September 13th, 2006
Robert Bosman
CRM, HRM, ERP software etc. are ‘islands solutions’
that therefore can not survive in the next web.
Let’s explore CRM for example, realizing that the conclusions will also be applicable for all HRM, ERP, accounting software et cetera.
In general there are only two basic models for CRM. The 1st one starts with a person and allows you to enter one or more companies that person works for; MS Outlook for example uses this model. The 2nd one starts with a company and allows you to enter one or more contact persons working at that company.
Both models show only a partial picture of every day’s reality. In the recent past, let’s say until the 70ies of the past century, both models worked reasonably well. Most people worked only for one company at a time, there where not that many cross company alliances and projects and no one used a personal computer nor email or the internet, simply because it didn’t exsists yet. Society was simple as were the technical solutions of those days.
But in the meantime everything has changed. Every day’s reality is a multi-role-network in which people have multiple roles in several organizations at a time, which organizations have all kinds of interconnections. One person can be a customer, a supplier, an employee and a shareholder at the same time and may participate in several inter-organizational projects and meetings. Moreover, this is also the case for most companies. The rise of all those web enabled social networks is only one illustration of these statements.
Using different software packages for CRM, HRM, ERP etc in a multi-role network society is in friendly words ’sub optimal’; they only may optimize one isolated information island at a time, but will never ever succeed in optimizing a global interconnected world. In straighter words: CRM and all other island software will fail in the next society.
Of course, CRM etc will be big business as long as no better solutions are available. But better solutions are on the way, solutions based on a web enabled integral architecture of human relations, which may be called Universal Relation Management URM®.
Both the next web as well as the next society
will be based on a whole new architecture, of which
URM - Universal Relation Management - will be the very core.
Technorati Tags: web 2.0, URM, Universal Relation Management, CRM, HRM, ERP, architecture of participation, co-creation, society, practosophy
September 8th, 2006
Robert Bosman
Co-creation will be the very heart of Society 4.0
As mentioned in these blog articles ‘The Next web’ and ‘The Next Web & the Next Society’, we are in the midst of the 3rd web and heading for the ‘next next web’, Web 4.0, that eventually will create a tremendous change of our society.
Web 4.0 will never evolve based on the ‘island approach’ in ICT, in which every person, every organization and every government creates it’s own information system and after that spends a tremendous amount of time and effort on building bridges between all those seperated information islands. Web 4.0 and Society 4.0 will be based on a new ‘architecture of participation’. Or even better on ‘an architecture of co-creation’, because co-creation will be the very heart of Society 4.0.
One of the main characteristics of that architecture is that it will be multidimensional: we will be able to look at the same data form many different perspectives. For example, the perspective of the company is different of that of the individual or the government; but they do share a lot of the same information. Why wouldn’t we organize that information in such a way, that that overlapping information can be generated from one and the same source? In order to do that, the new architecture has to cover at least the following dimensions:
We’ll talk more about these dimensions in the nearby future and also explain some of the terms mentioned in it.
Technorati Tags: web 2.0, webhistory, data islands, trends, megatrends, architecture of participation, co-creation, society, practosophy
September 7th, 2006
Robert Bosman
Even the most complex things
need simplicity as a fundament
It is Ray Ozzie, Bill Gates successor at Microsoft as ‘Chief Software Architect’, who addresses (on his understandebly not that active weblog) one of the most challenging subjects for the future of the Web.
‘For years, as many of you, my work life has involved significant travel. As significant bi-coastal coordination has now entered into the mix, things have gotten even more complicated for me, for my wife, for my assistant and hers. In order to stay on the same page, each of us has the need for (limited) visibility into aspects of each others’ calendars and schedules. Each of us has a mix of private, shared, and public events and meetings that we’re tracking. Some of these we edit privately and publish to others. […] It’s tough because we use a mix of different email/calendaring systems – corporate as well as non-corporate, web-based as well as client-based. And to each of us it makes sense to want to edit the calendar in our own PIM application of choice where we do all our calendaring and scheduling work. […]
And the same goes for contact lists. In our case, each of us has a mix of private, shared, and public ‘address books’ or ‘contact lists’ that we’re managing. At work I deal with contacts in my enterprise directory as well as my own private contact list. But I share [also] two completely different contact lists with my wife – one that is our “home rolodex’ with plumbers, doctors and the like, and one that is our “family rolodex” with friends & family. And I know she has other contact lists she shares privately with members of groups she’s working with.
As an industry, we have simply not designed our calendaring and directory software and services for this “mesh” model. The websites, services and servers we build seem to all want to be the “owner” and “publisher”. ’
It appears to be a simple, every day’s problem. But it hits the essence of the matter. First of all it illustrates that our present approach doesn’t fit with even the simplest and most common tasks in every day’s life. Secondly, it shows the interaction of multiple agenda’s, multiple contacts, and the public vs. private aspect and the publisher/owner dimension. Moreover, it deals with the incompatibility of today’s systems. What Ray doesn’t mention but certainly is part of the same problem, is that of all accounts on all that separate web portals, everyone with its own requirements for username and password. So, Ray’s problem is that of all of us.
As long as we don’t have a solution for these ‘simple daily problems’, we’re far away of a profound new architecture for the next web. I would even suggest making this problem the first one to be solved, before even trying to go on with everything else.
Ray’s solution by the way, based on Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) is a very clever one for the present web; but I’m sure he and his team are working behind the scenes on a more fundamental solution for the future. For me it’s very clear that the final solution will start with an architecture based on Euler’s Graph Theory. Just because that’s the only fundamental approach to any kind of network.
Technorati Tags: web2.0, CRM, simplicity, simple daily problems, Ozzie, SSE, practosophy
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