Aaron’s Potlatch

I was looking for a project to try out on Google App Engine, and also wanted to have something to showcase the comment system in Demisauce that i was working on. So, here is another Personal Blog Engine. You can get the code at my Github repository.

I dual posted this on my new Aaron’s Potlatch Blog on Google App Engine, but you will need to comment here because i don’t have the comments set up there yet.

User powered communities, and user generated content (Web2.0) have started to replace tasks that were provided by employees of companies previously. Most of these initial tasks are simple decisions. Other online communities, Open Source software and Wikipedia we see all decisions, and processes being open, so that the entire operation of a large organization is without a traditional management structure or decision making process. The cost structures of these organizations are much less than the traditional company, so how far can companies go to reflecting these new virtual organizations?

The first wave of these employee tasks being replaced have been fairly simple in nature, and very close to the consumer. Digg.com community, or RSS Readers selecting articles replaces editors, vetting, content checker’s. Youtube members contribute short films, acting, directing, producing the content themselves, replacing or supplementing tv/movies etc. Users providing reviews and ratings on amazon.com replace employees at Best-Buy in sales staff, and research staff, and in purchasing staff deciding what products to stock.

A commonality of the employee functions being replaced: Simple decisions (Consumer “likes” or “dislikes”) Ones where employees were previously trying to act as a proxy for consumers. Examples:
- Best Buy sales staff: providing advice to consumers about the “best products”
- Best Buy Purchasing manager: Deciding out of many products, which to stock, amazon.com doesn’t need to decide, they can stock them all, allow consumers to choose
- newspaper editors: select most interesting articles
- newspaper fact checker’s: Check content, Digg.com readers can mark content as potentially inaccurate

However, more recently a couple of consumer input services have started which are more strategic and interesting: DellIdeaStorm and MyStarbucksIdea: Replace executive decision making on “what to focus on”, which products and projects to work on. These are more complex decisions, has cost trade-off inputs, more strategic decisions.

The “upper and middle management” of a company is there to allocate out scare resources to projects, focus on executive decided “goals” and “strategies”. To shuttle information up to executives, and shuttle down decisions. If consumers can start to dictate what to focus on, how much more of traditional middle management of corporate structures is going to go towards more web 2.0 user contributed input? With more information systems meaning we don’t need information shuttlers, with direct online information, voting/decision making online will we need as much middle management in the future?

What to focus on (Goals and strategies), how to allocate resources to these goals, feedback processes seeing if work meets users needs, can these go away? An open source community or Wikipedia has no/less formal decision making processes, middle management, yet is able to have a common direction. The engineers, tester’s, content editors adding value to an open source project are all “Value added”, that is every single person on the project is involved with directly adding value to the user. Compare this with a company with layers, and layers of middle management which does not directly add value to the product but instead is considered necessary to deliver the companies products/services.

So, how far will companies move towards new decision making processes? Web2.0 style decision making for more strategic processes? And, what tools will this reflect?

I have finished reading “The Big Switch:  Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google“, and although I have been an advocate of cloud computing (S3, EC2) before, this even more strongly reinforced my beliefs about the switch to utility computing.    It talks about the original usage of electrical systems in the world, replacing the water-wheels at manufacturing facilities, but where the company still runs their own power generation.   I particularly found amusing a quote about how the manufacturing companies when faced with electricity that could be bought from a utility, brought up the fears of “what if it goes down”.   This is the exact same fear I hear people in enterprise hosting bring up about Amazon S3, or Google Apps.   The cost and complexity of hosting today in an Enterprise IT environment, with the overwhelming complexity of compliance, disaster recovery planning, data backup, change management, release management, funding prioritization creates a stunningly difficult solution to hosting software.    With the complete ease of signing up and using hosted applications such as Google Apps, it makes me feel sure that yes, the movement will move towards utility computing.