact I’m looking for one myself! (shameless plug: if you’re interested, please mail me at adrian.lee @ utopia-edge.com). On top of that, you learn something new, and you can start boasting about your mad skillz and start becoming an uber among your peers.

And I’m not the only one. Here’s an interesting site with 55 reasons! Also, this is in response to several posts I read about designers and programmers, but mostly from a programmer point of view. I’m a little bit of both so I do think I kinda know where the two camps are coming from. But I do admit that these four points only begin to scratch the surface. Still, while I’m not like really hardcore, it’s in my belief that EVERYONE should start doing this.

Resources: CSS Layout Techniques, YUI Library, Layout Gala, CSS Zen Garden

Wow… I’ve been following this for a little while, and they’ve finally gotten acquired by Google. For an obscene amount of money I might add. Here’s a few thoughts on this:

1. I think this will jolt quite a lot of people into starting up companies, just by the sheer amount money the acquisition involves. This could very well be a tipping point for another boom (and hopefully, not a bubble).
2. This is proof positive that anyone with a good enough web service (not site) can make it if they play their cards right, and are extremely lucky to boot with the right product at the right time in the right place.
3. As for the above, the right place right now is not in Singapore. Specifically, not a service that only targets Singaporeans. I’ve always said that Singapore is way too small, and that hasn’t changed. And will never change. Add to that the fact that YouTube isn’t even profitable… what hopes does a Singapore company have of profiting on an Internet population of 1.5 million (give or take)? Or selling out on 1.5 million users?
4. Media is where all the money is right now. But Google has monopoly on the media long tail so it makes sense for them. YouTube and Google are a perfect marriage because YouTube has the long tail of the video community, and Google has a stranglehold on the long tail of advertisers. For the rest of us, if we want to strike it big, we’ll either have to look for a long tail in a new market, or hope to get acquired by a big guy.

I’ve got a feeling that things will start to get interesting…

Just before that, this is what I plowed through in 3 days… a funny book by the dude from the Top Gear TV show Jeremy Clarkson - I Know You Got Soul. Dry British humor absolutely permeates this book as the dude from Top Gear rattles on about how machines have souls and character, and proceeds to describe the machines that do exhibit that. And he picks both the likeliest (Rolls Royce Phantom for instance), and unlikeliest candidates (an aircraft carrier) for a veritable beauty pageant of machines and boys’ toys. Well… I guess you couldn’t really expect more from the dude from Top Gear. A very entertaining read, and actually very informative when he delves into the history of the machines. Just imagine the Discovery channel in the written word, except much funnier.

A little bird told me that the Media Development Authority (MDA) wants to take advantage of this Web 2.0 thing to kick the media industry up a notch, I personally know of several local Web 2.0 startup projects that are getting off the ground, everyone wants a blog or a podcast now, and all the marketing big wigs and the media industry are going ape over social networks (think My Space… and nothing more).

This is both healthy and a little worrying personally. “Web 2.0″ was useful to describe a way of thinking about the Internet. But, having seen the dot com burst, any buzz term that takes precedence over substance has always worried me somewhat.

Social networks, AJAX, network effects, folksonomies, blogs, wikis… yes these are new adoptions that are gaining ground, but technology is so much more than the sum of these parts.

Technology is about people.

Choon Keat sent me this article about how content management systems have been on the wrong track (Thanks Choon Keat!), and it kinda mirrored exactly what I’ve been thinking. Technology is fundamentally about helping people. It’s not about the plumbing (AJAX). And it’s certainly not about the money (although it’s an essential bi-product in almost all cases).

It’s about solving problems. Solving people’s problems. Real people, mind you. It’s about fulfilling a need. Most of all, it’s about helping people… be it to find long lost friends, or to share photos, or to bookmark sites, or to manage process document that are in a mess.

I hope people don’t lose sight of this in the gold rush.

That’s given me a fresh perspective on technology and the stuff around it (i.e. People). For one, it should be the other way round! A perspective on people and the stuff around them (i.e. Technology). For another thing, the postings will get a wee bit more geek heavy but I’ll consciously try to avoid writing Martian wherever I can.

An aside: Sorry for the light posting… life has just gotten crazy again

I’ve always liked the way Miyagi writes… entertaining, self effacing and most of all, he knows what he’s talking about. But today, he’s writing about some hacker dude ripping the content of Today and putting them into RSS.

Dude… that’s got nothing to do with Today being hacked. TODAY: TODAY hacked, it’s on your phone at My Very Own Glob {Curiosa Felicitas}.

This article actually started a short e-mail thread because I actually proposed RSS to a layperson (please don’t forget that about 88% of Internet users don’t know what the heck RSS is in the first place). After reading the article, the customer was worried that RSS presented a window for hackers to hack into the website.

Happily, things were cleared up and now there is excitement that RSS can be delivered to mobile phones as well.

So, Ben, thank you and damn you for your over-sensational, slightly innaccurate headline.

technorati tags:web2.0, singapore, blogosphere

“The Service may be used only for services that are generally accessible to consumers without charge.”

What this means is that you’ll hopefully be seeing a mashup of Google maps and Singapore information pretty soon, maybe on corporate websites. Imagine if you use satellite photos on your site to allow users to map directions from their home to your office.

Best of all, it’d be free, as long as you’re providing it free to end-users.

The only pity is that StreetDirectory.com should follow suit, but I understand the revenue pressures that offering their maps for free would entail (who could forget the lawyer letters). Here’s hoping for the day when Singapore tech startups have the kahunas and cash to offer the same thing to users everywhere!.

technorati tags:singapore, mashups, technology

For one, the grassroots are definitely changing, what with the rise of blogging as an avenue of free speech. Media isn’t monopolized any longer, thanks to Tomorrow, and a whole other bunch of bloggers out there who dare to say their peace.

Also, he derides (although gently) the lack of an underground culture in Singapore - apparently he only saw two classic rock-type brudders and that constitutes all of Singapore’s underground. And also the lack of Shonen Knife was cited.

Sure… ask a Music Junction shop for Shonen Knife why don’t you… doesn’t the fact that something is “underground” means it’s not visible to the tourist? Take Seattle… (supposedly) huge underground vibe. I’ve been there about 5 times and, honestly, it seemed pretty boring to me. Probably because I couldn’t find or be part of any “underground”! And that’s the whole point isn’t it?

Just wanted to say my peace…. Still, I agree with him on Singapore being a little too strict a police state though… but you could argue that either way.

technorati tags:singapore

1. I’ve read starblogs, and man most of them just ramble on. Xiaxue was totally off topic, but at least that was entertaining (sounded kinda like she was taking a piss out of her own “stariness” in her post).
2. I feel dirty looking at the site - like a whore. “Click here to win $75,557″, which is by the way probably a premium SMS number to SMS Stomp.
3. What’s up with the layout? My eyes hurt just glancing at it…
4. Ads for the Straits Times Interactive, and My Singapore right in the middle of the page?
5. There are no links out of the site! Blogs are about conversations between bloggers - discussions and debates and most importantly - overt point of views. They’ve just gotten it wrong man.
6. Jeff Ooi thinks this is 2.0. It’s not. I don’t see any social thing going on, I don’t see any AJAX, and blog posts are like once a week on the exact same day? That’s not blogging.. that’s a columnist. (Try to ignore the fact that I sometimes post only once a month… heh… busy lah). But nevermind all that - it just doesn’t break any new ground.
7. Anyone remember Project Eyeball? I think this will be equally as successful!
8. I think Miyagi thinks it’s lame (if I’m reading between the lines correctly).
9. Justin thinks it’s lame… for sure.

But there are some saving graces….

1. It’s XHTML Strict (ok so I’m a geek… shoot me).
2. They spent a lot of money on the photography, so the photography looks good.
3. At least old media is trying and doing something about it. At least not NATO like me heh.
4. As a content site.. it is actually very rich. Loads and loads of content. It is SPH after all.

To the mediaslut… I don’t think it’s peace for peace sake. They just wanna cash in, and they need blog readers.. so make peace lor….

STOMP - judge for yourself.

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