Socialcast Helps Teams at NASA Communicate More Easily and Capture Tacit Knowledge

NASA, where the hard work literally is rocket science, depends on timely communication: not just between control centers and distant space craft, but also among workers distributed across NASA's ten major R&D centers. Recently the issue of inter-center communication has become especially important, as NASA undertakes its Constellation program to update the Space Shuttle. Previous NASA missions were usually developed at a single NASA center. The Constellation project, a major technical undertaking, spans centers and requires far-flung research and engineering teams to work together efficiently.

So it behooves NASA to find broadly applicable solutions for employees and contractors to exchange information—exchange it, and record it, too, for another transformation NASA is facing is the aging and retiring of its workforce. The average NASA employee is nearly 47 years old and has worked at the organization for 17 years. There's a lot of NASA history and knowledge walking around in lab coats and business casual. And many of those employees are beginning to retire. To preserve the organization's intellectual capital, NASA needs to find a convenient, unobtrusive way for employees to record and share their tacit knowledge.

These challenges were evident to a group of NASA JPL engineers who attended the KM World conference back in 2007. There they heard a talk by Tim Young, CEO of a social networking platform solution called Socialcast. Tim talked about the benefits of Socialcast, a SaaS service that enables company employees to post status messages, ask and answer questions, share documents, and so on.

The NASA engineers were intrigued and decided to launch a pilot project. Celeste Merryman, a pilot manager for Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) at NASA JPL, and Douglas Hughes, a project manager at NASA JPL, ran the pilot project, which involved customizing Socialcast for the NASA environment. The new SaaS service was dubbed NASAsphere.

Now the results of that NASAsphere pilot are in, and they're quite compelling.

• NASAsphere participants invited 398 of their colleagues from around NASA, with 55% acceptance rate.
  
• Within the 60-day span of the pilot, the NASAsphere community grew from 78 activated accounts to 295.
  
• Communications truly crossed geographic centers. When employees posed questions, 93% of the answers came from users at remote locations. By the end of the pilot, at least one person from every NASA center had participated in the NASAsphere community.
  
• A survey of NASAsphere users found that 52% recommended the platform be implemented for contractors and civilians, in addition to employees.
  
• In the same survey, 45% of users said they expected they would contribute to the NASAsphere platform weekly.
  
• Not surprisingly, the report recommends a broader implementation of the Socialcast solution.
  

For more details about the pilot and its results, check out the NASAsphere SlideShare presentation here or the final NASA JPL report here.

Cloud Computing Predictions, Revisted

All right, I'm going to strike the tentative tone that had crept into one of my predictions for cloud computing in 2009. When I read about the success of Marketo, Central Desktop, and others SaaS vendors, I can more evidence of young SaaS vendors racking up impressive sales by solving important business problems. So I'm revising prediction #4 to read:

Small vendors who apply their domain expertise to bring the power and convenience of cloud computing to business areas underserved by IT, can gain market traction and growing a profitable business by delivering exceptional operational business value to customers.

I still believe that, as one commenter to this blog put it, "PaaS is a tough nut to crack." But SaaS offerings that are focused and immediately useful should have a very good 2009. Which, of course, is wonderful news.

LiquidPlanner Integrates Micro-blogging and Time Sheets with Statistically-based Project Management

In a blog post last week, I cited LiquidPlanner as a SaaS company that was tackling an important business problem—project management— in a new way (applying statistics to change guesses into estimates, thereby dramatically increasing the accuracy of project plans).

Today, the company announced its 2.0 release. I'd like to call attention to a couple of new features in the release.

Integrated Microblogging

LiquidPlanner has integrated micro-blogging in its project management interface. This makes a lot of sense.

Thanks to Twitter, a growing number of people recognize the power and convenience of micro-blogging (posting short messages, perhaps containing links, that can be read by large numbers of people who opt in). Twitter, of course, is mostly a public forum, the exception being any hypothetical network of users who all password-protect their updates.

Internal business communications call for a separate, parallel channel to Twitter. Hence the launch of Yammer, a company that replicates basic Twitter functionality for closed communities, such as companies.

But Yammer's tweets or blog-posts aren't integrated with any other business software. It's unlikely that Yammer users are going to abandon Twitter, so it's entirely possible that someone might end up using:

• Twitter for the public commmunications
  
• Yammer for internal communications
  
• 37 Signals or Microsoft for internal project management
  

with no integration between Yammer and the project management program.

LiquidPlanner offers the advantages of Yammer—secure internal microblogging—with the added advantage of context and linking: I see find all the micro-blog posts related to a specific project, for example. Or put another way: now micro-blogged posts become another convenient information source for tracking the development of projects.

LiquidPlanner calls this feature "workplace chatter." It looks like this:



Users can see everything, including "chatter" and design documents, related to a project.



Time Sheets

Another new feature is time sheets. LiquidPlanner 2.0 offers built-in time-tracking, obviating the need for separate software to track the hours that people are putting into a project. Time-tracking data can be exported in standard formats for use in HR and billing applications.

Putting It All Together

These new integrated features make a lot of sense. In addition to posting documents and status, why not blog about a project and track hours, all in the same program? LiquidPlanner creates a workspace where customers can manage and record everything having to do with a project.

I expect we'll see more integrations like this in the SaaS market.

Disclaimer: LiquidPlanner is not a client.

Postscript to disclaimer: For information on becoming a client, contact me.

Which Do You Offer a Weary Traveler: A Unicycle, a Bicycle, or a Segway?

A guy is walking down a long road. He's tired.

Three trucks pass him, then come to a screeching halt. The drivers hop out. They open the backs of their trucks. They're salesmen!

The first driver offers the traveler a unicycle. It's low-cost and easy to maintain, possessing only half the tires and less than half of the moving parts of a bicycle. It doesn't require any electrical charging system or cables. If you forget to plug it in when you go to bed, it's still ready for use in the morning. Very nimble. Low cost. Agile. And it's pretty cool, too. How about it?

The second driver offers the traveler a bicycle. Of course, everyone knows how to ride a bicycle. Yes, it has more moving parts than a unicycle, but it's easier to use. Yes, you still have to pedal, but how hard is that? It's easier than walking if you're tired.

The third driver is wearing a suit, and he comes gliding up on his Segway. Here's the best choice of all, he says. Turn-key solution. No walking required. Minimal training. The Segway handles all the forward motion for you. You just stand still. Yes, it's more expensive than the other solutions, but you end up doing less work, and you'll have more energy for other activities. Now, let's talk about a charger and a service contract.

Which vehicle does our weary traveler choose?

Which business model would you bet on?

Unicycle Products

Unicycles are exciting and fun, but they require our traveler to learn new skills. I'm going to bet that most people reading this post think that the unicycle is the least likely choice for our traveler.

Yet how many companies bet their business on weary, overworked customers learning new skills (programming languages, complex UIs, etc.)? The novelty and supposed low cost of an approach blinds companies to how things look to a customer. Even if the customer isn't consciously opposed to novelty, he or she is just not likely to get around to learning new skills in order to realize the vision promised by a vendor.

Segway-style Products

At the other extreme, we have Segway-style products. Ingenius. Turn-key. More maintenance overhead. If a novel programming framework is a unicycle, an enterprise software suite from SAP or Oracle is probably more like a Segway. Lots of features. Minimal tinkering for end users. High cost.

Bicycle Products

The bicycle is somewhere in between. Our weary traveler still has to do work to ride a bicycle, but he already has the skills to do it. Yes, there's potentially some maintenance involved, but bicycles are so ubiquitous, there are repair shops everywhere. And maintenance costs shouldn't be exorbitant. So, yes, the bicycle doesn't eliminate all work, but the traveler can begin riding right away without breaking his budget.

My guess is that he hops on the bicycle. (Unless he's also wearing a suit and has the budget and corporate mandate to go for the Segway.)

(In 2007, 18.2 million bicycles were sold in the United States.)

Moral: Even in a tough economy, a bare-bones, low-cost product will have difficulty gaining traction if it requires customers to change their habits and do things they've never done before.

As always, comments welcome.

Unicycle photo Creative Commons Copyright (some rights reserved) by Julian Meade.

Two SaaS Companies that Solve Business Problems for Customers

In a couple of recent blog posts (here and here), I raised the question of what type of cloud computing start-up would be likely to succeed in today's business environment, in which companies of all sizes are interested in cutting costs and minimizing risks. I suggested that business customers would feel comfortable with new programming paradigms (e.g., Salesforce.com's Apex) offered by large, stable companies, but shy away from similar offerings from smaller vendors. It's not that the smaller vendors won't get any customers; they just might have a hard time getting enough to stay in business.

Cloud Computing Opportunities for Start-ups and Other Small Companies

But, aside from infrastructure offerings, there are lots of great business opportunities for small cloud computing vendors. I believe that most of these opportunities share these traits:

business domain expertise + effective execution + cloud technology

Being small and new won't be problems (i.e., risk factors in the eyes of customers) for small vendors who demonstrate that:

• they thoroughly understand business process problems that are important to the customer, and they are dedicated to solving these problems
  
• they have a solution that directly addresses these problems in an immediately effective way
  

Getting Down to Business

Here are two software start-ups that offer examples of what I mean.

Compli is a SaaS company based in Portland, OR, that offers a software platform that enables car dealers to measure and manage their compliance with industry regulations. Through the Compli SaaS platform, car dealers can deliver compliance training to employees and employee test scores on compliance tests. As regulations evolve, and new state-specific regulations appear, dealers can distribute new compliance content to the appropriate employees and demonstrate "good faith" efforts at compliance.

Compliance is an important issue for car-dealers, an operational head-ache of sorts, and Compli's SaaS solution gives them an easy way to stay on top of the issue in a cost-effective way.

If you visit the Compli Web site, you'll have to hunt hard to find any references to SaaS and cloud computing. The words "SaaS" and "cloud" don't appear on the home page at all, and in the video featured on the home page, President and CFO Lon Leneve mentions SaaS only after discussing the scope and importance of compliance for car dealers. The company is focused on solving a business problem, and they're leveraging SaaS technology to do it. How's Compli doing? Last year was a record year.

I've written about Liquid Planner before, and I'll be writing more about them next week. LiquidPlanner offers a hosted project management solution that brings probabilistic analysis to project planning. In another words, while other programs like Microsoft Project force project planners to give a fixed estimate for how long a task will take, Liquid Planner lets planner input ranges and probabilities, so they identify risks up front. The result is planning software that's more detailed, more accurate, and more informative.

The solution includes other collaboration features, as well, but I'd like to point out that once again we have a SaaS company focused on solving an important business problem—project management—in a new and compelling way. Factoring probability into project planning makes so much sense, I think LiquidPlanner would be an attractive offering even in a traditional, in-house deployment; delivering LiquidPlanner as SaaS, so it can reach all members of a distributed project team while lowering hardware and software costs, only makes it more compelling.

And how's LiquidPlanner doing? Quite well. Business is growing. The company itself is a small, lean-and-mean team of ten people whose founders have extensive experience in data center management from Expedia. Steve McConnell, who has written authoritatively on rapid software development and software estimation, is an advisor to the company.

These two companies, Compli and LiquidPlanner, demonstrate the business opportunities available for SaaS start-ups. Both companies are focused on solving important business problems (regulatory compliance and project management) in new ways. The problems they're addressing will remain important to customers even in an economic downturn. The companies are leveraging SaaS to deliver their solutions broadly and cost-effectively. Both companies share share these characteristics:

business domain expertise + effective execution + cloud technology

Disclaimer: Neither Compli nor LiquidPlanner is a client.

Predictions for Cloud Computing in 2009

Short and sweet.

1. The cloud computing market will grow in 2009.
   
   
2. Most of that growth will be enjoyed by a small number of large vendors (e.g., Amazon, Salesforce.com) with solid reputations for technical prowess, reliable service, and financial stability. (The financial stability part is not to be underestimated; it will win over CFOs and CIOs.)
   
   
3. Despite all the buzz at conferences and the cheery encomiums exchanged in blogs, new entrants and small vendors—especially vendors who try to replicate or enhance in a minor way the offers of the major vendors—will have a tough time closing deals and generating cash.
   
   
4. Small vendors who pursue niche markets and apply their domain expertise to bring the power and convenience of cloud computing to business areas underserved by IT, stand a chance of gaining market traction and growing a small, profitable business by delivering operational business value to customers.
   

The success of this last group will depend as much on their domain expertise (e.g., about problems with insurance claims processing) and consulting skills as on their particular cloud infrastructure.

Comments welcome.

Coghead's Demise is a Reminder to Sober Up about Cloud Computing's Promise

I was sorry to learn that Coghead, a Web 2.0 Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider, announced it was shutting down.

PaaS is an interesting model: a company offers a hosted service for developing, testing, running, and monitoring new applications. Customers can use the PaaS platform to launch new applications—or scale up existing ones—without deploying any local hardware or software at all. Sounds intriguing. Possibly very convenient. Possibly cost-effective.

It's proving to be too futuristic a vision. First, Bungee Labs, another PaaS provider, ran into trouble in 2008. Now Coghead is shutting its doors.

You wouldn't think this would be possible to read all the hyperventilating blog posts about cloud computing: how the time is right for cloud computing, everything will run in the cloud, what is the cloud—do we include PaaS? SaaS? If we don't define cloud computing properly, the cloud will perish! Many industry insiders are in a lather about these issues. It's as though the lottery has come up with the winning letters, which spell cloud computing, and now we have to scratch off the bonus letters just right to multiply our winnings or be sent home with a PC, jr. Nerves are a-jangle. Fingers are flying.

But if cloud computing is such an obvious remedy to the IT woes of business, why are these vendors in trouble?

Let's come down to earth for a moment. Let's consider this situation from the business customer's point of view. The business manager asks, Do I need PaaS? Is this really the most convenient, least risky way of building and deploying new applications?

I don't want to sound pedantic, but I think many cloud computing services will have trouble overcoming the obstacle that's snared many other technically impressive solutions in other IT markets of yore: just because you can build it and it's cool, doesn't mean that business customers will be comfortable with it. How many business customers in this increasingly risk-adverse environment are really going to adopt new programming paradigms and hosted services from small, evidently risky providers? Not many, I'm afraid.

Businesses want low cost and convenience. They want reliability and low risk, just as much. And (almost) nobody in business likes to learn anything new unless they have to.

I do think there are attractive opportunities for cloud computing in 2009. I'll details those in my new post. (Don't worry. It will be short.)

Note: Thanks to @chris_marino for tipping me off to the sad news about Coghead.