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Has BPM Reached a Tipping Point?

This statement is one of the interesting findings of a survey of over 1000 executives carried out by UK-based research firm FreshMinds on behalf of my colleagues in Capgemini Business Process Management. You can read the full version as a download here. But as the performance of two leading players in the BPM market Pega and Lombardi show – backed by comments from the market analysts – is that BPM is a very high growth market. The survey pulled out a lot of interesting background comments as well as a straight recording of what is happening on major issues in terms of reasons for, and level of adoption. I believe that these background issues explain the comments by Jim Sinur the Gartner Analyst who questioned in his blog  recently, why year by year the BPM market outperformed the analysts’ predictions.

BPM is not Dead: Changing the Approach to ERP

There has been a ‘BPM is dead’ point of view for a number of years, hence the title of Jim Sinur’s blog post ‘BPM is dead – Not’. But this is very much linked to the idea that investment in ERP processes will slow right down and that BPM is part of this market. This shift was identified back in 2009 by a number of commentators and linked to big-project ERP dying in exchange for the need for smaller, faster, cheaper ‘ERP’.  For example, see this piece posted by InfoWorld entitled ‘Why the big ERP approach is dead’.

This debate has moved on, as has of course the approach to ERP by the major technology vendors.  And for the last couple of months, Forbes Online has been running an interesting debate on ‘the end of ERP’.  There is a good cross section of representation in the posts and it’s all worth reading.  However the point of view in the post I highlighted states that it wasn’t that ERP was dead, but that it was just moving to the cloud. Or rather more specifically: what we want from ‘process’ is changing with respects to new enterprise reactions and requirements to new competitive circumstances.

As proof of this, one of the other key findings was that C level Executives saw the need for ‘processes’ to be able to be developed and changed rapidly to support market and customer initiatives and changes. Hmm not really what we associate with ERP, but very much what BPM provides. In much the same way the ability to ‘operate’ successfully by using ‘processes’ to deliver the business capabilities came up as well. And of course the third point was being able to operate at less cost. The automatic linkage is to see processes in terms of the third point, after all that’s what we have spent the last twenty years focused on! And the weapon to deliver this has been ERP and the automation of back office processes, which create the undesirable and non-competitive overheads in the business.

Good to Great: Stable Back Office with Agile Front Office Processes

Compare this with the second point about delivering business ‘capabilities’ and think instead about using the word ‘competences’. How did Volkswagen-Audi Group, VAG, get to where they are today? Better back office administration or being better at the core competencies of designing, building, selling, and servicing cars? Well you need the first to stay in business and be able to successfully operate for sure. But the ‘good to great’ difference is in their core competences and these are going to be based on ‘standardized ERP’ back office operations. As every aspect of business and society becomes technology linked and online, the interaction and creation of simple and fast ‘processes’ to deliver whenever and wherever becomes critical. Everything needs to happen in this fast moving domain. Increasingly that means the need to make an effective interface between the stability of back office pretty, fixed ‘procedures’ and the constantly changing ‘services’ of the front office.

The survey shows the simple fact that the world has changed: the last five years or so of shifting to online multichannel ways to do business. With industries, such as banking and insurance, having moved that way, more and more industry sectors have to think and change their behavior though embracing the ‘innovation’ in business models. BPM is being pulled into the enterprise from the edge and front office to do business in a rapidly changing, more agile manner. This is in contrast with ERP being pushed into the enterprise from the centre and back office around stabilizing and centralizing.

The old mantra of ERP ‘do more of less’ – meaning to reduce the variations in activities and processes as well as products to focus on a core market – has given way to ‘do less of more’ as customers demand to be serviced in a globally competitive world on their terms. There is the less obvious non-ERP driver for the growth of ‘processes’ and the reason for the constant rise in BPM!

]]> To some enlightened people, the glass is always half full and I must say, having had a good look at our newly released Global BPM Report, there is always a good reason to consider Business Process Management. Even – or especially – if you don’t like processes.

Let me explain.

As is noted in the foreword of the report, BPM has firm roots in management practices such as Total Quality Management, Business Process Reengineering and Model Based Development. It should be no surprise that many of the executives that were interviewed for the report emphasize the role of BPM in this area: as a critical weapon in the battle for efficiency, effectiveness, compliance and transparency in processes. Clearly, this aspect of BPM attracts organizations that have a fairly mature process culture and deal with processes that are more or less stable, robust and predictable. TRAIN processes if you like, that benefit from being well defined, manageable, measured and monitored. This is a foundation for continuous, lean-style improvement and some executives will have their KPI’s directly linked to the results (just like the salaries of a few railroad CEO’s now depend on the punctuality of their trains).

On the other hand, in a challenging and changing business environment 
that is characterized by uncertainty,
 BPM allows organizations to adapt, be more agile and fleet of foot as well. Here we are looking at a breed of processes that should be just as easy to model and execute as to change (say supporting a new, composite consumer product or an unexpected partnership with another market player). Instead of burying process logic deep inside Java, ABAP or COBOL code, it is extracted and defined externally through a BPM suite. It puts processes right at the fingertips of the business side of organizations and turns them into more flexible BUS processes. They are able to quickly change route when internal or external circumstances dictate so, thus acting as an Agility Layer on top of the highly standardized, even commoditized parts of the business.

Still, there is yet another world which is difficult to grasp for people that like structure, control and pre-defined processes. It’s the world of CAR and SCOOTER ‘no processes’: unpredictable, continuously self-adapting and much more focused on reaching the destination, rather than planning the road towards it. People might be collaborating in many different ways – depending on the specific case at hand – and merely need to understand what information is needed from who to finalize the case, instead of being prescribed what activities to carry out in what order. Interesting enough, as the report points out, BPM is currently moving into exactly this unstructured, collaborative age with the newer tools providing No Process support through adaptive case management, business rules engines and real-time decision support.

So here is the good news: whatever mode of transport you fancy, there is something valuable to pick up from BPM. I am sure the Global Business Process Management Report will give you fresh ideas on where to start or restart. Have fun processing it.

]]> As an old guy, I often look at blogs and tweets with perhaps the wrong mindset, so here is a question for those who have been good enough to take the time to read my posts.

Should I blog my personal opinions, which might be unsubstantiated by facts. Or should I blog on, and link to, information that’s personally helpful for me to reach towards an understanding of this fast-moving and changing environment?

My personal inclination is to the latter, and my personal choice in the types of blogs I read is equally factual, but I would welcome some feedback. Please!

The slightly tenuous link is that ‘mobility’ based activities tend to be short and opinionated whereas web-based activities tend to be deeper and involve more factual content. So in keeping with my own inclinations I always look at initiatives in the industry that enable improved interactions or simplify deployments, etc.

NIEM: A Case on UML standards

Some of the most interesting get very little publicity because I guess they don’t have something to sell and are therefore not ‘marketed’ strongly. An interesting case is the US Federal Program called NIEM (National Information Exchange Model).  Described as ‘a national program supported by federal government, NIEM connects communities of people who share a common need to exchange information to advance their missions’. NIEM is not a data exchange, or database, or even necessarily the same thing as Open Data. Instead, it is a real and practical attempt to produce workable common vocabularies for various government and industry interchanges.

I was reminded about NIEM and its work on 20^th Feb 2012 when an industry-focused subgroup presented two Unified Modeling Language files to the Object Management Group, OMG. This is in response to an agreement the year before for NIEM to develop UML profiles in support of their vision and initiative. What is interesting about this work is that it is to help tool and product vendors incorporate these standards into their products. With the carrot being that thoseUS government and organizations dealing with the US Government are given preferred status to purchasing. Moves such as this with guaranteed markets often do work. So, just as the use of ‘models’ is very much back in favor, it is also well worth taking a look at the details of the topic of data exchanges between enterprises – in my humble opinion!

Mobility and New Propriety Platforms

Also on the topic of standards comes a blog from Dion Hinchcliffe: an interesting opinion on how mobility platforms are creating new proprietary platforms – disruptions to the ‘open’ web and internet. This actually came out at the end of December last year and I have waited for some time to see how it shaped up against the announcements at Mobile World Congress, MWC. For a good range of reviews see cnet.

Frankly it was mostly an arms race around specifications of devices from a range of manufacturers, although it does feature the first preview of Microsoft Windows 8. Interesting that the company – perhaps considered as the most-defining of the PC era – should pick a non-PC event to showcase its all important next generation platform. Apple not to be outdone announced a new version of the iPad just after the show.

The show very much confirmed the dominance of Android, with Google claiming that 300 million devices are now live and running on Android and with 850,000 new activations a day. Apple didn’t give any figures. As a user of an Android phone (Samsung Galaxy Nexus) and an Apple iPad it’s easy to see why with the huge range of great apps and widgets for both. And that brings it back to Dion’s point in his blog the web versus mobile apps.  His well argued point, that I recommend reading in full, is that the mobility revolution has, for various reasons (including good marketing and the simplification of development which led to an explosion of ‘apps’) seduced people away from the content-oriented ‘open’ web.

Risk of a New Lock-in Model

Frankly I hadn’t thought of this until I read this piece, not that I haven’t recognized it (see my previous blog on the growth in enterprise app stores). So, is this going to turn into a new lock-in model? And if it is driven by Bring Your Own Device, BYOD, then it might seem the enterprise may not be making some of the choices. More than ever, all of this argues for enterprises to determine a strategy and policies quickly or risk finding themselves committed to a course of action without even realizing it. For example, it might be difficult for the CIO to propose Windows 8 as the broad corporate standard for 2013 if the most aggressive and business savvy part of an enterprise’s management and knowledge workers have built an unassailable position on Apple or Android.

]]> Just when you thought that Clicks & Mortar finally, irreversibly was a topic from an overhyped past. Global clothing retailer C&A pilots an unexpected use of the Facebook Like in its Sao Paulo store. It equipped its garment hangers with displays that show the number of Likes each item has received on Facebook in real-time. Admittedly, the display looks a bit retro digital from a distance. Also, I am not so sure if women will be inspired to buy a particular item if many others have indicated that they also like the item: a low number of Likes might actually be a better recommendation. At least to certain women. I think.

But never mind that. This is not the Psychology Blog, although changing your Facebook relationship status (or other statuses) nowadays seems a crucial moment in life that must to be carefully timed.

Many of us cannot imagine living anymore without the dynamics of the social web, which is powered by the Internet and mobile devices. Still, we yet seem in full search for the optimal balance between social and technology. Mobile apps like TheFinds’ Glimpse could just as much – or even better – guide consumers selecting products based on the social network. And there are already plenty of apps (like Layar) that provide consumers with an Augmented Reality – which could easily include Facebook likes – through their mobile devices.

The question is however whether the latest mobile app really will help us to become more social, as shopping with a friend may become much less fun if she is continuously pointing her smartphone to items, finding out what Facebook thinks. Also, there is a good chance she will be less focused on the actual items for sale, occupied as she will be by handling the device and interpreting the information that pops up.

Of course, we are not even considering shopping anymore in Virtual Reality (anybody in SecondLife against this, any of the four?).  But Augmented Reality just might look a little bit different from what we currently think as well. More real, if you like.

The late Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC would be more relevant than ever with his vision of Real Virtuality: we should not be entering or caught up in the virtual world. Instead the virtual world should enter ours, not screaming for attention but as true calm technology: “that which informs but doesn’t demand our focus or attention”. Our next mobile device may just as well turn out to be a digital hanger, a pico projector, smart paper, glasses (the parodies are by now funnier than the original) or just an occasional, soft Internet Whisper in our ears.

Nothing more than appropriate that I participated in a new workshop concept the other day that was also coined Real Virtuality. Invented by our always creative colleagues of the Accelerated Solution Environment (ASE) it featured real Like, Follow and Retweet stickers that the participants could use during the furthermore tech-light session for – well – social purposes. There were even Dislike stickers (eat your heart out, Facebook!).

Unfortunately I cannot explain in detail to you how the Paper iPad worked, as we do occasionally tend to enjoy the fruit of our Intellectual Property just a little bit longer. It was anyway a great day with great clients at our chateau Les Fontaines, in the middle of the woods.

Guess Mark Weiser would have liked the place as well, given the final paragraph of his landmark paper about ubiquitous computing and calm technology: “There is more information available at our fingertips during a walk in the woods than in any computer system, yet people find a walk among trees relaxing and computers frustrating. Machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods”.

Technology that calms us. Let’s make it Real.

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"May you live in interesting times” is reputedly an ancient Chinese curse suggesting that the stress of chaos and change does not make for a good life."

There must be more than a few IT colleagues who feel they are indeed living in ‘interesting times’ at the moment. But until recently the key initiators of change were the business managers and users who they could at least try to screen out and keep on the edge of the business. Now it seems that the recent announcements by long established technology building block providers show they are set on contributing to the change too.

IBM’s new ‘PureSystems’ approach

IBM, who as a rule doesn’t do ‘superlative’ marketing statements, introduced their new approach to how hardware and software will be delivered in optimized fully integrated systems. Called ‘PureSystems’, this is “one of their most significant announcements in twenty years”. With a completely dedicated website  it starts with the overview “expert integrated systems fundamentally change the experience and economics of IT with built in expertise, integration by design and a simplified experience”. Note the words fundamentally change and in this case it’s true for IBM. For the first time, the hardware and the software business units offer the results of their integration into a single unit to build and ship fully integrated products.

There is no doubt that the results will perform better, be simpler to manage, easier to troubleshoot. As IBM points out, there is just one dedicated support function and any arguments about faults on software or hardware issues will disappear. But it still means shifting to the mentality of ‘technology stacks’ and accepting that all the products will come from a single vendor. Maybe not much of an issue in a ‘forklift’ replacement or upgrade program, but that’s not likely to cover everything, so parallel operation of a mixed environment looks likely.

Oracle offers the ‘red’ stack

It’s the same story elsewhere with Oracle offering the ‘red’ stack. They set out the reasoning for its approach and benefits in a whitepaper  which although a couple of years old still makes a good briefing on the topic. More recently the benefits and the push for using a full stack seem to have been much more around the Oracle eCommerce and web initiatives. And that again comes back to what the most likely approach most IT departments will adopt: the ‘a stack’ approach for delivery of their new ‘services, ‘web’ ‘cloud’ initiatives. Three terms that are becoming horrible confused and frequently interchangeable, but all share the common requirement for a virtualized online set of technologies.

HP talks of ‘converged’ as its approach to stacks

If IBM has a blue stack and Oracle a red stack then I am not quite sure what color the HP approach should be called. Possibly they would be happy to be thought of as a ‘transparent’ stack. I say this because HP are deliberately not trying to build the level of their stack to reach as ‘high up’ as their competitors in order to make themselves the natural partner for the pure software vendors. The terminology is also different with HP talking of ‘converged’ as its approach for clouds, data centers, and even networks. They acknowledge the need to bring old and new, both in terms of installed bases, strategic choices that need to continue to be used, as well as building to launch radically different requirements for ‘services’ on clouds. The question is, does this turn out to be a compromise in actual performance and other metrics against the more closed and highly optimized stacks?

Opportunities and challenges for IT departments

The reality for most IT departments is that for new non-traditional IT requirements, it will be simple enough to gain the advantages of a ‘green field’ approach and go for a stack to reduce the work of deployment and operations. The challenge is whether it makes sense to replace or integrate existing applications that are already in place and running. While every IT department will be different, here is an interesting write up and a good representation of what this might bring around when considering how to approach a JDE deployment. There is one other possibility and I know of an insurance company board currently asking itself why it would scrap its whole IT approach (it has become the usual expensive entanglement of customization with huge maintenance costs and use Commercial Off The Shelf, COTS) and replace it all on a non-capital investment basis.

Now that really is ‘fundamental change’ that qualifies as living in interesting times!

]]> It’s interesting to see how Agile principles currently enjoy a state of obvious Renaissance. Or should we say Epiphany? To our mild surprise, there is a whole new generation of both clients and IT professionals that seemingly just today discovered the virtues of Agile. This despite all the heroic efforts of 80′s and 90′s pioneers such as James Martin and Tom Gilb and an Agile Manifesto that still resides on a by now slightly anachronistic web site.

Agile is back in the spotlights. Don’t worry though, we won’t bore you all over again with the basics of frequent iteration, time-boxing, intense collaboration and self-steering, scrumming teams. Instead – in true Agile style – let’s focus on the deltas: what is different nowadays?

First of all, despite the newcomers, Agile by now is a completely established, mature practice with many organizations embracing it as their default approach to creating and implementing solutions. There is also a wealth of practical experience, even on how to apply Agile in complex, multi-shored situations. About time to stop the evangelizing, although there is an almost completely autonomous micro-economy of Agile Gurus, producing vast amounts of books (no topic that is more inviting to the aspiring IT writer) and speaking on series of conferences across the world in which Agile Gurus convert the already converted.

Guys (and girl): here’s your wakeup call: you’ve done it. Your mission is completed. Victory is yours, Agile is the new normal. So let’s focus just a bit more on actually delivering agile projects, rather than writing about how to do them, shall we?

Also, let’s realize there are certain project areas that won’t necessarily benefit from an Agile approach right from the start. Although we might all be shallows by now, we’d better realize there is a category of systems that are robust, predictable and have extremely stable requirements. TRAIN applications (rather than CAR or SCOOTER applications) are better supported by well-chosen, slow moments of introspection and upfront thinking and specification: doing things right the first time – when it’s feasible – may save a lot of time and effort every now and then. Having said that, there are very few development efforts that won’t benefit from step-wise, risk-driven delivery in the next phases.

Furthermore, looking at Agile practices themselves, there are some clear changes on their way, most notably the move away from its comfort zone of plain, custom software engineering. New tools are being applied to create agility layers on top of the established, not so flexible core applications landscape. Think business model-driven automation, lightweight ERP interfaces such as DUET Enterprise, mobile platforms, business process management suites and next-gen visual BI tools.

The quick growth of SaaS marketplaces also brings profound changes, as catalogue-based delivery of standard, multi-tenant solutions puts requirements management in a very different light, if any (much more about this next week). Instead of gathering requirements, prioritizing them and implementing them in subsequent sprints of software development, we start from the vanilla solution. Then we enhance it through agility layers – where necessary and possible – to fit the desired value scenarios. This seems like a far cry from the original ideas of software engineering, but actually the roots of Agile methodologies such as Scrum very much focus on what needs to change, rather than what needs to be build. It just takes a slightly different mind-set.

Finally, the on-going consumerization of IT has equipped many business users with their own tools. And they know how to use them too. Self-service BI, visual mashup builders, configurable portals and business rules systems enables them to reshape their own information reality on the fly, over and over again. Über-agility, if you like, with every individual running their own little scrums and sprints at will.

So yes: Agile is more alive than ever. But its world sure looked different yesterday and further changes are destined to occur. All very appropriate indeed.

]]> Okay, it’s a silly question. But after years of Relational Databases, RDMS (and frankly with database skills and operation being one of the most core and central planks of the IT department) we suddenly have a rash of announcements. This can only be summarized by stating that the databases in the new announcements are firstly, very different from traditional RDMS, and secondly, show decided differences in how data should be handled and stored. In those not-so-distant days, the competition was all speeds and feeds, with Oracle and IBM each trying to go one better. Useful comparisons  could be made even just a year ago.

We are Working in New Database Territory & SAP HANA

This blog got kicked off by a couple of things, starting with the announcement from SAP that SAP HANA is a total winner for them and that they are keen to press on and become a fully competitive player in the database market. I read in a handy report from The Register: “SAP also wants to displace “legacy databases” underneath its vast ERP suite, and has rejiggered its budgets and come up with another $337m dedicated to what it calls the SAP HANA Adoption Program”. The same report also included the figures from an SAP benchmark test, ‘at Volkswagen’s Shanghai facility’. “A NetWeaver Business Warehouse query that took 20 minutes on a disk-based setup (using an unnamed database) took 45 seconds running atop HANA using memory and flash”. Wonderful! Incredible!

Fortunately, The Register is not one to be taken in by these kinds of statements, and followed with the crucial statement, “The exact specs of the configurations were not divulged, and of course they matter a lot” – and that is the big punch line. We are working in new territory using new techniques, and there are no established benchmarks except one: unstructured data does not work on structured Relational Databases, and if you try, the results are awful and easily exceeded by using a new type of approach with one of the ‘new’ types of database!

Unstructured Data Reveals New Intelligence & HP Vertica

In exactly the same style, HP sent me the stunning testing results of their Vertica Database against a competitor. The difference was so extreme that, just as with the SAP test, you had to ask if this was a like for like! And then we can add several other Hadoop-based or other approaches and get another set of amazing results… But exactly what are we testing for? Let’s go back to Vertica and try to understand what it really is. And believe me, it’s tough to grasp as it turns several notions on their heads. HP currently describes it on their website as, “The HP Vertica Analytics System provides revolutionary real-time analytics – purpose built for tomorrow’s demands today. Simple to use, it delivers the fastest time-to-value immediately to business users, DBAs, and programmers”. Simple enough, but isn’t that the same as what SAP would claim for HANA and how it’s used?

Oddly enough, Wikipedia seems to have a better write up on Vertica in terms of what it is and does than the HP site, and it provides an equally good explanation of SAP HANA too.  More importantly, it’s possible to arrive at some understanding of the differences in the approach and use of both from this. The sea change in technology – that the web, clouds, and services bring and is referred to as big data – is still moving in terms of what and how solutions will be built. But at its heart lies data – that data is not transaction oriented and structured. No, it’s radically different in being both unstructured and accessed in apparently random manners for ‘insights’ to provide new intelligence.

Back to Basics to Understanding Data & Amazon Web Services

We learnt the hard way at the beginning of the PC Network disruptive change that data, data models, and data management were crucial. Now is the time to start studying data and its use all over again and that means considering what requirements you are delivering and how to use and store data. I don’t think we can take much for granted on databases from the traditional world in going forward. Instead I think we are all going to have to go back to basics and create a new 101 understanding of what we need and select products accordingly.

Sorry did I say products? Maybe I should have said services as there was a 3rd announcement that made me sit up sharply and wonder about this. Rather casually, Amazon Web Services let slip that the enormous numbers of objects their Storage Cloud was handling. And BusinessCloud9 included a nice graph that projected by Q2 2012 more than one trillion objects would be stored by Amazon. So perhaps that’s the way forward and we won’t have to worry about choosing and sizing a database and storage at all!

]]> They’re all residing on my laptop, smartphone and tablet now. Like four quarreling sisters, SkyDrive, iCloud, Dropbox and Google Drive are ostentatiously competing for attention. As a consumerized IT user – in my own micro space – I am confronted with exactly the same question that enterprises face more and more: what shall I put in whose cloud?

As always, a simple answer would be the best. It would be great to just choose one superior supplier – say Acme SuperCloud 9 – and stick to it for all cloud business. Unfortunately, reality may turn out to be more delicate and a situational approach will often need to be taken.

Much like the way I find myself currently dealing with various, personal cloud storage options. As most of my media is still brought to me through Apple channels and devices, I turn to iCloud to hold it for me. For all the materials I often need mobile access to (I am a Windows Phone 7 user), I prefer SkyDrive. For open documents that I want to collaboratively work on with others, Google Drive from now on is my natural choice. DropBox has the slightly unrewarding, but in fact glorious role of being a general backup. Then – of course – there is a limited, but crucial collection of confidential data assets that in no way should be stored anywhere outside my own premises. I keep them on my own machine in an encrypted data vault and have them backed up by a Time Capsule.

Clearly, reputation is everything here as the various financial plans for cloud storage tend to gradually resolve around one and the same benchmark. But the track record in real life is even more determining: if one of the solution installs improperly, crashes just a few times, is too often unavailable or – the horror – loses data, it will mercilessly be replaced by one of the other cloud sisters in the house. That set aside – assuming that robustness and trust are being dealt with sufficiently by providers – I can explore and switch my options freely, increasing my benefits from the cloud over time, while learning more and more.

For enterprises, at their own scale of reality, it is a very similar play. There is no specific point in selecting one cloud provider to deal with all purposes. There is also no urge to determine right now what computing, storage and application loads should be moved to the cloud and what should stay on premise. Possibly with the exception of start-ups and certain small and medium businesses, the hybrid scenario will be the de facto standard in the forthcoming years.

We will need to move forward step by step, opportunistically weighing our options, considering new paths as they emerge, leaving the unreliable and dusty ones, improving while we learn. Data sovereignty considerations may keep enterprises from moving their applications to a public cloud that is run from another continent: understood, run the delicate ones on a regional cloud or keep the crucial data on premise and process it on a public cloud. Two years from now, regulations may have been changed and options with better economies of scale become feasible. You may not be ready to fully migrate these vital, but ill performing client / server analytical applications to the cloud: fine, just replace the data crunching parts and have them run by a superfast, specialized Big Data cloud.

The options are limitless and smart navigation is key. Come to think of it, we may want to coin the concept of the Situational Cloud right here, right now as a flexible way of benefiting from various, evolving cloud options, supported by a set of well-defined design patterns or ‘cloud stereotypes’.

Providers need to understand that the ability for enterprises to effortlessly navigate the evolving cloud landscape is instrumental to broader adoption. I can easily switch between my personal storage clouds because they all have been integrated in the same way in my file system. Similarly, cloud providers need to move to joint, open standards around how to store and compute in the cloud. This may temporarily feel to them like cannibalism, but soon the increased usage of the cloud by enterprises will bring them the desired additional revenues.

In the end, we want to be able to have different cloud deployment scenarios at our fingertips and literally play with them: seamlessly changing as insights, alternatives, rules and regulations, technologies and business cases evolve. Some enterprises will prefer the details of such a situational approach be hidden, for example through automated, policy-based tools or by partnering with a specialized provider that takes care of the orchestration activities. Other enterprises may choose to stay in control for now and will strive for maximized transparency around the attributes of different cloud options. They accept that choices will need to be made and frequently re-assessed.

Then again, making choices can sometimes be very simple. Aspiring and already quite successful startup GreenButton enables applications even literally with a green button: if you push it, external cloud power – running on Windows Azure, Amazon or vCloud – will be activated on the fly to speed up calculations, analytics and graphics rendering. If you want to know what pushing the button additionally will cost (or save, think about it), all the information is there to make the decision.

Knowing what buttons to push when, and have all the insight for support: it’s really what the Situational Cloud is about. Let’s go and push a few of these buttons.

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Is the industry hyping ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) as the next big thing? I don’t think so. It’s much more a forced response to users driving the issue by deciding to use their own devices. AND this is the big point: it’s the cloud that allows them to do this. No, not your Enterprise IT idea of a cloud defined by its role in supporting Enterprise IT, but genuine cloud technology accessed via the internet as an extension of the web. This apparently universal situation of users moving beyond smartphones and into tablets, and at the same time changing how they work, is now an established reality almost everywhere.

This is a very worrying situation. Why? Because by definition this is an uncontrolled situation and good IT management and practice is based on firm controls and governance. This, TOGETHER with rethinking how the use of cloud technologies can benefit the IT environment, creates a huge spread of possibilities equaled only by the huge spread of security risks that goes with it. There is a further dimension to this and that’s doing business with customers, suppliers and others externally, certainly through the use of ‘content-driven’ forms on websites and increasingly via orchestrated services and apps using a cloud. All of these activities are in play at once with great pressure on delivering or accepting their deployment. 

Put Governance for Security in Place before Tackling BYOD

No wonder this resonated with me when I read a new whitepaper by colleagues at Capgemini entitled ‘Secure journey to the cloud – a matter of control’. I will leave you to read the full paper, which separates the various ways clouds are used and defines the appropriate approach to address each one. As is usually the case with dauntingly complex topics, the paper succeeds by breaking the whole down into addressable parts. This is important because before tackling BYOD there is a need to identify and put in place this level of fundamental governance for security.

Dismissing BYOD as ‘Not allowed’ is not the Answer

I want to focus on BYOD because it is simply a huge ‘out of control’ reality that pretty much everywhere needs to have a spotlight shone on it. There is a tendency to try to dismiss it by saying that it’s not allowed. But that doesn’t work and won’t work, particularly as there are too many board level executives in leading roles who have adopted BYOD! I have heard the iPad in particular called the ‘executive revolution’ and there is plenty of evidence in support of the desire to adopt and deploy. Interestingly, this support is coming from some of the major IT vendors too. SAP published a compelling article entitled ‘iPads have helped some of this company’s salespeople double their sales’ in which they quote not only themselves but IBM as commercial leaders. It’s hard for Enterprise IT to argue against adoption on the grounds of endangering the ERP systems when SAP is arguing for adoption!

There are whole sites now dedicated to using iPads in business with lots of good examples of making commercial benefits in different areas, as well as practical tips on the technology and its management. The somewhat wrongly (to my eyes, at least) entitled iPadCTO site is a good example, though I think it should have been called iPadExecutive given the content. I recommend a visit to get a really good grounding in the business iPad revolution. There are indexed vertical industry sector examples to be found at the ipadtowork site and frankly any business press has plenty to say on the topic. Clearly the ‘not here’ argument isn’t going to work at any level in the face of this level of factual examples.

How to Approach Cloud Security and BYOD

So onto practical steps: there is obviously a need to assess the risk posed by the device itself. And there is surprisingly little information on this because, as you will discover on the eSecurity Planet website  the simplicity of the operating system and its design features limits the threat opportunities. Equally, its operational manner via the Apple app shop (which is a cloud by-the-way, albeit an interesting example of a publicly accessible one with strict private management and access) makes for further security. And of course iPads and other BYODs are naturally being operated by users, and should be maintained by conscious policy as devices ‘outside the firewall’. The concept of defining this as ‘outside-in’ (see the Capgemini whitepaper on this) is catching on in the industry and it means that Enterprise IT ‘inside the firewall’ or ‘inside-out’ is safely isolated.

The big risk is the users themselves and their behavior. This is particularly so with email and attached documents or passwords stored in contact files. In short, the number one issue to ‘secure’ is the user! This is a recognizable fact in conventional security too, but with BYOD the IT department’s ‘controlling’ capabilities are too limited for real safety. I may be wrong but I reckon that something beyond the rules and guidelines is required to shock users into the reality of the personal risk. One good answer is to include a reference to the pwnedlist website where a quick anonymous check can be made on any email address to see if it has been hacked. I would also urge a monthly check of your email address at https://www.pwnedlist.com/ to test if you are one of the more than 12 million currently known to have been compromised. Now that makes it VERY personal!

So two routes in combination: go ‘Enterprise out’ towards the cloud using a structured approach and tools; at the same time, opt for ‘User in’ around BYOD and the new level of personal risk. If you can break up the ‘haze’ then the safe adoption of the many beneficial aspects of the cloud is achievable.

]]> It’s still an established benchmark for any application developer building a web shop: before starting to discuss structure, activity flow and lay-out, you have a look at the world’s leading example and see what’s hot. What would Amazon do?

Well, they are doing it again. With the launch of the AWS Marketplace, Amazon shows any IT department what they are up against in the forthcoming years: a neatly organized, easy accessible catalogue of open, highly standardized IT services, ready to deploy in seconds, paid per use, all on one invoice. And – of course – at incredibly competitive prices.

I have often discussed with our clients how quick – and through what steps – they could be benefiting from the public cloud. And the same advice would be coming back over and over again: “We’re not saying your entire IT landscape should be on Amazon next year. But for sure, they are quickly defining a new normal in terms of how fast, easy and cost-effective you should be able to deploy new solutions”.

That benchmark just became more tangible and solid than ever before. Go at the AWS marketplace yourself and browse around a bit. Will your IT department be able to provide the same catalogue, with the same self-service, usage-based pricing and deployment in minutes? And even so important: are your prices more or less on par with what Amazon is offering?

More improvements should be expected. It seems like a missed opportunity not to present the AWS marketplace in exactly the same way as the Amazon web shop (that would have made the point even more). And for now, you can only imagine what will happen when more and more business applications will become available (did anybody say recommendation engine?) through the very same marketplace.

For now, the bar has been raised. We are not saying the internal IT market place of your organization should be just as good as Amazon’s. Not yet, that is. But a new normal has been defined and we’d all better have a good look. Happy shopping.