paul walk’s weblog

Commenting on the Google Apps outage last week, John Proffitt, IT services director at APTI, an Alaskan public TV station, said:

“It was constant troubleshooting, testing, research, posting to the Google Apps forums and so on. Plus there’s the emotional strain of wondering whether you completely screwed up by moving everyone to Google Apps as our sole e-mail system. That’s what freaked me out: Did Google just make me look like an idiot?”

[via Gmail leaves Google Apps admins nervous on InfoWorld, my emphasis]

In the higher-education-institution (HEI) community I have seen a fair amount of debate recently about whether or not institutions should be looking to embrace the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model and, in particular, making use of all remote those Web 2.0 services. Why run local services, when you can simply find a remote service to provide for your needs?

Perhaps this is a model for the future. But is the right model for the present? There is a growing, commonly-held belief that we are about to enter a global recession. Just the fact that the assumption is commonly held may be enough to make this a reality. Clearly there is a degree of economic uncertainty. Is this a good moment for HEIs to begin a brave experiment with outsourcing services to remote companies?

Now, Google are clearly not a fly-by-night company - their size now makes them a fairly safe bet. But the vast majority of Web 2.0 companies are a fraction of the size of Google. As it is, many Web 2.0 services appear to exist with no visible means of support, other than venture capital. I imagine that venture capital can become harder to find in a period of economic down-turn. Much Web 2.0 service delivery is supported through an advertising model, relying on a revenue stream coming from a small percentage of advertisements ‘clicked’ on. Again, perhaps people are less likely to respond to advertisements in a recession….?

Chris Adie, who spoke on ‘Managing the Risks of Web 2.0‘ at this year’s (excellent) Eduserv Foundation Symposium, made the related point that Web 2.0 services which rely on a global scale in terms of numbers of users and/or on social networks will become decreasingly useful if the number of users starts to drop. Essentially, the network effect works both ways….

Incidentally, Chris also pointed us to some Guidelines for Using External Web 2.0 Services supplied by Edinburgh University. and spoke authoritatively about the institution’s use of remote Web 2.0 services and the risks involved in this, especially in terms of compliance with the Data Protection Act. Interestingly, the ‘back-channel’ at the symposium, populated primarily perhaps by people likely to be passionate about new technology, tended to dismiss some of Chris’s points. I felt that some participants either didn’t realise, or didn’t care that Chris was describing risks to the institution.

Once we got past the recession at the end of the dot-com bubble in the first years of this century, the notion of an open-source operating system had reached a level of sufficient maturity for it to enter the mainstream. Web 2.0 services and SaaS as a viable, mainstream approach will likely reach similar levels of maturity in time. But perhaps now, more than ever, institutions need to make sober appraisals of their options for service delivery or procurement.

After all, no one wants to be made to look like an idiot!

Technorati Tags: Google, SaaS

I came across this quote:

The coolest thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone else

attributed to Rufus Pollack, in a in a post on the Talis blog, Nodalities.

Absolutely, couldn’t agree more. The point is not so much whether this statement might be true or not, so much as what it does to your thinking and planning if you decide to take it as an article of faith. This reminds me of conversations I had with colleagues last year when I was working on the XCRI project (a project to develop a schema and related tools for the creation and management of standard and interoperable course catalogue data). We started to evolve the idea that Universities should consider the approach of opening up the non-contentious data in their considerable internal management information systems, slapping public facing APIs on to these data sources and inviting the world in to use what they could. We surmised that:

• the barriers and costs to doing this kind of thing were rapidly diminishing
• the possible gains, in terms of new business opportunities, partnerships etc. might be worth this small investment.
• the more you did this, the more chance of discovering a new opportunity

During many a debate about addressing all kinds of thorny issues surrounding IPR, security, access control etc. we wondered aloud why we didn’t start with the peripheral stuff - the data which didn’t need to be secured or controlled in these ways. We recognised that this sort of development had long since taken place with other systems in a typical university - notably with library catalogues for example. So why not with course catalogues?

In business terms, this kind of activity might, perhaps, be described as a loss leader - giving something away for free in the hope that it might open up a channel to more profitable business. Amazon did this long ago with their E-Commerce Service, and it seems to be working well for them! Crucially, they go out of their way to show-case the solutions built by other, third-party developers on top of the Amazon services.

As me move into a world of institutional repositories, with Universities beginning to accept the benefits of providing open-access to scholarly output, will we see this trend extend to other types of less sector-specific information? Some quick examples might include accommodation details and bookings, expertise directories, course catalogues(XCRI!), calendars of public lectures etc.

Technorati Tags: AWS, management information, open data, Rufus Pollack, Talis, universities, XCRI

A short report from Gartner reckons that the newest Google Apps Premier Edition is still not ready for prime-time in the enterprise, but that it is close, likely to evolve at “internet speed” and, crucially, ahead of the competition. The killer feature offered by Google’s suite of tools is collaboration - something not well supported in current mainstream office suites. Still a major issue with Google Apps is the fact that the user has to be online to use them. Incidentally, Google are charging $50 per user per year - while Gartner estimate the average annual cost to the enterprise of providing email services to be more than double this figure at $122.

The report’s authors go on to identify two targets for proliferation, one of which is:

Individuals will experiment with Google Apps, employ it for short-term, ad hoc collaboration projects at work and spread word of their success to drive “viral adoption” by other users. Viral adoption will eventually lead to end-user pressure for IT organizations to include Google Apps.

The viral adoption is happening and I have already experimented with these tools for “ad hoc collaboration projects”, with some success. And not just Google Apps of course, take a look at the exhaustive list provided by Ismael Ghalimi’s on his Office 2.0 Database.

I was particularly interested by report’s second recommendation:

If your enterprise wants to experiment with Google Apps, segment users into — and begin piloting Google Apps for — two different classes: those users most likely to experiment with it on their own for collaboration (inside and outside the enterprise) and those not currently served by the enterprise’s IT infrastructure.

This could clearly apply to any services offered remotely of course - not just Google’s. I wonder how many enterprises are sufficiently flexible and confident to experiment in this way? How many of the early adopters identified here find themselves unable to translate the rich, collaborative experience they find outside the enterprise, with the dull fare served up to them by their corporate IT departments?

Technorati Tags: software as a service, enterprise, Office2.0, Google, Web 2.0, web services, Google Apps, Gartner