It certainly seems to be a while since I jotted down any thoughts about “Life, The Universe and Everything” but it seems that the “Life” portion has taken somewhat of a front-seat, commanding position over the last few months so that it has been difficult to get that sit-down time.
Winter has definitely arrived today. I had to hunt out the cold remedies and that’s not an easy task in this house. So here I am, sat at my desk wondering what the day will throw at me and sipping a hot cold & flu remedy!
I was impressed last week when I sat down and watched a live broadcast from the Salesforce.com “CloudForce Live” event in London. Am I the only one that has been confused about the relevance of Twitter or am I just a typical IT dinosaur that can’t work out the point of it. I mean, let’s face it, why would I want to tell everyone in the world that I was “on the train to London“, or “being crushed by the most gargantuan person to get on the train this morning“? No-one in their right minds would put a sign outside their house saying “Hello everyone, I’m out”! That sort of invitation is plain stupid, and yet in twitter-land that happens every single day. Some tweets are the sort of thing that I’m not sure I want people to know; “I missed the train this morning“, “I got reprimanded for using my phone on the plane” – that last one is an admission that you have no regard for the safety of yourself and fellow travellers, I’m a pilot, I should know. It all seems so Twee! Ooh … I like that, an old English expression makes a comeback in the world of Tweeting. Are your tweets just Twee?!
Salesforce.com seem to have taken that next step in the world of Tweeting. The critical thing about Tweeting is the fact that you are alerted to status changes or events rather than just watching what other people are doing in some kind of voyeuristic manner. So now they have constructed an interface to their software that looks like Facebook but acts like Twitter. Instead of having “Friends” you can follow people (OK that’s nothing new), and you can follow other objects in the Salesforce.com world. That means that any object/event in your IT estate could become something you follow – now I get it! If I am working on a document in a virtual team I can follow that document and get updates when anyone changes that document. I can follow a helpdesk ticket and see that it is being followed through properly. I can follow the status of a server or an application and be alerted when anything changes. If we now add thresholds or allow a user to configure when to be alerted about stuff then it really becomes useful because I won’t get a Tweet-storm every time I open up my facebook -like dashboard.
Now it becomes really useful because I can take this off my Desktop/Laptop and onto my phone which goes with me everywhere. This makes us truly connected to the business in which we work – although I may regret this in time to come. Taken a step further I am then able to manage my piece of the business from any location as long as I have some form of telephone connection.
The next step is to see that eMail, as we now use it, is likely to become a thing of the past. How many emails today are really just instant messages or tweets? If we add to this the whole idea of presence and location then I think we must be getting close to something that releases us to manage the business we are in rather than constantly responding to emails.
Having said all of that, the real problem is that most of the applications and systems that we have out there are in no way geared up to work in this way. What we need is equivalent to a huge Events Network that will be able to manage trillions of events and we, as individuals, will subscribe to published events and corporations will do the same. Take the thorny issue of expenses for example. What if you never had to submit an expenses claim ever again? Every time you used your corporate card to pay for something, the event would be published and followed by the accounts department in your office. You would also validate the expense (that would be another event) and the funds would be dealt with as part of a twitter-like feed. I probably need to think this through a little more fully, but it sounds like it might work.
Take security as well. I think the aim should be to distance security from the centre and take it to the edge of the corporate network, nearer to the user in fact. An event can be published by anyone, but to receive information about that event you need to subscribe to it, in twitter terms, you need to follow it. The responsibility then lies with the publisher to validate whether the subscribe request is granted and they can revoke that permission any time they like. That seems like a much better model to me than locking everything down to the extent that we do, incurring significant cost in the process.
Seems like we still have a long way to go in this corporate environment to get to the type of systems that will support this type of use. So, I suppose, in the meantime, “Sat at my desk drinking a cold remedy and blogging” will have to do.
