CTO Blog
One of the greatest privileges in any field is working with the next generation, and specifically, listening to their perspectives on the issues. A little while ago I met one of Capgemini’s ‘BTC-ers’, Sham Mitra. (BTC stands for Business Technology Consultants, and is Capgemini UK’s technology graduate intake and development programme). Sham was keen to engage in the next practice work and I asked Sham to provide his perspective on the Web shift.
What then developed was an idea for a potentially benevolent though definitely a little mischievous fairy godmother to visit a major fictitious organisation, and we’d love to hear your views…
The corporation and fairy godmother in the following post are purely fictitious and any resemblance to any real corporations or fairy godmothers is purely coincidental…
The Incognito Banking Corporation and the Fairy Godmother 2.0 – guest post by Sham Mitra
During a boardroom meeting at the Incognito Banking Corporation, a fictitious financial organisation employing 100,000 staff across 30 countries, a Fairy Godmother appears. And in our story, the Fairy Godmother is no ordinary Fairy Godmother, she is a Fairy Godmother 2.0.
She lays down what will happen to the business in exactly a month from today, and it doesn’t make for good listening.
The company will lose its entire IT infrastructure – everything will go – from desktops to laptops, servers to printers, mid-range to mainframes, comms cabinets to datacentres, office to core business applications, and all the data they have – and all they’ll be left with is one internet connection to a desktop computer, with a power connection to walled socket power supply, in the head office.
In one month from now – *poof*!
On the bright side however the Fairy Godmother, being the good natured person that she is, allows them to have a hard copy of their records data – such as financial, account and employee records.
I’d now like to open up the debate on how the Incognito Banking Corporation can continue with business-as-usual without feeling the full impact of losing its entire IT infrastructure.
Where would we start?
A re-assessment of the market? A compliance and risk approach? The organisational model? The enterprise social model? The process model? The data model? Custom build IT? Packages? Blind panic? Consume from the Web? What would the new front, mid and back-office look like? How would people know how to use it? How much value is really in the data in the print outs?
We would need to answer questions such as how can the business ensure the security (and integrity) of the data? How can the business swiftly access a robust information infrastructure? How would its people and customers experience its services enabled by a new business infrastructure exactly one month from now?
And, in the end, is it a realistic option for the business to mesh together a collection of consumer and industry technology and multiple of web-based services to support its core operations?
Would the end result look any different from what it had?
We’d love to hear your views!
Some context for our fairy godmother 2.0 – the paradox of corporate ICT investment versus consumer technology
The UK governmental board for trade and investment reported that in the year 2007 the UK had the world’s ninth “best Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure”; this is in-part due to the lavish global investments that were made during the speculative bubble that was known as the “dot-com era”.
During this era of unprecedented economical growth, which was catalyzed by the proliferation of technology-driven investments, many of the stocks within the IT sector rose exponentially without a solid grounding, and this foundational flaw was due to most (but not all) of the internet start-ups having the same business plan of monopolizing their respective sectors through network effects. When the dot-com bubble numerically burst on the 10th of March 2000, by hitting its peak on the NASDAQ at 5132.52 points, there was a global panic in commercially-based technology investments and as a result the UK commercial investment in ICT fell year on year from its height in the year 2000 at £34.9 billion (up 165 per cent between 1992 and 2000) to a relative low in the year 2004 at £28.6 billion.
However, with all this investment in ICT that had come before us paradoxically we now find it to be the home user who has a more sustainable ubiquitous reach of IT resources.
In the book MESH Collaboration, by Andy Mulholland and Nick Earle, Chief Strategist at World Ahead Chris S. Thomas is quoted as saying “the emerging technology-aware labor force is probably using more advanced technology in their personal collaboration than most corporations have deployed or allow today”, and this is echoed by IT strategists and CTO’s alike.
The UK Office of National Statistics reported that in the year 1997 the number of employee’s using computers and telecommunication devices to work from home (“teleworkers”) reached 0.9 million (900,000) and by 2005 this had increased to 2.4 million – it’s roughly estimated that by the end of 2008 this number will have reached 3.5 million. What this represents is a paradigm shift in communication that is allowing employees to openly collaborate globally without the restrictions of an office network, and technologies such as virtual private network (VPN), voice over internet protocol (VoIP), teleconferencing, videoconferencing, and instant messaging are collectively making home working easier and more reliable.
These technologies coupled with rapid developments in virtual reality – such as the Emily Project, SecondLife, and applications such as Microsoft Photosynth – and the increase in the uptake of online collaboration platforms such as Google Docs and Zoho Office Suite, has meant that cloud computing is becoming a more realistic option for many firms and most of the major technology companies are now driving this forward. Intel, for example, has already pioneered wireless power transmission (which effectively means a mobile device can stay powered continually without the need of wires), and there are a myriad of internet services providers all driving forward the adoption of wireless internet technologies.
Corporates are similar to governments in many ways, and they too have invested heavily in ICT infrastructure only to see the home user have more IT at their disposal.
And so, the question becomes – what’s the real value in continuing to invest in corporate ICT in the ways we know how to?
Back to our Fairy Godmother… one month less 5 minutes to go… where would we start?….
About the author
Oh Fairy Godmother, thank you for this wonderful opportunity to re-think everything!
The best people to solve this quickly are those 100,000 employees. They are the ones who know what they really need.
So what we need is employee engagement on a massive scale, and a very short time-frame, to determine what we actually need, what is important, as well as how to do it.
I propose an intensive month-long brainstorm, from which the new “Business Technology” infrastructure will emerge…
We would:
1. Set up a Salesforce Ideas account for every employee (wisdom of the crowds, like Digg, but with ideas – http://www.salesforce.com/salesforceideas)
2. Set up a Yammer account for every employee (microblogging, like Twitter, in an enterprise setting – http://www.yammer.com)
The Salesforce Ideas platform would be used to capture the needs and ideas of every employee, seeing the highest priority ones rise magically to the top as discussions take place and consensus is formed.
The Yammer platform would be set up to encourage as much cross-departmental “following” as possible, so that diverse conversations emerge and great ideas are stumbled upon serendipitously.
What would emerge from this?
Perhaps a mixture of quick-to-roll-out package-based and cloud-located solutions with thin clients / netbooks for every employee to access these through. (I hope so!)
I just hope it wouldn’t be a general consensus to use Excel and Outlook for everything!
What do you think would emerge?
Would this work? Why or why not?
And would a necessarily better solution emerge if the fairy godmother had given us three years to do this?
Hi Dan – I like it!
Building on your ideas, I think we’d need to factor in how to guide the emergence in certain areas of compliance, risk and core banking operational running at cut-over, and also how corporate decision making would take place in this emergence. Thoughts very welcomed on how we’d balance these aspects with the social enterprise.
Your final point is well made. Perhaps I should see if there’s any magic left in the wand – what if we could engineer a simulation in a virtual environment?
Thanks Dan and “Fairy Godmother” for your comments, I like both of your ideas especially the one about virtual reality… And as it so happens I was looking into how Web3D is taking shape, and whether or not adopting this would be a pragmatic option.
For those of us who are old enough to remember two-dimensional computer games, you’ll also be old enough to remember when they were superseded by three-dimensional, networked, multi-player computer games. Let’s take the most successful multi-player, cross-network, game to date – World of Warcraft. The World of Warcraft features millions of players worldwide who interact with each other in the form of avatars (animated three-dimensional characters) by text and by speech. They wonder around a three-dimensional world interacting with other avatars, and in effect build relationships. And what happens as a result in is a deeper level of immersion as the avatars build a rapport with one another – surely this would benefit business? Imagine if we were all avatars in a Capgemini world? We could interact in the same way we do in the office, we’d be able to conduct meetings in a virtual meeting room (one-to-one or in a group), and even pull up presentations displayed on a virtual screen. And the great thing here is the entire infrastructure already exists. A non-gaming version of this exists in the form of SecondLife, and company’s like Reuters and indeed Capgemini have already established a presence within this virtual world.
So, you’re probably asking yourself the questions “what about network security?” and “how can we keep the data secure?” These two questions can be answered by looking to the Jericho Forum. The Jericho Forum (as defined by Wikipedia) is a “group of organizations working together to define and promote the solutions surrounding the issue of de-perimeterisation” – working without boundaries.
In the Forrester Research report “Web3D: The Next Major Internet Wave” – dated 18th April, 2008 – the editor is noted as saying “Within five to seven years, Web3D
will deliver an interactive, immersive experience much richer than the static, text-oriented or even interactive graphical interfaces of today’s Web”. So, the question here is can we realistically adopt a virtual reality environment as a corporate infrastructure? And in the interim can we adopt social networks as a practical means of communicating with employees? Serena software certainly seem to think so – they have adopted a company wide policy called “Facebook Friday” where they essentially use Facebook as acorporate infrastructure.
If we’re going to overhaul the IT infrastructure why not take the risk and adopt something “new”? Couldn’t services like Salesforce and Yammer be incorporated into a SecondLife environment?
I’d be fascinated to hear your thoughts…
I like your comments and ideas about the future and find the thought of a 3D virtual office fascinating. Only time will tell whether virtual reality worlds where workers can interact with each other as avatars will prove to be a novelty or a genuine collaborative enhancement.
Either way, I’m looking forward to finding out. In a sector where many teams are distributed over very wide areas this could help build relationships and increase productivity. How about a virtual coffee every morning to start the day?
I have some ideas of my own the way we use IT in the future. I would like to see the concept of Cloud computing grow with far more powerful applications than Google Apps being run server side to reduce the need for processing power on the user’s computer.
Let me share a scenario that I have invented. A young graphic designer is always on the move spending time at home, his studio and with clients. He doesn’t want to carry around a bulky powerful laptop with expensive state of the art graphic design software. How about a Cloud infrastructure where he can connect a server running the design software allowing him to operate just the graphical user interface (GUI) from his 7 hour battery life Netbook or PDA?
A new breed of lower specification devices even have a new name attached: Cloudbooks. If we rewind not so many years ago when Moore’s law ruled (The theory that the number of transistors fitted on a circuit board can double approximately every two years) it seems inconceivable that the future of personal computing is with small devices with processing power seen 5 years ago. However that’s the exciting thing about working with IT, ideas change, opportunities emerge……
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