NYSE To Close Two More Rooms… Electronic Trading is Taking Over

The WSJ reports tonight that the NYSE is going to close two of the remaining four more rooms by November 1st. The Blue Room and the Extended Blue Room (or EBR on the Floor) are closing leaving just the Main Room and the Garage. The NYSE has already closed the New Room.

“The moves reflect the pressure on the NYSE’s stock-trading business following the industry’s shift to electronic trading and the emergence of competitors touting advantages like faster execution or greater anonymity.”

I was on the Floor last month, and was shocked on how empty it was. The normal buzz on the Floor was non-existant, and there was a ton of empty space. The downsizing by the Specialist firms, $2 Brokers, and member firms is obvious. The guys I know down there say the Floor is down 60% of the people. I think they were low on their estimate.

Why trade on the Floor when the NYSE themselves gives a rebate of 25 cents per 100 shares of posted liquidity that trades on the NYSE ARCA platform?

Office 2.0 – Consumers will drive Office 2.0 adoption

The New Platforms panel at Office 2.0 hammered home their idea that consumers will drive Office 2.0 adoption into the enterprise. The panel assumed that Web 2.0 platforms will be the standard for the enterprise, and the moderator called them all out on this. While this makes sense to me, I agree that is not necessarily the right assumption.

The panelists all agreed open standards are critical.

The conversation then gravitated to …. Facebook (shock!). From Facebook they have learned to keep the platform quite simple.

Allowing multi-vendor support through mash-ups allows the experts in a given component to enrich the user’s platforms.

Platforms that are adopted must solve a customer’s problem. While this is clear, simple, and obvious, firms must keep this in the forefront of their minds as they design their platforms and applications.

Office 2.0 – Entire Conference Organized Using Online Tools

It is day 2 of the Office 2.0 conference. It is fairly amazing that the entire conference is paperless and was organized and managed using on-line tools only. No desktop apps were used at all in any part of the organization of this conference. No documents exist on local hard drives or file servers – all are in the Web cloud. Ismael Ghalimi’s talk on the subject was illuminating. Look at this page to see the various on-line tools (18 of them!) he and the other organizers used. The only paper they accepted were checks (why pay the credit card feeds?).

Office 2.0 – Social Computing Panel…

Still here at Office 2.0…

Is Social Computing just for kids? What happens when they grow-up? Will this change how we work? Is this changing already? The Social Computing panel which discussed this was quite interesting.

Firms and business people are already using Social Computing tools. Dove just setup a Ning group to discuss their products with their customers in Germany. People are using LinkedIn to get to know their coworkers better (do you really know what your coworkers did more than 6 months ago?) and to get to know people they are going into a meeting with. Plaxo is working to enable an Open Social Web with their new Pulse social networking feed. These are just some examples mentioned by the panelists.

The elephant the room was Facebook. There was a very interesting discussion about how the worlds of Facebook (for friends and family) and LinkedIn (for work) are starting to intersect. There were differing views on this… Should the networks be bridged or kept separate? Do you want your business friends to be part of the same group as your family and social friends? The social networks have not solved this yet, but all agreed that this is an issue and that this will be solved.

One thing mentioned that seems interesting is the Bill of Rights for the Social Web. I will read this later and comment on it then.

Office 2.0 – is there social networking / Enterprise 2.0 for business?

At the Office 2.0 conference, Adam Carson kicked off the Enterprise 2.0 track by asking and trying to answer this question – “in there social networking / Enterprise 2.0 for business?”.

Adam defines Enterprise 2.0 as bringing the concepts, tools, and technologies of Web 2.0 to the Enterprise. Web 2.0 is not Enterprise 2.0. You need to take Web 2.0, add permissioning, add human resources, add management strategy, add business use cases, and add the IT department, and you get Enterprise 2.0 Solutions… Bottom line, you need a lot of collaboration to get to Enterprise 2.0 solutions.

Your Enterprise 2.0 Framework does some interesting things:
(1) Connects the Enterprise to itself. You can use these tools to be more like a community
(2) Increased transparency & productivity. You can get better access / use of tools and applications. You can self-serve your IT
(3) Delivering the Enterprise to clients. You can do Enterprise-wide CRM, improve client communication, and external views.

How do get buy-in?
(1) Management Support
(2) Usability – should be dead simple
(3) Integration – into existing workflow and solutions. Cannot be a new thing, but an improvement to existing work patterns.
(4) Accessibility – allows easier seamless adoption
(5) Top Down – if managers are blogging, the staff will follow
(6) Training – not how but why and what’s different
(7) Templating – structure and refuse. Don’t start with a blank page each time.
(8) Solve Problems – make it easier for IT to allow adoption

What are the barriers and risks?
(1) Lack of management support
(2) Organizational and cultural resistance
(3) Adoption – needs to be 9x better to get adopted
(4) Legal / regulatory issues
(5) Funding / support
(6) Attention / time / priority
(7) Lack of willingness to experiment and potentially fail to learn and grow
(8) No “Long Tail” of users
(9) Trouble proving business value – how to prove ROI before you try…

Thanks Adam for great talk, and sorry for any errors I made lifting info from your slides and your talk!

What is the future of work – Office 2.0?

The first panel at the Office 2.0 conference is a discussion on the future of work. The panels are people from Microsoft (Excel team), Google (Apps team), SAP Labs, Intuit, Etelos, and GigaOmniMedia. Some key takeaways from their discussion:
- Collaboration is the key to the future office
- Innovation in the consumer space is moving faster than innovation in the enterprise space
- New tools being developed for the consumer are being brought into the office by the individual. IT teams are reacting the the innovation from the consumer space
- Customization for tools is a key without programming by end user – they build their own work flows, they choose their own content, and they use the information to make decisions.
- Small businesses will drive the innovation because they are not encumbered by the legacy enterprise and the large entrenched IT staff
- Data standards and open API’s enable a stable platform on which innovation can be performed

Office 2.0 is a test of mass collaboration

Office 2.0 has 600 people sitting in a room blogging, taking notes on their laptops, and working their new iPhones. It is amazing how the network was created and deployed on the fly by Covad and Swisscom. It is a test lab, and so far it is working fantastically. The entire conference is paper free and was created using Enterprise 2.0 / Web 2.0 tools only. Participants are mass collaborating on their new iPhones, and interacting over Twitter, IM, etc…

On my way to Office 2.0

I’m on my way to the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco. I’m particularly interesting to see what new cutting edge technologies, solutions, and ideas are discussed over the next couple of days. Also, I’m keen to see how this applies to Financial Services. I’ll be posting during the show, so stay tuned.