Nimbleness 2.0
I was using a web service provided by one of the web 2.0 music
discovery companies. I was having a bit of trouble ... the API just
didn't let me do what I wanted to do. I explained my difficulty to one
of the startup developers. Five minutes later I got an email describing
a modified API that now did what I needed it to do ... and the change
was not only described, it had been implemented and deployed!
This kind of nimbleness is a hallmark of web 2.0. Development is
lightweight, changes are easy to make and deploy. It doesn't hurt when
the main developer pushing out a change is also one of the founders of
the company. When the developer is in charge, things can happen fast.
In larger companies though, like Sun, it is hard to be nimble. We have
lawyers, we have branding, we have trademark police. We have security
reviews, firewalls and proxies. We have lots of processes in
place to protect the interests of Sun. All of these processes take
the all the nimbleness (and the fun) out of the development process.
A month or so ago I decided to take a deep dive into web 2.0. I figured
the best way to learn this stuff was to actually do it. So I wrote a
web2.0 mashup. I think it is pretty cool and I think others will think
so too. Now, if I was working for myself, I'd just toss the app up on
one of those commercial web hosting services and I'd be done. My app
would be deployed, people would be using it, I'd be happy. However,
I'm working for Sun, so instead of deploying the app, I am trying to
figure out how to navigate through all of the proper procedures to get
it deployed. I suspect that by the time I get this mashup out there, I'll
have spent more time wending through the processes than I did actually
writing the software.
I know Sun can be nimble and flexible. The fact that I can write this
in my Sun blog is a testament to that fact. But if we are going to do
the web 2.0 thing, we have to be able to act more like a web 2.0 company.
Perhaps it is time for us to form the 'Nimbleness 2.0 exploratory
committee' that can (after a few months) make some recommendations
about how we can be more nimble.
Wow! Nice! Good Luck! Sun's researchers armed with "the right to be nimble" seems like it would be an interesting phenomenon.
I hope that if anything comes of your idea that it won't be limited just to Web 2.0 but will also enable more publicly licensed software of all varieties. Those tight feedback loops you describe are a prominent feature of Web 2.0 apps but are not exclusive to that kind of app.
-t
Posted by Thomas Lord on August 31, 2006 at 02:34 PM EDT #