Here at MyST Technology Partners we've used the word to describe content services that are flexible. But after a bit of research and commentary from Phil Wainwright, I have a broader perspecive of agility.

At the second annual Agile Business Conference, one of the five basic things that attendees will learn is how applications continue to become easier to build as the adoption of standardized, component-based systems and services reduce development effort and increase integration with existing applications and business processes.

The mantra of this conference is best stated by Bill Davidow, author of The Virtual Corporation:

"To the outside, it will appear almost edgeless, with permeable, continually changing interfaces. From the inside, traditional offices, departmental and operating divisions will be continually changing."

This scenario will play out in most technology circles as well, and the advent of Web services and XML standards will lead the way for revolutions in information management. But this trend is not just about businesses and information systems - it's about people too.

How do you create an agile workforce, or an agile executive team? I'm not an expert in business management, but my gut tells me that it has a lot to do with creating a learning organization - a business tilted in favor of just-in-time learning skills. This suggests a strong capacity for reflection and team learning, and the ability to develop shared visions and shared understandings of complex business issues. Perhaps the agile business is largely dependent on information systems like weblogs, refined content channels, and information objects that can be easily associated with virtual and physical things.

Everybody is talking about blogging.

There’s no denying that blogging is a disruptive force in many areas—journalism, enterprise knowledge management, web marketing, content management, and many more. But, like any new paradigm, blogging is in for a period of growing pains.

Blogging technology evolved to meet the needs of the grass roots bloggers—predominantly, individuals wishing to publish to the World with minimal friction. The unintended consequence of current blogging technology was demonstrating the power of blog-like technology for enterprises—organizations that don’t necessarily wish to publish (everything) to the World.

I just read John Foley's excellent article on the state of blogging in InformationWeek.  I found it interesting that while explaining the benefits of blogging for enterprises, this article also—inadvertently, I suspect—offers a great example, of why many enterprises will resist the use of today’s popular blogging tools. Specifically, John writes, “People may switch employers, but they'll take with them electronic journals of their best ideas.” More than a few enterprises would frown on this, to put it kindly, yet this is what today’s popular tools enable. (In fact, some actually mandate this by making each user’s own machine the content server).

The needs of enterprises are very different from the needs of individuals. Enterprise blogging technology must (just for a start):

• Provide granular access permissions—not all posts are for all eyes
• Easily aggregate postings of multiple authors
• Provide cross-author searching
• Discover semantic relationships between postings automatically
• Support behind-the-firewall deployment
• Support SSL connections for secure transmission of company confidential material
• Provide content agility—the ability to easily repurpose content for different use cases

MySmartChannels (and its underlying Web service platform) was built specifically to meet the emerging needs of enterprises while maintaining the individual benefits associated with personal blogging. A public version of MySmartChannels is available online for anyone to use for free at http://myst-technology.com.

The author of this blog item (RSS Behind the Firewall - Jeremy Zawodny) makes a good point about a loosely-coupled model - using RSS to stay abreast of information at home and at work.

Now I need to have two aggregators: one at home and one at work...

The trouble that I perceive he's raising is that with two separate aggregators, it's essentially doubling the setup, configuration, and most importantly, each aggregator is not going to know what the other aggregator is doing. Items that you read at work [of course] show up at home as unread items. This is indeed a thorny issue because synchronizing anything is fundamentally a bad idea.

Although I love my client-side news aggregators, this issue points out how important servers are to knowledge systems that help you manage content, regardless of your geographic location or the computing device you happen to be using. As devices become more connected, this issue will grow in complexity - already I suffer from this problem on two desktops, an iPaq, and a notebook.

One observation - NewsGator achieves this if (and only if) you use Outlook for e-mail and a Microsoft Exchange folder for persisting incomming news. As you roam from system to system, the Exchange folder is always updated.

What's the more pervasive answer? - I'm not sure, but I suspect it has something to do with a meta-data integration platform. ;-)

I've noticed that many people in Internet circles where I travel have started to use the term 'web services'. But I see little evidence they truly grasp the nature of this new and somewhat confusing idea. As terms go, this one was likely coined by someone who didn't give it much thought - probably the same person that came up with 'weblog'; another poorly architected term whose concrete has dried.

Loosely-Coupled.com defines web services with elegance.

"Automated resources accessed via the Internet. Web services are software-powered resources or functional components whose capabilities can be accessed at an internet URI. Standards-based web services use XML to interact with each other, which allows them to link up on demand using loose coupling."

In addition to this definition, I like to apply a simple test to determine if an information architecture is truly a 'web service'. If the technology in question can be used to create solutions that the designers didn't plan for, it is indeed a web service architecture. Unintended consequences and the ability of the technology to outlive its intended objectives; that's what qualifies it to be a web service in my view.

For all the rave that blog tools are making in the trendy space of loosely-coupled applications, I have to point out that none of them are actually architected as web services. Sure, you can find instances of web services surrounding their monolithic client-server designs, but few have actually built their platforms with the intent of creating unintended consequences. I appreciate that most blog tools provide RSS and RDF feeds, but these features hardly qualify them to be considered web services. The Blogger API makes a fair attempt, but it's limited to a very narrow set of use-cases that inevitably surround a mostly rigid framework.

As blog tools grow up, instead of downloading a complete weblog platform, you'll simply pick a few 'collaborative lego's(tm)' off the shelf and assemble the desired weblog features. One of the legos will provide (properly encoded) remote storage, while another will include a rich-text editor of your liking.

In the near future, content management systems, [whether for personal publishing tasks, or enterprise-wide knowledge management solutions], will likely be the result of users' interpretations rather than a single company's product vision. It will be people like us that build these future systems. Our intended designs will be someone else's unintended consequence.