Joe Lamantia.com

IBM recently announced the next ver­sion of Lotus Notes will sup­port Open­Doc­u­ment For­mat as a native file for­mat (as reported in IBM Bets Big On Open Source In Next Release Of Lotus Notes). This shift to an open file for­mat is — as the major­ity of the cov­er­age of IBM’s announce­ment cor­rectly inter­prets it to be — a direct chal­lenge to the dom­i­nance of the Office suite of pro­duc­tiv­ity appli­ca­tions, a class of prod­ucts in which Microsoft has long relied on pro­pri­etary file for­mats as a cor­ner­stone of it’s mar­ket con­trol strat­egy. Mak­ing the chal­lenge explicit, the next ver­sion of Lotus Notes will also include “…built-in word pro­cess­ing, spread­sheet, and pre­sen­ta­tion graph­ics soft­ware”.
Since Microsoft relies on the inte­gra­tion of Share­Point and the Office suite as a pil­lar of it’s col­lab­o­ra­tion plans (in Gates out­lines Share­Point strat­egy, ham­mers IBM, John Fontana of Net­work World quotes Bill Gates as say­ing, “The key point is that Share­Point is becom­ing the key plat­form for col­lab­o­ra­tion of all types… When peo­ple look back on what we are doing with Office [2007] here, the most rev­o­lu­tion­ary ele­ment will be what we are doing with Share­Point.”), IBM’s shift to Open­Doc­u­ment For­mat is also a strate­gic move in the larger cat­e­gory of enter­prise col­lab­o­ra­tion, itself a sub­set of the emerg­ing com­pre­hen­sive infor­ma­tion work­ing envi­ron­ments For­rester Research calls the infor­ma­tion work­place.
An End to Impe­ri­al­ism
I’ve sug­gested already that the con­cep­tual con­struct labeled ‘col­lab­o­ra­tion’ is at heart another instance of enter­prise soft­ware and solu­tion ven­dor mar­ket­ing rhetoric designed to mask real­ity — it’s sim­ply not pos­si­ble to change estab­lished cul­tural, orga­ni­za­tional, per­cep­tual, or philo­soph­i­cal under­stand­ings of what work is and how it should be done with an approach cen­tered on tech­nol­ogy — in a quasi-utopian haze.
IBM’s adop­tion of Open­Doc­u­ment doesn’t change this pic­ture of the col­lab­o­ra­tion land­scape. Instead, it indi­cates a larger shift; dawn­ing recog­ni­tion and acknowl­edg­ment that mono­cul­tures are no longer viable, or valid, or broadly accept­able in the enter­prise arena.
The cre­ation and preser­va­tion of mono­cul­tures (recently in the news asso­ci­ated with Microsoft thanks to Dan Greer and oth­ers’ pre­science) is one of the salient char­ac­ter­is­tics of the old approach to enter­prise soft­ware solu­tions. It is espe­cially vis­i­ble in those enter­prise solu­tions whose intended role within a port­fo­lio of prod­uct and ser­vice offer­ings is to serve as a con­sis­tent rev­enue source, strate­gic bul­wark against com­pe­ti­tion, and cost shift­ing mech­a­nism whereby clients paid for the devel­op­ment of new prod­ucts and ser­vices, often under the guise of main­te­nance, patches, upgrades, etc.
Broadly, the old approach to enter­prise solu­tions was an impe­r­ial model, with aspects of colo­nial­ism, that pur­sued a mil­i­tary style take and hold growth pat­tern.
Wikipedia offers the fol­low­ing intro­duc­tion to impe­ri­al­ism:
“Impe­ri­al­ism is a pol­icy of extend­ing con­trol or author­ity over for­eign enti­ties as a means of acqui­si­tion and/or main­te­nance of empires. This is either through direct ter­ri­to­r­ial con­quest or set­tle­ment, or through indi­rect meth­ods of exert­ing con­trol on the pol­i­tics and/or econ­omy of other coun­tries. The term is often used to describe the pol­icy of a country’s dom­i­nance over dis­tant lands, regard­less of whether the coun­try con­sid­ers itself part of the empire.“
In the realm of soft­ware impe­ri­al­ism, the cus­tomer orga­ni­za­tion buy­ing and installing an enter­prise soft­ware pack­age was seen as a form of ter­ri­tory to be occu­pied or con­trolled by one or more hos­tile, rival­rous soft­ware and ser­vices ven­dors seek­ing to extract con­tin­u­ing rev­enues from their occu­pied pos­ses­sions; rev­enues in the form of main­te­nance, sup­port, cus­tomiza­tion, admin­is­tra­tion, or other sorts of solu­tion upkeep and exten­sion expenses.
Empires exerted con­trol for­mally through a vari­ety of polit­i­cal and eco­nomic mech­a­nisms, and infor­mally through influ­ence over polit­i­cal, eco­nomic and cul­tural spheres. Wikipedia’s entry for “empire” offers some instruc­tive par­al­lels to the enter­prise solu­tion model:
“First, in an empire there must be a Core and a Periph­ery. The empire’s struc­ture relates the core élite to the periph­eral élite in a mutu­ally ben­e­fi­cial fash­ion. Such as rela­tion­ship can be estab­lished through any num­ber of means, be they aggres­sive, coer­cise, or con­sen­sual. And while there is a ver­ti­cal rela­tion­ship between the core and periph­ery, there is a lack of sub­stan­tive rela­tions between periph­ery and periph­ery. This rela­tion­ship he describes as an incom­plete wheel: there are hubs and spokes, but no rim.“
The rela­tion­ship of inter­con­nected elites is easy to see in the pat­tern of incented sales and buy­ing deci­sions; “Need tick­ets to that exclu­sive event? No prob­lem, we’ll get them for you right away…“
But it’s the idea of dis­con­nected hubs and spokes that is key to under­stand­ing the cor­re­spon­dence between the old enter­prise model and impe­ri­al­ism. How often do indi­vid­ual client solu­tions (per­haps for dif­fer­ent depart­ments or busi­ness units) inter­act with each other? How often do instances of the same solu­tion for dif­fer­ent clients allow effec­tive inter­ac­tion between dif­fer­ent clients of the same ven­dor? How often do dif­fer­ent prod­ucts nom­i­nally part of ‘inte­grated’ solu­tion sets that were in actu­al­ity assem­bled by aggre­gat­ing the offer­ings of acquired com­pa­nies suc­cess­fully inter­act?
Again, with­out over­load­ing the anal­ogy, there are clear par­al­lels between the degrees of empire and the life­cy­cle of enter­prise solu­tions and ven­dors.
“Motyl also posits vary­ing degrees of empire: For­mal, Infor­mal, and Hege­monic. In a for­mal impe­r­ial rela­tion­ship, the core can appoint and dis­miss periph­eral elites, obvi­ate any exter­nal agenda or poli­cies, and directly con­trol the inter­nal agenda and poli­cies.“
As a con­sul­tant, I’ve seen aggres­sive soft­ware and ser­vices ven­dors directly drive busi­ness direc­tion, strat­egy, invest­ment, and process change deci­sions all too often. Orga­ni­za­tions lack­ing vision, effec­tive lead­er­ship, or those enter­ing com­pla­cency or suf­fer­ing decline look to ven­dors for lead­er­ship by proxy, allow­ing or ask­ing ven­dors to apply their own inap­pro­pri­ate frames of ref­er­ence and per­spec­tives to under­stand and choose courses of action in sit­u­a­tions out­side the vendor’s proper domain.
“In an infor­mal impe­r­ial rela­tion­ship, the core has influ­ence but not con­trol over appoint­ing and dis­miss­ing periph­eral elites, direct con­trol over the exter­nal agenda and poli­cies, and influ­ence over the inter­nal agenda and poli­cies.“
This infor­mal rela­tion­ship is the posi­tion of the entrenched ven­dor that pro­vides ‘per­spec­tive’ on many sit­u­a­tions out­side their proper domain. Ven­dors seek­ing to increase their ter­ri­tory within client orga­ni­za­tions often pur­sue growth via this method. Alter­na­tively, ven­dors will con­trol the envi­ron­ment in which cus­tomers and other ser­vice providers make deci­sions, as in the “open API” approach wherein the enter­prise exposes a por­tion of it’s archi­tec­ture, code base, or other plat­form, but main­tains exclu­sive con­trol over the API with­out any bind­ing com­mit­ments.
Wikipedia con­tin­ues:
“Finally, in a hege­monic rela­tion­ship, the core has no con­trol over appoint­ing or dis­miss­ing periph­eral elites, con­trol over the exter­nal agenda, influ­ence over exter­nal poli­cies, and no con­trol over the inter­nal agenda or poli­cies.“
This is the stage that the exist­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion solu­tions seem to be enter­ing, as wit­nessed by IBM’s announce­ment, and Microsoft’s fail­ure to date to advance the OpenXML stan­dard to full legit­i­macy.
The Pass­ing of Imperium
In essence, the old enter­prise approach exem­pli­fied the closed sys­tem, one that was sus­tained by the author­ity and cred­i­bil­ity of the orig­i­nat­ing ven­dor in the face of other com­pet­ing closed sys­tems. Fun­da­men­tally, soft­ware empires and impe­ri­al­ism are pred­i­cated on the valid­ity of closed sys­tems. What hap­pens when open sys­tems become the pre­ferred model?
“Empire ends when sig­nif­i­cant periph­eral inter­ac­tion begins, not nec­es­sar­ily when the core ceases its dom­i­na­tion of the periph­eries. The core-periphery rela­tion­ship can be as strong or weak as pos­si­ble and remain an empire as long as there is only insignif­i­cant inter­ac­tion between periph­ery and periph­ery.“
Open­Doc­u­ment is designed to allow exactly the sort of periph­ery to periph­ery inter­ac­tion that closed archi­tec­tures pro­hib­ited. IBM’s shift to Open­Doc­u­ment shows aware­ness that old style closed impe­r­ial enter­prise sys­tems are no longer viable. In this, they are fol­low­ing the chang­ing rhetoric of those such as Larry Can­nell from collaborationloop.com, who offers a strongly pro-open sys­tem view in A Vision For Col­lab­o­ra­tive Tech­nolo­gies:
“I believe open­ness breeds inno­va­tion, and there are many parts of the col­lab­o­ra­tive tech­nol­ogy mar­ket that need a big injec­tion of inno­va­tion. While ven­dors con­tinue push­ing inte­gra­tion as their pri­mary value propo­si­tion for closed sys­tems, the astute com­peti­tor will embrace open­ness and pro­vide inno­va­tion within an ecosys­tem of col­lab­o­ra­tive tech­nolo­gies based on open stan­dards. Today we have a plethora of email sys­tems which nearly every­one con­nected to the Inter­net is capa­ble of using. We need com­pa­ra­ble open and sim­ple choices for other col­lab­o­ra­tive tech­nolo­gies; whether it is col­lab­o­ra­tive work­spaces or online com­mu­ni­ties. It will not be until we have sim­ple open stan­dards that fos­ter famil­iar­ity and easy inter­con­nec­tiv­ity that will we see wide­spread use and explo­sive inno­va­tion.“
Can­nell is care­ful here to take a pos­i­tive and forward-looking line regard­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion, but his view of closed sys­tems is clearly neg­a­tive. And the implied con­se­quence of a closed sys­tem is lack of inno­va­tion, one of the key signs of orga­ni­za­tions in decline.
Didn’t I start out by say­ing that we should be wary of the mar­ket­ing rhetoric sur­round­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion? Yes, pre­cisely because the major­ity of the rhetoric com­ing from enter­prise ven­dors still exem­pli­fies the closed sys­tem, impe­ri­al­ist enter­prise ethos.
How­ever, in the case of IBM, it’s clear that they’ve antic­i­pated the con­se­quences of ignor­ing the envi­ron­men­tal shift to open sys­tems that is at hand, and reacted accord­ingly, at least as regards the core doc­u­ment stan­dard under­ly­ing Lotus Notes (which is still awful, BTW, just in case any­one mis­in­ter­prets this arti­cle to mean I think oth­er­wise…). The rela­tion­ship of Notes to Work­place seems largely unknown at this point, and still sub­ject to bit­ter infight­ing, in another great par­al­lel to the impe­r­ial model. Microsoft, as the other major col­lab­o­ra­tion ven­dor, may be able to stem the tide against open sys­tems in the short term, but will even­tu­ally have to respond.
My thoughts on the cur­rent form of enter­prise solu­tions as a class / indus­try / way of solv­ing busi­ness prob­lems remain unal­tered — in fact I think that IBM’s move sup­ports many of the pre­dic­tions I made ear­lier this year, fol­low­ing ear­lier treat­ments by oth­ers writ­ing on the same subjects.