Inferior Innovation

Today as I was getting ready to shut down and head home for the day, Kristen was exploring a new discussion forum service that we have at work. Based off of Jive forums, this offering has been embraced by several different groups which have desired the ability to add discussion forum capabilities to their traditionally static web-sites.

I had never made a post or reply to these forums before, and never has an information search returned an entry out of one of these forums - so I was seeing it for the first time. Kristen wanted to understand how information was organized, grouped & structured. Being of what I felt was sound technical mind - I tried to explain only to realize that I couldn't figure out what a Forum vs. Category was in the hierarchy. Clicking through the navigation further demonstrated that performance was lacking and that most forums were nothing more than 'seed' posts trying to spur discussion which never came. (Gee, like a few of my blog posts eh ?)

To this point I want to coin the phrase, "Inferior Innovation". Google it, you won't find it elsewhere ;-) Inferior innovation is the use or application of new technology to solve a business problem, which has already been solved. Most often it is the commercial/enterprise implementation of a technology that is free, open-source or more consumer oriented.

Kristen illustrated my point for me. She pulled up eBay's groups interface where she is an active participant in several on-line communities. She was able to quickly navigate to the post/topic she wanted and enjoyed the fact that her identity was cleanly integrated with other eBay information such as rankings. - Again, something missing from the corporate implementation. Knowing the team that has worked very hard and diligently to bring this service to our enterprise, I don't fault the people - but I do find the technology lacking.

So you're reading this and are thinking- great Mr. Smarty; what would you have suggested they use ? - Well, I'm not suggesting that I know all the reasons why Jive may not be better in our environment- but to restore Kristen's faith that discussion forums & communities were important in the enterprise and to demonstrate that other teams in the company have found ways to work around the limitations of this type of implementation - I popped up a browser to a team responsible for piloting new technologies who had implemented a discussion forum on their own - based on phpBB.

Kristen clearly liked it better. She instantly felt like she knew how to use it, it almost felt as though it was what eBay was using all along. Oh - and it's exactly the same technology that powers every other discussion forum we participate in. For me, it's FlyerTalk, myITForum, JungleDisk, and others. - Every one of these is phpBB based.

I can hear the 'but it won't scale' argument coming already, well - maybe scaling-up would be limited to the hundreds of thousands of users which use these consumer facing services - but why scaling out isn't simply the matter of cloning a VM template confuses me.

With the race to Enterprise 2.0 being based off of Web 2.0, too often I find that commercial implementations, geared for the enterprise is an inferior - 'me too'. I've seen it with IM (Lotus Sametime), I've seen it with Wiki's, I've seen it with E-mail (Outlook Web Access), RSS, Blogs, Forums, and the list continues.

If we want to show innovation, why reinvent the platforms which have already become defacato standards ? - Apply those talents not to reinvention, but inventing and truly innovating.