Redefining Business Capabilities

Service–Oriented Architecture the way we see it

Redefining Business Capabilities

Using Service-Oriented Architecture with

Web 2.0 technology

Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 The forces of change 4

3 Services Transact, People Interact 7

4 The Business and Technology Model 10

4.1 The "Open Standards" Mid Layer 12

4.2 The "Back Office" Layer 12

4.3 The new Front Office layer 12

5 Web 2.0 as a business capability 13

6 MashUps - Personalization of interactions 15

6.1 Examples of a MasUp in a Utility based on Google Earth 16

7 Completing the Business & Technology Model 17

8 Summary; Chefs or Cookbooks? 19

8.1 The difference between contacts and content in market-driven activities. 19

8.2 Welcome to the ‘‘End of Business as Usual” 20

8.3 Business Game Changing Examples 20

8.4 Web 2.0 Business Traits 20

9 The technologies of Web 2.0 21

9.1 RSS—Really Simple Syndication 22

9.2 AJAX—Asynchronous JavaScript And XML 22

9.3 Tagging—People-oriented data taxonomies 23

9.4 REST—Representational State Transfer 24

The formalization of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions has soared well over its intended business market. The IT market expected a boom but got a thump. However, that didn't mean SOA was ignored by the marketplace. The pairing of SOA and Web 2.0 has quietly proved its value across many industry sectors.

In 2006, a new consumer trend was noted. Home users are becoming more sophisticated merchants/users of technology than traditional business users. They seem to be less interested in the mechanics of Web 2.0/SOA and more interested in the results of using the technology as dynamic, customizable, building blocks for products and services.

Companies able to capture this new buying trend gained significant profit. The three ingredients for success were:

Recognition of consumer abilities with the web

Reorganization of business processes

Better resource management and collaboration in ecosystems.

The following company profiles demonstrate how a SOA business model brought shareholder value and laid the cornerstone for future industry growth:

Threadless (www.threadless.com) typified a startup with a business model based on Web 2.0 technology for customer access and SOA for business processes. With first year revenues of $12 million and substantial profits, it was typical of the success that companies who have married both layers of technology together have achieved. Threadless provides an online platform for those who are interested in good quality, relatively unique, or niche T-Shirts. The thriving community on Threadless can submit designs, exchange opinions and ideas via forums and blogs, and rate one another’s designs. The key business driver is that members can also vote on their favorite designs. Every few weeks, Threadless produces T-shirts based on the top three designs and mails them directly to the members of the community who place an order. At $20 a Tee-Shirt, and with none of the usual expenses of a clothing manufacturer like a dedicated design team, stocking expenses, warehousing fees, distribution, surplus, etc., it’s a very profitable business.

With more than 600,000 T-Shirts sold in the first twelve months and sales rising at a phenomenal rate, it also shows that niches can be very big. Actually in this case, it’s a collection of niches, as the constant feedback from end users allows the exploitation of a bigger and undiscovered/untapped market. All of this is achieved with no marketing costs by using the new viral marketing concept where people “tag” others sharing the same interest, helping each other to find things of common interest. However, the concept is not just for startups; large established businesses with well known brands can benefit from this model too.

Redefinining Business Capabilities 1

1 Introduction


2

Toyota introduced www.scion.com as a brand for affluent 20-30 year old drivers in California; just the kind of people who would not normally buy a regular Toyota! With sales of more than 150,000 units just in this state, the innovation represented a lot of additional revenue that Toyota could not reach with its regular brand and model range. It also refreshed the value proposition of the “right” car to the so called “iPod generation” who were proving to be more interested in and spending more money on the “gadgets” rather than the cars. Scion is more of a virtual rather than physical brand. Accessed via the Scion website, it nurtures a vibrant community that shares interests in music, events, entertainment, travel, etc. The one thing that brings these communities together is a need for transport to get them to their interests. For the Scion community, it is something personal that expresses each individual’s personality.

The Scion community can choose from three standard models of cars offered by Toyota—a hatchback, utility or sports car. Through the Scion network of franchised car paint and tuning shops, they can turn their model into a personal “ride”. The concept is nothing but a commercial spin-off of the popular TV series called “Pimp my Ride” in which a team of automobile experts turn ordinary cars into heavily customized specials. Toyota gains not only market share, but limits the disruption of building more and more customization onto their volume production lines, thereby retaining the most profitable parts of car manufacturing like financing, ongoing service and parts businesses.

What these examples, and others, have in common is that they all use technology externally as a means to “link to” and “work with” customers, or partners, in an interactive and collaborative way. The term “technology” is perhaps better to use than IT with its distinctive current meanings around supporting an enterprise’s own internally defined functions. Put simply, it’s the ability of Web 2.0 to support people in ad-hoc interactions, linked by SOA within the enterprise through a more flexible internal structure of processes, to the transactions of the existing IT systems.

It is not necessary to move to an entirely new business model to take advantage of both layers of the technology. For many years, the struggle to align IT with business needs has been a constant challenge. It’s not easy to fully resolve this issue because it involves a complex blend of business demands that have been constantly changing; with most changing even faster today. A majority of IT systems in use today were implemented to capture and automate an existing internal process in order to gain operational efficiencies usually expressed in terms of time, reduced numbers of staff required, better availability of internal data, and therefore all justifiable by cost.

The establishment of these highly effective procedures that automate the expected “Business as Usual” operations has worked, and with the economic downturn in recent years, it has played a substantial part in keeping costs down. Now markets are mostly rising and costs cannot be cut any further; therefore the need has been to increase revenue by competing in the marketplace against others. By definition this means extending existing offers, or in more likelihood introducing new offers, and make new demands on the existing procedures and systems for “flexibility”.

IT has answered this need for more frequent change with the “adaptive” model that promises to reduce complexity and improve the tools that manage change. But there are limits to what can be done. The universal use of email with the Internet providing much simpler interfaces and connectivity, coupled with an array of new technologies for personal communication, have all conspired to drive people into processes that increasingly demand faster actions. The exponential growth of email traffic creates a need for recipients to prioritize response to various people through “manage by exception” filters. The increasing rate of decisions calls for more business intelligence, but not necessarily via data mining techniques; something more immediate is required to enable decision support using current information.

There are calls for a new and different enterprise architecture that permits operational departments to have more freedom to organize their own localized requirements and changes, at the same time as there are requirements for increased compliance management of IT systems. Then there are pressures of open standards, open source and security, as well as more devices to integrate. This paper presents Capgemini’s view of a different conceptual model to address the issues and lists key requirements that must first be addressed.

Success has become less about managing “business as usual” transactions and more about managing exceptions or events by allowing people to interact with new types of collaboration tools based on communication and content. The key to handing changes being demanded in the existing business model is to apply the same blend of people-centric Web 2.0 with flexible, process-supportive SOA to act as external business model drivers. In time, this will also lay out capabilities to build upon for more radical business change; the kind of change that some industries have already had to face. In music, travel, entertainment and other vertical industry sectors, well known brands have struggled to survive, and in some cases disappeared, as consumers change their expectations and buying habits.

Welcome to the end of business as usual, a time to recognize exactly what change is occurring through business and technology that is leading to new capabilities.



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It is not unusual to hear people talk about the technology they own in social conversations today. Comparisons of phones, PCs, gaming Systems and a number of other devices, all of which have increasingly become a part of our everyday lives, have taken center stage in our society. Nor is it surprising to find that home consumer PCs are often faster and more powerful than what users access at their workplaces. More particularly, a growing number of people know how to use these products to manage their everyday lives, through innovative software and tools that allow them to do so.

For those under thirty years of age, usually referred to as “Generation Y”, this is not technology at all; these are necessary skills required for an active social life; whilst for those above this age the imperatives may be different, but no less compelling. The easy availability of information through technology has drastically changed the way consumers make their decisions. Whether it be a purchase or the selection of an ideal holiday destination, all our decisions play a part in making up the increasingly ubiquitous role of technology in our lives. This behavior shift introduces several points to consider: First the difference between the more “people centric” uses of technology by Generation Y, compared to the more “content centric” use by the older group; Second, the comparison between ways that people interact with technology at home versus work.

2 The forces of change

Users, and increasingly, consumers create (technology) markets

Reluctant IT users at work, who devolve responsibility to the IT department for systems, behave differently in using the Web at home for their own decision-making, and skilled users at home expect more from their IT systems at work. Both introduce their views into the workplace on how IT should work; however, these views are not actually based on current IT systems with their focus on cost-driven data management, but rather on user driven perceptions of “value”. Over the last 25 years or so, technology change has been driven by these same users adopting new technologies on the basis of their desire to extract personal value from their use, before businesses can make a cost-based economic decision to adopt the same. In most cases, they directly imported their technology into the enterprise, which ultimately was forced into adopting the same.

Business cases based on cost were, and are, very hard to make for cell phones, email, the original Web, and now for a new generation of communication/collaboration tools. What they provide is personal productivity as opposed to enterprise procedural cost reduction, plus the expectation that all businesses have these capabilities as a part of their “infrastructure”, to be able to do business with others. The twin forces of internal and external expectations of how business should be conducted—linked to employee adoption and consumer capability—is a prime driving force of a technology-based change in business processes.

But what of the technology itself? The items in the previous diagram represent a continuation of the shift that started with the data processing mainframe in a corporate datacenter, remote from users running vast calculation programs. This moved outward to provide departmental applications based on mini computers with the role of capturing the processes of the department, though in a data-centric manner. It is worth taking a moment to reflect that the creation of the business department-based model was driven by the need to create manageable silos of data; only in the beginning was this based on the organization of filing cabinets. Subsequently the silos were captured by departmental applications still based on “data” centricity; but it was the advent of the networked PC that started to change this, and work became “information” based.

The resulting explosion in the use of information created the term Information Technology (IT), the role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO), the need for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to regain consistency in core enterprise data, and the technology architecture of client-server. All of these technologies may be regarded as data-centric with improved capabilities for personal access to, and use of data as, information.

It is not surprising that the initial design of the World Wide Web should have been based on the need to extend the capabilities for the sharing of information through improved management of data. It is more usual to describe the Web as being based on “content”, to make a distinction between the computer-centric rendering of data to be viewed as information by people, and the goal of the Web to create content especially for people. The result was a new type of technology architecture that placed the emphasis on standardization and communication.

The tremendous success of the Web was driven by its standardization and simplicity, coupled with the availability of a sufficient number of PC users, which drove up the volume at a rate never seen before by any previous technology. More people led to more content, and more content in turn drew more people, until the Web and its underlying technology of the Internet became a ubiquitous global utility. As it reached towards this level, businesses of all types recognized the need to be involved, but equally the limitations became evident too.



6

Today the spread of broadband has overcome speed, one of the major limitations, and the hype that drove the notorious “internet bubble” has been replaced by activities based on sustainable value over and above mere content. All of this has led to technology evolving to support what people and businesses need in a better way. The result is to add new technologies to the browser/content model—all extensions to the basic, well-established principles and core technology of the Web and the Internet, summarized by the statement of capabilities.

Browsers browse, Services transact, People interact and MashUps customize

Vertical industry sector associations have become the new drivers of specific business service standards that allow inter-enterprise and ecosystem markets to be created under the heading of “Web Services”. Whilst 2006 has been the year when community-based interactive sites from YouTube to MySpaces of the world have flourished at a growth rate that exceeds the original growth of the Web, from this platform, the technologies for personalization are starting to become the new growth wave for both business and personal use. This latter technology area represents a very real shift in user-driven expectations of how technology should support them. This is hardly surprising given the criticism, for years, of the poor interface between IT systems and people.

There are many ways already circulating to describe a “Service”. Unfortunately, most are technology based, though many agree that the biggest benefits are to be found by business process change. It follows that business managers should be defining requirements for “Services”; something that is not easy to do without understanding what “Services” are and the capabilities that they provide. Capgemini uses a simple example based on the airline industry to describe the capabilities, how they can be used, and the power that successful deployments can have to completely revolutionize an entire industry. It starts with what can be achieved for business, the value versus cost issue, and then how services enable and extend the capabilities.

The so called “low-cost” airlines that entered the market some years ago introduced radical change not only into the airline sector, but also into the overall travel market by enlarging the entire market based on “interacting” as well as “transacting.” Many airlines realized that potential customers now had the technology at home, and increasingly at work, to be able to do business directly without needing the intermediary travel agent or call center. In the case of traditional airlines, the web was used as an alternative channel to sell the same product by another route which meant fixed pricing, a set of offers chosen by the airline, and always the same process based first on choosing a destination. The primary benefit was cost reduction in handling the transaction more than enlarging the available market, and the transaction process defined by internal considerations remained unchanged.

The contrast with the new low cost airlines could not have been greater. The new arrivals designed their processes from the external considerations of the prospective customer, with the emphasis on “interaction,” to allow the customer to control the way they wanted to shape the factors that determined their purchase. As an example, it has become popular for potential customers to enter a date, how much they are prepared to pay, and then to be offered a choice of destinations. This is a previously unheard of principle in an industry that based everything on the destination being the starting choice for the customer! The results have been a much enlarged market for air travel, with new airlines almost total beneficiaries, in addition to having taken their share of the market for traditional travel too. The results forced traditional airlines to modify their own behavior, copying those features that they could, such as online check in, with the result of an overall industry transformation in the expectations of customers forcing still further reforms.


3 Services Transact, People Interact


8

It’s the external “interactions” with the market that create the differentiation to win more sales to create value to the business, as opposed to the internal transactions which are largely non-differentiating other than on the basis of cost. The value versus cost determination can be simply understood by equating it to a call center technology refresh; handle more calls per hour with the existing staff, and the justification will be on cost; convert more calls into sales per hour, and the justification will be value. How to win more sales? By better identifying the customer’s requirements and being able to match them through operating flexibility.

Whether Customer or Market, people-centric “interaction” produces differentiation and value; supported by the flexibility of dynamically orchestrated “services” of the “front office”; whilst the traditional applications provide cost-effective, compliant transactions in the “back office.”

The airline example can be extended to illustrate how all of these capabilities have been used. The online provision of boarding passes that can be printed by the customer at their home or office to avoid long queues and delays onsite has become very popular. It has also introduced the need for a new type of cooperation in the air travel ecosystem between the airline and the airport operator. For the boarding pass to be accepted by the airport operator, there must be a transfer of the necessary information from the airline, an example of a “Web Service”, providing inter-enterprise capabilities based on standardized information. The exact format of these web services has been established in the vertical trade association to enable all airlines to be able to communicate the necessary information to all airport operators.

An example of separation of the existing back-office transactional systems from these new flexible front-office services is shown by airlines who have introduced auctioning upgrades. As passengers arrive and “check-in” at the airport, they are offered the option of an upgrade and asked to “bid“ for it. The check-in process is held as a local service during this activity, and when the check-in period closes, the passengers with winning bids are called forward to pay for their upgrades with credit cards. On completion of this activity, the necessary final seat allocation is made; boarding passes are locally reprinted, and only then is the completed file sent to the existing back-office system, which receives it in the original format as a data stream.

The advantages that this separation of the front-office differentiating activity from the back-office commercial transaction processing includes: Extra revenue for seats that would otherwise not yield any further revenue, a transparent allocation process that passengers can understand and choose to participate in if they wish, reduced risk of centralized system outages affecting operations, etc.



There are several important lessons in these examples, which are all based on real-life implementations that should be recognizable to most managers who have to travel.

Service-Oriented Architecture is more about the ability to support new capabilities than delivering existing types of projects with SOA as a new approach.

The new capabilities enabled are usually to be found in the front-office, and are aimed at being able to extend business opportunities by increasing flexibility to events.

Differentiation usually means the ability to accommodate “people” and their ways of handling situations, both as customers and as employees, as part of the processes.

It is likely that significant parts of new capabilities will be external to the enterprise; the design of the process must be “understandable” to them and their services.

The importance of “standards” and “standardization” in terms of both technology and industry best practices are paramount.

Once a few players start to transform their way of doing business, then very quickly customer expectations change and the competitive market is transformed.

Leading business schools have studied the impact of customer expectation change, followed by market transformation, and believe it leads to an enlargement of the existing market. The taking of this enlarged and previously “unseen” part of the market has built up market share for new entrants very rapidly, and positioned them favorably to take on existing players in what has previously been thought of as the mainstream market.

10

The original proposition for the introduction of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) was based on a three-layer model developed to explain the various technologies and their roles by Intel. The categorization of understanding the difference between “business” services, “a composite of services to form a process,” and the common, shared services of the “infrastructure” was initially very thought provoking and helped stimulate understanding by Enterprise Architects. However this three-layer model does little to help the Business Architect or Manager to develop an understanding of how to rethink business processes.

Late in 2005, Capgemini introduced the concept of visualizing an enterprise in the form of an old fashioned wagon wheel to help focus attention on the critical area that SOA could change; namely the market facing operations in the “rim.” The traditional applications make up the spokes and the hub is the enterprise data that these applications both create and consume. This simple conceptual model showed up critical issues that needed to be grasped, such as the difference between the “Transactional” data-centric existing applications, and their “silo” procedures, versus the open, collaborative “Interactive” area of the rim. Unlike traditional applications, many activities in the rim will connect across the entire enterprise as and when required. The integration complexities of such wide-ranging activities may not need to be considered as, if interactions do not create or consume any of the enterprise data from the hub, they will not need traditional integration practices.

The most critical issue of all was the need to define the connecting integrations where an interaction needed to progress to become a transaction. As an example, the purchase of an item will start with a series of interactions that will discover the options available, such as price and delivery from different suppliers, but when a final supplier is chosen, then this will need to become an enterprise “transaction” that meets the necessary compliance rules, which govern a full commercial financial transaction resulting in the recording of the correct data.

4 The Business and Technology Model

Capgemini has led thinking on applying SOA, and now Web 2.0

Improving the currentway IT is delivered

Changing the wayBusiness can use Technology

SOA + Web 2.0

Adding new capabilities, Improving business

agility, speeding up implementations and

cutting delivery costs

Redefining the way processes and information

can be used, adding new value through business

effectiveness

The impact of People and Contacts;

making new markets and Revenues

1st

Stage

2nd

Stage

and now . . .

3rd

Stage

A Service-Oriented Enterprise (SOE)

is an organisation that operates more as a network

of services than a hierarchy of functional units

Service-Oriented Applications (SOApps)

are ‘‘applications’’ delivered as ‘‘services’’ in manner

that are aligned to Specific business operations

Service-Oriented Infrastucture (SOI)

is the alignment of the technology elements of the

common Infrastructure to support SOE and SOA

independently of the business logic

A label used to cover the whole topic e.g. as PC/Networking in 1990

Interactional OperationsThe new high growth wave arising from the

internet and web built around standards.

Delivered through SOA driven by end users

understanding how to gain value from

communication, content and collaboration

To ‘‘interact’’ for optimisation prior to making

an enterprise transaction

External Web ServicesThe use of standards in data

(and increasingly process) for

non competitive exchanges

such as ‘‘book to bill’’

Transactional I.TThe traditional centfalised enterprise IT

environment where Financial and

Commercial Compliance remain the drivers

supplemented by cost and agility

Enterprise

applications

Operating

departments

Enterprise

data

• Business Innovative

• Value Justified

• Interactive Technology enabled

• Line of Business Manager driven

• Compliance and Evolution

• Cost Justified

• Technology based

• CFO and CIO driven

Open Standards connecting

organisations together

Web 2.0

& SOA as a

mechanism

to interact

SOA as a

mechanism

to interact

Existing Legacy ‘‘Back Office’’ systems

New ‘‘Back Office’’ People, using contentCommunication & Collaboration

There are a series of points to consider at this stage; including whether or not the enterprise can satisfy itself that the data being offered is valid and authentic, the process that obtained it was legitimate and secure, the people involved had the authority to make the agreement, etc.

The experience gained by Capgemini in developing the detail inherent in the wagon wheel concept, and using it to examine business requirements showed how important this aspect was becoming. Increasing amounts of external data from “Web Services” were also arriving to add further complications, as more vertical industry sectors started to create trading ecosystems. Other factors were also making an increased impact, such as the Open Group “Boundaryless Information Flow” work (www.opengroup.org) to create standards for genuine interactive/transactional business; the increasing advent of ‘‘Open Source’’; the use of “Software as a Service,” and last, but not least, the huge influence of the technologies generically entitled “Web 2.0”, on the way people participated in processes.

As technologies and products grew exponentially in 2006, coupled with a corresponding rise in business experiences, it became time to move to a further level of detail. Just as the three-layer model had underpinned the need for increased focus on the business process side leading to the wagon wheel conceptual model, this has in turn created the need for a further level of focus. In introducing the “diamond” conceptual model, Capgemini has again sought to provide a simple abstraction model that allows important principles to be grasped before attempting to decipher the complexity of the technologies, and make visible the business capabilities that are realizable. Importantly, each conceptual model offers a further level of abstraction over the previous models thus supporting a progressive introduction, with growing capabilities being realized.

The “Diamond” conceptual model builds in the demands that have become increasingly visible in the past year, and can be directly related to both the business principles that have been seen to drive success, as well as the technology changes.

The “diamond” model separates business activities into three distinctly different zones reflecting differences in the type of activity, the technologies used, together with requirements to support external access and standards. At this stage of development of the technologies, standards, and indeed business practice, much of its value lies in answering the common question concerning technology strategy during a period when everything seems to be changing.



"Open Standards" and "Open Source" are the "glue"

Existing applications

as well as new style

Services are all exposed

through a common

set of standards that

are based on both

industry/sector

business standards

as well as actual or

defacto Technology

Standards

Open Standards connectingorganizations together

Web 2.0& SOA as amechanismto interact

Existing ‘‘Back Office’’

SOA as amechanismto interact

People and ServicesInteractions

Book to BillData CentricTransactions

New ‘‘Front Office’’

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4.1 The ''Open Standards" Mid Layer

As more and more enterprises find themselves transacting “book-to-bill” electronically with their trading partners, the importance of the middle layer as the key integration mechanism to the external world is becoming paramount. Inter-enterprise “book-to-bill” can only work by the use of open standards, so all participants can be sure that the documents exchanged are readable, and accordingly, it must be implemented to—as well as maintained around—the latest commercial standards. It will need to handle much more than just data exchange formats, authentication and security of transactions, maybe digital rights, and an increasing number of other tasks will also need to be handled by the “services” provisioned to implement this layer.

Much of the work of The Open Group (www.opengroup.org) is based on this. The growing interest in their TOGAF architecture, with the World’s first IT Architects Certification scheme (ITACs) is a reflection of the requirement to be able to implement this layer correctly to external current practice. The Open Group is organized as a “not-for-profit” standards body using a series of forums to address the individual elements that need to be standardized, to ensure that inter-enterprise commercial businesses can take place. Its membership is wide-ranging, covering both commercial members in most global vertical industry sectors to reflect business requirements, as well as technology vendors and system integrators.

4.2 The "Back Office" Layer

The bottom half of the diamond is the existing “Back Office” systems that handle the “book to bill”, and all similar enterprise transactions, including ERP, that are data-centric. Here the principle of a strong “walled garden” to protect access, together with minimal technology change to the existing applications and systems, are key technology requirements. The business drivers are compliance, to ensure that the enterprise is operating within the increasing amount of legislation, and cost, as there is little business differentiation beyond being the lowest cost operator to be found here. Business value is to be found in using the data from these systems through data mining, and reporting capabilities, but overall the task will be to manage this layer at the lowest cost in a stable and reliable manner.

The interfacing of these systems to the Open Standards layer is where Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has an important role to play in existing IT systems. On the “Open Standards” side, the formats will be different, and will continue to change as new functionality is added. The enterprise has little control over these changes, both in terms of detail, and more importantly, in terms of timing. The ability to use “services” as the mechanism to expose an existing application to the required open standards, web services enables the scale of the change to be minimized, initially to connect, and then to be maintained for ongoing operation. Though by definition, SOA is loosely-coupled integration, the overall design must be up to best transactional practices using proven enterprise architectural approaches.

4.3 The new Front Office layer

Before detailing this layer it is necessary to introduce “Web 2.0” and its increasing role.

PC–Network and Service-Oriented Architecture are names for a broad collection of technologies brought together in a recognizable manner that can deliver new types of capabilities to support businesses. The challenge in understanding Web 2.0 is, unlike a breakthrough product innovation such as the PC, around which products and services were developed, i.e. there is no core piece of technology. If anything is the core “product,” it is people, particularly Web literate users who now have clear views on how they wish to use technology. Accordingly, once again the adoption has been driven initially by skilled users, but increasingly by consumers as a more personalized and effective manner of navigating through the existing content-overloaded Web. However, just as with all previous technology changes, users are increasingly adding these capabilities to their working practices by downloading programs, or carrying them in USB storage devices to load at work, or just working from home.

A simple business example is the Capgemini CTO Blog (www.capgemini.com/ctoblog)

where Chief Technology Officers from various Capgemini business units commenton their personal experience in applying various technology solutions. The Blog is dynamic, reflects different personalities and opinions, is highly interactive, allowing users to post their feedback and comments, and is widely read. It is also a source for well-defined and qualified sales enquiries via direct emails to Blog writers, based on their issues and needs expressed in their respective blogs. There are a number of points that differentiate the Web 2.0 people-centric nature of the blog from the Web 1.0 content-centric nature of the well-laid out Capgemini site at www.capgemini.com

An increasing number of people do not search on Web 1.0 content, mainly due to a massive and bewildering number of returns that it typically generates. Instead, they prefer searching blogs for a particular topic that can help find people with real and sustained depth, demonstrating their experience.

As the blog continually updates, it provides more than static “advertorial” content; it is a series of case studies and experiences that continually enrich the detail.

It is possible to directly interact, ask questions, and air opinions, not only to the blog writer, but also to the community reading the blog topic. The focus of a like-minded community adds to the value gained by supporting wider interactions.

The community can share further content of its own through the use of “tags” (section 9.3) that allow direct access to content that they have amassed on the topic and is relevant to them.

Blogs are often linked to each other, so interest in one provides recommendations from other members of the community leading to other Blogs that are “on topic.”


5 Web 2.0 as a business capability


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It is possible to use RSS (section 9.1) and subscriptions to alert the reader of Blog updates thus saving empty trips to bookmarked websites in the hope of finding something new. This also maximizes efforts of those posting, allowing them to continually reach out to the widest number of people.

Web 1.0 = Content Web 2.0 = Contact

Web 1.0 is the accumulation of content with the increasing problem of finding what you want when you want it, and relying on search engines to improve the situation. Whereas Web 2.0 is a dynamically changing environment of up to date experiences, with people acting as guides to help find more relevant information on topics of shared interest.

It may seem that the technologies of Web 2.0 will create a similar problem to the existing problems of Web 1.0, namely too much of everything to be useful in addressing a particular requirement. The aim to address content-centric overload with new technologies allowing people to interact with each other based on their experiences, underpinned by a better navigational model to align content and link to a transactional capability via Web Services and Service-Oriented Architecture is impressive. However, the question that remains is, “How will all these technologies enable a person or business to be able to perform better?”

One answer lies in MashUps, a name with origins in actions of a DJ who mixes different music tracks to produce a new and unique blend. Mashups have been steadily gaining support across consumer and business communities that are leading the way to implement Web 2.0. Business Week tipped MashUps way back in July 2005 as the hot technology that would transform the Web. A MashUp can basically be defined as:

A website or web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience

In a sense, it is the ultimate form of a “rich experience” beyond a spreadsheet. It allows a user to create combinations of content from across the Web into a unique webpage that is personally relevant and caters to their interests. Many early examples of MashUps were based on using the geographical content of Google Earth overlaid with statistical information to provide a visual aid to locate businesses and homes. www.housingmaps.com is often quoted as the first widely seen commercial example, and is today thriving as an easy way to locate a property to rent or buy in the USA. This is an excellent example of a commercial site providing a platform on which others in the property market can place their content to make it reach a wider audience and be easier to understand.

There are many opportunities for enterprises to provide a MashUp platform with an AJAX toolset to make themselves the indispensable center of a business ecosystem. Google started the trend, but as an example, a retail bank could equally offer a MashUp platform for its customers to build their own views of their finances. For example, a user could link content from other sites that provide information on aspects such as prices from alternative suppliers of energy, to see if and when, a change of supplier might be justified. This is a much more powerful proposition with added value to customers, and more interaction opportunities, than the addition of an alternative channel for essentially the same products via the Internet.


6 MashUps – Personalization of interactions


16

Internally, the MashUp does much to answer the requirement for a structured view of information that will enable decision support. They are already popular in financial dealing rooms where dealers are replacing spreadsheets with MashUps to gain advantage in their ability to use more sources of information, but in a form they can readily understand. There is an increasing requirement to provide key decision makers with more information than internal sources can supply. Both potential purchasers and sellers would like to be able to negotiate their “deals” with access to information on general market availability and price of the product, in addition to accessing their own internal information which offers guidance on previous deals, but without any reference to the overall dynamically-changing external market.

In keeping with the spirit of both Web 2.0 as a shared knowledge environment and the best practices of Open Source, there are several websites that provide collections of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and MashUp platforms. These help users construct their own MashUps using sources that others have found to be valuable. www.mashup.com is an example, and as of January 2007 it offered 127 APIs and 56 examples or platforms. In addition, there are tutorials, blogs, and a directory based on tags to help people further the development and spread of MashUps. The examples in the next section show Google Earth as the base level platform with statistical information from other web pages added using a toolset from www.enterprisehorizons.com

6.1 Examples of a MashUp in a Utility based on Google Earth

With a greater understanding of the technologies of Web 2.0 and their abilities to empower people to make a difference to events and opportunities, it is now possible to return to the topic of the new Business and Technology model partially defined in section 4.0. The upper part of the “diamond” is very different in almost every way from the IT systems in the bottom-half. The most striking difference is that success depends on this being a “public” and “open” working environment, in which the enterprise meets and does business with its customers, suppliers, and partners. Users exercise control over the extent of Web 2.0 technologies to use, enabling them to choose the most effective way to interact with their networks to make a difference. The operational focus is outward, towards people, markets and events, with skilled, experienced people able to identify and manage opportunities or threats. The concept is similar to a financial trading market with the emphasis on dynamic recognition of opportunity.

The contrast with inward-facing, procedure based data-centric transactions of traditional IT could not be greater. Some enterprises have already recognized this and adopted a policy of moving people “outside the firewall.” Although this may work for relatively contained workers such as research staff, it is not really the answer for operational roles. There needs to be a layer that provides the orchestration of the business process services to allow people-driven interactions to become business-based actions. Service-Oriented Architecture facilitates this.


7 Completing the Business & Technology Model


"Open Standards" and "Open Sources" are the "glue"

Existing applications

as well as new style

Services are all exposed

through a common

set of standards that

are based on both

industry/sector

business standards

as well as actual or

defacto Technology

Standards

Open Standards connectingorganizations together

Web 2.0& SOA as amechanismto interact

Existing ‘‘Back Office’’

SOA as amechanismto interact

People and ServicesInteractions

Book to BillData CentricTransactions

New ‘‘Front Office’’

18

Some of the processes will be collaborative in nature, supporting a workgroup to action a localized requirement that has no enterprise, possibly even a departmental level of involvement, e.g., a transport manager redirecting a truck to a different route on the basis of new information on traffic conditions causing problems. Other processes will require departmental records, such as the need to create a data record of the truck driver’s hours, whilst others are formal enterprise-level transactions such as the “signed” delivery note for the goods delivered. A further example would be the interaction of a user to determine the best price and delivery for a business purchase. Whilst this process may be with multiple suppliers, it is an interaction with no commitments. But on reaching a decision, it must become an official order logged into the back office systems at the bottom of the “diamond.”

The role of the SOA services layer is to ensure that these transactions follow a predetermined, commercially defined path for compliance that results in the ability to offer data to the mid-layer—based on Open Standards—in the same way and formats as if the transaction had originated externally. This architectural concept allows for the “opening up” of the enterprise’s trading activities in the top of the “diamond,” without compromising the security and compliance management of the back office transaction systems in the bottom.

8.1 The difference between contacts and content in

market-driven activities.

The strategic desire to create value and control costs within the existing business has led many enterprises to develop a strong focus towards creating a “knowledge driven,” or “service-based” environment. Whilst both are highly desirable goals, the tendency is to be internally focused around capturing and compiling “best practice” for reuse. The creation of content is expensive to achieve and costly to maintain and, in practice, difficult to ensure that constructive use is made of the results. There are two basic possibilities: Implement the best practice into a fixed procedure and use it repetitively, or rely on people’s abilities to determine how to reuse.

The reuse of best practice can be likened to a cookbook containing a selection of proven recipes offering the ability to replicate a particular dish to a wide variety of people with varying levels of skill. The challenge is that the recipes are both fixed and dependant on certain ingredients, which implies that advanced control of the circumstances are necessary to be able to manage the situation. Within an enterprise this is possible, and resulting reuse will pay off in terms of time, predicted quality of the outcome, as well as reduction in overall costs to achieve.

If the desire is to use the knowledge and services to create differentiation or optimize a situation, then this is predominantly external to the enterprise with the need for a more dynamic ability to make the best of a situation. This has more in common with the approach of a chef in using the best available ingredients to make not just a meal, but create a personal “experience” for the diner. Web 2.0 technologies, with a focus on supporting people through content, collaborative partners and interactions, offer a new set of capabilities towards achieving it. To continue with this theme, Web 2.0 can be used to create a virtual kitchen in which the chef can meet other cooks or diners to discuss their requirements, and even demonstrate the use of a particular cookbook.

The ability to incorporate experienced people into market facing situations offers the opportunity to maximize the existing business, whilst the ability to allow customers to choose how to do business through self-selection of their optimum choices adds to the size of the market that can be addressed. Offering a MashUp Application Programming Interface (API), or a MashUp Platform, allows customers, partners and others to add or build your offerings into their environment. The “front-office” should be treated as an “open” environment in terms of encouraging external parties to participate with internal people and faculties in a highly interactive manner.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) plays a significant role as the method by which the business execution is linked to people-centric Web 2.0 with the help of the flexibility offered by “services” to orchestrate processes. This linkage is able to offer departmental-based collaborative business actions within the “front-office” as well as offering the data for enterprise transactions in a correct and consistent format to the existing “back-office” systems. An integration layer based on Open Standards, and possibly using “Open Source” software, is the critical boundary between the various environments of “front-office,” “back-office” and inter-enterprise exchanges.


8 Summary: Chefs or Cookbooks?


20

SOA plays a similar role in linking the existing “back-office” transaction systems to this integration layer by exposing the systems in correct and consistent formats. Security and compliance management is used to safeguard all transactions passing into the “back-office,” regardless of origin.

8.2 Welcome to the ‘‘End of Business as Usual’’

A demographic inevitability!

8.3 Business Game Changing

Examples

8.4 Web 2.0 Business Traits

Valued in direct proportion to the scale and dynamism of the data it helps to assemble, create, manage, etc.

Able to harness the “long tail“ effect to enlarge the size of a given market through “self service”, and the service automatically improves the more people use it

Hyperlinked by users binding it into the structure of the existing Web to continue to create its organic growth

Benefits from viral marketing, completely replacing conventional marketing driven by users recommendations

Communication-oriented, providing a platform for exploitation, as opposed to content-oriented, with protection against exploitation

Percentage of technology-literate

at work and as consumers

Percentage of non-technology

literate at work and as consumers

Business

as usual

New business

models

Inflection point

Depends on Market & Industry

The demographics change in consumers and the workforce alone

mean businesses have to change

New

Old

Right

Wrong

Aware

Adaptive

Innovative

Opportunity

Amazon leads by offering popular items corresponding to external demand

Barnes and Noble leads with its internally defined offers

eBays allows external demand to create new markets and indexes

CommerceOne failed as it defined the markets that it would make available

Google business model continuously improves as people return to explore

Traditional Software business is based on reselling periodic upgrades

SecondLife participants create over 7 million lines of code a week

Estimated 500,000 Chinese working to create “superior” game players for sale

Having said that Web 2.0 is made up of a broad collection of technologies, it does—like Service-Oriented Architecture—have a set of recognized principles that products, services and solutions should adhere to in order to be classified as part of the Web 2.0 environment. These principles are important in terms of acting as a guide to development, and to ensure that solutions can be used by the Web community at large in a recognizable and “standardized” manner. Tim O’Reilly, a well known figure in the development of the Web and Open Source software, first coined the term in 2004 and subsequently laid out the following principles in September 2005. These were partly in recognition of what was already happening, but the following year saw an explosion of both Web 2.0 based sites, and more importantly, people using them. The text in bold is the original O’Reilly principle and the italic text is an interpretation of the principle.

The Web as a Platform

A technology platform that can be used as a common development medium

Harnessing of Collective Intelligence

People creating, editing, defining and indexing the content

Data as the next “Intel Inside”

Data becomes the basis for standardization and not the processor design

End of the Software release cycle

Modularity and Open Source provides the basis for continuous improvement

Lightweight programming models

Encourage widespread participation through ease of use

Software above the level of a single device

Network-based and community-centric

Rich user experiences

Fast, interactive, and personalized

Success in the eyes of users is related to issues of frustration over the existing, content-heavy Web 1.0, improvements in the numbers of home users with broadband, and in no little way to the changes in lifestyle brought about by the proliferating numbers of digital devices, cameras, iPods, Smartphones, etc. Success—from a technology point of view—was due to the availability of some other key technology elements, which Web 2.0 builds upon: Common browser technology capabilities, the use of Open Source software to support the principle of continuous development by the community to add new features rapidly, and the freedom to use by anyone.

Three new technologies - RSS, AJAX and Tagging, a new architectural style, REST, and a personalization approach,

MashUp, are generally accepted to underpin Web 2.0.

9 The technologies of Web 2.0



22

9.1 RSS—Really Simple Syndication

The first point to make is that there are several definitions of what RSS stands for, as it has evolved over the years, starting with Netscape’s Rich Site Summary in 1998. Although Rich Simple Syndication is really a precursor to the current technology, RSS was devised as a method of making page linking more effective in terms of an improved or “richer” experience to view a series of interlinked pages on a particular topic for the content-centric Web 1.0. As an example, consider the navigation of a site like eBay or Amazon, where the need is to link pages together as seamlessly as possible and allow the user to navigate in the manner of a process, rather than taking each page as a separate item to be found through a search engine.

As numbers of linked pages increases, difficulties in avoiding “broken links” increases proportionately, aggravated by having to trace dependencies for each and every change. RSS reports any page changes, possibly on other sites, as well as internal changes by different authors and helps make it possible to have more changes to the otherwise “static” arrays of Web 1.0 pages. With the beginnings of Web 2.0—a constantly changing and dynamic environment of disassociated people adding and changing their blogs or other interactive media—it came into its own as a method to notify a user if a change has been made to the media that they are tracking.

The business value of this internally lies in the ability to send notifications of changes to critical information that has been published to users who have an RSS subscription to the media. It is an attractive method to deal with increasing needs of a more dynamic business environment. Externally, it can be used much the same way between enterprises in a common ecosystem, such as freight forwarding for general notifications. In the case of the Capgemini CTO Blog, (Section 5), prospective or actual clients interested in specific topics and information posted on the blog (two or three additions every week), can choose to have an RSS subscription and be notified when new comments are available. Using a blog in this way improves communication and interaction between an enterprise and its customers/clients in a way that is otherwise extremely difficult to replicate. However, as the reader has control to subscribe/deregister on topics, the onus is on the authors to make their blog pieces interesting and of high value.

9.2 AJAX—Asynchronous JavaScript And XML

AJAX also has its roots in the desire to solve a longstanding problem: Improving the handling of more complex presentation of data on screen with faster refresh rates. As far back as 1996 with IFRAME, followed by Netscape’s Layer 4, leading to Microsoft and ActiveX, AJAX has been a key requirement to allow browser- based technology to achieve more interactive processing, though originally it was required to speed up the loading of complex, graphical page downloads. Once again, the breakthrough came as a consequence of changes to a number of



technologies and the way they were being applied.

In February 2005, Jesse James Garret formally proposed the concept of AJAX on the basis that the then current generation of browsers contained the technology elements for it to work. The attractiveness of AJAX was that it was both simple and avoided much of the risks present in other methods, which were vulnerable to importing “active”, and therefore potentially malicious, code into the client. AJAX is based on using widely understood and adopted JavaScripts to bind together the other elements, all of which are based on well known technologies and standards in a very simplistic manner: XHTML and CSS for presentation, Doc Object Mode (DOM) for dynamic display and interaction, XML and XSLT for data interchange and manipulation, together with asynchronous data retrieval via XML HttpRequest. AJAX has become a critical component in the construction and implementation of “MashUps,” (section 6).

9.3 Tagging—People-oriented data taxonomies

A tag is a keyword that is associated with, or assigned to, a piece of information such as a picture, article, or video clip as a description that will enable keyword-based classification of the content to which it is applied. Unlike conventional data classification taxonomies (where a rigorously enforced, and usually not easily understood, series of classifications is assigned generally by IT management), tagging is informal and generated by users in line with their views on the relevance of the information. The same content may have multiple tags from any number of people, and usually those tags reflect their different interests in the content. As an example, a view from a bridge across the River Thames in London could be tagged as a view of the River Thames, a picture of London, specifically around an element such as Big Ben or a concept such as heat haze. All of these tags can be in use at the same time, offering a degree of flexibility and syndication of the content in a manner not achievable with conventional data management.

A more meaningful example of using tags would be for a blog post on Service-Oriented Architecture to show a list of associated tags such as: Services, Architecture, Standards, etc. A reader could select the tag on “standards” and this would immediately provide an index of all the content that has been tagged by a variety of people relating to “standards.” Any new content that is tagged as “standards” would immediately be made visible, and more tags can be added to any existing content to offer other views of its relevance: such as ‘IEEE’. Seasoned

Tagging not

Taxonomy

Rich User

Experience

An Attitude

not Technology

Addresses the

‘‘Long Tail’’

Page Ranking

User reviews

User Self Service

eg; Google AdSense

eg; del.icio.us

eg; GoogleMaps

eg; Amazon Reviews

Participation

not publishing

eg; BlogSphere

Decentralization

& the Long Tail

eg; BitTorrent

Trust and

Reputation

eg; WiKipedia

Data as the new

‘‘Intel inside’’ std

Open to permit

‘‘hackability’’

The perpetual

beta

Remix at will

Some rights reserved

Encourage

Play

Software improved

by use(rs)

User behaviour

Not predetermined

Trust and empower

Your Users

Small Pieces

Loosely coupled

Rich User

experience

Granular

Content

Strategic Positioning

The Web as

a platform

User Positioning

You control your own

data/content

Competencies

Services not packaged software

Architecture of participation

Cost effective scalability

Remixable data sources and transformations

Software above the level of a single device

Harnessing collective intelligence

What else makes up Web 2.0? The O'Reilly Meme Map

24

Web 2.0 professionals refer to this people-oriented method of managing content as a “Folksonomy,” to distinguish it from the conventional “Taxonomy” approach.

When tagging is linked to other Web 2.0 technologies, it provides the missing piece around how to organize information in support of ad-hoc, people-oriented interactions. These demand increasing amounts of information, often from external sources, to be aligned to market or ecosystems for immediate decision support. Knowledge Management by contrast is internally oriented and offers an enterprise a method to ensure reuse of its standardized best practices.

9.4 REST—Representational State Transfer

With so many new technologies that functionally differ from their predecessors and are implemented in support of very different user and business requirements, it is not surprising that a new architectural model is emerging. However it is important at this stage to remark that REST is not universally understood or accepted. Some enterprise architects with responsibility for large-scale highly resilient systems are reluctant to accept REST for a variety of reasons, suggesting that it is insufficiently proven. On the other hand, there are increasing numbers of large scale implementations occurring as familiarity with the approach increases, which suggest that it can scale in the manner that it was proposed to provide.

If the two arguments are considered using the Business and Technology Model diagram illustrated in section 4 as a reference concept, it is easier to understand the points of view represented by both sides. A business solution in the lower half of the diamond relating to back-office legacy transaction systems requires a traditional architectural approach, whilst types of requirements in the top half of the diamond, built around people and interactions, can benefit from the REST approach. The origins of REST lie in the paper: “Architectural Styles and the Design of Network based Software Architectures,” published in 2000 by Dr. Roy Fielding from which the following definition and principles are taken:

Representational State Transfer is intended to evoke an image of how a well-designed Web application behaves; a network of web pages (a virtual state machine), where a user progresses through an application by selecting links (state transfers), resulting in the next page (representing the next state of the application) being transferred to users and rendered for their use.

REST defines a core set of principles to ensure uniformity of implementations as it is expected that individual implementations will interact together in order to extend the value of REST-based Web 2.0 solutions. The four main principles are:

Application state and functionality are divided into different resources

Every resource is uniquely addressable by a universal syntax for use in HyperMedia

All resources share a uniform interface for the transfer of state between client and resource consisting of:

- A constrained set of well-defined types

- A constrained set of content types

A protocol that is:

-Client/Server, Stateless, Cacheable, Layered

The picture that is emerging from new technologies such as RSS, and AJAX, together with the changes in the way that Web 2.0 is promoting a people-centric, communication and interaction environment, is of a very different business model at the edge of the enterprise. The challenge is not around the computer-centric data model in the center of the enterprise, where inconsistencies in any element are disastrous and success is achieved through end-to-end integration (or as close as possible) in a monolithic approach. The whole approach of Web 2.0 has been to enable the average end-user to design and personalize the way that they gain advantage from being able to interact with people and content.

SO

A2

00

70

21

90

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0

Copyright © 2007 Capgemini. All rights reserved.

Capgemini, one of

the world’s foremost

providers of Consulting, Technology and

Outsourcing services, has a unique way

of working with its clients, called the

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Backed by over three decades of industry

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Capgemini employs approximately

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About Capgemini and the

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