Sunday, March 14, 2004

Congrats to Tom Malone for the launch of The Future of Work, a terriffic look at how decentralization is affecting the nature of the organization, the structure of business and our work lives. When we first launched Lotus Notes in the early 90's, it was an era of Reengineering The Corporation, in which companies were reducing the cost of coordination internally through business process reengineering.  Companies embraced Lotus Notes, an advanced communications technology for the time, reflecting the changing nature of the organization from centralized hierarchical structures toward more decentralized work flows. When I left Iris/Lotus/IBM in 1997, I did so primarily because in '95-'96 I saw, in our customers, the beginnings of something quite significant: they were extending their core business processes and practices outward to partners, suppliers, and in some cases even customers.  When we launched Groove's V1 product in 2001 and began selling it to enterprises, our primary focus was on how it was an advance in decentralized communications that would reduce the cost of coordination externally in a manner not possible with technologies primarily designed for enterprise use.  The fact that enterprises and government have embraced Groove truly reflects the changing nature of business from centralized structures toward networked, decentralized organizational relationships. Over the past 12-18 months, we've seen some other very significant technology-catalyzed changes occurring in business, in society, and in our everyday lives.  Last year was most certainly the "year of the laptop".  Broadband is now ever-more pervasive, and 2003 was also undeniably the "year of WiFi".  Our PC usage patterns have been transformed: we carry them to meetings, use them at hotels and on client sites and at home.  Whereas most of us used to do most of our work in our "office" or "cube", our most important work is now done in our "virtual office" - the one that is implemented in software on PC's and a variety of devices tucked away in our backpack, briefcase, purse and pocket. This isn't a small trend: its impact on business, society and our lives is huge.  I would strongly recommend that you spend some quality time with this presentation based on a landmark study done in 2003 on the pervasiveness of off-site work. I sit here writing this as we're about about to lift the veil from what I believe you'll find truly represents the next generation of communications software, Groove v3.0.  Our primary design goal for this product, based very specifically on how it has been being used by our customers over the past three years, was to implement, for its users, the essence of their "virtual office".  Where we do our work together, and where we want to do our work together because of how it feels and just works.  We now live in an era of extreme mobility, where the attributes of secure communications, coordination, and synchronization are core to most everything we do in terms of information work.  An era where our tools and mobile devices must be specifically designed with advanced, elegant awareness & notification to help us to efficiently swarm around our joint activities, and to aggregate and prioritize notifications in ways that help us to conserve our attention and cope with information overload. Think of how you yourself work, on a day-to-day basis.  This era is one of virtual work performed by a highly decentralized workforce.  Technology's role in this era is to bring us effective horizontal fusion - reducing the cost of coordination between us in a manner not possible with centralized technologies.  It should reflect the changing nature of work, from the physical workplace, toward the decentralized workspace.  And it most certainly will. 3:58:36 PM

Thursday, February 26, 2004

It's been a few months since I've posted - a very busy and exciting time here at Groove. Both in terms of what's been happening in the business and market, but also because we're closing in on the first beta of Groove V3. I can't wait to tell you about the improvements in V3 ... because after having used it day in and day out for a few months now, I've simply never felt nearly this excited about a product that I've worked on. And that says a lot. More on V3 in a few weeks! For those of you who have been following Groove for quite some time, you may recall that the product's original raison d'être was to enable people "at the edge" to dynamically assemble online into secure virtual workspaces, to work together and to get something done, even if those individuals were in different organizations with completely different IT infrastructure. Today, with the gracious permission of one of our most significant customers, Groove made an announcement that I'd like to talk about for a moment. It's very significant to me for two reasons: First, the nature of how Groove is being used in this solution demonstrates to the extreme the very reason why Groove was built the way it was, from a technology and architecture perspective. Decentralization at its finest. The customer's core challenge was to enable individuals from many, many different organizations - most of whom had little or no opportunity for training - to rapidly assemble into small virtual teams to selectively share information, make decisions, get the job done, and disassemble. The individuals are geographically dispersed. They use different kinds of networks, behind different organizations' firewalls and management policies. They are very, very highly mobile. And there are few applications where the requirement for deep and effective security is more self-evident. Groove's press release can be found here. The Department of Homeland Security's press releases related to HSIN can be found here and here, while Secretary Ridge's remarks are here. Why was a decentralized architecture for this network so fundamentally important, and thus why was Groove uniquely suited for the task? This brings me to the second reason that I'm tremendously pleased to have had the opportunity to contribute to solving this problem. Larry Lessig taught us that in software-based systems in cyberspace, the code can define outcomes - inadvertently or intentionally - that might have an impact on society. Or better stated in this case, the system's core architectural design principles have a real impact not only on the system's mission effectiveness, but also in how it might effectively preserve and protect rights. To understand these issues more deeply, one need look no further than the eloquent work released this past December by the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the Information Age, called "Creating a Trusted Network for Homeland Security". If you're interested in the "why" of decentralization, read the report. Look at the members of the task force. And take particular note of their proposed SHARE network and its architecture. (Interestingly, Richard Eckel wrote about it in his blog before he became aware of the details of Groove's involvement with HSIN.) Lots of stuff here to read, but it's truly fascinating if you are interested in understanding how decentralization and peer-to-peer technology is having a real impact on government and society. Although so, so many people are involved in this project because of its scope, in particular I'd like to recognize Col. Tom Marenic, Pat Duecy, Ed Manavian, and especially our partner Mike Kushin of ManTech/IDS. My sincere thanks for your leadership, your passion about the mission, and your appreciation for organizational dynamics, social dynamics, technology and architecture in assembling a large and empirically effective system for purposeful social interaction. 8:11:27 PM

Sunday, September 14, 2003

Power to the Edge:  A new book by Dave Alberts and Richard Hayes - open sourced in its entirety by CCRP.  This book is truly a must-read for anyone interested in decentralization and the social and organizational relevance of shifting power to the edge, whether in a commercial or a defense context.  As you read about the technology enablers of the edge, it'll become clear why products such as Groove - as COTS enablers of the fully-networked collaborative environment - have such immediate relevance to the defense community. A debt of gratitude goes to John Stenbit and Lin Wells for catalyzing the creation of this tremendously timely, useful and relevant piece of work. 1:11:19 PM

Thursday, July 17, 2003

BoingBoing: Firewalls are Broken, links to this.  Just as in the Infoworld article a few days ago, people are discovering why compartmentalized security such as that implemented by Groove is so important moving forward.  The alternative is more than a bit frightening: Recognizing their valid concerns, would you allow your employer to "lock down" and remotely manage your home computer? 12:46:44 PM

Thursday, July 03, 2003

Extreme Mobility: a rant that I had to write after reading Tim, Dave, and this all in one day. 11:43:15 AM

Friday, May 30, 2003

Joshua Allen makes some really great points about the fact that many companies to have a "don't ask, don't tell, and please for the love of God don't do anything stupid" attitude related to blogs.  There is actually good reason for this:  By suggesting that employee blogs might be "officially sanctioned", or by in some way acknowledging that the corporation benefits from the blog, the company is arguably exposing itself to claims that it is contributorily and/or vicariously liable for any injuries the employee-bloggers cause.  By providing the employee resources and active support related to blogs, if the blogger is ultimately sued for libel, the plaintiff may very well claim that the corporation is also liable ... not a totally specious position.  It makes sense to me that Sam keeps his blog separate, and it has been fascinating to watch Microsoft either explicitly or tacitly permitting the company's direct hosting of so many employee blogs. I'd love to know their official position on these issues, since they clearly have an extremely talented legal staff that could provide leadership in this dimension.  I am surely not a lawyer .. just an employer and (personally) a blogger.  I've only been pondering this since fall of 2001, with my corporate legal, communications, and HR staff, trying to do what seems prudent within my own organization, understanding that employees will indeed blog, yet also trying to keep a line drawn between their actvities and the company's.  It'll be quite interesting over time to see how our legal system ultimately sorts this out. 4:23:45 PM

Saturday, May 17, 2003

I can't say that I agree with Don Park on this one.  In every organization in which I've been a manager, hierarchy becomes unavoidable because of course it's essential to utilize organizational network forms to cope with complexity.  But hierarchy by its very nature causes filtering and interpretation, and in order to truly keep a continuous "feel" for what's going on in the organization and in the market, I strive for more sophisticated network forms that inject more than a bit of the "edge" into my thinking. Don says that "the CEO is not likely to know about, let alone subscribe to, a lowly QA engineer's blog."  Perhaps.  But I seek out and truly relish interaction with people at the edge of my organization.  When I find a hairy bug (e.g. a deadlock, or a comms or memory issue in the product), I love having the developer come in and debug it face-to-face.  It gives me a chance not only to understand more about the product's internals, but also you have NO idea what I learn while chit-chatting while waiting for debug files to copy, etc.  Design & implementation issues, stuff that people have been building off to the side, things about the organization, rumors, etc.  And of course they also milk me for what's going on in my travels, in my official role as Overhead at the organization. I love listening to an individual sales rep or SE when we're on a sales call, because I get a better feel for what's actually going on with customers or prospects.  I try to pattern-match across reps so that I can see what might be improved in the sales process, rather than just listening to my VP of Sales.  I love interacting with designers and developers when doing my Thursday detailed feature design reviews.  I suppose this is just classic "walking the halls", etc., but I feel as though without this kind of direct nonhierarchical contact I would lose touch with my organization, and people throughout would know I was disconnected and would lose respect for me. With regard to blogs, I do agree that we need to figure out some kind of structure, but I don't think it should be strictly hierarchical.  I've got nearly 150 feeds that I monitor in one way or another - some employee, some not - and of course it's way too much to consume everything.  I've asked myself "if you could only read 10, which would you read?"  But I've found that this is the wrong question.  Reading those 10 would be like only having meetings with my direct reports.  I look to blogs for serendipity, and I won't truly understand what's going on "out there" unless I mix it up a bit. So rather than hierarchical blogs, maybe the answer is a mix of some close (recurring) and some far (random)?  Maybe I should constantly read my 10 favorite feeds, and have the reader spit a bunch of randomness at me from the remaining 140?  All I know is that I need to mix some "practice" with the "process", to force some chaos into the system rather than just treating it as merely complex and manageable - which it most certainly is not. 7:01:41 PM

© Copyright 2004 Ray Ozzie. Last update: 3/14/2004; 4:07:20 PM.