Factors in realizing value of Enterprise apps

Take a look at this finding from Sandhill.com and NeoChange




It tells you that THE most important factor in realizing the value of investments in Enterprise apps is Effective User Adoption. If you go all out and foster Effective User Adoption for your apps, its more than half the battle won. Also note how Software Functioanlity accounts for just 1% of the pie. And its ironical that most of our endeavours in the IT industry is invariably focussed on providing more and better functionlity. We may build the greatest tools, but if we dont enthuse the user to reap the benefits of using it, the companys investments in Enterprise apps is bound to have negative returns.

Perhaps what this also suggests is that within an organization, within a defined time span, we reach a plateau of functionalities we REALLY require. And then, its time to rethink on how to effectively deliver these in a way that fosters better user adoption, aligned to any organizational change programs.

Enterprise 2.0 apps are getting cheaper!

A recent report from Forrester predicts enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies to increase dramatically over the next five years, the end result being a gloabl enterprise market of $4.6 billion by the year 2013.

Read this in conjunction with the another report on the prices of Ent 2.0 apps,which suggests that "...the price drops (of Enterprise 2.0 apps) will be due to cutthroat competition, commoditization, bundling, and subsumption, with many startups and established big companies competing for the enterprise dollar..."

Among the popular tools, maximum price drops will happen in blog, wikis, social networking and widgets. But the only one that could command a higher price is mashups, which will see a steady rise over the next five years.

It is to be noted that new innovations in the blogging tools arena may not happen, as it is a saturated space, where the feature differences between the players is not of much significance. On the other hand, Wikis that are intuitive and easy to use are not available aplenty, and hence new players like SocailText will continue to have an edge.

Mashups have not gained as wide an accepatability within the enterprise as the other 2.0 tools and given its potential, it will rise in prices and features, while the other mature tools will bow down to price cuts and commoditization.

On reCaptcha

My interest in CAPTCHAS never seems to vane. And now theres reCAPTCHA!! And its very interesting to understand how its put to use.

It is estimated that around 60 million captchas are solved every day, each involving around 10 seconds. That roughly translates into 170,000 hours of work! Those are some astounding figures. The essential idea behind ReCaptcha is to constructively channelise this huge amount of work.

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

This cool feature can be added to your website/blog, as also in the form of MailHide to mask your email id, thus helping the cause of digitizing valuable knowledge.