Vision. Passion. Responsibilty. Knowledge.

Now beeing back from my recent voyage to the high regions of big visions, I deliberatly came down a bit to get a closer view of the land I glanced from high above and naturally enough besides the natives to whom I wish to bring enlighenment, there already are some missionaries abroad, but I didn’t see no chapels let alone any cathedral yet. Unfortunatly but not unexpectedly, there are also no paths or roads yet and my ever so knowing google maps would refuse to come up with a route from my current position to the new land of glory and instead presented me only with a general direction where to head to.

But lets stop this metaphorical nonsense.

I did a little research and looked for people who also work on this topic (which was quite clumsy work, not really having defined the topic itself so far) and being not that successful, I called up a friend of mine, who I really hope will get involved also in the future. I then quite ruthless (mis)used him and my wive by confronting them with masses of unsorted thoughts for a couple of hours – which in my experience is a good way to get things sorted out. I was not very successful in communicating this vision of mine, but I think I could at least light a spark which is the most important thing to get things moving. But anyway. Let’s see, if now I can put down some of the thoughts on the topic so far.

What is “information streaming in a corporate or enterprise context” all about?

One problem with todays enterprise information systems is, that they mostly regard information as a rather static ressource which is to be gathered, stored aggregated and then provided to those who beforehand where identified as the recipients who might benefit from it. The handled pieces of information are mainly information about “state”, let’s say for example “company xy has between 1.000 to 5.000 eployees”. While this is certainly useful or even necessary the real useful information in terms of identifying opportunities and such is the information about the change of state, not of the state itself

Opportunities are all about timing and the recognition of a change of state.

This information about “change” has a much more volatile nature and its value more often than not decreases fast after quite short a time. Todays approaches to handle changes mostly trigger some kind of workflow that in the end brings the information to the attention to someone who hopefully will make something useful of it.

The implementation of such a “trigger and workflow” system quickly becomes rediculously complex since the value of the information largly depends on many also volatile factors. For example:

“We’re about to lose a project to competitor xy” (degrading the rating of a opportunity in the companies CRM system)  in combination with the information “competitor xy is in financial trouble (from a stock market news ticker) will create an opportunity whereas both single pieces of information will not (to the same degree).

There is no way to implement a fixed set of rules, which kind of information should be forwarded when to which person. These rules are much too complex and volatile by their very nature and the amount of information to be handled too big.

Instead of trying to let the sender or creater of a message determine the relevance of a piece of information you shift this authority over to the reader or recipient.

Practically speaking:

The goal is to react faster and to miss less chances and opportunties.

The way is to generate a large stream of seemingly homogenous information about all kind of changes of state in “objects” that might be commercially relevant and to provide the recipient with tools to sieve and fish in it and to add their own value by repeating and forwarding it. This is what twitter does in a really unrestricted and uncontrolled environment.

I had an almost religous experience yesterday: A vision that lingered for years in the back of my head suddenly took shape and stood before me in bright daylight (well it was kind of rainy outside, but that made the vision all the more shiny).  As all good visions are supposed to be, it came almost out of nowhere: Sitting at breakfast with my family, talking about this and that, I lazily read some articles in a german business magazine and stumbled about an interview with a quite crazy guy from Denmark, Morton Lund (http://lundxy.com).

The interview itself was not that exciting, but the story behind it was interesting: A man who achieved a lot in small time, lost it all even quicker and obviously refuses to let himself be overwhelmed either way. So I googled Morton and had a look at his homepage, which at that time featured a report from his recent speech at StGallen Symposium for entrepreneurs. I took his advice and watched the video of the speech of Kishore Mahbubani (http://www.mahbubani.net/ -> thanks for that one Morton) and afterwards many others as well. This was quite inspiring by itself and it kind of put me in the mood of generally thinking in huge dimensions for a change.

I then looked up the projects, Morton is involved in at that this time and read on the page itself a bit and came about a brief reflection on SaaS under the headline of “There is something really (b2)big happening” and there was this little sentence:

“How-come you are much more updated on your remote friends weekendtrips – then you are updated  on your company and colleagues last efforts – well the answer is simple – the is NO INFORMATION STREAM in you company”.

This quite exactly describes a phenomen I was thinking about or even working at for quite a time now, but in this sentence its brought to the point and finally I can put a name to it: A corporate information stream.

I had another experience this very week which amazes me still: After having worked for about a year now, building up a SaaS department for a partner of ours, I finished this work and to reflect this, I entered an “end date” for this engagment in my Xing account, not expecting how many ripples this small change would produce. Within half an hour after this change the Head of Sales of our partners largest competitors called me, asking me if everything was alright and if I might have a mind to drink a couple of coffees with him. Mutual partners of ours where irritated and inquired about what this change might mean to our mutual projects. And last not least my colleagues for a year from the sales team inquired about wether I was turning my back on them. As you see we didn’t communicate clearly, that my work at out partner was time limited from the start and that nothing extraordinary has happened at all. But the effect of this small a news, which took me about 30 seconds to enter is quite extraordinary.

I just come from evaluating a long list of big and small CRM Systems and having produced one myself in the past, I have kind of understanding on how the CRM mainstream works. It works and thinks in terms of gathering, structuring and compiling data and establishing workflows, the better of which can be integrated with partners and customers of the company (if they are willing to be intergrated).

But what is missing is a way that every piece of information that is created anywhere in or around the company can be broadcasted by anybody to an audience that ist not exactly known at the time of posting and so can come to the attention of somebody, the poster would never have expected to be even interested in the first place. This somebody is the one who can make an opportunity from exactly this information at exactly this point in time. This way of working is bound to create much more opportunites and more creativity than the traditional data centric way of doing things.

In my head forms a vision of a twitter-like system with a tight role and rights management and easy ways of integrating the information of existing applications, like crm, erp and helpdesk environments. This might well prove a groundbreaking way of doing business not only in the sales field but all accross the companies. I can see it before me in great detail at the moment and started at once to begin making this thing happen.

Stay tuned.